Lunch today with my advisor. Interesting and good things brewing. More to follow, if they come to fruition.
Tuesdays are hectic, this one more hectic than most. I look at my weekly schedule and I see all these huge, wonderful blocks of time for reading/writing/thinking, and then those blocks get nibbled away-at by appointments and lunches and whatnot. As I am counseling B (who must make a lot of progress on his thesis or risk being booted out of this school), you have to treat the self-appointments as every bit as important as the ones you keep with others.
Not that I'm one to talk. Wednesdays are supposed to be an all-work, all-day for me (at home) and already I have a lunch meeting and another at 3:15 tomorrow, which shoots holes in the entire day.
Zygmunt Bauman urges us to be always mindful (conscious, self-reflexive) about the quality of the public sphere, and I think this sort of mindfulness can also be seen, by analogy, as necessary to one's intellectual growth, or it will be stunted by a never-ending series of urgent-but-ultimately-unimportant obligations, commitments, meetings, etc. That's pretty much what happened to me from 1986-2002. Don't you-all make the same mistake.
Posted by otto0114 at January 25, 2005 10:55 PMI don't disagree that I have some work to get done this semester, but not being funded (as are more than half the grads in our department) is a world away from being booted out of school!
Just setting the record straight!