Three weeks ago, I awakened to my first Monday of underemployment. The world has changed radically since then, or maybe it hasn't. It is hard to know. Let me collect a few snapshots here.
--I am still adjusting to the idea that my schedule has a lot more flexibility than it once did. I continue to think about the balance of writing, walking, and other practices that make up the best morning. I am also aware that it may change in 2 weeks when we go back to Daylight Savings Time.
--Similarly, I am thinking about more travel than I once would have, back when I had to consider how much vacation time I had accrued. One of my church friends asked me if I had considered going to the God Spa retreat. I am now considering it.
--My replacement arrives today at my former campus, just a month before the accreditors come for a big visit. When I took the job that brought me to my former campus, we had just a month to get various accreditation documents ready, but that was a much easier task than getting a campus ready for a visit. I wish her luck; she will need it, but she might not realize that she needs it. She's coming from a University of Phoenix campus, so she won't have had experience with the accreditors that will be coming at the end of March.
--This is also the week where lots of people on the academic side will be moving into and out of offices at my old campus--or at least, that was the plan when I left. I don't miss that aspect of campus life.
--Over the week-end, I signed a publishing contract for one of my essays to appear in a book of essays about assembling poetry manuscripts. It has been so long since the initial acceptance that I assumed that the project had fallen apart. What a pleasant surprise to realize that it has not.
--Whenever I get this kind of news, I wonder if I should be doing more to attend to my poetry career, such as it is. But then I look at various submission guidelines and feel that jolt of shock at submission fees. I saw one journal this week-end, one that was fairly new, charging $5.00 to submit. Nope--not doing that unless you're a journal where an acceptance might actually further a poetry career.
--And even then, part of me has to laugh at the idea of a poetry career. I don't think anyone is making a living off of their poetry book sales. Even poet laureates have teaching jobs.
--And yes, I do understand the precarious economics of literary magazines. I do not feel called to underwrite those economics with my poetry submissions, but I am not criticizing those that decide to play that particular lottery/game.
--I came across this article in The New York Times yesterday, an essay that looks at these developments in Ukraine through the lens of 80's popular culture. It calls the coverage the worst kind of nostalgia programming: "There was the buildup of tensions over a supposed “military exercise,” the scenario that opened “The Day After” in 1983. There were the columns of tanks, an image out of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Soviet newsreels and the 1984 movie “Red Dawn.” There were the maps of Europe, with arrows diagraming pincer attacks and fire-red explosion graphics."
--That article ends this way:
"You could see this as evidence that we were still living in the same world that we lived in last week. You could assure yourself that this did not fit the apocalypse-film script, that this was not, in the end, 'The Day After.'
You might also remember, though, that that is exactly the sort of thing someone always says in the first 15 minutes of the disaster movie."
--Here's hoping that we can back away from this brink in the way that a pop culture movie script would not.
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