Twitter makes me a lazy blogger
Posted on | May 30, 2007 |
That much should be obvious, but I hope the updates on the sidebar are explaining why I’m not posting much. I found myself emailing a colleague yesterday saying that I had a heavy writing schedule over the next 6 months, with every week already planned. In retrospect it’s an odd thing to have said, ridiculously earnest and overwrought, especially when for various reasons the other person was struggling to get one thing done compared to my 4 or 7. But it’s just true. When you get to write full-time, there are increased levels of performance (some external, some internal). Sometimes you’ve got to recognise when you’re on a roll, because the times won’t always be so suitable.
Even though there’s a lot going on I’m feeling like I might finally have a rhythm to what I’m doing and almost satisfied with what I’m getting done. Most of all, I’m loving that the opportunities for writing are beginning to match the number and the timing of the ideas I’m having. I am a happy nerdy writer, and in the fourth year of being a postdoc, I guess it’s better late than never! It says something, though, doesn’t it, about the amount of self-knowledge that’s probably necessary when going in to a postdoc, or even a special studies program (that’s management-speak for sabbatical). That ‘rhythm’ I’m talking about has personal and circumstantial aspects to it that can’t be planned.
The greatest luxury of my job so far has been having the time and the opportunity to learn how to plan. I’m beginning to think - along with Ros Gill, whose recent work anticipates this - that the greatest class battle we face is fighting for this sort of time: not only the headspace to literally think beyond the demands of today or next week, but also the sense of security of being able to imagine the future. I still struggle with the second one, but for me that’s about navigating a bunch of personal choices bestowed by a neoliberal postfeminist culture rather than the struggle over precarity per se. And it seems that the only way to reckon with my relative privilege is to use every writing opportunity I have to question the inequality of its distribution - at a local and a global level.
Now I’ve said all that, of course now I expect a whole heap of comments from people waiting on some overdue chapter, review, interview edit, supervision query, email or phone call. I’ll be tweeting from the sidebar if you need me, and going to bed early.
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June 1st, 2007 @ 6:23 pm
May I be the first to say “Congratulations” on getting that rhythm! It is an amazing thing to have achieved.