I've Packed Myself into a Corner

(I have since managed to clear a path out of the study. The trouble is that I'm selling my bookcases to my bartender, and they're being picked up today, so I had to move them out of the study--past the mountainous boxes of books--then move the books back into the study so that the bookcases can be moved down the stairs. It is all very complicated.)

Oh, but yes, how I do hate moving. I used to love moving. Can you believe that? There is something satisfying about purging the old crap--I still like that part--but wrapping up and lifting every single item that I own, now that I own a fairly large number of items, is less than pleasing. Yeah, that must be it. I used to like moving because I didn't own anything, and moving was basically just an exciting new re-decorating activity. Not so much these days.

This move is complicated by the fact that I have to keep three sets of boxes separate: the boxes that will go into storage (by far the largest pile), the boxes + cello that will go into my mom's house (not such a large pile), and the boxes that will move with me to Field Town. They're all labeled, obviously, but I don't trust the movers (which I will have for exactly 2 hours, including their travel time, so I don't know how much they'll actually get done) to carefully check each label before setting the box into the truck. Because I'll need to remove things from the truck in a fairly specific order, so--oh, I'm giving myself a headache.

This post is pure procrastination. I have never worked as inefficiently as I have lately. I will pack one box, making a careful list on an index card, which will then be taped to the side of the box, of every book contained therein (I think I've gone a little crazy this week, too), and then I will sit on my floor or in a chair staring at the wall for approximately 15 minutes. There is nothing in this apartment that I want to deal with at the moment. And the movers come on Friday. And between now and Friday, I am having 1) lunch with my advisor, 2) a drink with an old professor, 3) dinner with two friends, 4) dinner and/or drinks with a different friend, 5) at least one yoga class, and 6) whatever I'm forgetting. I may have actually planned more dinners than there are nights this week. Time is short; it is short indeed.

Ugh! Send motivating thoughts my way, please please!!

Inexplicable

Because I can't be bothered to pack, I decided to do this quiz that I saw linked on New Kid's blog. Here are my results:

Your Score: Older Futhark

You scored

Language of the Norse, Older Futhark! Thirty symbols, all told. And no hardier, more warrior-like tongue has ever graced the longships of the Viki or left the Celts and Saxons in such quivering fear. There's only one drawback, that being you died 800 years ago.

Link: The Which Ancient Language Are You Test written by imipak on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Oddly enough, this is what NK scored, too.

Oh, the Astonishment!

This morning, I am awash in a peculiar mixture of delight and alarm.

Alarm:
because in less than one month, I will be teaching full-time.
because I begin moving one week from today.
because the summer feels effectively over--at least, the nice relaxing putting-things-off part of the summer.

Delight:
because I actually seem to be on top of things.

Maybe I just set my standards really low, and that's how I've been able to check off most of the things on my to-do list; even the un-checked-off things, like the conference paper draft, are well in the works and should be finished before courses start. (In fact, I do have a draft; I just don't feel it's good enough to get credit yet. Soon, soon, I tell myself. I've been researching for a few hours a day all week and with luck can beef it up before I actually move. Wait--I move in a week. Who am I kidding?) (See! Delight and alarm at work, within the text itself!!!)

Yeah, so, things are strangely under control. I have two of my three syllabi; the third is supposed to be determined by committee before we start teaching this fall (everyone teaches the third class), but I'm a little nervous about it because it's a comp class, I've never taught comp, and I wish someone would just send me the syllabus already. But anyway. That class actually shouldn't require too much advance-reading time, so it'll be okay. I have a reasonably well revised draft of my book proposal, which I hope to show Advisor early next week. I've updated my CV and job application cover letter template. I still need to review my writing sample, which has changed somewhat since last year, but that shouldn't take too long, I don't think. And I might redo my dissertation abstract--wait, do I even need one? Now that I've graduated? See, those job search workshops in grad school don't tell you how to do round 2 of the job search! It's very annoying.

