oh, the places you'll go

With ten minutes or so left of my grad class last night, the light bulb went off in my head: a fantastic idea for an anthology of which I cannot speak because I haven't figured it out yet, but it kept me up most of the night thinking. We may just be on to something here, but it may be that I don't have the capital to pull it off. At the very least, the prospectus has to wait until after January's College English. Do you like how I speak as though there's a possibility that the prospectus would be ready before January?

Paul-o and I were talking the other night about how we didn't really feel prepared for life after that big milesone of GETTING THE JOB. I imagine folks at Syracuse did try to prepare us, but maybe we just didn't want to hear it or just couldn't hear it because we were so focused on that one goal of THE JOB. I left class last night feeling as though maybe I gave students too much of an idea of what it's like from day to day in THE JOB--the way priorities shift, what has happened to my teaching, the unbelievable weight I carry around about publishing. Perhaps the difference really is that the weight just changes shape: in grad school, all that weight is about getting THE JOB and now all that weight is about GETTING TENURE and after that all the weight will be about PUBLISHING WHAT YOU REALLY WANT TO SAY. The weight never really goes away, so academia is a good place for people with internalized supervision, discipline, and guilt complexes. If you don't have these, how will you survive?

Thanks, Mom.