What's Next?

Dissertation: The next thing I have to tackle is finishing Chapter Seven--the last case study of the dissertation. Then I need to come up with some concluding remarks. I've already written a future research section to that, but I need to find a story to conclude with.

Employment: I still need very much to find some temporary employment until school starts in August. I received a call for an interview for one of the library positions I applied for. That's cool, but it's not really the position I wanted as it is less than 20 hours a week--that's not really going to generate the kind of finance I need right now. Of course, some money is better than no money so hopefully it will be a start.

This Blog: ABDMom started a discussion about the future of her blog, and that topic has been on my mind lately as well. Rather than hog her comments, I thought I'd post on the subject.

I started this blog after re-reading Joann Bolker's Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day. I was assigned the book in a seminar I took during my MA coursework and I had placed it on my shelf after the seminar. In reading it a second time during my proposal process, I really took to the idea of keeping a log of my writing and using that log to start my writing for the day. A blog only occurred to me when one of my colleagues sent out an email with her blog as she was going overseas. I had no idea what I was getting myself into--no idea I would find so many wonderful friends, supporters, and future colleagues. I thought that after the diss was over, that would be the end of the blog. Period. But now--I'm hooked. I love just writing every day. Four years of graduate school could not get me into the habit of writing regularly, but keeping this blog did. This has really helped me manage my dissertation in a systematic way. I haven't keep a regular journal in years and this kind of journaling feels great. I think I will continue to blog after the dissertation is defended and turned in, but how.

As ABDMom noted, keeping a blog can have limitations. I am constantly censoring myself here. I leave out my personal feelings and emotions a lot. I don't comment too often on media and politics, or on the personalities and forces at play in my own world (like my CoChairs and my institution)--topics that I would love to discuss. The longer I have kept this blog, the less information I've given about my work and that feels odd to me. There are a number of alternatives--the question is which one--and I think I'm leaning in a different direction from my ABDMom....

1) Go Further Underground: It would probably behoove me as I'm going into my first TT job to blog more secretively. Start a whole new blog with a new identity and be very careful. Then I could talk about the trials of work and my personal life more freely.

2) Stay Semi-Private: I don't make a lot of effort to hide myself in this blog. I don't put my full name on blast, but it would not be very difficult to find me by all the information I've given over these months. And I'm okay with that--for now.

3) Embrace my Double Consciousness: Being Black in America, many have argued, means having two lives. As Dave Chappelle said in his interview on Inside the Actor's Studio (which was GREAT if you haven't seen it--catch a repeat on Bravo tonight at 9PM EST)--being Black means being bilingual. My professional life is really different from my personal life, although I fuse the two in a lot of ways, I desire for my job to be my job and not my life. So why not create two spaces--one in which I openly discuss my scholarship and teaching, allowing students and colleagues to know what I'm working on and how that work is developing--the other for my downtime when I'm home and wanting to talk about just life.

Option #1 would encourage me to stay in the academic-blogosphere and while I will always read academic blogs, I'm not sure I want to continue to write myself into that community. Right now, it does fulfill a need for me as I am away from my institution, but as I prepare to go to New School City, I am looking forward to being in a new department and participating in that community and that will be more than enough academic life-stuff for me. My department is very young and I already feel a sense of kinship with the junior faculty in the department so I hope that we will be able to lean on each other through the trials and tribulations of starting out. Maintaining a very underground academic blog, while keeping me in touch with people I've come to care about a great deal (even though we haven't met!), would probably only serve to make me paranoid at work and would encourage me to vent perhaps too much about the things in academe that bother me.

Option #2 just would not be wise or comfortable for me starting my job. Am I afraid of being "Tribbled,"--not really, but I would continue to censor myself in the event that colleagues and students read my blog.

So I'm leaning towards #3, but I'm curious to see how it will play out. I am imagining a blog attached to my personal website at school. I am also imagining something very new being developed somewhere in cyberspace that is a commentary on all the things that interest me like love, food, music, church, shopping, etc. But I really don't know. I feel like I may start working and feel the need to journal in more traditional ways. I am open to whatever my happen next, but I do know that my blogging, in this space, is coming to an end soon. I may do a little spell as "My So Called (PhD) Life" after this diss is done, but even that feels like it would be short-lived. But like I said, I really don't know....