Easter snow

As a northern person from way back, I always get a laugh (okay, a bitter laugh) out of the pictures of green grass, Easter egg hunts, chicks and bunnies, spring clothes, and all those images of general sunshiny goodness that the news likes to promote. As I think back, the only holiday with consistently worse weather than Easter in a northern climate is Halloween. (I have yet to experience a Halloween without gale-force winds, snow, rain, or all three, but it seems appropriate then.)

It's not snowing today, although we got close to a blizzard a couple of days ago. The freezing rain is pouring down on the brown, dead grass, and the sky is the same unvarying gray that it has been since what passed for sunrise this morning.

But sometimes you have to go with what you believe rather than with what the objective sensory experience of the weather tells you.

When I was little, I liked wearing new clothes and shoes for Easter even though no one would see them, since we were stuffed into a snowsuit and boots for the trip to church.

As a teenager, I had some very un-Easterlike arguments with my mother about whether I needed to wear full winter gear over my new spring dress to go visit the grandparents. "It's Easter! It's spring," I insisted, and won, though my legs beneath my stockings were mottled blue with the cold and my teeth chattered in the icy wind and snow.

In contemplating what seems to be a dead season, you have to believe it's alive. You have to will yourself into being Shelley.

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Teaching: that was then; this is now

A friend recently wrote that because of various schedule conflicts she was going to drop the last book on her syllabus. She added something like this: "I would have agonized over that choice when I first started teaching, but not now."

Along those lines, I discovered that I had left an entire week off my otherwise detailed and carefully planned syllabus for this semester. When I first started teaching, explaining this to the class would have made me worry: would they think I didn't know what I was doing? Would they complain because now I assigned additional readings? This week, however, I went in with a new syllabus for the rest of the term, explained it briefly, and joked that although I obviously could read literature, I clearly couldn't read a calendar.

I'm thinking of other things, too, that once took a lot of time (and sometimes distress) on my part that I don't think about now:

Fielding the "when will you give our papers back?" question.
Then: I tried to calculate when I could get them done and went short on sleep to be sure that I got them done.
Now: "When I get them done." Smile.

Confronting a plagiarist.
Then: Talk to other teachers about an appropriate penalty (rewrite? report it?), get worried, and brace myself for the discussion.
Now: Know what the penalties are. Tell the student I need to see him or her. Apply the penalties.

Having a student talk in class or acting up in some way.
Then: Get angry, but don't show it. Get flustered.
Now: Give the Steely-Eyed Glare (tm). Ask the student to speak to you after class.

Having a student ask you a question that you don't know the answer to, or challenge you about an answer you've given.
Then: Backpedal desperately, maybe. Worry that you don't know as much as the students.
Now: Say "I don't know. Can you tell me more about it?" or "That's amazing; I didn't know that. Can you explain that further?"

Linked to this is the knowledge that about some subjects, students will have a deep well of knowledge from some special interest they have. For example, instead of launching into an explanation of some historical or cultural event now--the Battle of the Marne, maybe, or Gettysburg, or the meaning of "elegy," or the history of the light bulb--I ask if anyone knows something about it. Often, they do, and once they've given their explanation, I can expand on it and bring it back to the class discussion.

What about you? What do you do differently now that you've taught for a while?

Lessons from Lucy

You know that I Love Lucy episode where Lucy tries to wrap the chocolates but they keep coming along the line faster and faster until she's overwhelmed?

Yeah, it's like that right now, but I will write a real post soon.

Woods walk

  For those who want something to look at besides unfinished writing.

Random questions with a few answers

Questions that have drawn me away from writing in the past 24 hours.

Everybody knows that Charles Dickens became a crack reporter of parliamentary doings, but what system of shorthand did he use? Gregg? It hadn't been invented yet. Pitman? Maybe. (Answer: Gurney.) Did he and other writers who began as writers of shorthand (e.g., Arnold Bennett) keep using it for short notes and things once they began writing novels?

Is there a life cycle to academic book prices? I've been pricing two books I want to buy, one from 1992 and one from 1997, and they're both ridiculously expensive. Does this cycle sound right to you? Freshly published: full price or discounted at MLA; 5 years out, may be discounted and show up on Scholar's Bookshelf; 10-15 years out, priced like a Shakespeare First Folio; 20 years out, $2 on eBay and abebooks.com.

Will I ever get to see the wronged wife of a cheating politician haul off and smack his face on live television, just once? Am I the only otherwise nonviolent person who hopes fervently to see this?

