Friday Afternoon

The summer after my first year here I got my first solo-authored manuscript back from review, about 7 months after I had submitted it. The decision was revise and resubmit, and I was pretty crushed because it wasn't an outright accept. In fact, I think I even cried about it.

(These days, being much more jaded, I'm pretty happy about a revise & resubmit, because I know the chances of the paper getting published eventually are high. I also know that the changes I will make to a paper after a revise & resubmit will probably make it a much better paper. That first paper was eventually published and it all worked out in the end.)

Anyway, like I said, I was crushed. It was a Friday afternoon and I had spent all week in the hot city working hard on something, I don't remember what, probably a different manuscript or something, and I was tired and feeling defeated and like a total failure. As luck would have it we were scheduled to go up north to Jake's parents' house on the lake that afternoon, so shortly after I got the revise and resubmit decision we packed up the car and drove north for 3 and a half hours. And by the time we arrived there, in the cool woods, I was feeling a lot better about life. We walked into the house to a chorus of "Hey!" from everybody, and soon a drink appeared in my hand, and chips and salsa were nearby, and I sat there listening to happy chatter and watching the boats on the lake. A feeling of peace settled over me as I realized that work is not the end all be all of life, and it was okay.

Today was kind of stressful, not in a horrible way, but in a low-grade way. My friend is going up for tenure in the fall (actually, a lot of people I know are) and we spent a couple of hours poring over her research graphic, which is a visual representation of her research trajectory. It is actually a brilliant graphic and communicates well her different research strands and foci, but it still merited discussions about which of her papers to put into the graphic, where to put particular titles, how to orient this and that, etc. The research graphic is one of only about eight hundred documents she is creating for her tenure case. The thing is huge and by the end will represent about 6 months of hard work. Six months. What goes into getting tenure here (just creating the case to submit to the committee) is crazy. It's not even the work, per se, it's all of the worrying and the strategizing and the agonizing about whether to use this word or that word, and how to orient one's teaching statement, and how many people to solicit for external letters, and when to do that, and how to craft a good department letter, and on and on.

Once I left her (with dread in my heart at the thought of going through this process myself in the near future), I returned to work on my grant proposal, with renewed anxiety about how much I suck and my work sucks and I don't have enough publications and I am going to die alone and poor in a van down by the river.

I'm not going up north this weekend, but now I am going to shut down the computer, walk home, hang out with the kids and Jake, and sit out back on the terrace and watch the flowers and listen to the birds and remember that work is not the end all be all of life. Thank you Jake and Milo and Nora for giving me that perspective.