Crunch Time

Thanksgiving was on Monday and it often serves as the marker for some sort of crunch time in academia. The time after Thanksgiving means midterms, essays due, group presentations, and all sorts of other things.

I was traveling for most of the weekend so I didn’t do much of anything except read a great book called Academic Ableism (everyone should read it btw). I also have been feeling a bit under the weather as happens when you are traveling a lot. The lack of having time or the physical well-being to do things has me reflecting on the crunch time that is October and all the things to do but also the things left behind.

I started participating in the 9x9x25 blog challenge with a colleague at work but even that has slipped away this week. This is due to the fact that we are both at a conference tomorrow and Friday which meant that this was an extra short week for us. I have also slipped from my writing 1000 words a day challenge which is supposed to increase to 2000 words a day in November. Again some of that has to do with momentum changes but I also know a lot of it was due to the large question mark that was placed over the conference paper that I was supposed to write.

Today I received an email saying they will be publishing the schedule this weekend & can I send a finalized my title (meaning about 17 days before the actual conference). I’m really conflicted about this conference; part of me just wants to tell them forget it because it seems very poorly organized. I know it’s crunch time for everyone, but I’m really not used to not knowing the schedule of a conference 2 months ahead of time (what happens to others who have to travel from far? But I digress). The other part of me wants to maintain currency in my non-directly work related research. I know that I’m not healthy enough to make that decision right now because my tiredness will win out (sleep good, intense research bad?) but I know that’s just the congestion speaking.

Everything seems to be ramping up right now so it will be interesting to be at this conference for the next 2 days in terms of perspective that it will provide. I’ve set time to revisit all of these thoughts on writing enough and not enough on Sunday. The conference paper will add to my word count for the month so that’s another positive, I just have to balance that with all the other crunch time things.

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