Mark Bauerlein: Break out the chocolate and put your feet up; you're working too hard

Over at the Chronicle, Mark Bauerlein has ignited a firestorm of controversy (for the academic world, anyway) with his post "Stop Pushing Yourself." A sample:

But if we look at tenured professors in the humanities and in many other disciplines, it seems to me that much of the work they do is entirely self-generated. The conference papers that have to be written, the scholarly articles they want to complete, the book projects that hang over them . . . these are not required. They are elective. . . . So why do they do it? Is it really worth sweating all those months getting that manuscript in order—which upon publication will sell only a few hundred copies—just to boost your annual raise a few hundred dollars?

New Kid had a good take on this, pointing out (as did some of the original commenters) that this applies only to the most privileged portions of academe, and Michael Berube points out that service work isn't being counted at all in Bauerlein's model. Eric Rauchway makes the point about privilege but with more charts and graphs for added outrage, and jbj at the Salt-Box says that maybe and in a very loose sense some of the activities are optional, but they're only optional if you think that things like advising, faculty governance, and paying attention to your teaching are optional (which apparently Bauerlein does).

I've said before that no one, and especially academics, likes being told "I'm so busy that I don't have time to do X, but would you do it?" It's a pistols-at-dawn remark to tell someone that you don't think he or she is as busy as you are, and, in effect, this is part of the sore spot that Bauerlein has hit with a sledgehammer. He's saying, in effect, "You're busy, but you don't have to be, and so your busyness doesn't count. In fact, a lot of what you do doesn't really matter." That's right up there with "I don't have time to read this manuscript/write this committee report/learn how to use Blackboard/meet with this student, but I'm sure you wouldn't mind taking it on" as an incitement to rage. His point goes deeper than that, however, as the bloggers mentioned above have discussed so well, so I just have a few questions:

Did Mark Bauerlein see his two books as optional? Would he have been promoted to full professor without them?

That "few hundred dollars" may not mean much to him, but to someone who takes coupons to Costco and is elated when she saves $15, it's a lot. I guess it depends on whether you already have a lot of money, but $300 is a lot to most of us, especially, as several have pointed out, if it's added to your salary base and extends over a lifetime.

And those readers? Are we to give up if we don't sell books like Dan Brown and Tom Clancy combined? Channeling Milton: "Still govern thou my song, / Urania, and fit audience find though few" (PLVII.30-1)

Isn't the incessant whining about and fear of academic deadwood that goes on in the Chronicle and elsewhere proof that "pushing yourself" is not only encouraged but required in academics? Does anyone expect this culture to change?

If he doesn't think that contributing to a store of knowledge is important, what about teaching? What about the extra time we take to just sit down and talk with students who want to talk? Is that time wasted, too?

I wonder if Bauerlein isn't part of a more general trend that's always being written about: you know, the corporate executive who quits everything to raise goats in New Hampshire or open a cafe or whatever. He makes a pile of money and then writes a "My Turn" in Newsweek pontificating on the joys of rural living and the bad effects of corporate stress. Maybe that's the case with Bauerlein. He's done what he needed to do and now wants to cut back (maybe; this is speculation), and, because he doesn't see how others might not be in the same place in terms of salary or career, he's eager to see other s do that too. In other words, the most charitable interpretation of what he's saying is that he's made this discovery and wants to share it with the rest of us.

Of course, such an attitude rests, as it always does to a greater or lesser degree, on privilege--not just the academic privilege of having a 2-2 load at a private university but having the salary that goes with it, the kind of salary that maybe allows you to kick back, open a box of chocolates, put your feet up, and relax.

If you want to offer me that salary, give me a call. In the meantime, I'll be writing.

You might be an English professor if . . .

. . . you hear Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars" on the radio (and it seems to be on constantly), and you listen to "If I lie here / If I just lay here," and, instead of being moved by it, you think this:

No, you're still in present tense, so "lay" should be "lie." "Lay" is the past tense of "lie" or an entirely different verb altogether. Get with the program!

On writing: learning to sprint and other enticements

I turned my internet connection off today, and, sure enough, I got more writing done. By "turned off" I mean unplugged, which means that to override my "no internet" ban and give in to temptation I would have to root around underneath my desk and plug it back in, a real disincentive. By the time 5:00 rolls around, I'm eager to get at my email, which I would have been checking all day except for the ban. You know what? There was nothing interesting or important there, nothing at all. It's a good lesson in just how indispensable email can be.

