My alarm went off at 6:00am. On a Saturday morning. I groaned. Looked at the clock. Groaned again.
Do you know that I still have the alarm clock I bought in 1998? I purchased it from Target when I went to college. It still rests on my nightstand. Still works. It’s outlived each of my iPhones. 1998. Simpler times. Studier times. Nothing simple or sturdy about 2023 if you ask me.
Meowalicous leapt onto my chest after my third groan. She clawed at my face. I pushed her paw away. Then she clawed harder. Meowalicious tries to scratch my eyes out in the morning. Because she’s hungry. She’s a real peach.
Now, to the heart of the matter. Why, dear reader, was my alarm clock causing me to groan on a Saturday morning?
Work. That’s why. Work.
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Now, before I write another word, I want to acknowledge there is a flexibility in a college professor’s schedule I’ve been chasing for a long time.
I was obsessed with my Romantic Literature professor’s work schedule after he told us ours was the only class he taught that semester. It only met on Tuesdays and Thursdays! Later in the semester, I told him it sounded like he had a pretty sweet gig. He laughed at me and told me there was nothing easy about his job.
Yeah, right, I thought.
Waking up early on a Saturday morning twenty years later had me thinking that maybe there was nothing easy about his job.
I’ll spare you the details but, this morning, as I’m both participating in a Zoom meeting and penning this humble blog, I’m thinking about work. My teaching schedule is lighter than it is has ever been. I have very much arrived at my Romantic Literature professor’s place. However, my outlook calendar is a wasteland, my email is a cesspool, and I feel as busy as I’ve ever felt.
And here I am working on a Saturday. I’m scheduled to be in meetings all day today and tomorrow. I could have flown to the East Coast to participate in these meetings in-person but, given my current reality, the trip felt like too much. Thus, Zoom on a Saturday and Sunday morning. There’s a conference program to build with colleagues from around the country and I’m one of the people helping to build it. Glamorous work? No. Lucrative? Not really. Important? Maybe. Regardless, here I am on Zoom again.
***
There’s all sorts of things on my agenda that feel very disconnected from what I thought being a college professor would be. And still think it should be. Thinking, writing, and teaching. These are things that feel good. Racing to meetings, handling administrative tasks, and responding to email. This, my friend, is work that is eating up much of my life right now. My soul too. A cat scratching my eyeballs out at 6:00am.
It’s not that I’m not a hard worker. I am. It’s that I need to figure out a sustainable relationship with this job that, so far as I can tell, is hungry for my eyeballs. Checking email from 6:00am until 9:00pm? No, thanks. Constantly working on projects whenever I get a second? Opening up my email to work on papers or enter information into charts or do this-that-and-the-other-thing morning, noon, and night? No, thanks.
I suppose if there is a flexibility in my schedule, it will be found in my ability to carve space to create a more reasonable path forward. Boundaries, Sam. Yes, boundaries.
In part, this rumination on being a college professor is born from my move to Iowa City. There’s more on my plate now, I guess. And there’s complexities about this new position that are demanding. At least they feel demanding to me as I’m sitting in this Zoom meeting early on a Saturday morning. Don’t get me wrong, kind reader, I’m happy to be in this new place, but I’m still adjusting. And I’d like to still have my eyeballs on the other side of that adjustment. I’m worried that poor man in the picture at the top of this blog is without eyeballs. Squint and see if you see any.
Samuel Jaye Tanner 