Dear As Yet Nonexistent Readers,
This is a new blog. It is essentially blog #2--continuing from where my previous blog left off. If you were unaware of that blog, it goes something like this:
Once upon a time there was a young woman who wanted to get a Ph.D. and become an English professor. In her last few years of Ph.D.-dome, she struggled to finish her dissertation, and struggled to find a job, and struggled to suppress her personal life in order to meet her professional goals. She struggled and felt lonely and isolated and experienced a lot of angst, but eventually the tide turned. She finished her dissertation, and earned her Ph.D., and somehow, by a mixture of some talent and will but probably mostly luck, secured a tenure-track job.
But this was not the end. It was the beginning. Or perhaps the end of the beginning. Hopefully not the beginning of the end. Actually, in many ways I'm working out exactly what stage of life this is. It's in many ways the "real" beginning of my professional life. It has also in many ways given me a new hope for a personal life. But there's a balance and a struggle in each of those things as well as between them. And so, I'm thinking of this whole after-Ph.D. life as a murky, amorphous space--hence, a kind of afterlife--but also a new life entirely. In a good way. It really is a better life. There is more stability, more of a confirmed sense of accomplishment--but it's certainly not the end. In fact, I think the question now is: what is the end? The goal? Tenure? Sure. But also maybe not, because tenure is never really certain these days. And I haven't published anything yet. Which is a concern, and kind of makes me nauseous.
Anyway, so this blog is going to document my new angst, new friends, hopefully new accomplishments and milestones, you get the drift. At any rate, I should say that this blog started in a fit of procrastination, as blogs often do. I think my first blog started this way too.
This blog also started as an outlet for me to vent. I vent. I vent a lot. I could, for instance, vent about what a slow grader I am. So slow that I just bought an egg timer to try to force myself to limit how much time I grade and write comments--to reign myself in. I could also vent about how writing skills among college students have degraded amazingly in the last few years alone, and by extension, I could vent about how much kids today are being deprived of the kind of education they need, and that I was lucky enough to receive.
Right now, however, the angst is begging to be released in a more concrete way: I'm going to take a long walk.
Until next time.
