A none-too-fond glance back at calendar year twenty-oh-ten:
- Courses taught: 4
- Students taught: 206
- Number of undergraduates among them: 191
- Number of those undergraduates older than my cat: 3
- Amount of respect I can have for students born after 1990: 0
- Plagiarists busted: 3
- New books published in hardback: 2
- Old books published in paperback: 2
- Old books published in audiobook format: 1
- Highest Amazon.com ranking for any of those books: 110
- Lowest Amazon.com ranking for any of those books: 4,959,391
- Articles published: 6
- Book reviews published: 12
- Journal volumes published: 1
- Articles and reviews edited, copy edited, and proofread: 71
- Typescripts of new books delivered to publishers: 1
- Single-spaced pages of notes accumulated for the next trade project: 574
- New book contracts received: 2
- Nights in which I got an adequate amount of sleep: 0
- Conferences attended: 6
- Presentations delivered: 3
- Estimated expense of travel, lodging, and registration at these conferences: $1,600
- Conference trips paid for, in whole or in part, by Rutgers: 0
- Amount spent on two taxi rides in a single week in April: $395
- Expert opinions delivered in legal cases: 2
- Radio interviews to flog The Lexicographer's Dilemma: 5
- Letters of recommendation written: 22
- Letters written for promotion and tenure cases: 4
- Anonymous referee's reports on scholarly books: 7
- Anonymous referee's reports on scholarly articles: 11
- Hours wasted in pointless committee service: 1.3 x 1024
- Visits to hospital emergency rooms: 3
- Encounters with boneheaded doctors who made my condition far worse, in one case requiring an additional trip to the emergency room: 2
- Tracks newly added to my iPod: 10,012
- Number of days it would take to hear those songs, listening around the clock: 28.5
- Estimated ounces of tea drunk: 4,380
- Estimated milligrams of pure caffeine in that tea: 46,538
- Estimated ounces of wine drunk: 2,950
- Estimated ounces of pure alcohol in that wine: 369
- Number of Four Lokos it would take to get the same buzz, for caffeine and alcohol respectively: 298, 128
- Inadequately acknowledged ripoffs of Harper's Index: 1
7 comments:
Um. At least you're still alive? You could always write a memoir about your encounters with medical professionals.
Also, being an undergraduate is hard! You could at least respect our struggle to do well in gen-eds that have nothing to do with anything we actually want to study in the face of overwhelming apathy.
Legal opinions?
Was it Shakespeare or a different author of the same name?
Being an undergraduate may be hard, but it deserves no sympathy. Undergraduates are guilty of what Rudyard Kipling called "the sin of being young," and that's one of the hardest sins to forgive. It just reminds the rest of us that we're aging.
Resolution: cut back on the pointless committees until the university begins paying for your conferences.
Say, weren't there also a few books placed under contract for some series you edit?
Post nasal drip is sometimes aggravated by undergraduates with their sinful youth showing!
Emjay
What does it do to one to keep track of one's lowest Amazon ranking?
Can't be too good for the old sanity - or is it just cause for a chuckle and a good excuse for minor tippling? (I *did* see the wine-consumption record!) :)
Liz R.
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