Day Diary for Dec. 9, 2021
It’s a rare diary in which I actually awake in our beloved Middletown. I live in Indy, but I had a late event last night and an early morning meeting scheduled today (subsequently cancelled). So I wake in a dark hotel room at the Student Center, to the sounds of the giant heating unit outside my window cranking (and shifting into some sort of overdrive periodically). I lay in bed for a bit, thinking it must be like 6:30 or so. On the nightstand to my left, my phone glows to life. I pick it up and it’s a text from my wife, saying, “Good morning!” At which point I realize it’s 7:15, and that I have mis-set the alarm, and really need to get moving. I went to bed later than usual last night, having gone for a short beer with my friend K., who I ran into at the evening event.
So, Dec. 9 2021 starts out mildly stressed and running behind. As I do morning ablutions I debate breakfast options—pick up a bagel at the Cup and bring it to the office? Wolf down breakfast in the cafeteria downstairs? It seems ludicrous that I would come to work late on a night when I slept 1/8-mile down the street from my office. And I’ve got this thing in my head: I started an administrative (read: office) job in August, with more regular office hours than I had as a faculty member; and I’m a teensy bit paranoid about coming in late, even though my boss neither notices nor cares. It’s the secretaries! And it’s totally my projection, but I think they’re judging me when I come in at (say) 8:15, as I frequently do, having woken at 5:30, worked out, eaten breakfast, and driven an hour to work.
All of this courses through my head, along with the issue of nutrition. If I get a bagel at the Cup it will be less nutritious—I won’t have enough protein and I’ll be hungry again in 2 hours, and the fridge at work is filled with unhealthy items from a holiday event earlier this week, and…. all this coursing through my head as I dress, pack my bag, etc.
Ultimately, I opt for a couple hard-boiled eggs and toast in the cafeteria, which I sit and eat briskly while checking email and looking at the New York Times and the Washington Post, dimly registering the headlines. I read a story about changing gender norms in Saudi Arabia and the top half of a story about the latest research on the Omicron variant (it spreads more easily but causes less severe symptoms. Maybe). Somewhere in the deeper reaches of my consciousness I’ve decided that I’m being neurotic about the secretaries and, shit, I was here until 9 o’clock last night at an event I decided to go to because I thought it was important to my diversity-themed work, so if anybody has anything to say about me being late they can kiss my ass, as we used to say in the twentieth century.
I pack my bag, check out, stow my bag in my trunk, and go back towards the cafeteria to refill my coffee cup. As I’m on my way I run into C., a cordial acquaintance and faculty member, and we talk about our shared experience of retinal detachment surgery. And he asks me how I like administrative life and I give him a jocoserious answer. And while we’re talking my dear friend and colleague D. walks up, coffee mug in hand, and we talk about the retinal detachment club (her husband had it as well) and joke about our increasingly-late-middle-aged medical woes, then D. & I say goodbye to C. and walk towards the doors and talk about a meeting we were in yesterday, and resolve to meet for lunch next week or the week after. And I go fill my coffee mug and walk to my office, which I enter at 8:40, scandalously late, and kiss my ass if you don’t like it! It’s gray outside but pleasantly cool (not desperately cold as it has been recently), and talking with my colleagues has put me in a good mood—better than I’ve been in lately, as I’ve been mired in low-key work frustrations.
In the kitchen I pick up two tiny cookies (there was no appropriate fruit in the cafeteria, and my brain needs a bit of sugar) and: set up at my desk; log my food from yesterday and email it to two accountability buddies; answer two emails and send one email inviting a colleague to a phone conversation; send out a couple social media updates for a work project; peruse the day’s meeting schedule; talk to our communications director, who taps at the door and needs to check on something; then open this file and write this, bringing us to
9:41, at which point I plan to tidy my desk a bit and prepare to do the advance reading for a 10 o’clock meeting. This preparation doesn’t occur, because the communications director comes in and wants to check back in on the issue we discussed earlier, along with some other matters. We talk and I gently expel her at
10:01 and log into Zoom (the worst of both worlds: working in the office but not F2F) for the meeting, which is very easy and efficient and is over, with resolutions fixed, by 10:10; after which I walk down the hall in hopes of saying Hey to my boss, but her door is closed and she’s involved with something; and I leave the office suite and go to the fountain to fill my water bottle, and here I am back at my desk where I’ll tidy and tend to my to-do lists for the next couple hours…
…which pass more or less pleasantly, including several chats—one about a work thing, one about the Spanish Civil War (because he’s got books about it on his shelf)—with my colleague in the next office; a phone conversation with a department chair about a personnel issue (wayward faculty), a late withdrawal (wayward student), and a potentially promising initiative; various emails and to-do list scribbling and scratching. At about
12:30 I walk to the cafeteria and buy a cheese stick, some salad dressing, and a diet Dr. Pepper then come back to the office to the kitchen, where I heat my lunch (turkey chili with pasta) then carry it back to my desk, where I be-bop between Twitter (where I click on and read a beautiful essay by a friend from a literary journal), the Washington Post, my email, and the New York Times (the Metropolitan Museum of Art has taken the Sackler name off of the galleries that bore it because the Sacklers are America’s best-compensated drug dealers, having substantial personal responsibility for the opioid crisis, it seems). The lunch hour passes in this fashion: now I have a meeting at 3 p.m. and one at four, and a number of calls I’d like to make, plus I still haven’t tidied my desk, so I put my head down and work on this, that, and the other until
