Life generally treats me pretty well

A while back I was feeling stressed out, overwhelmed, unhappy, and a bit sorry for myself. To put things back in perspective I looked at a postcard from Guatemala I have hanging above my dresser:



"Encuentro de dos Mundos" by Daniel Hernandez Salazar

Talk about a picture being worth a thousand words: it captures so many of the divisions in the world. For me it asks, in the words of the old labor song "which side are you on?"

It reminds me how much harder life is for most of the people in the world. Compared to walking for hours each day to carry water or gather fuel (as many women in Africa do) grading papers and reading political science, while not always fun, is a pretty good livelihood. It also reminds me why I'm doing this: because I hope that by getting my Ph.D. I'll be better able to stand in solidarity with people like the women in that photo.

Next to it I have a nice paper Willamette gave me with our motto ("Not unto ourselves alone are we born") and a greeting card from the Truman Foundation with an artistic rendering of a quotation from Robert Kennedy:

In the world and at home, you have the opportunity and the responsibility to help make the choices which will determine the greatness of this nation. . .

You live in the most privileged nation on earth. You are the most privileged citizens of that privileged nation; for you have been given the opportunity to study and learn. . .

You can use your enormous privilege and opportunity to seek purely private pleasure and gain. But history will judge you, and as the years pass, you will ultimately judge yourself, on the extent to which you have used your gifts to lighten and enrich the lives of your fellow man.

In your hands, not with presidents or leaders, is the future of your world and the fulfillment of the best qualities of your own spirit.

All good reminders of the values I try to live by. I should find something that represents the Lutheran Volunteer Corps.

Yuck

Cold, rainy and windy here in Carrboro. Helps me sympathize with people in the UK. No wonder they conquered so much of the world--they're weren't after tea, spices, etc. It was the weather.

It's the busy time in the semester. By Monday I need to:

• Finish reading a book and write a 5-page review.
• Research and write a 2-page summary of social policy in Venezuela.
• Prepare to lead class on Monday night.
• Write an 8-page paper on political cartoons from 1898.

By the end of the semester I need to

• Grade fifty-some 8-page essays (all handed back by the Monday after next)
• Write a proposal to present at a local conference next semester.
  
• Write a 20 page research design (It'll be on trade liberalization and hunger).
• Write a term paper (research on anti-hunger policies in Venezuela)
  
• Write a 15-page reflection on the course on 1898 (no additonal research required, thankfully).

Sounds like I'm a grad student or somehting. There's also the marathon of grading finals, but everything else will be done by then.

So, I was thinking I'd complain about all of this, but as I was in the library tracking down books and articles I was having fun and was reminded how lucky I am to do this for a living. No promises how long that attitude will last. I think it's not that I don't enjoy my work, it's just that I'd like a little less of it. But plenty of people are in the same boat and the rest just hate their jobs.

Close save

So I was frantically writing my history paper and Word decided to freeze (because that's what Microsoft products do). I wanted to save what I'd written and it was still vi sable on the screen. So I used OSX's screen capture utility (called Grab) to take a screen shot of the frozen Word page, getting almost everything I'd written since the last save. Then I drug the image to my iBook screen (to the right of the external monitor which is my primary workspace when I'm at home--I love screen spanning) and relaunched Word so I could re-type what I'd written. Some time lost, but much less than if I'd had to come up with it again. Somehow even with the freeze I wrote close to five pages in a little under three hours this morning. Amazing what pressure will do for productivity.

So the moral of the story is: screen shots can make freezes less painful (PCs can take screenshots too).

Three times is harm

I love Back Porch Music (out-of-town folks can stream online Friday and Saturday 8-12, Sunday 8-11 Eastern Time). It's one of the main reasons I'm a member of NPR. But it drives me crazy when the DJ does that thing where he plays three versions of the same folk song in a row. Yes, it's neat how many different ways people can interpret a song, but at some level it's still playing the same song three times in a row and it drives me batty.

OK, time to write a paper responding to Fighting for American Manhood by Kristin L. Hoganson. The subtitle is "How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars." It's nice to see this stuff is getting let off the Women's Studies reservation and into general course work (it comes up quite a bit in the welfare states class, oddly enough, as well as in Intro to European Politics, which I TA).

Conversation

I've had some good comments and wanted to reply to some of them.

In a comment on my post about talking too much and listening too little Isabel writes:

I see NaBloPoMo from the opposite perspective. I'm using the list as an opportunity to visit as many as possible and "listen" to some new voices.

That's a good point. I'll try to read some new blogs this month. I'll let you know if I come across any gems. So check out NaBloPoMo if you haven't yet.

Katya asks:

congrats on being so productive on your non-work day! I usually do absolutely nothing on non-work days and thus always have cleaning, laundry, dishes and errands to do on every other day. Grr. So do you ever get a do absolutely nothing day? or is that forbidden in PhD land?

The thing is, if you count up how many hours I'm actually working it might even be under full time (this may change as I mover through the program...). Part of the problem is defining when I'm working though. People with 9 to 5 jobs are working when they're at work, even when they're chatting with co-workers, playing solitaire, etc. So how much of the time I spend distracted from work is the equivalent of that and should count as work time, even though I'm not productive? It's hard to be your own supervisor but I'm getting better at it. Of course there's a huge freedom there, too. The thing I need to avoid, and one of the reasons for enforcing a day off to play and keep house, is time where I'm not getting work done but I'm trying to make myself work so I'm stressed out from unproductively worrying about work, if that makes sense.

long day, far from over

Just a crazy few days. Wrote a paper all day today which I present in class tonight. Need to move out of the house where I'm house sitting tonight and then read to lead class in my International Relations class tomorrow. Then I'll have a moment to breath...