(Incidentally, e-mail or email? NYTimes seems to favor the hyphen, but most people don't use it. I feel a little like a 1920s person writing "to-day" when I use it but, like Miss Manners, I want to be perfectly correct.)

The other technique I tried is something I thought of as "sprints." With the idea that I can stand anything for 20 minutes, I set the timer for 20 minutes and write down my progress at the end. It may be a lot of words or only a few, but it looks like progress. An alternative system is to stop at the end of each hour and count the words.

Now, counting words isn't the measure of whether a piece is good or lousy, or even whether you'll have to scrap what you've written because it's so bad or goes in the wrong direction. But what it does is allow me to say this to the voices in my head: "I'm sitting here in the chair. I'm not reading election news on nytimes.com or talkingpointsmemo.com. And I am writing words. The only way to get from here to done is to write words, and I am doing that."

Deepak Chopra or some of the other fancy spiritual folks could probably make something high-sounding out of this (can you tell I have never read him?) but plain and practical is good enough for now.

Erase your memory? No, thanks, I already have.

In Psych 101, you learn about the Zeigarnik effect, a principle affecting memory. The Zeigarnik effect describes the situation in which you remember incomplete tasks better than completed ones. It's named after a psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik, who noted that waiters would remember an order while they were still serving it but forget it immediately afterward.

Although my memory clings with a desperate grasp to annoying commercials, random bits of doggerel (why couldn't I have memorized as much of Paradise Lost as I have of pointless song lyrics?), and times when I made a stupid mistake, it's a complete sieve about some things.

Today, I was talking with a colleague about Significant but Not Required Invited University Social Event. "I thought I saw your name on the list," he said. "Aren't you going?" I had a virtually identical conversation with another colleague later. "Didn't you receive the invitation?" he asked. "I thought your name was on the list."

Uh oh. The thing is, I might have received the invitation, or I might not have received it. Like all faculty members, I get a lot of, let's say, not immediately relevant mail on glossy cardstock from other places in the university. "Come help us celebrate the 150th anniversary of the invention of the shoelace," one might read, or "Please come and support our cause at this dinner for only $100 a head."

I look at them, and, if they require an RSVP, I respond. Action taken. Task completed. Task forgotten.

This also happens if I respond to something like a survey or a ballot of some sort. "Did you complete our survey?" goes the reminder. Beats me. Dr. Zeigarnik would be proud.

So, in short, I may have committed a faux pas by receiving an invitation and not responding, or I may not have received an invitation at all, or--and here is the scary part--I may have responded and completely forgotten it. If I did this on paper, it won't be in the sentmail folder so I can check, either.

Welcome to the road company of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotted Mind.

Shorter Chronicle: Turnitin--Spawn of Satan or Grader’s Friend?

The Chronicle has an article (behind the subscription wall--sorry) about John Barrie, the founder of Turnitin.com, the plagiarism detection site, the gist of which is the title of this post. The founder sounds as though he’s on a mission to stamp out writing-related moral turpitude before “another Enron”:

"The disturbing thing," he told the newspaper, "is that Princeton is producing our society's future leaders, and the last thing anyone wants is a society full of Enron executives."

Countering his view is Charles Lowe, who makes good points:

But critics say that's a fact to be lamented, not a cause for celebration. Not only does Turnitin grab student papers for use in its database without compensating the students, they argue, but it also encourages professors to spend time policing their students instead of teaching them. "Turnitin does sound wonderful on the surface," says Charles Lowe, an assistant professor of writing at Grand Valley State University, "but a lot of faculty members aren't even aware of why they might not want to use it."

Lowe's argument is that Turnitin.com uses student work for its own profits and generally without the consent of the students; it may create a climate of suspicion wherein students are presumed to be cheating; and instructors should stop being so lazy and make plagiarism-proof assignments.

I agree with Lowe, to an extent, but would note this: the idea that you can easily make a plagiarism-resistant assignment is true for writing courses but not for literature courses. In fact, a lot of the arguments I’ve seen against using Turnitin.com have come from rhet/comp people, and they are completely right in what they argue. A lot of the arguments I’ve seen in favor of using it come from lit people, and they, too, are right. It depends on what you’re teaching.

There are two separate issues here: the utility/morality of using Turnitin, and the necessity to create plagiarism-resistant (no such thing as plagiarism-proof) assignments. Both are connected, however.

