Tuesday 8 September 2009

What's happening.

Here's the thing. I'm in the middle of a very difficult semester. The teaching workload is very high, the subject matter in my Women Writing course is proving to be emotionally exhausting for me and for my students, there's a lot riding on what research I can squeeze into sausage casings during the next few months, so I've committed myself to producing lots, and the university has just thrown some fairly amazing obstacles in the path of anybody teaching certain categories of subjects next year which requires a lot of thinking and planning for there to be any chance of dealing with them successfully. I don't mind telling you that my ability to deal with it all in a calm and reasonably psychologically healthy manner is being seriously tested. Physically it sucks, too - just now I've got this disgusting twitch in my right eyelid, and writing 8-12 thousand words a week is a pretty sure recipe for tendonitis.

One catch with all of this, the part that's making it harder than it probably needs to be, is that it's put my mind into a state that feels a bit like how bipolar disorder sounds in the descriptions of it that I've read. I can't turn it off when I've met my deadlines, and so I'm amassing a growing pile of scribbled notes for future critical writing which in each case I'm horribly excited by the thought of but I don't know when I will get an opportunity to return to any of them. Certainly not within the next six months. Well, work is very demanding in both bad and good ways at the moment and it's hard to write about it or about anything else. With the small pieces of time off that I do take (and which I can only have if I let something else slide) I don't want to be thinking about how to put experience into words (to quote DW Harding) - I want to be gardening, or sewing, or cooking, or communing with a cat, or doing thing siwht friends, or dancing (!! yes Dorian and I have taken up social dancing! inspired by various things including the aftermath of the Canberra trip, Dorian's jazz adventures, and all those yearsof reading Dogpossum blogging about lindy hop) - basically doing something that's not all in the head, in the head, in the head.

So anyway I thought I should accept and say that much as I would love to be putting these experiences into the record of my life that is this blog, I'm basically on blog-writing-in-any-meaningful-sense hiatus, at least until the end of semester.

That said, I did enjoy posting pictures from Europe and I will continue to do post pictures, although pictures of La Trobe tutorial rooms don't have quite the glamour of pictures of gondoliers drifting by the Rialto. That was another thing (that trip) which was just too full for me to be able to write it down, especially in the little bits and pieces of time I had available. Suffice it to say that it gave me plenty to think about, and in between scratching up lectures and what have you, I'm continuing to do just that....(think).

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