End of the day...

I am five papers away from being officially caught up. Just a few days before student podcasts are due. And I have some serious writing to do for a few days. I would normally just take a section of my dissertation, The Mating Habits of the Lesser Red Squirrel (With Illustrations!), and rework some of it for my upcoming conference, but I'm not happy with anything that I wrote in the relevant chapter. An important reason to go to this conference is that I will be able to catch up with a lot of people who are attending, including my mentor and some chums who graduated a year or two ahead of me.

OK, I can snip some of the dissertation and put it in the paper. But I am still so fucking sick and tired of the Red Squirrel that I can't bring myself to even look at the illustrations.

And that's the thing. I have a variable and obsessive nature, which means that for an intense but brief period of time, I completely immerse myself in a subject and get everything I have to say out of my system. I think that the dissertation was just such a purgative. I can't bear to even think about it anymore, and it has been nearly two years since I looked at it. Damned thing.

Since I completed the dissertation, my publications/articles have been tangents, things that I was not able to work into the dissertation, but thought were interesting anyway.

Oh! Publication news! I still have not heard back from the folks I most recently submitted to. When I submitted this article, a real humdinger, which the reviewers said the first time around said was "potentially seminal" (shows what they know), I was living in St. Louis. I was recently told by my department chair that my CV looks "skimpy" (sorry, maybe someone could give me a course release?), so I emailed the journal I'm waiting to hear from about my revisions. The person I contacted said that editorial decisions had been made, and that letters would be going out soon. Within a few weeks, she said. But she can't tell me, because that is what the editor does.
Damn it.

Basically, that means that at this moment, my heavily researched and extensively revised (and thereby vastly improved) article is either sitting in a good pile or a bad pile. Right now. I totally want to cat-burgle the offices of this particular journal and sneak a peak at the manuscripts.


To distract myself, I watched the NOVA episode on human ancestry. I can't wait to hear what Ken Ham has to say. I bet he bitches.

HJ