Today one of my colleagues and I made a lunch date for the first Friday in May. It's the first time in more than a year that I've planned to share a table with someone who doesn't share my address. (We will eat outside; we will both be vaccinated.) We are both looking forward to it. It's been a tough season in higher ed.
Some of last semester's difficulties are paying off, at any rate. I spent November buried in slow and painful revisions. They weren't revisions as in "you need a better word choice here"; they were revisions as in "you need to read a dozen papers from a different discipline and condense them into a paragraph while also persuading the reviewer that your interpretation is correct. SO SO SO brain-bendy. It sounds weird to call an intellectual task exhausting, but it felt grueling. Two of the three papers I was revising that month have now been accepted, including the one where I was braced for a rejection. (The third is in limbo with an editor who seems a little overwhelmed these days. Aren't we all a little overwhelmed these days?)
The second acceptance was waiting in my inbox this morning, which was a most excellent way to start the week. Later in the day I received an email from a different editor, who was writing to thank me for completing a recent peer review task. That task had caused me a fair amount of anxiety, because the paper was written by a rock-star researcher about technology I've never used. But it was investigating a question I've thought a lot about, and so I did the best I could with the review. To my surprise, the editor dropped me a note that said "thanks for your smart and helpful review -- it will really strengthen the paper." This has never happened to me before, in all my years of reviewing manuscripts. If she was trying to encourage me to review for her again in the future, it worked.
We are coming up on a municipal election in Gladlyville, and the conversations are more heated than they've ever been. Usually municipal elections are quiet and boring, but not this year. One of the candidates for a position was heavily involved in drumming up local folks willing to travel to the January Stop the Steal rally, and he appears to have no regrets about the whole thing. I am finding that I cannot adopt a live-and-let-live approach toward him. I think his decision not only to proclaim falsehoods in the presence of abundant controverting evidence but also to encourage others in professing that same false belief -- especially given the near-disastrous outcome of that particular alarming aggregation of the willfully deluded -- that is disqualifying, in my opinion. There has never been another municipal election in which I have wanted to pull up people's yard signs and pitch them in the garbage, but here we are. In my everyday life I am a quiet law-abiding sort, so I will not be engaging in any stealth lawn redecorating. But just between you and me and the internet, I keep thinking about it.
Recent Comments