I’m happy to report that at this ripe age of 37 I have finally defeated my life-long tendency towards anxiety. I am yet to experience anything more liberating than getting rid of anxiety. Oh, not to worry about the scenarios of impending doom! It is a great feeling.

I have also gotten rid of most of my unhealthy compensatory mechanisms.

This year of my life was probably the most important one because I have transformed profoundly in the course of it. You only know how limiting your psychological problems were after you solve them.

And now I will go and eat my Birthday steak.

I just won an infant car seat in Vine. This is the best win ever because one thing I wasn’t looking forward to buying for the baby is an expensive car seat that will barely be used 3 or 4 times. Yay!

The myth of the “endless meetings” where academics wilted in boredom and sadness thwarted my early day in academia. I dreaded the service aspect of being on the tenure-track more than I feared anything else. I even warned the Chair of my department that I will be horrible at service.

Then, however, I discovered that the need to sacrifice oneself on the altar of useless and boring service was nothing but one of those myths people generate to feel sorry for themselves. This semester, for instance, I attended a total of 4 meetings. Three of them were for an extremely fulfilling, useful, fun committee that I would participate in even I didn’t have a service requirement. I will also give a talk to the people of our town on the economic crisis in Spain. And I advise Majors in our department whose last names start with K-M. I would be a dirty, nasty liar if I said that these service obligations are onerous. Honestly, I barely notice them. And I always rank excellent in service.

The way to make service pleasant and easy is to read the operational papers (if there are none, talk to the Chair of the Personnel Committee) and make a list of all categories of committees that exist. Then all you have to do is hit each category once and try to show leadership in a few. That is absolutely all. People who suffer on 5 departmental committees that nobody will appreciate are authors of their own misfortune. As the administrators keep repeating, “Nobody ever gets tenure because they are active in service.”

Also, all of these stories about women being forced into more service than men, being expected to be nurturing or serviceable, or being discouraged from research turned out to be lies. I’m not seeing anything even remotely like this.

I really hope these young men sue the stupid tabloid for millions and millions.

I wonder why the tabloid is not afraid of lawsuits. These guys are young, if they ask for the damages based on their life expectancy, they will surely get a lot in court.

I just discovered that today is my Day 25 on the Seinfeld Chain and I had never even noticed it. I have now fallen into a habit of writing every day. This was an enormous struggle at first but now that I have vanquished my tendency to work in huge bursts followed by long periods of inactivity, it feels like the most natural thing in the world to work on research every day. Today is my Birthday, yet I will still be working on my research because I don’t see what sense it makes to deprive myself of writing on such a festive occasion.

I now know that, for me, it is impossible to write for more than 1,5 hours a day. Anything over that results in low-quality writing. The best writing always takes place between the 50th minute and the 80th. There is absolutely no need to write for more than 1,5 hours a day if you do it every day. It isn’t possible to do the full 1,5 hours every day, so sometimes it is anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour. Which is fine, too, as long as it happens every day. And the 30-90 minutes have to be pure writing (without counting the bathroom breaks, online searches, and consultations with the dictionary). The other aspects of research (reading, consulting secondary sources) have to be done separately.

It is extremely rewarding finally to be able to organize my writing in a productive way. I considered joining a writing group but I honestly don’t feel I need to be stimulated to write. I do it as a matter of course nowadays. It took me about two years of an intense struggle with bad habits to get to this point.

Since it’s my Birthday, I will treat everybody to self-congratulatory posts.

Our students will be presenting their senior research projects next week that they have carried out under my guidance. I’m happy to report that, for the most part, I managed to steer them away from trashy analysis of trashy flicks and books. They have worked on Pérez Galdós, Bombal, García Márquez, Laura Restrepo, Paula Varsavsky, and Andean folktales.

I can only do as much as I can do, so there was one project on Laura Esquivel (a very trashy Mexican novelist) and two on Isabel Allende (a very trashy Chilean novelist.) However, one of the Allende projects was a very clever analysis of her Eva Luna on the basis of Friedan’s Feminine Mystique.

Plus there was one project on the Cuban revolution where the student started out with ideas gleaned in their entirety from the Cato Institute and somehow ended up as a passionate fan of Che Guevara and Fidel. As you can imagine, that was not my influence.

And there was also an absolutely fascinating project on how the Dominican national identity was formed on the basis of rejecting the Haitian identity.

Not a single movie was analyzed which cost me a lot of pouty faces of disappointed students who hoped to avoid reading anything in the course of the project.

I think I’m kind of amazing. If you agree, please congratulate. 🙂