What with my sudden decision last summer to finish my dissertation by October, starting teaching full-time in late August, and going on the job market in the midst of it all, it's been a LONG time since I've really been on top of my shit, housekeeping-wise. Sure, I'd scrub out the bathroom, vaccuum, and sort my papers and books into relatively neat piles when I had company coming, but that was about the extent of it.
Over the last few days, however, I have:
- Taken three large bags of clothing to the thrift store at my church
- Thrown out all the drafts and other papers in my refrigerator's crisper drawer
- Tossed a year's worth of old magazines
- Filed or boxed old letters & correspondence
- Purchased a shredder, the better to purge my file cabinet of old bills and bank statements
- Written thank-you notes for Xmas presents, my hand-me-down doctoral robes (which actually aren't in the style INRU currently uses; bummer!), and my mink
- Finalized my syllabi and uploaded them onto Blackboard
- Written two letters of recommendation
- Gotten my hair cut
- Dusted, vaccuumed, scrubbed, and polished my apartment's Victorian-era woodwork
I'm not quite done yet, but I'm starting to feel as though I can breathe again. Although I still have a lot of work to do before the semester starts (most urgently: writing an article for which I've already had the deadline extended once; revising a paper for a conference next month; planning my first week of classes), getting on top of my physical environment and removing some of those little nagging obligations always improves my outlook. For the moment, anyway, I am
so not thinking about the job market.
