Totally personal update. I imagine many casual readers won’t be interested. If you are, well, there’s a link, and you’re free to click it.
Ugh!
When I finish a story, I usually feel good. When I finish an academic paper–which I should add is something I haven’t done in years–usually I just feel the way a geriatric patient feels after a serious bowel movement…
…relieved, grateful to have survived, but not particularly gratified.
But anyway, except for a couple of tiny quotes I need to hunt down, some formatting issues, and editing it down to cut a half a page, I’m pretty much done with that academic paper on Korean SF films and cultural barriers problematizing the Koreanization of the SF genre. I figure a few hours’ work tomorrow is all I’ll need to put in.
And it’s painful for me to recognize that the deadline for this paper is also the end of summer. School starts again on Monday, and I got a lot less done this summer than I planned. I bombed the Clarion West write-a-thon, sending out only one story and getting one of two collaborations going (and even that, we failed to finish). In retrospect, I probably should have gone with my first instinct and bowed out this year, because I just had a lot on my plate. In addition to which, the sudden attack of tendinitis in one of my Achilles’ tendons put a real damper on my lofty plans of daily hiking.
The last hesitation I have is that because of plans which ultimately fell through–I was supposed to be visiting Japan this September, but it won’t be happening for reasons I discussed here–I didn’t end up traveling this summer. I don’t know if I actually saved more money, or made more money this summer because of that, but as the semester looms just a day and a half away, I feel an aching foreboding that I’m going to wish I had gone on a short trip somewhere.
But the past is the past, and there’s little one can do about it. On the positive side, I don’t feel as exhausted as I sometimes do after traveling and returning just in time for the semester to begin. That’s good. And I don’t really have any night classes this semester, which is good, since maybe I’ll be able to get an exercise routine going, and start sleeping earlier. (I’ll need to, since my classes start at 9:00am four days a week… groan.) Since my tendon is still bugging me, I’m thinking that this exercise is going to involve swimming, though if I can work some weights into it (without straining that tendon) I’ll go for a little of that, too. I guess it’s time to dig out my swimming stuff.