April 15, 2023

Something I thought about:

• This was both school and university vacation week, and the whole family was at home. I always like the laziness of these weeks — no running around all over the place — but also miss the tyranny of a schedule when it’s easier to be “productive” because time is so structured. Naturally, there was a bit too much on deck for this week, but it felt good to close out a few things. I was trying to find a balance between rest and moving forward and managed to get a bit more sleep. Actually, I had a better balance between input, output, and breaks and want to keep working on that.

Something I did:

• Caught up on grading
• Visited two sections of a course at Boston University to talk about Elizabeth Bishop and research
• More Diverse Verse National Poetry Month work
• Wrote my second post for the Love Letters to Poetry series
• Quickly turned around some final edits for a paper
• Made it to a 365-day streak on DuoLingo!
• A lot of logistics
• Went for a walk in the woods

Something I read:

• Mary Gaitskill on the Despair of the Young
• This post on how to assess projects / work / commitments in academia. The Eisenhower Matrix is generally great for something like prioritizing a to do list, but this is better suited to academia, where oftentimes projects lack “urgency” but require commitment.
• I finally listened to this beautiful conversation with Naomi Shihab Nye.
• A Coastline is an Immeasurable Thing by Mary-Alice Daniel

What does it mean to be from a place? Is it an accident of birth? Are you from the first home you remember? The place you lived the longest? Is it something earned, like citizenship? Something learned, like language? (p. 39)