20150327.0748

There are a number of things I am looking at updating as I move forward. Some of them are ongoing endeavors. My CV is perhaps the easiest example to find. It updates more frequently than my resume, largely because I focus on being a professional academic, and the materials of my resume do not change as much as they otherwise might. I am also looking at revising my teaching philosophy yet again. It needs to be updated, and more than just the refinements to phrasing that comprised the last revision of it. And there is the continuously delayed work of revising my dissertation for publication; I know I need to do it, but I also need to do other things, and those other things usually push the dissertation revision aside. The allure of the paycheck is strong, after all...

I have to wonder if what I have written in previous years also needs renewed attention. Take, for example, my posts to this webspace on this date in years past--2012 and 2014 are on record. In the former, I discuss bombast, titles, and contingency among teachers of professional writing. I do not know if the way I have talked about bombast with my students in the past is something I can continue--the relevance of the source through which I have tended to discuss the concept is fading with the passage of decades, and there is always the concern that the interaction of the demographics I occupy and the demographic stereotypes the source invokes will prompt complaints of various -isms on my part. Titles and contingency, though, still come up--and the latter may still be a thing to do with my classes. I will have to look over the article again.

The post from last year, a short and likely inept poem about cats in the lives of humanities scholars, perhaps ought not to be revisited so much in its actual form as in the idea presented in the last stanza. I do remain confused by the association of the aloof and dismissive feline with the humanities scholar stridently seeking validation amid prevailing social disdain, and that despite having three cats in the house. I am all the more confused when I hear from my colleagues of the ways in which their cats interfere with their work and lives, whether by eating articles of clothing or by sitting on keyboards and stacks of papers to read and assess or, as in the case of a long-ago friend, pissing on books and other things that make the scholarly endeavor possible. The Work is already enough of a challenge without adding to it feline intervention, Ceiling Cat or Basement Cat or something in between.

It is good to return to ideas now and again. They need to be revisited and interrogated to see if they still hold. Too often, people refuse to do so, accounting for many of the peculiar idiocies that pervade the world. And I am likely as bad about it as anyone else...