What happened to me?

So this is a bit odd. Here I am sitting on the train on my way home and I don’t have any work to do. Ok, maybe that’s not entirely true, there is ALWAYS something I could/should be doing for my work these days. But tonight I have nothing planned, for what seems like the first time in weeks! Ok, that’s not really true either, I just realized that there was no way I was going to get the grant done in time so I decided to say to hell with it.

Since I started teaching it’s been one thing or another. Working on lectures, making assignments, grading assignments, writing midterms (I still have to grade them, but that’s for the weekend) or working on some grant proposal. I vividly recall my postdoc boss telling Deirdre, after my farewell lunch, that she’ll have to keep me from working too much. At the time I though that was kind of funny. I’ve always thought of myself as a bit lazy and always able to find time to relax. Well, it turns out that he was right.

It’s the sick aspect of this job, you know that you have to bust your ass to do well enough to get tenure; only there is no way to figure out just how hard you actually have to work. It’s almost like a silent auction, only you can’t see the bids and you’re not really sure how often people are going back to up their bids. So you constantly do the same, thinking you need to do just a bit more.

It’s a really odd situation and one that is ripe for promoting paranoia. Despite all this I enjoy it. Grad school and postdocing were fun, but now that I have the chance to do my own thing I feel much more inspired. I’m pretty confident things will work out for me in the long run, so I guess it’s not such a bad thing to take a night off from time to time. Either way, I’m loving all the work I’m doing so I really can’t complain.