After grading on Friday night, spend the weekend working on a book manuscript review. Take copious notes. Spend today writing up the review. Pack it into your increasingly bulging "to be mailed" folder to take to campus. Think to yourself that the author ought to be grateful for such thorough recommendations. Realize that this will never happen.
Start reading for the class in which you're to teach a new novel tomorrow.
Turn on the internet at the end of the day. See e-mail, a nice reminder from a student: "I know you must have sent the letter you said you'd write for me."
Rats.
Consider having tattooed on your forehead (backwards, so that you can read it whenever you look in a mirror): You will never catch up. Never.
Repeat every day in October--and, as it now appears, November as well.
2 comments:
An odd twist: start reading, for teaching reasons (true desperation: teaching a new novel, need perspective fast) a book which you should have read for research reasons two years ago when it came out, and never got to. See upon opening it at last that you are listed in the acknowledgments - first. Feel honored and grateful - but also guilty - one really should not get this behind.
Just leave the feeling at honored and grateful--no one can keep up with all that's published these days.
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