Connecting

Just in time to rescue me from the winter blues, I heard from Wonderful Mentor, who always seems to know just when to send me an email. I miss her terribly. We haven't talked much since I've moved to Gorgeous City due to my move and her promotion/new administrative duties. So it was good to just feel connected again.

I'm mulling over Doc's post about the many things about being a new faculty member that were not surprising to her. Part of me feels the same way--I knew it would be fun and exhausting to get back to teaching after a year off. I knew I'd be super busy. I knew the commute would drive me crazy some days. I knew being so close to home would drive me crazy others.

I did not expect to do much reading, especially after the binge reading I did this summer while working at the library. But I didn't think I would be so behind on my writing goals for the academic year. I've revised a few papers for conferences and submitted a short biographical piece for a collection, but I definitely wanted to have one or two articles under review by now. The positive side is that I never expected to be in a writing group and that has been a wonderful experience--I just wish I was giving them a bit more of my stuff to read! And there is still plenty of time in 2007 thank goodness.

Most of all though, I definitely didn't anticipate feeling disconnected. I always thought of graduate school as this rites of passage process--this thing you have to go through to get through the other side. Perhaps it was just an analogy that worked for me because of my experience in the fraternity/sorority community. I thought that much like Greek-lettered processes, I would come through on the other side and feel more a part of the whole. The whole ivory tower thingy-ma-jiggy. Some days I do--when I'm having interesting conversations with colleagues or students or making new connections to colleagues in other parts of the countries. But most days--when I'm sitting in class or meetings or in my office grading--I don't.

There are a lot of reasons for this disconnectedness--most of which I can't go into here. Undoubtedly a few are my "fault," but many are purely the random result of a weird matrix of organization structure, demography, geography, time, and resources. The challenging part for me right now is negotiating how much energy to place in working on the vague goal to "get more connected." That I don't have the answer to yet.