About the assignment: These days, probably only a rookie would give a general assignment to write a 750-word out-of-class explication of “My Last Duchess” or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; it’s just too easy and too tempting for students to dump in material they’ve copied and pasted from the numerous sites that deal with well-known works. I’ve seen arguments saying that students feel insulted by such assignments and plagiarize as a means of expressing their contempt.

Most of the students I’ve caught plagiarizing, however (and never for an assignment like this, which I wouldn’t give), have had the same explanations: they ran out of time, or they thought the arguments they saw online would make their papers more impressive--mostly the former. But once in a while students will try to plagiarize even when given a well-designed assignment, one that engages students and requires drafts, unique perspectives, and so on. Yes, this occurs even in the best of all possible worlds, and it’s not proof of a lazy and disengaged instructor, a bad assignment, or even a bad student. That’s where people who make the case for Turnitin say that their product comes in handy.

About the utility/morality of Turnitin: I’m leaving aside the whole copyright issue with students’ papers, although it’s certainly a big one. I’m concerned primarily with how Turnitin affects individual classes.

Morality: One argument says that having students submit papers to Turnitin assumes that all students are cheaters, and I’ve heard instructors say that they only submit “suspicious” papers. Isn’t this more insulting to the individual student, however—to assume that he or she is cheating? If you were a student, wouldn’t you be distressed to learn that your instructor had singled out your paper because she was suspicious of it? Wouldn’t you wonder why she had submitted it and whether her suspicions had more to do with you as a person and maybe your gender/race/social class/attitude in class than with the paper itself?

Utility: Another argument says that you can get just about the same results using Google, so, why use Turnitin? Answer: it saves time. I have used it in the past, early in its development, and don’t do so now, but it did save huge quantities of time. (Yes, when I used it students could opt out of having their papers submitted by doing an alternate assignment, though no one chose that option.) Most instructors hate plagiarism because it violates principles of ethics, but they also hate it—or I do—because it wastes my time, and I hate any activity that wastes my time.

So here’s the question: is it all right to use something like Turnitin, which may be questionable ethically, if it saves you a lot of time? Is it all right to use something that may be profiting from students' work without their consent if it helps to stamp out a greater problem, namely plagiarism?

Syllabus squeeze, or "Hey, I read that in high school"

What do you call it when you find out that a book, story, or poem that you'd wanted to teach--or that you regularly teach--gets taught in high school? What about if several of your colleagues want to teach it? What happens if it's so popular that whole realms of the Sparknotes-enotes corner of the internet are devoted to it?

In theory, at least, this isn't a problem. Hey, it's good for the students to read a book more than once, isn't it? In practice, though, you hear something like this:

The Awakening, Great Expectations, The Scarlet Letter, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass?

"Yeah, we read that in English."

Hamlet?

"We did that in AP, and we partnered with a class in Japan over the internet. We put it on as an opera and sang it in both languages. My teacher said that having just a male ghost was too patriarchal, so we turned Ophelia into a ghost in Act V so that there'd be gender equity and the two ghosts could sing duets together."

Okay, I'm kidding, but just barely.

Seriously, what do you do about syllabus squeeze, when you feel as though you're making choices based not on the best texts that for what you want to do in the class but on issues that should be completely irrelevant, like whether they've already read the book in high school or whether analyses of it litter the internet, thus making plagiarism a too-tempting option?

If you're idealistic, maybe you assign them anyway and hear "my high school teacher said X" or "Dr. X said this" or, worse, just see the faces of those for whom Hamlet is a been-there, done-that, got-the-t-shirt event and that they plan to reread it approximately never. Or maybe they don't do this, but it's a crapshoot.

If you're cynical, maybe you knock yourself out finding obscure texts to teach. But you know what? Some of those classics are classics for a reason, and some of them are engaging for students and important in ways that others are not.

So what do you do?

Ooooh, snap! A transcendental smackdown.

From The Blog of Henry David Thoreau:

But the fact is, the earnest lecturer can speak only to his like, and the adapting of himself to his audience is a mere compliment which he pays them. If you wish to know how I think, you must endeavor to put yourself in my place. If you wish me to speak as if I were you, that is another affair.

[Title edited because I am culturally illiterate and did not know throwdown from smackdown.]

