#mind you I didn't have postdoc applications on my to-do list and I probably should have

[chromalogue]

Remarkable what a couple of nights (well, days) of decent sleep will do.

Granted, I was tired enough that instead of grabbing a pot from the rack to start my cereal in, I picked up the phone and started dialling, and stood there for a moment listening to a dial tone and wondering how I was going to fit my almonds into it.

But then I took a shower, and listened to The Adventure Zone as I dried off and dressed.  I had cereal with fruit and almonds on the patio and finished my Duolingo, promised to make English toffee for a bake sale the senior citizens are doing, and did a bit of gardening.  Then I went in and read for a couple of hours.  Three fairly good books--Credulity by Emily Ogden, The Leopard by Jo Nesbø, and Zero History by William Gibson--and two abysmal ones.  

The Rule of Thre3 by Eric Walters is a Canadian YA book set in Mississauga and premised on the idea that as soon as the electricity goes out civilization will disintegrate and the only way to stay alive is to build walled enclaves and not admit anyone unless they have useful skills.  Much talk of building a big, beautiful wall that makes everyone feel really safe; mass killings of “bad guys” from a distance; and--my personal favourite--referring to the flag at the Mississauga police station as “the Stars and Stripes.”  Never mind that actual accounts of disasters document communities coming together and people helping each other, or that we had a 2003 blackout in which people did just that, with none of this apocalypse business.  If I hate it so much, you might ask, why did I finish it?  Because unless something else comes along, I’m probably going to be writing my next ACCSFF paper about it.  

The Blink of an Eye by Ted Dekker is some kind of thriller, I guess, that tries not very effectively (or for that matter thrillingly) to keep Dekker’s pitch for evangelical Christianity at a dull roar.  Every part of it, from the shoddy research on Saudi Arabia and the Nizari sect of Islam to the depiction of a Western feminist trying to convince a woman to return to a forced marriage to the physics genius who uses equations to prove the existence of God in front of a class of 200 and his outraged mentor, just screams that he’s never had any experience with most of the things he writes about and is either too afraid or too contemptuous of them to find out.  If I hate it so much, you might ask, why am I still reading it?  Because if the Dublin conference accepts me, I’m going to be talking about how this genre has contributed to the erosion of American political discourse.

So yeah.  Read.  Went upstairs, edited two pages of minutes, and wrote a thousand words on the fic, which spent a few weeks languishing.  Then I cracked the three-volume French vampire novel I’ve been wanting to get to for weeks.  I did ten pages, same as I used to do ten pages of German, but it took only an hour, because I understand French.  Mostly.  I’ve discovered that I don’t necessarily understand all the shades of meaning conveyed in a depiction of two Louis Quinze-era aristocrats flirting with each other, but I’m not sure I would in any language.  

Then I came back down here and picked up the business writing course I signed up for yesterday.  I’ve wanted to strengthen my professional communications skills for awhile, in the hope that it might help me write better cover letters and e-mails to various town officials, and now that I’ve been asked to contact an author about a thing, I thought this was the perfect time to go ahead with the course.  I got far enough to learn that the essence of business communication is that you do your research, consider your audience, take care to not confuse frequently confused words, and try to minimize your use of profanity.  I’ll keep slogging, but I have the feeling I’m not who this course is for, and I’m not going to see the significant improvement in my writing that I was hoping for.  

After that I worked a bit at turning my dissertation into a book.  And now, if I just do a bit, just a little bit, on my article, I will have worked on every single thing that I wanted to work on today!  With one hour to spare until the technical end of my day!

I’m not gonna be able to keep this up tomorrow.  Silliness to try.  It’s just so nice to have managed to get to everything I’ve been meaning to do for ages, and it was so nice to concentrate on academic stuff for a day without the pressure of a deadline.