Something's Gotta Give

I have too many commitments. I'm going to have to renege on something. This means that someone is going to get what they want late, and may possibly be blown off altogether. To further the cause of personal blogging (= turning the private into the public for no good reason, often to the dismay of the public) and possibility to solicit advice from you, the internet, I am going to decide what to renege on right here in this space.

I'm arranging my commitments in a tentative hierarchy, and then drawing two lines. Commitments below the first line will be scaled back. Deadlines will be missed; work will be skimpier. Commitments below the second line will be broken altogether. Most of these are actually commitments I made to myself, which will make ditching them easier.

Duties to family: obviously these can’t be broken. I’ve been trying to shuffle them around a bit more, trading time spent watching Caroline for time spent cleaning, but basically nothing can change here.

Duties to students: These are often the first to be abandoned, but they shouldn’t be. In any case, I am about as behind on these commitments as I can afford to be. I’ve got a stack of old grading for my Reasoning class that I should get to right away. Now even.

Getting the GMO piece ready for publication: by November 4 I’m supposed to have my article “The Other Value in the GMO Debate” ready for publication. I thought this would only involve updating the URLs and proofreading. But now that I look at it, I see all sorts of other problems. Technical terms need to be explained for a lay audience. The paper is now three years old so political facts may have changed. I hemmed and hawed in the piece about the lack of postcommercialization monitoring of transgenics, but for all I know some of that is in place now.

________ The line of diminished expectations________

Pleasure Example 1: My neighbor Vicky Coffee told me just got a boxed set of Bruce Lee DVDs, and I thought “my, it would be fun to get together with Vicky to watch kung fu movies.” Not gonna happen. Example 2: The other night Caroline and I were watching Dan Zanes’ live DVD. Suddenly Caroline pointed to the screen and said, “Daddy, you have one of those.” “One of what?” “Those,” she said, right there,” and she ran over to the other side of the room where I kept an old mic stand and a Shure 57. I thought, “I want to make music again.” Not gonna happen.

the job market: I had wanted to revamp my dossier, particularly my teaching statement, this year. Looks like a lot of people are just going to get last year’s dossier, particularly people with Nov. 1 deadlines.

The abortion ethics paper Christ, when am I going to get to this?

The Buffy paper has a Nov. 1 deadline for abstracts. I’ll probably just send them the abstract for the previously accepted talk that I didn’t give, with a note saying that I plan to take Stevenson into account. I won’t actually be able to read Stevenson, though.
AAPT Has a Jan 16 deadline for abstracts. I was going to work on this during this term, as a part of revamping my teaching statement. Not going to happen. It will be Christmas break before I really work on this.

Orgasm paperWith all the blogging about the evolution of the orgasm, you’d think I’d have a talk on the subject. Don’t know when I’ll actually write it, though.

________Line of I’m completely blowing you off___________

Helping the department shape its visionLaura asked us temps for input into the department’s new mission statement. I thought about doing this as a part of my teaching statement work. Not going to happen.

blogging I'd like to blog this and this. Not gonna happen.