Glimpses of another time

Squadratomagico has a post up about what academics (and implicitly academics in the liberal arts) give up when they choose academics as a career. Among the things that she discusses are proximity to family, choice of a place to live, sense of a self outside the job, and even separation from one's partner if one follows the job instead of the partner to a new place and hopes for a better placement in a few years.

It's been this way for at least thirty years, as everyone who has gone to graduate school since the 1970s has always known before going into a Ph. D. program, but that doesn't make the situation good. It's been the same for several decades and despite occasional spasms of hope ("Urgent need for more Ph.D.'s in English predicted, studies say"--remember those headlines?), the employment situation doesn't seem to be changing.

There was a time, though, when the situation wasn't like this, as I've heard from older colleagues, so I thought a glimpse of those times might be interesting--or maybe would call them into being again.

An older colleague once told me about his experience at MLA back in the late 1960s: "I had six interviews, but when I walked into the pit (the interviewing room), search committees from other colleges would try to flag you down and get you to interview with them. They would try to sell you on their schools as you were walking by." I think he was ABD at the time when this was happening.

Another colleague told of going to MLA on a lark ("lark" and "MLA" are two words that do NOT belong in the same sentence these days) with some friends. They took some resumes with them and planned to sign up for some interviews with schools while they were there, because back then schools posted job descriptions and signup sheets. If you were there, and you fit the description, you could sign up and get an interview, apparently.

Let's hope those days aren't gone for good.

Shootings on campus

Once again, sadly, shootings on campus, with five dead and many others wounded, at Northern Illinois University. Our thoughts and hearts go out to them.

Surviving February: Human Hibernation?

A few months ago, The New York Times published "The Big Sleep," an op-ed that alluded to Graham Robb's theory that in the Middle Ages, people basically slept the winter away:

In the mountains, the tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. “Seven months of winter, five months of hell,” they said in the Alps. When the “hell” of unremitting toil was over, the human beings settled in with their cows and pigs. They lowered their metabolic rate to prevent hunger from exhausting supplies. If someone died during the seven months of winter, the corpse was stored on the roof under a blanket of snow until spring thawed the ground, allowing a grave to be dug and a priest to reach the village.

The same mass dormancy was practiced in other chilly parts. In 1900, The British Medical Journal reported that peasants of the Pskov region in northwestern Russia “adopt the economical expedient” of spending one-half of the year in sleep: “At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread. ... The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself” and “goes out to see if the grass is growing.”

I've been thinking about this ever since. Can it really be true? Medievalists, what say you? Is this a well-established fact in medieval studies, and, if so, why don't they teach us about this in Chaucer class? Is it even possible, physiologically speaking, to sleep this much after you're 17 years old? And if so, wouldn't your muscles waste away the way that those of people in nursing homes and intensive care units do?

Edited to add: I'm writing about this now because while this seemed totally impossible in November, by February--the month where days are short, cold, and gray--it's seeming more sensible by the minute.

Update 3-19-08: There's a letter to the editor about this in the NYTimes in 1906 , but it still sounds unlikely.

[Another post about human hibernation and Malcom Gladwell's take on it.]

Darwinism in Academe

From Jessica Burstein's "No: A Love Song" in the Chronicle (I think it's behind the subscription wall--sorry). Burstein tells about having a panel rejected by an organization that she'd been with since its first meeting (I was at that first conference, too), and along the way she says this:

Here's what I know to be true. Academe is about being rejected. Everyone is told no. Am I right about this close reading? No. Will you read my dissertation? No. Can I have this job? No. How about this fellowship? No. Publish my article? No. Might I have tenure? No. Do you want my book? Nope. Could I get a promotion, a raise, an office with a window, an office, 15 extra copies on the Xerox machine? No, no, no, no, and yes — wait, I changed my mind: No.
. . . In Texas, or its outlying areas — Cincinnati, Seattle, Amsterdam, Algiers — academics proceed by virtue of an algorithm of envy. Born of denial, "no" is its currency, while "yes" swaggers through alleyways like dinners with Susan Sontag or Stephen Fry: You weren't there; but they had fun, and quips were exchanged.

Finally! She's so right, and yet this is the part of academics that we all pretend mightily just isn't so, that all things are open to us, when actually most of us will spend our careers getting rejected.

