My new jungle

Ok. It has been an embarrassingly long time since I've written here. I am no longer in Mexico, for starters, and I have a real (!) job at a US university. Yay!! Anyone inside of academia will understand what it means to land a tenure track position at a university where you have excellent, supportive, collegial colleagues. For those of you outside of academia, it's a little bit like winning the lottery. The lottery prize requires incredibly long work hours and indescribably weird situations on occasion, but it's something that I've been trying to get to for longer than I care to admit and required 4 years of undergrad, 6 years of grad school, and 2 years of postdoc. I am, in short, thrilled.

Career fulfillment does not translate into not looking like an idiot goofball in photos. You can thank my lovely colleagues for this one.

My new position in the academic ivory tower comes with its own special challenges, and I would be lying if I pretended that I handle them all with grace or didn't create many of them for myself. The best I can do is laugh hysterically at myself (and sometimes my students or colleagues). I am not good at being a tweed jacket wearing, inscrutable, authoritative professor -- I'm young (relatively), female, and too goofy/sarcastic. As such, I plan to use this blog to occasionally share stories of what happens behind the scenes, or awkwardly publicly, for a young faculty. The stories will mostly be my own, but I will occasionally borrow from friends, so long as I have their permission.

To kick things off, let me tell you about a recent adventure I had on my way to work. I teach every morning at either 9 or 9:30 am, depending on the day, and I tend to arrive at work a little before my first class of the day starts. It was the second week of the semester, and it turns out that I wasn't yet in the groove. I was reviewing my slides and adding video content at my dining room table when I realized with horror that it was Friday, not Thursday.

In general, there is no good reason to wish for a day to be Thursday instead of Friday. Friday is the end of the week. Around here, Fridays don't even have meetings. Friday is a great way to welcome the weekend. My problem was that I teach my Friday morning class at 9 am, and it was now 8:52.

In a mad rush, I threw my laptop into my bag, tossed on the first pair of shoes I could find, and hoped desperately that I'd already brushed my teeth and hair (I had, thank goodness!). I more or less squealed into my assigned parking lot at school and took off at a sprint across campus to the building where my class was meeting.

I've become a runner in the past year, so at least I was partially prepared for my mad dash. Unfortunately for me, the skirt I was wearing kept riding up as I ran, rising up due to the friction with my backpack. I held my purse in my left hand like a football and used my right hand to keep pulling my skirt back down so that I wasn't flashing unsuspecting students as I flew across the Quad. Doubly awkward, I've lost some weight recently, and one particularly energetic attempt to keep my skirt from riding up almost pulled it off entirely. It is miraculous that I crossed the Quad without seriously violating indecency laws.

I was not wearing these shoes, or any other running shoes. At least I managed to grab flats on my way out the door. Can you imagine how much worse it could have been??

I got to my building, rushed up the stairs, burst into my classroom, and hooked up my laptop and microphone faster than I ever have before, while 62 pairs of eyes stared at me out of the murky darkness of the lowly-lit room. According to my computer clock, I must have bent time in there somewhere, because I was already lecturing by 9:03 am. The students never said a word about it, and didn't even call me out on the fact that I was breathing heavily into my mic like a lewd prank caller. They either like me or are scared of me. Either one would be completely fair at this point.