I keep thinking that I want less clutter less stuff less space, but then I can’t resist the college dorm room look of stuff taped on the walls everywhere. Above my desk at home is a small corkboard where I’ve tried to corral those impulses. Of course it’s full.
What’s there? Glad you asked! From the top:
– Handmade gift certificate for a $50 donation to Cashmusic.org from Jonathan from a couple of Xmases ago.
– Index card, a bit brown around the edges, with a note on it (in faded ink) that Jonathan put in my lunchbox the day I defended my dissertation, which reads “I am very proud of you!”
– Keychain with Gus’s first ever school picture in it. He was almost 3 yrs old and I’ve always been amazed that they were able to get him to smile. The keychain is cheesy, but it came free as part of the photo package.
– Half-used sheet of photobooth stickers of Jonathan and Gus (age 1.5 or so) from the not-very-mall-like mall. Gus is not smiling, but Jonathan is.
– “We are all Wisconsin” sticker from the faculty union I belong to from earlier this year.
– “Proud to be Shelfish” button from donating to the public library a couple of years ago.
– Fortune cookie fortune: “Knowledge is power.” It’s recent and from what I recall the food wasn’t all that good, and I’m not sure I believe it anyway.
– Note from Gus that festooned a birthday present of mine last year: “Magician gave this to you!! Don’t ask.”
– My ALA (American Library Association) membership card, because sometimes you need your member # to login to the website.
– Picture of Gus (maybe about 2?) taken with the Hello Kitty Polaroid Izone camera I used to have. It’s a sticker, too!
– NYPL library card, backside visible so I can see the barcode # in case I want to login to their databases.
– Business card (horizontal orientation) for Mud Flap Grrrl Designs, from which Jonathan bought me some rad embroidered handkerchiefs a couple of Xmases ago.
– My Inbox Zero Nerd Merit Badge. Still a challenging feat!
– Classic 4-photo black and white photobooth strip of me + Jonathan making silly faces.
Everyone is greedy for something, and I am greedy for time. It’s just dawned on me recently, like most self-realizations do, probably because I’m getting older and time is much less elastic than it used to be. I need sleep, I like to spend time with family and friends, I have chores. I used to have hobbies. I can’t work all the time. I don’t want to work all the time.
I do want to work all the time. Or, more accurately, there are too many things that I want to do and not enough time to do them. This is a good situation to be in, I realize. It would suck to have a job that didn’t make me want to do all the things. I spent so long trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to do, dancing around higher education, technology, and research, trying to fit them all together into something with a job title and a steady salary. It’s still a rush to have that now.
It’s a struggle to stop adding things to my plate, to say no to interesting opportunities because I just don’t have the time in my days. Looking at my long list of projects, committees, and tasks (thank you, promotion application, for making me all reflective), there’s remarkably little there that I would jettison. I love my library work, I love my work on the big college grant, and I love my research and writing projects. I could do each of those things 100% of the time. But no one has 300% of the time.
I am having trouble squishing 100% down to 33.3%. I keep joking recently that I have 3 full-time jobs because that’s the amount of headspace that each of my 3 worklives seems to occupy, even if that’s not technically true in the meatspace. I worry about the other worklives when I’m focusing on 1 of them, wondering whether I’m ignoring the other(s) too much. I know that this is partly a result of settling into things: my newly-expanded role on the grant, my main research project heading into coding and analysis and writing up mode.
I know it will get easier to balance these 3 things, but I don’t know that I’ll ever get over feeling a bit sad that there’s not enough time in the day for all the stuff I want to work on. Greedy, greedy, greedy.
Yeah, I know I did the self evaluation as a word cloud thing before. But I turned in my application for promotion today and I thought it would be interesting to see the differences between what I wrote last spring (which covered just last year) and now (which covers the entire time I’ve been at my job). Nice to see the words “collaboration,” “open,” “scholarly,” and “course” so close together.
But not quite. In the meantime, I’ve written + revised 1578 words of self evaluation in the past two days, so I think I can play a pass card again tonight.
What’s good for working *and* a guaranteed mood-booster? Why the Pixies, of course!
No time for anything tonight, not even to detail the millions of things I have to do. I’m tired, though, and need music to work by. Maybe music by people who don’t need as much sleep as I do will help? Let’s try it:
Extra bonus tie-in to yesterday’s post: watch for Kristin Hersh’s cute crazy dancing kid w/no front teeth, so excellent.
I’ve been trying to convince myself not to write about Gus on here anymore. He’s getting older and it just feels less like something I should do. After all, this is my blag, I should be blagging about me, right?
