I start teaching on Monday and have hit the point of panicking about how much work I have to get done by the end of the month/first week of February. It’s quite a bit of work, and on top of that I have personal/family commitments that I’m no longer willing to completely sublimate to my academic life. All I want to do is shout, very loudly: “I’m doing the very best that I can to get to everything that everyone needs/wants from me!” Instead, I’m making a list to try to keep track of it all, possibly solicit the occasional sympathetic pat on the head, and, perhaps, passive-aggressively indicate to the world that is waiting on stuff from me that I’m not just being delinquent — I’m really pretty slammed.
— Finish Humanities Initiative team-teaching grant (Draft. Final version.)
— Read/comment on someone else’s Humanities Initiative grant (Not going to happen, so I’m just crossing it off the list.)
— Write paper for Abu Dhabi conference. Possibly in Spanish.
— Finish writing chapter for edited volume on the literary forms of philosophy
— Finish writing chapter for edited volume on Amichai, Lorca, and Ibn Naghrila
— One other miscellaneous writing task for an edited volume
— Finish syllabus for grad seminar on medievalism
—Write syllabus for specialized grad seminar
— Reconcile accounts from Spain trip
— Review essay for LARB
— I’m sure there’s something else I’m forgetting at the moment (Oh, right. Finish editing the proposal for an overhauled undergraduate major in the department.)
— Catch up on emails (Some of them. The rest of them.)
— Resist hatred being spewed and encouraged by the new presidential administration.(This, of course, will not be done until 2020, and there are more substantial things to do that mere gestures, but I started out by wearing a bracelet with the Throne Verse written in Arabic while traveling on an airplane as a way to normalize the presence of the language in transit. In the more action-oriented column, I signed up for 10 Actions/100 Days and plan to participate in all the protest actions. ETA1/29: Also attended the emergency protest this week in Washington Square part against the Muslim Ban. ETA 2/2: Added myself to a database of people who can volunteer to translate at the airport.)
