my five

dhawhee tagged me for a meme: five things i do every day that contribute to my success. by "success" i mean "career success," i.e. productivity, and that requires me maintaining a certain lifetyle. i've been cogitating on this for a couple of days and here's what i came up with. keep in mind that i am a very small-minded person.

1. complain. i get a lot of personal gratification and, ultimately, peace from venting without guilt to people i love and trust who will take my side. oftentimes when i feel as though i have nothing else, i take (albeit somewhat cold) comfort in figuring out a situation that is causing me psychic disturbance. if i had to deal with various work-related incidents and real or imagined injustices in silence, i would become unhinged and very resentful, and therefore a very bad colleague.

2. put on makeup. i really love makeup. a lot. makeup makes me feel indulgent but not exorbitant, and it also recalls for me my years of being 10 years old and being crazy banananas for rainbows and the color purple. and stickers. i, like many 10 year old girls in ohio in the early 80s, collected stickers. and i would page through my sticker albums lovingly, and gaze especially long at those stickers that had prism effects and depicted rainbows or, let's face it, horses or unicorns. i would blur my eyes a little to be able to see them kind of differently and alter my encounter with the stickers in various ways. makeup for me captures that unselfconscious pursuit of aestheticism in life.

3. write. blogging, dissertation revisions, article revisions, responses to student's writing, conference abstracts, query notes to editors, emails to deans and department heads, emails to friends, etc., etc. gotta write to keep that muscle memory alive.

4. talk in funny voices to the pets. i believe it is a good idea to remind oneself daily of how little dignity one actually has in life. i also believe its a good idea to try to communicate with the Other. also to pet fuzzy wuzzy tummies, which are frequently made available when the pet in question is spoken to in a funny voice.

5. listen to great music. this makes me feel cheerful, energized, motivated and focused.

there are other, more professional things that i don't do daily that contribute, like trolling for book reviews of interest, coming up with various keyword searches for articles, reading online conference programs, read articles and books, etc., etc. but those are more, let's say twice a weekish.