Academia comes with two lovely limbos--early January and mid-May. Public school is in session (so my kids are occupied all day), but the university is still idling along with students gone, offices empty and corridors so cold and unwelcoming that the buildings themselves seem to say, "Stay at home. Curl up on the couch, while you still can..." Spring semester classes start in just over two weeks, so it's not a long limbo, but it is a nice one.
Still, there is work to be done, and today I worked on three stunningly different projects. I plotted out the syllabus for a new seminar on nineteenth-century women writers, I hurriedly put together an application for research funding for my sabbatical project, and I sent a query to an agent who I hope might choose to represent my novel. It felt good to get all of these projects done, but they are so different from each other that I also feel a confused sense of professional identity. Add to the mix taking down the Christmas tree and volunteering in my kindergarten twins' classroom for an hour, and I guess I have to go with Quin-Polar, which sounds like a fantasy about a post-apocalyptic frozen landscape.
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Have you read the book that's basically essays about every single book we loved in the 1970s? The author is a woman, my sister is reading it right now, it will come to me any second now... Anyway, you have to read it. Essays on A Ring of Endless Light, Girl with the Silver Eyes, The Moon by Night, every SINGLE book.
ReplyDeleteHmmmm. If you are Quin-polar, I must be quin^2 polar. YOU are the focused one.
ReplyDeleteQuin-Polar sounds to me like the love child of Sarah Palin and Brangelina who is destined to save us from global climate change in the next 4-D James Cameron movie blockbuster.