Monday, April 13, 2015

well, THAT was weird ...

How to tell your subconscious has finally caught on to the fact that you have tenure: You no longer have random anxiety dreams about being a job candidate.

Instead, you have anxiety dreams about being on the search committee. And they involve real people who actually work at the university behaving badly in ways that would, in fact, be entirely in character for them to behave in real life.

Progress.

Thursday, April 2, 2015

SAA envy

Have fun, everybody who's at SAA! I keep seeing posts about it all over Facebook and blogs, and I'm a bit envious, while at the same time aware there are all sorts of reasons why it wasn't a particularly good idea for me to go this year. Will DEFINITELY be at the next two, which are both local-ish.

A thought: conferences are a totally different experience when you're grown-up faculty than when you're a grad student. Back then, it was all about building the CV, and I went to a lot of random conferences, and didn't enjoy most of them very much because I always felt weird and wallflowerish. My real peers were at home, where there was always a lively cohort of other grad students, and no shortage of early modernists, whether grad students or faculty.

Now, I don't give a damn about building the CV, I go to SAA (sometimes) and Kalamazoo (most years) and that's about it, and conferences are all about 1) hanging out with one particular cohort of friends; 2) being around other people who are geeky about the same kinds of things I'm geeky about; and 3) being immersed in medieval / early modern stuff, and learning odd and random things about it. When you're the lone early modernist on campus, the immersion is a rare and unexpected pleasure; in grad school, it was something I took for granted.

The grown-up kind of conferencing, need I say, is SO much more fun. Only six weeks to Kalamazoo!