Time to Breathe

For various reasons, this semester has been even more ridiculously busy than last year’s, to the point where I feel like I’m barely keeping my head above the surface — and, well, sometimes sucking down a lungful of water. I completely blew a meeting today where a colleague needed my help making a case for a concern related to the staff syllabus; got caught up giving a cadet guidance on his essay after class, and I didn’t even realize I’d failed until I saw the other two people who’d been at the meeting coming down the hall. That’s the way it’s been going lately, and even the breaks — a pleasant, low-key Thanksgiving, taking the cadets in the opera club to the Met to see Aida, giving a good presentation at NCTE in NYC, celebrating my brother’s birthday with him for the first time in ten years — have felt like blurs.

When I find the time, I’ll offer a concluding post about the plagiarized field manual, but I think I’ll also take Clancy’s and Bradley’s advice and develop my reflections on the topic into a journal article — probably over winter break, when things slow down a bit. There’s a lot to be said there, I think, about genre and context, but also to build on the super-smart stuff Amy’s written about the relationship between affect and citation — and there are a whole range of affectual responses to the situation here, and I want to be respectful to that range.

For now, though, it’s back — back, I say! — to the house of pain stack of grading.