The move is mostly coming together, too. I'm in the Metropole, formerly known as the boyfriend's city (I decided that it needed a more concise name), until Sunday afternoon; not the best timing ever, but I had to get in one last visit before leaving this quadrant of the country. Yesterday I packed up the Kitchen Cupboards of Mystery, which actually contained far fewer mystery objects than I'd expected. I have not yet undertaken Pandora's Desk Drawers or Cornucopia Closet, which will doubtless leave me utterly boxless and panicked, but my books are mostly packed up and perhaps I'll even get everything done in time to go to one last yoga class next Thursday night. I hope!

At the moment I'm rather sleepy, having awakened at 7:30 for the last two days after not going to sleep very early, and am trying to stay awake and alert for an upcoming yoga class at noon. Wish me luck.

I would just like to say:

--that getting the proofs for my first article gave me a very nice feeling. The kind of feeling that Anne of Green Gables would have called a "thrill."

(Even though I'm not terribly thrilled with the article itself anymore. What's that thing that familiarity breeds, again?)

It Was Bound to Happen

The wireless that I've been stealing for the last 5 months or so has disappeared.

Well, if it was going to happen, the timing was pretty good--I'll only have about 7 days of an internet-free home. Already I feel my productivity increasing (although it's annoying, I confess, and I spent the morning haunted by the feeling that there was a Really Important Email Or Something that I didn't know about. Of course, there wasn't. The only even remotely interesting email I got today was the proofs for my first article--which was exciting, but hardly required immediate attention).

Blog-reading will probably be light, though, at least until this weekend, when I'm back in the uber-wireless Metropole.

Resolutions

A few years ago, my dad's new year's resolution was to quit grunting every time he straightened up (or stood up--I can't remember which). He kept it.

In that spirit, my resolution this year was to stop standing around in the shower after I'd turned off the water, kicking puddles towards the drain. I assume that I developed this habit as a way of postponing the chilliness attending my lunge out of the shower and towards the towels.

Anyway, here we are in July and I've successfully changed my post-shower behavior. I don't know why it mattered to me so much--it just really irritated me, how I'd dawdle in there.

I like this approach to resolutions. No huge, vague "Must get in shape!!!!! Will be more productive!!!!!"-type things, just identifying some little habit that irritates you and putting an end to it. Now I need to find another one for next year--shouldn't be too difficult!

Bored, Bored

I am sort of trying to work on my conference paper and am feeling...unmotivated. Here's the thing. The conference is in November, so I don't feel the enormous fear/urgency that usually prompts me to get my act together and fix the weird sentences, read secondary stuff, etc. All I feel right now is the obligation to get some kind of rough argument and analysis down on paper. Well, the "rough argument and analysis" currently fills 9 pages, which means I only have one more page to write. (Yeah, okay, I'm going to have to delete all of that vague waffling that I always do for two pages at the start of any writing project, as well as at least one utterly pointless section on page 4, but I'm not doing that yet. Allow me my illusions!)

So the point is that, while I'm not thrilled with my superlative academic achievement in this paper just yet (witness the following sentence: "A textual aside by [Some Guy] reinforces this view of his role as seeking to control his reader by arguing against a more cynical interpretation of the events of [This Person]'s life"), I'm still very proud of myself for having produced nine pages of prose four months ahead of time. And therefore I'm spending a lot of time screwing around on the internet.

For one thing, I just ordered the last book in that series that everyone's talking about. I was going to wait; I felt no urgency at all earlier in the summer, when I still hadn't read the penultimate book--which I didn't think much of, to be honest--and was going to hold out until it came out in paperback. But I'm too afraid of having the ending ruined for me if I wait that long! So I've ordered it, and I should get it right before I move, which ought to give me enough time to read it before classes start.

But, well, so my bloglines are empty right now, and writing this little post constitutes the next phase of Internet-Time-Wasting. I really ought to go undine's route and cut myself off from the 'nets for a certain number of hours per day; the fact that I'm widely publicizing such content-less ramblings is all the evidence I should need.