Something I thought about:
- I found a better way to work. I have, for a long time, been trying to keep several things going at once by blocking different times of day for those activities, like “Write for 2 hours,” “Grade for 2 hours,” “Prep for 1 hour,” etc. However, it takes me time to shift gears, and I realized I was setting myself up for failure. I’m more productive when I can devote longer chunks of time to each activity, so I decided to set a primary type of work per day that I’ll focus on — and then if I have the brain space for other things, I can move those forward, as well. I already had “teaching” and “corpus linguistics” days. Now I’m breaking out writing and grading, as well. With this approach, I was actually able to write a conference paper and grade much more quickly than I’d expected, and I felt good about completing these and enjoyed the work more when I didn’t have the pressure of shorter blocks.
Something I did:
- Wrote my SANAS paper/talk
- Went to the SANAS conference
- Met some wonderful people
- Presented the paper
- Attended a reading and a lecture by Natasha Trethewey
- Went to STOMP
- Got Dunkin’ Donuts! A store just opened in Lausanne.
- Went to the salon for the first time in I don't know how long
Something I read:
- Technically a project, not reading, although I did find it through a Mastodon post. This literature clock is delightful.
- I'm still thinking about Karinne Keithley Syers’ latest Pelagic School newsletter:
The possibilities of combinations to create emotional experiences are derailed, for [Gertrude] Stein, by the problem of syncopation. As if all the elements that need to combine keep sliding off each other, failing to form a complex object and remaining just a scatter of individual things. Some of the problems are narrative, some are architectural. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the problem lies in how the narrative is nested within the architectural.
