Thursday, June 14, 2007

All around, a good week

Good things that happened this week, in no particular order:

- remarkably few meetings, and meetings are usually the plague of my existence

- e-mail from the chair of a program I admire at Small University Down the Road a Bit. She said she's been reading my blogs and would like to talk to me about teaching grad courses. Yes, blogging is finally paying off professionally.

- e-mail from Terrific University Press to which I had sent an outline and sample chapter from my dissertation. They are "very interested" in seeing the entire manuscript. I dropped it in the mail today--let's hope that was $12.25 in well-spent postage.

- comment from Fantastic Mentor that I'm welcome to teach "anytime" in the American Studies department. Yes, the pay is not phenomenal, but it's nice to know I'm missed. She specifically offered me the opportunity to teach a course I already have in the can. And it would have two TAs, so I wouldn't have to grade papers, which is pretty much what chased me out of teaching.

- news today that I'm one of four people to be interviewed next week for two open positions in the teaching resources center at my university. I've been collaborating with the people there for many months, and I absolutely adore them and the work they do. I like my current job (most of the time), but I'd LOVE this job--and it's fun that I've pretty much been able to test drive it through these collaborations.

- A coworker and friend invited me onto his radio show yesterday afternoon to help interview one of my favorite authors, Margaret Atwood. I only asked one question, but what a fabulous opportunity. (Thanks, Andy!)

11 comments:

betty said...

WHAT?!?!?!? You got to interview MARGARET ATWOOD? I'm so jealous! She might be my most favorite author ever. Actually, I probably wouldn't have been able to speak in her presence. Wow. Like, totally, uh...wow. That's about all I'd be able to say.

Rhonda said...

Wow! Congratulations (and good luck with the job(s) and the manuscript)!

JM said...

wow! what a week!

Anonymous said...

For a while after you joined us in the non-academic world I was worried that I would no longer feel inferior when reading your blog. But I'm glad to see that isn't true.

Anonymous said...

Wow, that's a week indeed. Best of luck on all of these fabulous opportunities.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I'm sure that will keep a busy schedule roaring.

Andy

Obsinguod said...

Well, it is because you do a nice job of tagging things and throwinf in that chrono. index to fill out the sidebar. And in lieu of google ads, there are these people trackings (to blogs) on the right. "Hello" it says, "memehole below, citations beware; take oxygen and sammiches and a computer that doesn't think you are simply exploring."

This begins (since there doesn't seem to be an explicit explanation) to explain Clutter Museum. However, you seem capable (for example) of deposing and reemitting 600 papers etc. whereas the people who end up with uncountable cats or lightbulbs in their freezer and drywall; who inspire the sites declaiming the new disease as bad yet unmonetizable may differ.
A precis entry of yours on suburbs mediating (Jeffersonian) democracy makes some sense of it. I am guilty of putting hideously terse memes in piles with a banded corpus I mean to excerpt synthetic marrows from, and never getting to it until it bewilders. Is Clutter Museum likewise -intended- as a Vatican Museum of matches between wooly one-line tautology and historicity-pulling cross-digested dissertation?

Orthogonal, coincidentally, to the empirical case of the USA in general?

I had imagined, from the title, a FARK.com specialized to see what cramped people; maybe a take on stuff people leave at Fujiyama or geyser-viewing vantage points that parks people clean up.

Queen of West Procrastination said...

(All-caps ahead): YOU GOT TO ASK MARGARET ATWOOD A QUESTION??? My jealousy is overwhelming like you can't believe.

(Did I mention the fact that my old roommate and I had a Margaret Atwood wall in our apartment? It all began with this drawing of her, from the Globe & Mail, where she's dressed in a ballgown and popping out of a cake, to celebrate the annivesary of the Giller Prize.)

I am so excited that you got to do that. (Also, hooray for the job opportunities and the interest in your manuscript! And hooray for the recognition that blogging is a valuable academic activity!)

Anonymous said...

Dear Steve No_,

After rereading your comment a half-dozen times, I have decided that you are in fact a real person and not some kind of artificially intelligent attempt to pass as human. You had me at "cat collecting."

Barbara said...

That you had such a week (and I enjoyed following it bit by bit through Twitter) makes me really think that good blogging can lead to some pretty interesting outcomes. Your example should offset some of the gloom swirling about in the blogosphere about people not daring to blog out of job concerns.

Nicely done indeed.

Scrivener said...

Wow! Congratumalations!P