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In case you were wondering, it's Monday morning.
No, it's not that stereotypical "case of the Mondays" or me wanting to off myself to avoid 40 years of cubicle work. I've seriously been working on things all weekend, so I feel like my weekend never happened. I also didn't get to go to church this weekend for the second straight week (car + weather problems = too slippery to safely pull out of our driveway Sunday morning) and I really miss it.
There's a first time for everything.
The plan has been to work on prepping my lectures (I know give six hour-and-15-minute lectures per week, and each has about twice that much, if not more, in prep time) so that during the week, I can place my focus squarely on my research and dissertation. Beyond a small (five page) paper I have to write by tomorrow at 11:00 am, I've basically managed to accomplish that goal this weekend. Of course, this meant about 8 hours of work each weekend day, but I'll have the whole week beyond that sociology paper to work on research.
So, I'm hoping to get the final draft finished for my old crappy thesis research (tornadoes and mobile homes) and send it to Rob for his edits, write at least 10 pages of dissertation framing to give to Tom/Jim by Friday, and maybe address one of my "lost papers" for a potential cheap publication. If I can get those things done, I'll prep next weekend too, and keep this up. If I can just work every day for the rest of the semester, the long-term benefits will far outweigh my personal insanity.
One strange thing that I have to mention: in my World Geography class at the Kent Campus, I'm covering East Asia this week, and covering the Meiji Restoration, zaibatsus, and so on in Japanese history, how these have evolved into keiretsu and the basics of the post-war Japanese economic model. I'll also have to talk about the Plaza Accords and how the US strongarmed Japan into recession, etc. Then came "The Lost Decade" of the 1990s.
While I was prepping about this, I made a realization. When I took World Geography back as a freshman in college, the first geography class I ever actually took, the Meiji Restoration was one of the first topics that actually grabbed my attention after sleepwalking through most of the semester until that point. It's just weird to think that, now eight years later, I'm teaching the same damn thing to a class of freshmen.
I mean, I can barely remember who I was at that point. I was (for the first part of the semester) a 17 year-old who had no idea who he was or why he was. I mean, I've been importing some old blog entries from my old Adventures of the Geographically Irrelevant blog on blogger (circa late 2004, early 2005 and now they've all been moved over and that blog has been killed) and I barely know who that person is some of the time.
[Funny sidebar: because of the way the Movable Type entry mechanism is, some of those old entries accidentally get published as a current post at first, which has led to some really really confused comments from more contemporary readers before I get them moved back to their proper chronological place...]
Those entries come from a time when Amy and I were already married!
Could I have really changed that much in that short of a time to where I barely recognize myself from back then?
Posted by Your Friendly Neighborhood DJ on February 26, 2007 08:41 AM | Permalink
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Actually it was only a half hour drive from Kent to the volvo but we would have had to have waited for a cab and then there was no time. Oh well, stupid not having a car!
Posted on: March 18, 2007 11:51 PM