But then we have a day like today and how can I not blag about it? Thanks to falling back he was up at 6:15am even though there was no school today. (I was up before 6am because that’s how my insomnia rolls lately.) I started in getting ready for work and a bit later he ran into the bedroom to excitedly tell me: “Mom! I just added a wiki page!”
He’s fairly obsessed with a new Kirby videogame that’s just come out for the Wii, and has watched countless YouTube videos and played it at a pal’s house last weekend. Apparently there’s a Kirby wiki out there — who knew? Which Gus found, discovered he could edit, and then wrote an entry about a boss called Water Galbaros. All before 7am. I couldn’t be more proud! He’s been working on that page and others on and off all day, and the page now has images too that other folks have added throughout the day.
Then I went to work, only to come home to the news that Jonathan and Gus had bought a small frying pan (with an egg on the handle, like this!), and that Gus could fry his very own egg. Which he proceeded to do, right before my very eyes. He even sprinkled salt on it from the salt cellar like a proper chef. (And then he ate the egg, also right before my eyes.)
I’m trying not to get all mushy and sentimental but lately I’ve been, well, all mushy and sentimental. He’s just such a great kid, and it’s all going so fast I can’t stand it.
Just so you know, this is going to be a short, boring, bragging post.
I’ve got lots of balls in the air right now, and one of the things I’m doing is looking to see where my scholarship has been cited. It’s just the best kind of nerd high to see that one of my articles has been cited once, another 3 (!) times. And the one that’s been cited 3 times has been viewed over 1,400 times, according to the journal’s website!
I’m jonesing to see how often the article that was published last week has been viewed, but that journal doesn’t make those #s visible in the author interface. Plus it’s probably too soon for anything real. Although, when I tweeted about it (see, told you it’d be braggy), someone who has 1900+ followers retweeted me, so that’s something.
I’ve got other stuff to finish tonight, but tomorrow night I’ll be looking to find my top commented-on posts at the library blog I contribute to.
And I leave you with this: go, open access publishing, GO!
A quick search shows that I’ve blagged about daylight savings time in the past. I’m generally a fan of falling back, though since becoming a parent it’s less of the extra-sleep-fest than it once was. My kid still doesn’t get the sleeping in thing, but at least he’s old enough now that he lets us sleep even though he wakes up at the usual schoolday time.
I spent the whole day today thinking about the “Time Travel” episode of Pete & Pete, most of all about one of the songs in the episode. Of course I don’t know the name of the band or the song. I could probably just go out to the living room and fire up our DVD player and see, but I prefer to sit here typing and believe that it’s a Drop Nineteens song.
Alternatively (who’s been writing a scholarly paper!), you could watch it for me and let me know whether that’s the song I’m thinking of. Here you go:
The nice thing about keeping track of my word count is that this here blog writing month thing makes me feel extra special because I’m guaranteed to have at least something in the spreadsheet for every day, yay! Yes, it’s gamification, but it helps keep up the writing motivation to be able to say that I’ve written something every most days. I do indeed need stinking badges, apparently.
So that’s why I can say for sure that I don’t feel guilty about a short post tonight, because the paper I’m working on with my research partner has grown to 4470 words after my efforts this afternoon. Hard to know exactly how many new words I added, probably only a couple hundred. But revising is hard, too, so I’m calling it a job well done and knocking off for tonight.
It’s hilariously cliched but true: when you are a librarian, people sometimes say things to you like: “I bet you love to read” (true), and “You must read all day” (false). I mean, I do read all day, just like you do: I read emails and meeting minutes and other worky stuff.
I have tried and tried to make time for reading, the nonwork kind, the fiction kind. STORIES. I put it on my list of Things I Try To Do Every Day. But it’s so easy to let that one slide. Unlike writing, it doesn’t get harder for me to read the less I read. And unlike exercise, I don’t get all hunched-over and achey if it’s been a couple of days since I’ve picked up a good book.
Reading is so easy to ignore, but it makes me feel mournful when I think about how little I read. I stare at the pile of books on my desk, on my shelf, and wonder when I’ll ever get to them. I could cut out internet reading, but my feed is never really under control anyway so it’s not like I spend lots of time reading on the nets. (I’m also about 4 issues behind in the New Yorker, but who’s counting?)
But, (lest we end on an unhappy note), good news, everyone! In a couple of weeks I’m going to be traveling by bus for a long, long time. Bus travel is no picnic, but I’m actually somewhat gleeful when I think about the time I can spend reading.
