Miss into Ma'am

Exhaustion and sleeplessness is a marathon. There is no respite from it, no "catching up." For a night owl with children, it is not going to ever get better until the children become adolescent night owls themselves. So that's, like, a decade. That's a marathon.

Before I had kids people called me Miss. After I had kids people call me Ma'am. I don't think it's the pregnancy that aged me so much as the last 4 years of sleep debt.

It's the middle of the night. I'm up because my cough won't let me (or Jake) sleep. Best to try to get some sleep sitting more upright in the living room. I wonder if there is a treatment for chronic recurring bronchitis? I don't want to spend the next 5 months coughing like I did last year.

I was at a conference. Usually I try to use conferences to get some extra sleep, but that seldom works out how I imagine it will. You just don't sleep as well in a hotel bed, and this time, I found myself needing to get up early each morning after late nights. So I got a lot less sleep than normal, but it was totally worth it. It was one of the best conferences ever. One reason was because there was a plenary talk that totally blew my mind and the associated paper is exactly what I needed to clarify and re-orient my research direction. This particular scholar's work has done that for my career in the past. This person is an incredible thinker, it's just amazing.

But aside from that and the other productive and enjoyable intellectual connections with others, the conference was just super awesome for me in terms of connecting up with all of my friends and colleagues. Lots of tenure toasting. I got to spend time with a great friend, which I loved, and catch up with other friends, including one of my former advisees. I spent more time with the delightful people from University 2, and I got to see folks from my own grad student days, and make better friendships with other people. Conferences are so awesome that way because it's like a yearly reunion. You get to connect with your own former grad-student cohort, and with the next generation of your own former grad students turned professors, and with other people you've met over the years...just awesome. I really let go one night and had the most awesomely hilarious (and kinda bizarre) time, although it was painful to stay up until the crack of dawn and then have to get up just a few short hours later to give an 8 a.m. talk.

(I think I'm done celebrating tenure now. It feels like I've fully celebrated the heck out of it at this point.)

Having tenure is starting to sink in in little ways. Like that 8 a.m. talk...I was pretty relaxed about it. I thought, eh, so what if it sucks? I'm tenured. Prior to this, I always felt like every talk had to be awesome, there could be a potential letter writer in any given talk, I needed to present my best side, etc., etc. Now I don't need to do any of that. It still ended up being a good talk, I think, thanks to adrenaline, with a nice-sized audience which impressed me given its early hour on the last day of the conference.

But, you know...I was up until 2 a.m., then up at 6 to prepare for my talk, then somehow never slept on the plane because I was in a middle seat, then went to bed tonight only to be kept up and woken up by my cough, so here it is at 2:30 and I'm still up, somehow, although I'm not sure how this is even physically possible at this point. And tomorrow my full day of work starts at 7 a.m., with no resting in sight. So...yeah. It's a marathon.