A Statement of Vague Intent

I had a very busy winter break. First, there was just the readings: Rousseau's Confessions for one course, Foucault's Discipline and Punish for the other. That's a combined total of over 1000 pages of course material. Both works are worth reading (well, the first half of Confessions is worth reading; I wouldn't go out of my way to read the second. Sorry, Rosseau.), but ye gods, they eat up the time.

And I didn't have a lot of time to spare. I had a presentation in the Confessions class to give when classes resumed, and an essay due in the other. (The respective topics were the Chevalier D'Eon and chora. Both of which could fill out there own posts--one was a gender bender, and one involved going to my first voluntary church service in years--but if we dwell on either, we'll be here all day.)

So I was very busy, until very recently. And now that all the immediate pressure's off, I found that what was left wasn't so much a sense of relief, but a question: where do I go from here?

It wasn't just a matter of what work I jump to next. I felt like I needed to reassess my overall goals. So I looked at my overall goals. Essentially, out of all of them, I'd only made any progress on one. Want to guess which one? (HINT: I spent last Friday night watching 12 back-to-back episodes of Big Bang Theory.) Simply put, it's not enough to write down on a piece of paper (or scream into the digital void) that you're going to get something done. You've got to do it. So I've made some steps in that direction already; next up, I want to tighten my academic belt. Now that I'm a little ahead in my assignments, I should use that advantage in other areas. It's time to get some conference proposals out there. And I need to stop waiting for the publishers to come to me--this time tomorrow, I want a draft of my query done with. And then there's the exercise: if I take one hour from the TV time and apply it to getting in shape, the shape will be got.
As a matter of fact, let's go one step further: for the time being, let's see who I am when you strip away the comics, the TV, and the video games. (I imagine what you'll find is a man who prefers TV, comics, and video games, but let's not spoil the surprise.)
Big finish: I call myself Person of Consequence. So isn't it time I got out there and did something of consequence?

Later Days.