It’s peak insanity time in the semester (also decade), so we all need some levity. Here’s my contribution.

Blogosphere professors, do you have any visible tattoos? I am particularly interested in hearing from women and/or folks in STEM. I ask because I’ve been dreaming of getting tattoos pretty much forever, and I know this makes me a midlife-crisis cliché (“all middle-aged women get tattoos lol”), but I also mostly don’t care since my desire for coolness has gone the way of the dodo, as did my ovarian function.

However, I am worried about the perception by 1) undergraduate students and 2) colleagues, but mostly students. I am in a very male-dominated field that hasn’t grown less male dominated in my twenty years as faculty. This semester, I have five girls in a class of seventy. I am still aware that most people don’t think I have any business being where I am, in a position of professorial authority in my area. I am worried that having visible tattoos (I’m thinking inner forearm) will further label me as someone who really doesn’t fit.

Granted, this is actually a combo of gender and area: I don’t know any male faculty in my area who have visible tattoos, either, even among younger men whom students tend to admire. In the arts and humanities, I suspect there are (some? many?) faculty with tattoos, as I imagine this type of personal expression is probably more expected and accepted, by both students and faculty, than it is in STEM.

So what say you, academic blogosphere? To tat or not to tat? Any tips for tats?

Hello bloggy friends, this is your friendly neighborhood academic! Only I’m not so much friendly as I am grouchy as f*ck.

I have reached a level of business that is probably a bit like the eye of the storm. Around me, the vortex of job demands suctions everything in its path, yet I sit in the middle, pretending that things are not as crazy as they are. Pretending that things are not completely out of control.

I have more tasks competing for my time than ever before and than I ever thought possible. And it’s not because I don’t say no, because I promise I say no all the time; I’m a veritable Queen of No these days. I delete, unread, way more emails from all sources than should be allowed in a civilized society. Yet, with teaching overload, endless admin tasks, nonstop proposal writing, conference organization, editorship, and trying to run a research program, advise graduate students, and get papers out, I am now at the level of overwhelm where I am late with everything, disappointing everyone, and I can’t even muster the energy to care.

Everyone wants my time/attention, and they will just have to get in line and I will get to whatever they need when I get to it.

There’s no amount of prioritization that will help it. Other than death, the only solution is retirement, something I’ve been dreaming of with increasing frequency. Alas, I’ve got another decade and a half till then.

I read online that people are much happier in their 50s than in their 40s because in your 40s you are an old young, while in your 50s you are a young old. That’s true; I feel better about myself as a person, about my inner worth, and about my relationships with important people (my husband and kids) than ever before.

But the decade and a half that I still have to devote to the job seems simultaneously brief and positively endless.

As for my fiction writing, I haven’t worked on the next novel since the semester started and I left off at about 40%. I really want to get back to it, but I don’t have time, or actually I don’t have guilt-free time. How can I write when there are all these job-related obligations I should fulfill instead? I’ve been trying to stave off the writing cravings through short fiction and quick prompt-based writing games on social media, but that’s like eating granola bar when what you really crave is a huge steak.

I’m not a child, and I know I need to suck it up and do what needs to be done. But it’s getting increasingly difficult to push myself to do things I don’t want to do, because there’s no end and no respite. I’m being overly dramatic now, and things do get better between semesters, but breaks are only enough to sort-of catch up, not to get ahead of the work or to actually rest.

I don’t know if this is garden-variety burnout, midlife edition, or if perhaps we are still reeling from the effects of Covid, and by that I don’t mean physical but mental. It’s definitely true that students after Covid are not what they used to be. I have more students than in the past, but they are on average much more poorly prepared to tackle class material. The math level has dropped off the cliff for reasons I don’t fully understand, but it makes it very hard to teach students physics when they lack fluency in basic algebra and introductory calculus. I’ve always enjoyed teaching undergrads, but I feel increasingly hopeless at how vast a chasm of ignorance I face every semester. I literally have to remind (reteach?) people how to do a cross product, that a^n-b^n is not equal to (a-b)^n, how to use the chain rule in differentiation, how to perform integration by parts. Something like 75% of people cannot calculate the first derivative without making some sort of calculation error along the way.

I really shouldn’t complain. In the corporate world, I would be treated to the analogue of “take the old dog behind the barn and shoot it.” I am aware that keeping a job through disillusionment and burnout is a great privilege.

But it doesn’t change the fact that after twenty years in the ever-more-grinding grind, it’s hard to be chipper about it. That I literally cannot remember the last time I had a free, restful weekend, and not just anxiety-ridden forced downtime during which all pending tasks loom like an ominous specter.

And this doesn’t even touch on everything that’s going on politically. I know as grownups we’re supposed to hold it together, but it’s been years now of holding it together. Eventually, everyone needs to unclench.

The vaguely scatological metaphor aside, how are things going with you, blogosphere?