How the mighty have fallen.
There was a time when Ben Munson's blog was the top Google hit for "Ben Munson." It even trumped the hit-rate for websites vilifying the other Dr. Ben Munson--no, not my father, but the Dr. Ben Munson who was South Dakota's first provider of legal abortions. Oh, did I let that go to my head. I just thought I was on top of the world. Nobody could touch me. I was the powerless king of the powerless kingdom known to pundits as the blogosphere.
Of course, vanity corrupts, and absolute vanity corrupts absolutely. Imagine my shame--yes, shame!--to realize that I was no longer the top hit for "Ben Munson". Indeed, I am far from the top hit. I think I'm about seventh as of today. Why, loyal reader, would this be so? The answer: perfectionism. In the past 5 1/2 years (which is essentially how long I've been a professor, give or take a week), I have gone from being a reckless, headstrong, writer to a writer who is much more cautious and protective. Why, you ask? Two reasons. First, my years of reviewing and editing papers has given me the opportunity to read some manuscripts that have shown me just how good the first submission of a paper can be. Shame on me for submitting manuscripts with typos. (Yes, I once sent in a paper where I misspelled 'tacit' as 'tactic' throughout. This wouldn't have been a problem if the paper hadn't been about tacit phonological knowledge in children. Shame on me.) Second, well, as a consequence of having been reckless and headstrong, let's just say that I've been bitten and burnt a few times. Once bitten, twice shy. Thrice bitten, once cowering in a corner covering one's ears and vowing never to put my work in the public view again.
Now I feel like everything I write has to be perfect. I have been working on an entry about Brokeback Mountain and my top 10 desert island DVDs for over a month. It's good--trust me, it's good--but it's not perfect, and I don't want to embarrass myself. I also have a catty entry about two kids on an airplane that I wrote a few days ago. Again, it's good, but it has a slightly cheap feel to it, like a grade Z David Sedaris rip-off. Sorry, Gerilyn Timler, this one's going to have to wait until I have a little more inspiration. A third entry was going to include a scanned picture of Kevin Burk in the 1st grade. (The year? 1963, when ol' Jack and Ennis first met on Brokeback Mountain.) I even have the sketch of an entry on my top 10 desert island novels and the top 5 desert island nonfiction books. I have sketched out an entry in which I'm going to present never-to-be-published data on diadochokinetic rates in gay/lesbian/bisexual and heterosexual men and women. They're just not ready yet, and I have so many other things that trump them--AE duties, teaching, research, advising, committee duties, conference presentations, cooking, cleaning, ironing, cat care, and, most importantly, 'quality time' with the SO.
Of course, none of this would be a problem if I wasn't so needy. That hit rate made me feel so good. The equation in the title line says it all: vanity + perfectionism + neediness = frustration.