it's personfessional

hi. this blog has been, to put things mildly, a bit short on new content lately. i'm as surprised as anyone by my total inability to write down my thoughts for public discussion. i've never been shy with my opinions, blogging is procrastination, and it's an election year. what gives?

i blame long-term goals. every day is another day closer to the academic job market, the heinous online job rumor compendia, the general expectation that as an Academic Blogger i will say things that are topical and incisive rather than wackily partisan, off-the-cuff, or mildly offensive. since i started thinking about actually finishing my dissertation someday, i've felt a little stifled. everyone knows my tendency to namecall is rad -- but could it get me not-hired?

what's worse than asshat-deprivation, though, is my scary intuition that the personal and the professional are going to slam together here in some unbecoming way, and i'll be worse off for it. which sucks: most of the (legitimate and thought-provoking!) feminist-inflected bitching i might do about my profession will include examples that seem uncomfortably, if not inappropriately, personal.

for example: what if i admit that i hate talking in workshops (in order to write about why that is)? am i allowed to discuss the health issues that are keeping me out of the field right now (and how it came to be that i wasn't encouraged to think of them before i went in)? maybe it's enough to decry the aggression norm and our collective, discipline-wide disdain for Balance in general terms, but i'm not sure. i read a lot of anonymous "women in academia" blogs, and mostly i think "golly, i'm sure glad that's not [insert department i know or identify with here]." but then i have non-anonymous conversations with actual women in academia and oh. wait. it *is* the departments i know and identify with.

all of which is just to say that for lots of reasons, i'd like to keep writing about everything under the sun, emphatically including the life that goes on when i am not dissertating, because being afraid of the job market is not a good reason to let job >> life.