And yet we enable this behavior to occur. I'm reminded of this when I hear well-known people in the field saying things like "I think I'll do a panel on X at the next MLA" or other big conference. Isn't it a competitive process for them as it is for the rest of us grimy proles? How do they know it'll be accepted? Is it because--gasp--the proposer has a big name? MLA and all other conferences piously deny this, although a few years back PMLA, in an essay about why fewer academics submitted articles to it (answer: because they thought they had a snowball's chance in hell of being accepted), did admit that it relied heavily on "solicited contributions" rather than those submitted to a blind review process. (I think that has changed.) I know that some conferences "strongly encourage" (yes, that's a euphemism)including a "well-known scholar" as a respondent or chair if the organizer wants the proposal to be accepted.

I'm also reminded of this when I'm on a conference committee or hiring committee. Everyone gleefully wishes for a big pool of applicants or proposals to make a "strong program" or get the "strongest applicant." The more competitive a pool is, the better, according to everyone's estimation, and if a pool is small, everyone wonders whether it's good enough.

But wouldn't a sufficient number of good ones (applicants, proposals) do? Do we have to wish for excessive numbers? We're not breeding salmon here; we're choosing applicants or proposals. How Darwinian do we have to be? How many people do we have to say no to in order to satisfy ourselves that we're competing our way to the top?

The answer is "a lot," and that's why Burstein's conclusion is unlikely to change anytime soon.

RBOC (still here)

I will write a more substantial post soon, but for now, RBOC--now new and improved, with whining added!

Like the rest of the northern half of the country, I am ready to be finished with snow, snow, bad roads, worse roads, and generally awful weather. I'm a northern person from way back, but come on!

With the shovel, kitty litter, rug, rope, and other accouterments of northern living cluttering up the back of my car, a state trooper from around here would know I'm just ready to dig myself out of a snowbank and not preparing to bury a body. A state trooper from the south would think I'm another Crazy Astronaut Lady, minus the duct tape and diapers.

Classes are going well, and I got another piece of writing out the door this week.

A warning from the academic unconscious?

I don't usually post dreams, but this is an academic one.

I'm rushing to leave for a conference and reach in a manila folder to grab a copy of my paper before I ride out to the airport. Take the laptop this time? Nah, no need for that, I think.

Later, at the conference, I'm sitting in front of the audience and am up next. To my horror, I discover that what I have grabbed is not the paper I wrote but something else: the notes folder, with the first page of the paper, assorted scribblings, and a couple of articles. I leaf through it, but there is no paper there. Do I explain? Try to wing it? Read the first paragraph, then announce that I'm going in a different direction and will talk about something different, as I've seen done before?

The panel chair calls my name . . . and then I woke up.

Finished, done, gone, and out the door!

I've just sent the long article, so all told, that's three things sent this week (if you count proposals, and I certainly do count them). That leaves just work for class and a couple more things to get done before Tuesday.

In the meantime, I am lining up the possibilities for non-Superbowl-related amusements:

Shoveling the driveway again. Because like everywhere else in the northern half of the U.S. we've been getting record amounts of snow here in Northern Clime, this has become a daily (or sometimes twice daily) meditation-and-exercise regimen.

Knocking down the deathcicles that are hanging from my eaves. Seriously, one of the icicles is at least three feet long and tilted at an angle that would stab the unwary visitor to death if it were to fall off. There ought to be a murder mystery in which the weapon is an icicle, which would melt away and leave no trace.

Mediating the Cat Deathmatch that keeps erupting because Older Cat has decided to take Younger Cat's place on top of the filing cabinet in the room where I work. Younger Cat considers me her possession and will usually not tolerate any other cats within 5 feet of me, so my concentration keeps getting broken by hisses and yowls.

Clearing the decks for the next set of projects. By the time I've finished writing something, it's as though I'm a bird in the midst of a nest of papers and you can't see the floor anymore. Putting the previous project's copies, drafts, books, and general detritus away somehow gets my brain ready for the next batch.

Schadenfreude?

I'm still trying to catch up on projects with missed deadlines (hence the light blogging).

Here's a question, though: why does the knowledge that others are still later with their work than I am make me so deliriously happy? I'm not happy because they're behind, exactly, but I feel absurdly relieved if, after receiving something or hearing from an editor, I'm reassured that I'm not the only one who is late.

Is this schadenfreude? Is is the Daffy Duck philosophy of life, which states that "It is not only necessary that I succeed, but that you fail"?

I don't think it's either one, exactly. I'm not happy at others' misfortunes and don't want them to fail, but I am happy to learn that others are in the same boat. Is this "misery loves company" instead? Is there a name for it? Academic commiseration?