A fine whine

I had no intention of coming to campus at all this week but here I am, two days in a row, clattering away at the computer in my office instead of baking festive holiday cookies at home. And why? Well, I can't say, exactly, because yesterday at our semi-annual the sky is falling meeting outlining new procedures for spending departmental funds (in a nutshell: don't!), those in attendance were reminded of the need to be mindful of the narrative we craft, but my mind is still so befuddled by the convoluted procedures I will now have to follow as a department chair that I'm in no fit state to be mindful of crafty narratives. Instead, I will keep silent on the substance of yesterday's meeting except to wonder when we can move away from the word crisis to describe a situation that has been going on so long that it feels like the way things have always worked. I mean, the first time you get hit over the head with a sledgehammer might feel like an unprecedented outrage, but by the 50th time, it's just another Tuesday.

But I am happy to comment on the other reason I have to be on campus today, which springs from the existence in the world of academics who somehow fail to understand the academic calendar. Raise your hand if you want to be handed an essential task on Dec. 19 and told that you must complete it by January 4! I didn't raise my hand for that but nevertheless here I am wondering why editors at academic journals can sometimes be so clueless about how academics plan their schedules and the existence, for instance, of the winter holidays. 

Yesterday, when I first received the final version of an article due for publication over the winter, I thought I would just run through it and correct any little infelicities that might have crept in over time, but then I noticed that a quote had been mangled and realized that I was going to have to check every quote in the essay for accuracy, which I couldn't do at home because the necessary books are in my office, except for the one that, fortunately, I was able to locate in our library. And then on closer inspection I found that somewhere along the line other errors have been introduced--and I know they're not my errors because they don't exist in the version I submitted to the journal, such as a misspelling of an author's name and the presence of the word oftentimes, which I never use, in writing or speaking, except to ask students to change it to often.

So here I am clicketing away at the keyboard, being mindful of the need to craft narratives while sledgehammers periodically pound on my back. Not too often--but never oftentimes.