The reviews for Diminished Faculties came back at the end of February. The reviewers were positive and had some good suggestions. I wrote my reply, Duke University Press’ board met, and yesterday I signed the contract. That’s some happy news. I found it actually helpful to publicly announce a deadline, as I did in the …
Continue reading “Work update: a new deadline and a note on endless apologies”
Compared to the massive life and death issues people are facing, this is a tiny thing, for a tiny segment of the world. But with that caveat, it is still worth saying. In 2009, I was diagnosed with a very aggressive version of papillary thyroid cancer. I had to bail on my courses, and lost …
Continue reading “Academic advice from cancer for the COVID-19 epidemic: let it go”
Health update: I went back to the oncologist today. My tumour marker is back down, which means last time was a blip, or variance, or measurement error. Which is what I expected. The BP drugs are still not working so we are trying yet another one. Which is good because I’m getting monster headaches from …
Continue reading “Health update / McGill Bullshits on Divestment”
I am now officially working on a chapter about fatigue while fatigued, though I am not writing about my own fatigue (except for a small conceit at the very end). And as I said earlier, it’s not so bad–I’m a pretty happy person with a word processor window open and a pile of books on …
..and I don’t actually need to binge write. I need to finish. I have no idea why people pick November for this, but there are NaNoWriMo and NationalThesisWritingMonth and AnyGoodThing. All of these wonderful initiatives seem to be good for writers and help them solve problems. Unfortunately, they don’t solve problems that I have as …
Gary Thomas, one of my undergraduate mentors at the University of Minnesota, passed away on 29 August. I happened to be in town for the memorial on September 28th (I was at a conference upstairs!), and Richard Leppert–my undergraduate advisor and Gary’s close colleague, friend and confidante–asked me to speak as a representative of his …
I taught my first class as a professor in the fall of 1999. As I enter class today, this will begin my 21st year as a professor (my first class as a teacher was in fall of 1994, so that’s 25 years ago, not 20 but whatever). Undergrad and grad school were 10 years combined …
