Post Tenure Blues?

Post-Tenure Blues? Blahs?

One of the few work colleagues I trust with my super-sekrit identity pointed out the other night that I haven't been blogging much. The truth is, I've felt under the gun, even though in November, when I was blogging almost daily, I felt on top of things. There is a difference -- I'm teaching four classes this semester, and the one that was meant to be a doddle has turned out to be rather a lot of work. And so it goes.

There have been other things to keep me from blogging. Sometimes, when I need to blog the most, I really can't. Here's where the pseudonymity thing really helps: when very few people knew the medievalist under the mask, it was just easier to generalize my stories. Now, I worry that people will wonder if I'm talking about Colleague X, or if I'm on search committee Y. And a lot has been going on that I haven't been able to find the distance to write in the way I'd like to write: relatively objectively.

But I have been reading, and thinking, and have a plan. I want to write something on how my blog reading and writing habits have changed over time, especially as some of my blogfriends have become RL friends, and how moving some of the personal stuff to LiveJournal has also changed the way I interact with people via this blog. There may be Facebook commentary, too.

But for now, I want to write something that addresses several posts since last month. The first is the string of posts that began (for my purposes) with Tenured Radical and moved from there, in which there were recriminations, finger-pointing, attempts at sympathy, and some common sense and empathy. Then, most recently, is today's post at Historiann on Kerry Ann Rockquemore's column in IHE on the myth of balance while on the tenure-track. Notorious, PhD's comments on many of those posts have me thnking as well. So tomorrow, that's what I'm talking about.