With muchos gracias to Grettir the Strong, the updates to my blog are complete, or close to complete.
The URL www.toddpetersen.org (which I've been keeping under my pillow for months now) is all ready to roll now, and should be able to service your Todd Petersen needs for the forseeable future. I'm just coming on a crazy semester of five courses and five preps, and I don't wanna do that anymore. I sort of feel like I have to sometimes because I don't have the power to crush people's skulls between my open palms. So instead I just do extra work, which makes me feel as if I am really necessary. I might not be -- heaven forbid I'm not -- but it only matters if I think that I am indespensible. What others think is irrelevant really, right?
But seriously folks, it's strange to be thinking about how to get out of so much work. Being a college professor can eat your lunch. There is so much a body can get into that has nothing really to do with the thing that makes a person want to be an academic in the first place. What follows is a list of the things at work I want to give up for Lent (I know it's months away, but who cares):
1. Bitching about money. I'm never going to be rich, so who cares? "Rich" and "cool" are almost never synonymous.
2. Getting mad at other people who can't be bothered to [fill in the blank]. I'm never going to get them to change by reasoning with them. Plus: they'll get more upset if I ignore them.
3. Spending time grading work that students have obviously treated with disdain or depraved indifference. Believe it or not, some students seem not to care if they do a good job. Normally these papers take a really long time to grade in relation to ones written by conscientious students, which strikes me as patently unfair to the students who work hard. They deserve my time, not the lazy wiseacres, who couldn't care if they were in my class or lying in the gravel somewhere.
4. Doing more creative projects just for the joy of it. I've been doing so much lately just because it might have some potential career benefit, and I'm thinking that one of the benefits of tenure is that I can let my attentions wander a little. My primary professional responsibility is to be creative, and not in any particular field of endeavor. In fact the work I should be doing should be outside of the box of my discipline.
I'm also going to put more effort in to writing and sending that writing out into the world. This blog is a good way to do that. Keep your eyes peeled for new posts, which I should be sending out through social media channels and the like. If you're part of my Facebook Crew, Google+ Posse, or TwitterHood, you should know when something has been flung into the world.