2:09 at which point I go on a coffee run, and also stop by the hotel desk (in the student center) to pick up my snazzy Ball State fighting cardinals winter hat which I left in my room (the nice hotel kids wrote me an email to let me know). It’s warming outside and nice. As I approach the doors of the SC a college student with heavily mascara’d eyes and a knit hat with a pom pom on top charges towards me, head down, reading her phone intently; I step aside and she forges past, never noticing me. I’m back at my desk at about
2:20 and catch up on some emails while I sip my coffee; then walk over to one of the academic departments for a short convo with the chairperson. This is quite pleasant (this chairperson is awesome) and quick; I walk back to my office (down the hall, up a couple stairs), knock on my boss’s desk and touch base about a developing situation, and then am back at my desk at 2:55, sipping my now-cooling coffee, having delayed my 3 p.m. meeting by 10 minutes so I can make a semi-pressing phone call. Which I make, then get into my (now) …
3:10 meeting five minutes late. This is a meeting with the team of an academic journal I co-edit. My partners in this work, B. and L., are among my favorite colleagues. We have dull stuff to cover (which essays are at what stage of review, what the queue looks like, etc) but the meeting is fun because they are awesome. When we reach the “anything else?” stage of the meeting B. suggests that the three of us meet in Indy and have a drink in the spring to celebrate the completion of our work on the journal: we’re turning it over to new editors after six years in the saddle this summer. To which we all say, Yey-ah! At 3:59 I log off and then log on to my…
4 o’clock meeting which is considerably less fun: a Zoom meeting including about 20 people concerning a university event in January, much of which is spent going one-by-one through each person’s plans for the event. Reader, I spend most of the meeting reading Twitter in distracted, not-super-pleasurable fashion, sufficiently distracted that (as I write this—five or so hours later) I can’t remember anything I saw on Twitter or much of what occurred in the meeting. I report in when it’s my turn, and I am unable to get my questions answered because we run out of time because every freaking person had to report in. Mildly annoying. Then at 4:59 I log off and get on my
5 o’clock phone call, with a student raising a concern about something that appeared on an exam. This was fairly quick, I took notes and told the student her concern needs the attention of someone in the discipline, so I say thank you to the student and hang up and write an email to said person summarizing the issue, taking me to
5:30, and time to go home, and yeah really it turns out I needn’t have been concerned about coming in late, need I have? I gather my things and (finally) tidy my desk; I’m working at home tomorrow and taking Monday off, so I won’t be back till Tuesday, so I need to be careful to pack up thoroughly. I water my office plant. By the time all this is done and I’ve filled my water bottle &c, and walk to the student center, where I left my car, it is
5:54. I drive home in the dark; cloudy, no stars. On Tillotson there’s a fresh accident scene—a car seems to have pulled into traffic and gotten t-boned; the airbag is out, but it seems like the two drivers are standing in the street on their phones. I crawl past it and head toward the highway, flipping between NPR news (Russia/Ukraine; boosters OK’d for 16-year-olds; labor productivity went down by the highest percentage since 1960; coral reefs …somewhere? New Zealand? are coming back) and Sirius XM’s “the Loft” station (some 80s new wave bands – XTC and Echo and the Bunnymen, along with some current stuff and Joni Mitchell’s “The Hissing of Summer Lawns.” God I love Joni!). And I muse on various work conundrums (conundra?); also, on the fact that I need to text my sister-in-law, who (C. says) is struggling with it being the 6-month anniversary of my brother’s death; and other things that quickly evaporated from memory. It’s an uneventful ride, on the quick side, and I’m pulling into my garage in Indy a little before…
7 p.m. I collect all my junk of two days away (small suitcase, brief case, canvas bags carrying various lunch and dinner vessels) and juggle my way into the house, where C. greets me. We talk as I put things away and throw dirty clothes in the laundry basket, etc. C. is warming roasted broccoli and baked potatoes in the oven and has bought a rotisserie chicken from the neighborhood grocery store. She tells me about her various work projects, issues, and episodes as we fill our plates and take our places on the couch. We eat and talk, leaving the TV off and catching up. At about
7 we turn on Jeopardy and watch the Professor’s tournament, on which a history professor massacres two (ahem) English professors, and weirdly one of the categories is ‘Prof talk,’ including five questions that every professor in the world would know. (“sabbatical,” “ABD,” etc. Why?) When the show ends, we talk some more: C says she’s sustaining her equanimity in the midst of the bad Covid news (Indiana is a national leader in hospitalizations; everyone’s waiting to see how big of a deal the Omicron variant is; and we have plans to travel from Christmas Eve through most of the next week, including a trip to New York). But, as she says, “we’ll make daily decisions based on the best information we have.” I don’t point out that that sounds like something you’d hear at a public health press conference. And I share some of my musings about various work issues, episodes, conundra. Then C. watches a sitcom while I sit on my end of the couch and, on my laptop, check my calendar for tomorrow and write this. She’s into another sitcom now, so I open Twitter and scroll. A little later we watch an episode of W1A, an English sitcom about top bureaucrats at the BBC, which is quite amusing and requires attentiveness because of the quick dialogue in a range of different British accents. We’re in bed and drifting towards snoozeland a little after 10.