A Day in the Life...or Tenure Gets You This?

5:35 am: Coffee machine gurgles. Open eyes. Still dark. Sleep or get up?

5:47 am: Crawl downstairs in dark. Blow nose, etcetera. Flip open laptop. Write novel in dark.

6:49 am: First child awake. Reads to self in armchair in dark beside me.

6:54 am: Hubs stumbles down, flicks on tube to see how EU and Asian markets fared. Boo-yah!

7:17 am: Gotta shower. No, not enough time. Damn. Maybe tomorrow.

7:58 am: Second child wants to bring lunch after assuring me last night he wanted to buy pizza. Whip together Fluffernutter, throw in Sun Chips and a Capri Sun. And to think I used to be macrobiotic.

8:23 am: Policeman with K-9 patrols every car on train. Drugs? Explosives? Who cares? I'm gonna be late for graduate seminar - and I'm the speaker.

9:06 am: Stare longingly at Starbuck's.

9:12 am: Natives restless. Presentation... goes.

10:00 am: Meeting with Dean. In another building. Clouds open. Umbrella buried under books/sports equipment/sweathshirts/what-have-you in car back in metro parking lot.

10:10 am: Drenched. Meeting cancelled.

10:28 am: Free time. Hide with latte in Dental School. What the heck?

11:00 am: Lecture pharmacy students on Prescription Drug Abuse and Diversion. Realize half-way through that slides are from last year. Realize colleague in back row of lecture hall is frowning. Realize said colleague is one of peer teaching evaluators. Gulp.

12:30 pm: Emails replied to, memos written, fires snuffed. Time to sit down and revise manuscript for Psych Services.

12:42 pm: Grad student enters, crying...

1:44 pm: Back to paper.

2:17 pm: Fire alarm. Walk down 12 flighs of stairs. Starts raining - again.

2:43 pm: Back to paper.

3:00 pm: Someone's cloned me - meeting with Gero Psych research team vs. meeting with Department Chair. Hmmm... flip a coin.

4:03 pm: Promotion and tenure packets due tomorrow. Xerox machine: 1, me: 0. There's always Kinko's...

4:23 pm: Back to paper.

4:34 pm: Colleague barges in without knocking, berates me for making her Chair of a committee. I inform her of my new management credo - the squeaky wheel gets the grease - and because she squeaks louder than anyone else. she can be in charge this year. Humph.

5:08 pm: Adrenalated from shouting match. Wander down hall to see Grants Specialist. Shoot bull while inhaling mini Milky Way darks from her bowl.

5:13 pm: Oh my - how did the time get away? Two paragraphs finished on paper... Maybe tomorrow.

8:16 pm: Damn. Forgot to bring stuff to Kinko's. Gulp.

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The Writing... Going good. Very good. Er, going well. Very well. Whatever.

Reading... Whipped through LOVE STORY by Erich Segal (yard sale freebie). Clocks in at 131 pages - I see why he's a screen-writer. Into SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS by Marissa Pessl and SIDE EFFECTS by Alison Bass. Good stuff so far.

No wonder I'm so tired... Peace, Linda