The Awful Part of the Year: Grump, Grump, Grump

It's the awful part of the year for an academic on the quarter system.  All my academic friends and bloggers are doing their countdowns to the summer (it's already started for most and people are talking about reading -- reading, you know, for pleasure - oh I am so jealous I could just spit -- don't get me wrong, academic friends, I love you, but man I don't want to hear it -- Facebook is an exercise in torture!) and posting their ambitious summer plans.  And all I can think of is how much I hate hate hate being on the quarter system, where I have. . .what?. . .six long weeks until it's really over, and I can begin again to have a life.  Maybe.

In good news, sort of, I got tenure, which is lovely, but predictably came with all sorts of increased committee and advising responsibilities.  I'm doing some things I really believe in except I'm finding it difficult to believe in any of it right now.  Grumble grumble grumble.  I haven't even gotten my new title or even seen how much the paybump is, but there's all sorts of stuff to do -- both good and bad -- and it's driving me mad.  This morning I wondered whether for the sake of my family I really should find a different line of work.  The family's been feeling neglected.  Work-life balance is really a matter of choosing who I am going to piss off at any point in time.

But of course I need to get on campus for office hours and this meeting of grumps and that meeting of two earnest leaders.  Then I get to rush home and do a thing with my son to prove that no matter how much I'm gone and how much I have to tell him to go away, I'm busy when I am home, he is the center of my world.  One thing is for certain:  I am not the center of my world, a fact that is both the way it should be and painful.

So all this can be summed up neatly as grump grump grump.  And I feel bad about putting nothing but grumpiness out into the world.  Somewhat.  But not enough to not press Publish, apparently.  I've been thinking that the purpose of this blog is to say things I really can't say to colleagues and shouldn't bother my family with.  So there might be some heavy blogging in the near future because I have a lot to say.