Little Breakdowns

In the hallway tonight, I felt a little panic nibbling around the edges. Naturally, someone stopped me to talk.

The last few weeks have been a lot of little hoop jumping moments, and they've added to the vague sense of distress that I had the wrong idea about what I was being hired to do. There are, I am reminding myself, a few ways to build a department and to handle new hires. You can hire someone who does something your department is lacking. This is what I'd thought was happening. But you can also hire someone who does something similar to what your department or someone in it already does. And, realistically, there's the possibility that you weren't being strategic at all.

So there was some mild discomfort when I discovered the two of the courses I thought I was being hired to teach were already being taught. But I bucked up, little campers, and got on with it. Imagine, though, the horror when I found out today that the other course I'd been developing and shepherding through various hoops and hoopla is being taught in another department.

Superfluous?

An economic luxury?

Soon-to-be bureaucratic piñata?

Oh, how tired I am tonight. If you see anyone coming with sticks, warn me. Or at least stuff me with candy. They shouldn't disappointed.

Whirlwind of Productivity

Today, I'm in my office, which is freezing though it sounds like the heat is on, and I've got the song "Mercedes Boy" by Pebbles stuck in my head, though I haven't heard it since probably 1989 and I've got iTunes on loud shuffle trying to exorcise it from my head.

Go on, click that link and suffer with me. I bet you didn't know there was an extended version. Thanks, YouTube!

As the title says, I've been all kinds of productive in the last 24 hours. Yesterday, I graded 25 projects and provided detailed feedback. I wrote two reference letters - though I need to proof them this evening. And for the conference we're "helping" to co-host (the other co-hosts have largely vanished and my co-conspirator here has been the usual level of disorganized) was falling behind on things, so I also sent out 50+ acceptance letters.

The conference is tiring me out, as I knew it would. All the things I was afraid would go wrong have. Big Ideas/Bigger Mouth from the other U - who asked to co-host - has found all his promised funding gone, all his "friends who would do us favors" vanished, and may well have gone on vacation. That's left us to find the keynotes, to review the proposals, to send the acceptances, and thus far, to come up with all the funds that have been come up with. For my part, I've put together a banquet, transportation to the banquet and a local tourist attraction, found a band, ordered drinks, ordered the furniture and the setup, found the funding for all of that at a tiny university in an economic recession, and last night, sent out all the acceptance letters.

I'm tired. And yet my grading is caught up, and my lectures are planned. I do not deserve "Mercedes Boy." I don't. If this is karma, I'm sorry for inventing polio. I didn't mean to. Please stop this song and let me rest.

RBOC: Planning and Griping Edition

Busy trying to clear things off my desk. Feels like the workload for my year (or maybe just the term) has been front-loaded.

But progress has been made. The following items are in the planning stages and need feedback:

• I'm planning the meal for the closing banquet of the conference we're helping with. Honestly, who left the guy from Texas in charge of a menu for a group that's guaranteed to have lots of vegetarians? Even worse, our caterer has just stopped giving prices with their catering guide so I'm going into this blind and well-aware that I'm going to have to negotiate. Anyway, how does this sound for a vegetarian menu:

1. ravioli porcini morel (the main course)
   
2. fresh mesclun salad
3. baked sweet potatoes
4. baby squash
5. angel food cake with seasonal berries

• I think I've got a widget/gadget/whatever the hell Blogger is calling it this week to help deal with the job search status questions (incidentally, there didn't seem to be a great counter for Blogger, but there was a spiffy one for WordPress). My question is what things would you like to see me track? I was thinking about the overall cost; the number of jobs found, applied for, contacted by, and various types of interviewed for; and maybe the number of requests for particular types of documents. Anything else?
• On a different note, one of my soon-to-be-graduating seniors said, in response to a discussion about Interlibrary loans, "Wait...so the library will give us a loan?" They were quite disappointed when a fellow student said "Yeah. Of books and magazine articles."
  
• My Mac is still softwareless. It's a $2600 web browser at the moment (oh, and it plays "Spore" - see the example at the right of one of my creations). I tried to request the software I'd need for it, and am now locked in a battle with IT over whether I should have to buy copies of software that the University has upgraded to and that I'm required to use in teaching for this computer.
  

And on that note, good night.

King for a Day

Today, by virtue of being the only faculty member in my department who isn't teaching in the early evening, I've been elected to attend the Department Chairs meeting. I would like to think that this will be a fascinating learning experience. But I suspect it will be a mind-numbing chart fest where I'll be bludgeoned with endless Excel spreadsheets of University assessment mumbo-jumbo which seems to be all the rage these days.

For whatever reason, I keep picturing it a bit like the trial from "The Crucible," but I've no idea why. Maybe it's the oddly officious way in which things are done here - so often, decisions seem to be made by scaring the herd in a particular direction. But I find it interesting that Miller could have been writing his play not about McCarthyism but about academic decision making.

We're still in the midst of figuring out things with our candidate and the entire department is on edge. Today I had to explain to our chair that someone asking for specifics probably means they're comparing us to another school that has all of those things ironed out and codified - research start-up funds, timetables, and such - and that coming into one's first or second job, those details become oddly comforting and should be seen as a search for some sense of security rather than as being picky. It doesn't help, particularly, as Dance has pointed out, that there isn't exactly a simple means of comparison among such things.