My Frontal Lobe is Giving Off Steam...
...from all of the effort it's taking to suppress all of the things I want to blog about. It is taking so much energy, so much effort.
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...from all of the effort it's taking to suppress all of the things I want to blog about. It is taking so much energy, so much effort.
Dear Loyal Blog-Readers:
Spring semester mania has prevented me from updating you all on my life. Sadly, Twitter and Facebook have given me the false sense that a one-line update is sufficient. To those of you who hunger for more, I apologize. The RCT planning grant with Rvachew and company is in its busiest week. Mina's going to Greece and we have to get her experiments ready, Greek instructions and all. I have three undergraduate theses to comment on, and one dissertation. Sara, Sara, Vanessa, and Megan come before long discursive blog updates. We need to get the VLAM experiment just right. The labphon handbook chapter is overdue. I still have one JSLHR AE letter to write, and a review for a journal I hadn't previously heard of (Journal of Learning Disabilities, maybe?) that I have to do. A marriage to attend to. A sister and a nephew who I need to keep in touch with. A dad who's exhausted. Former students finishing their dissertations who I want to keep in touch with. Eden and Kari deserve my attention.
Three students doing UROPs. Five students planning new MA theses. A class to teach. Two lab meetings a week to run. An independent study with Miriam that is nicely synthesizing an important body of work. Two phone meetings a week with my co-PIs on the HSD grant. Some form of exercise every day, at least 45 minutes. When Kristy sends an E-Mail asking for comments on her ACPA presentation, I can't say no. She's a hard worker and deserves my attention. She did a great thesis and I'm not going to drop the ball on that. Drop the ball like I have with Kelly's bilingual SLP paper, Ruth's dissertation article, Adriane's first dissertation article. Hold tight, friends, your time will come. Letter to the editor of Journal of Communication Disorders about that unfortunate 'gay lisp' article--I need to get that done sooner rather than later. Graduate school reorganization. Chair of Equity, Access, and Diversity. Director of Graduate Studies. Chair of the Education and Psychology P and R council, member of the graduate school executive committee. Need to consider all sides of the story, think equally about loyalties and commitments at different levels of organizational structure. Who wins, who loses, what are the underlying issues. Follow the money, follow the power, think globally, act locally. Protect your students. Advocate for the centrality of my discipline. Never lose an opportunity to talk about how the work in our department is central to the mission of our college and our university. Think about my colleagues. When someone looks like they're having a bad day, try to suss out whether there is something structural that is causing it and, if so, ameliorate that. Build bridges. Form alliances. Don't consolidate power or hoard resources, build networks. Strength in numbers, find synergies. Be careful how you present yourself to the broader community. You are at a crossroads. Be known for your scholarship and for the force and content of the arguments you make in public. Don't be known as a whiner. Don't be a malcontent. Be strong, be sharp, be quick, be convincing. Command respect rather than demanding attention.
How is Jennifer Windsor doing? How is Joe? Catching up with them used to be a weekly ritual, now I almost never see them.
The GID data need to be published. They need to. Period. Laura Crocker worked too hard on that thesis for those data to wither on the vine. Kathleen and Elizabeth--a great project and one that has the potential to really help them in their early careers--can't forget about that. They are too good to ignore, and E. is really enthusiastic about this right now. It's an opportunity for me to learn about semantics and to make potentially a big contribution to the sociophonetics literature. IAS grant--an opportunity to talk with my colleagues about issues that transcend what I usually do. Nice meeting with Carol Chomsky and Kathryn Hannah yesterday--can't lose that momentum. Dinner at Peggy's tomorrow. I should take time to enjoy it. No fewer than 12 articles in various stages of presentation. Sun needs me to work on the Delayed Naming article--it isn't expandable, it's an important part of her pretenure work. The vocal-tract length article needs another experiment to bring it up to tier-one journal level. I refuse to park that one in a tier 2 journal. The gay lisp article needs attention. I can't expect Sara to be thinking about that when she is working on her dissertation. Parry needs me to work on that Praat script to extract the work from Eden's novel-sound learning study.
I need to get more grants. The RCT, an NSF grant on vocal-tract changes across the lifespan. Lucie is on board but Houri might take some convincing. The R01 on voice changes at puberty--they need me to work on that. I have gained so much weight--I need to have a plan to get back to where I feel good about myself. Fangfang just sent back a great set of revisions on our article, and I need to comment on that before she gives birth. We NEED to get that one out before the competitive renewal goes in in August. Kari has great momentum on the methods article, and we need to work on that. Need to think about data-loss issues in that paper. Is there a better way to do the analyses than we currently have done?
Lazy lazy professors--you just teach your classes and go home and don't do anything. You should be happy you get any salary at all. In the real world, you would have to work.