Turning a Giant Ship

Do you ever feel like you have emotional or spiritual ADD? That is me this week. Here I am, eating the Taco Bell, chugging the coffee, staying up way too late for no good reason: pooping in the temple, as it were.

That seems to be the tragic flaw of our species. That tree is not only good for that owl, but for that stream, and this air...with the added benefit of being nice to look at, but I'd much rather think about the credit card it will pay off if I cut it down and sell it to that salivating businessman. He will even grind the stump for me so I can pretend like it hasn't been there for the last 300 years.

Poop poop poop.

You can tell I'm in a good mood. Actually, I am. I just finished my fourth-year review, and I can say that my tenure prospects are now the devil I know, rather than the much scarier one I don't. To add yet another cliche to the pile, I can now see the dots I need to connect between year four and year six....

Which maybe giving away the plot a little: I don't think I will be successful in going up a year early. However, I have modified the goal a bit: I will instead return to--gasp!--the job market this fall.

Why would I do such an absurd thing: the academic culture is dying as we speak. It's because I've located the roots of my discontent in my current job: I've been too busy to monitor my marketability over the last few years (gee, twins, new house, cancer...), and I'm beginning to worry, like some of my more intelligent colleagues, that if I HAD to go back on the academic job market, I simply wouldn't be able to compete.

Well, hogwash. What better way to feel righteous about a tenure bid than feeling some love from outside institutions? After all, my job offer from U. of Alaska helped me negociate a much higher salary than my dean wanted to give me.

Now that I've straightened that out, I can return to the temple for a moment.

We're in the process of organizing the girls' room (the master bedroom). We just painted two large bookshelves "life preserver orange," and filled them with the children's books and videos I've been collecting for the last 20 years. The room looks like a clown suit gone bad at the moment, but sometimes you just need to throw something--anything--together and then let time help you edit. Time + maturity = slow movements toward wisdom. Every little progression is wondrous. Just the way the shelves look against the wall, with their incredible offerings in art and literature...it makes me long to be a kid again. My own kid, I guess. Isn't raising children partly an exercise in reliving your own youth, the way you would have wanted it?

We are overdoing it on the Sesame Street, though. Good lord.