Breaking cycles

Very soon, next week in fact, I'll return with the dogs to my small college on the hill for another round of 17 or so weeks spent half there and half here. My routines will remain remarkably similar - walking the dogs twice a day, working doggedly on my Monster - but they also will vary in other ways.

For one, Darwin won't be coming, as he is doing right now, to try to lie on my lap while I type at the computer. An unrepentant Mama's Boy, Darwin loves to stand on my lap and place his front paws on my left arm and "hang" like that, purring contentedly and wagging his extra-long tail. He also likes to head-butt my left arm, which doesn't make for much accurate typing, while he kneads my thigh, which is now covered in little incisions, some newer, others healing, made by his claws, which I'm not terribly good at keeping clipped.

Still, he's better than Magellan, who when she decides she wants my attention, basically plops herself unceremoniously on top of the keyboard and begins to insert whatever errors she decides are needed in what I'm typing, be it this blog or my Monster or school work.

Magellan also doesn't come with me to the little apartment in the woods at the small college on the hill and I'm a little concerned because she's been wanting a lot more watering lately. Those of you who know me, know that Magellan has been "watered" with a bottle since she was an un-weaned kitten. She never outgrew this watering and my husband says it fulfills some kind of psychological need for both the cat and myself. But it's sometimes a drag to have to water that cat three, four, five or six times a day. My husband, of course, says she drinks fine out of the bowl when I'm not here.

Today I had a flash of genius and I placed a shallow water bowl near the bathroom sink. She drank avidly from that this afternoon and I'm hoping she gets used to it and relieves me from my self-imposed responsibility.

Although I've really appreciated the long break between the time school ends in December and when it starts in the new year, and it's been very productive (another finished and revamped limb of my Monster went off to my advisor yesterday Priority Mail), I am looking forward to getting back into the classroom and interacting with the students once again.

This semester I'm teaching a class I've already taught before, so it won't involve as much prep work as last semester when, foolish me, I taught a totally new class and had to read (and read about) several texts I had never read before so I could teach them. I don't regret the decision because that class was one of the best (if not the very best) I've taught yet, but it did take a lot of time that I could've invested in my Monster.

Still, I'm right on schedule to defend si Dios quiere in June and then graduate in August. My husband is making noises about throwing me a graduation "You're finally a Ph.D.!" party, and while I'm not much of a party person I think this one is one I have to have. It's been such a long haul in so many ways.

Meanwhile, my advisor sent me information on a great summer workshop at Cornell on transnational theory and feminism and I was looking today at the Bread Loaf Workshop in Non-Fiction at Middlebury, also in the summer, thinking I might want to do that someday (if I get accepted, of course).

But if I've made one resolution this year already it's this: Come June, if and when I'm able to finish my Monster, and after I've fulfilled my summer program responsibilities, I'm taking the rest of the summer off to do absolutely nothing of academic or intellectual importance or significance or value. I'm going to break the cycle of work-work-work that I've been on since August 2002, when I entered my program with the goal of completing a Ph.D.

Being a creature of habit and routine, I'm definitely a woman who enjoys cycles. But the cycle that brought me into and has maintained me unwaveringly within the Ph.D. track is one I'll let go off for about two months this summer. That'll make getting back into the working groove, when my tenure-track school year begins in August, even more special.