I have spent nearly all day trying to finish one of my articles so my editor won’t regret hiring me, but a certain Boy Genius is making it difficult. First, and in spite of our patient explanations, he didn’t care for the time change and awoke at 5:20. Then he decided two short naps wasn’t enough and added a new one. At eight-WTF-o’clock.
Nap, you say. Well then Chelsey has time to write, doesn’t she. While he naps.
Yes. I thought so too. I opened my laptop, the document I’m working on, all nine sources I’m using, and wrote a paragraph. ONE WHOLE PARAGRAPH. And then the Boy Who Barely Slept awoke. This was repeated twice throughout the day. Otherwise, if I tried to work on it while he was playing with his toys, he’d invariably fall, or bonk his head, or try to do dental work on the dog who is generally quite long-suffering but has her limits.
This is why freelance writing and stay-at-home-motherhood are incompatible. If I had childcare or even a child who napped in long, solid blocks — which, I believe, are a myth visited upon us by sadistic writers of sleep-training manuals — then yeah, I’d be productive. As it is, I have to wait for a break, which comes in the evening when the husband gets home, but first we have dinner, and then I leave to write, but I have to be back within an hour and a half for Cranky Genius Bedtime (still nursing), and by the time the Bedtime Ordeal is over and the little Evil Genius is in bed, yea, asleep, well by then it’s almost eight o’clock and I’ve been up since five-something and the words go onto the page, but when I see them again in the light of the next day, I know there’s no way in hell my editor wants to see this linguistic concoction.
So that’s how the freelance thing is going.
From Straight Man by Richard Russo:
I haven’t persuaded my freshmen that the ability to persuade is an important skill. …[P]ersuasion — reasoned argument — no longer holds a favored position in university life. If [students'] professors — feminists, Marxists, historicists, assorted other theorists — belong to suspicious, gated intellectual communities that are less interested in talking to each other than in staking out territory and furthering agendas, then why learn to debate? Despite having endured endless faculty meetings, I can’t remember the last time anyone changed his (or her!) mind as a result of reasoned discourse. Anyone who observed us would conclude the purpose of all academic discussion was to provide the grounds for becoming further entrenched in our original positions.
Although I publicly espouse the tenets of argumentation — because it worked on me and for me — I privately agree with Russo here, at least as regarding the majority of people.
10. If I can’t read their writing, I don’t have to read their papers.
9. Relatedly, I get a refresher on what cursive looks like. Some of my students quit school in fifth grade and think that cursive is how everyone writes. (Seriously, cursive still exists?)
8. I don’t have the problem of Blogger marking my students’ blogs as spam. Yay?
7. When my students lose interest, it’s because I’ve genuinely bored them — not because they got distracted by texting under the desk. (BTW, traditional students: it is so totally obvious when you’re doing this. That’s why I call on you when I do.)
6. I save my back the pressure of trudging around with a laptop.
5. My students can’t instantly fact-check me with their BlackBerrys and iPhones.
4. There aren’t any hard-drive-ate-my-homework stories.
3. I don’t catch them turning Safe Search off and “accidentally” “running across” porn while doing “Internet research.”
2. Three words: No fucking ringtones.
1. I don’t have to worry about what they say on RateMyProfessor.com.