Kid Fears

New job begins next week. I read the Chronicle fora and I get all goopy in my tummy thinking about the challenges facing me. Every time I check my email from New College, I seem to get some press release about some fabulous national recognition of some faculty member and I think "how the hell am I going to match that?" I have a lot of work to do.

I tell myself that they must have seen something worthwhile in me, something that made me desirable and made them feel I could be a productive member of the faculty. My task is to figure out what that is and do it. Sigh. A friend and I used to talk about how we always felt like frauds, no matter how well we did in grad school. I'm sure we're not alone in that and that the feeling goes on after you've achieved the degree. It must; I'm feeling it now.

The Indigo Girls were right. What would I give for my kid fears?

Defeated Reading

A good friend is reading-along with her friend; they've decided that they've got to finish Gravity's Rainbow and they'll be blogging the experience weekly, I believe. So read if you'd like, the novel or the blog posts. I've got other texts to keep me warm.

All this talk of reading, though, makes me wonder why I'm so reluctant these days to read anything that I "need" to read at all. I have no problem slogging through EW or the daily paper with my coffee in the a.m. I read, when I have uninterrupted computer time, scores of blog posts. But sustained academic argument? Poetry? Novels? Increasingly, I have a tougher time doing it. I can come up with all sorts of reasons why--not the right lighting, have a headache, need more notetaking space, don't have more than 10 minutes to spare right now--but really, the reason I don't read is because I don't make it a priority. I don't schedule time in to read. I don't make time for reading, and that means I don't make time for my work. I've got to work on that.

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