20160307.0607

The weekend seems to have passed by in a blur; I know it happened, but I have trouble recalling how and when it happened. I have perhaps been too much immersed in my work, that such a fogging of memory has taken place; it is not an issue of too much strong drink, since I am on an antibiotic (to my annoyance; the drug is causing nausea and...interesting effects after my food is eaten) and, because I try to be a good patient, am therefore not drinking. (Complain though I do, the treatment is having the desired effect; my eye is much less swollen--a little remains as yet--and I do not think I will be suffering an eye infection at any point in the near future. Hell, I do not think I'll be suffering any infection for a while.) I admittedly do not have a good sense of time; I never have had one, and I wore a watch for many years to help account for it. My cell phone has taken the watch's place in large part, as I think it has for many; I still check the time frequently, and perhaps my current sense of dislocation stems from not having done so as much over the weekend as I normally do.

But the weekend is done now, and so work continues. Three of the classes I teach today are going to be doing peer review of one another's work, ideally getting commentary that they will use to improve their performance in advance of the version of the paper I will review going into the upcoming break. The fourth, since it is moving into an annotated bibliography, will get the citation lesson; I have a good one prepared, since I had had to have one to hand for job interviews, and it might be good to deploy it once again. One class's papers still need my attention, too, but there are not many of them to negotiate, and there is time enough to attend to them. Further, I am amid reading for my freelance work; the client knows that I am in a heavy teaching semester, and the work was not flagged as being terribly urgent. It will get done, and relatively soon. All of it will, in fact; there is no other way for me to go about the business of doing the work, not if I want to continue to be paid for my efforts.

And I do want to be paid for the work I do. Some of what I do, I would do recreationally. I have always enjoyed reading, for example, and quite a bit of the reading I have done outside of school and work has been bad. After going to school, and graduate school, I do find enjoyment in puzzling out ideas and drafting papers that lay them out for others to follow along. (If I do end up outside academe, I will likely still do such things.) But if I am going to work on a schedule set by others, if I am going to do tasks assigned me by others, I expect to be compensated therefore. There are other ends towards which I could direct my time and effort, after all, even if doing so does tend to make time pass by in a strange blur.