Ugh, ugh, ugh. I am not in a good mood. This may have something to do with having just worked the sixteenth day in a row since I got back from the workshop, and STILL not having had time to get to work up the notes from said workshop, which I really WANT to do.
This weekend I've been reading project drafts - which I am by my standards being VERY slow to return - and they are just ANNOYING ME. WHY are two-months-from-graduating students still not able to tell the difference between effect and affect, don't seem to know that a literature review is not a series of one paragraph summaries of individual journal articles, forget to add figure captions, present individual measurements each on their own three sample dinky bar chart spread over five pages rather than coming up with something actually readable, and apparently have not heard a damn thing I've said all year? And these are my better students - the worser ones didn't bother submitting drafts (but will no doubt be desperate for support over the "break").
People are annoying me. My back hurts in a different place than usual which is not very bra-compatible (possible minor injury from swerving to not stand on the cat whilst carrying a heavy bag of cat litter early in the morning when I'm all stiff and more injurable) which means I've been not wearing a bra until THAT causes shoulder pain (I'm too busty for any reasonable biological purpose, it's just a cruel joke to give me more kinds of backache) then putting one on until the other place is too annoying then taking it off... My socks are annoying me. The new format of my sudoku magazine is annoying me. plastic bags are annoying me. _I_ am annoying me. You may be noticing a theme here.
Maybe it's hormonal? Another way in which the human body is not well designed. Which annoys me.
Last week we had another opportunity (three line whipped, 3 hours of an insanely busy week, and I had to miss a seminar I really WANTED to go to in another department to have a chance of getting my work done because of the "opportunity") to be spoken to as a School by a senior administrative person, followed by Q-and-something. This time the something was at least not bland stonewalling - it was quite aggressive "all your fault" type statements, which make a change, I guess. Q-and-accuse instead of Q-and-bland-stonewall? This particular Senior Figure is a good speaker, which is actually an issue at times - English does not distinguish well between "you" meaning "all academics and academic-related staff", "you" meaning "the School of Edgewards Studies Of Assorted Kinds" and "you" as in "me, the one individual being spoken to". A good speaker sounds as if they are speaking to you directly, but when they keep saying "you haven't..." and "you have to stop..." and "you don't..." and "you must appreciate..." people with badly wired brains like me react very badly to the personal touch and feel increasingly guilty and angry and misunderstood and NOT HEARD, which is a huge trigger for me.
Also, they dragged us all to the meeting (in a not comfortable room) for "1-00 for 1-20" which CLEARLY means there should be at least a cheap nasty coffee and a small plastic packet of mildly flavoursome biscuits (and an opportunity to subtly jostle for the very small number of packets with jammy dodgers in, the most child-directed biscuit clearly being the most desirable), coupled with forced social niceties with colleagues you dislike/do not know well or an exchange of mild insults and grumbles with colleagues you do know well, right?
Wrong.
Apparently it meant 1-00 so you can find there is no coffee, grumble, and rush off and buy your own from the shop or machine because there isn't time to go back to your base building and make one, and just about get back for 1-20, when you will be Glared At by Incoming for potentially insulting the Important Person by being nearly late and not arriving for 1 as instructed so we can all be sitting there neatly looking Keen.
After the Important Person spoke and accused, then another person explained how the new admin system is going to be wonderful but is about 50% understaffed at the moment because it requires the hiring of multiple new administrators on mid-level bands (i.e. same pay rate as academics) in order to have better strategies and complete special projects, but this would soon be done and it would all be great as long as we also went on multiple courses to learn the new systems. Finally, a Lesser Deanlet spoke (for quite a while) about new Faculty processes, and about Targets for the Next REF (grrr). One thing really stood out - unlike previous talks from this person (who is actually a good teacher, an impressive researcher, and a mostly decent colleague apart from a tendency to speak to everyone as if they are a naughty six year old with a short attention span - to be fair, they have three small boys at home aged between 4 and 8, and it must be hard to turn that off at times!), which pushed the "all connections are good connections" the message now is that we should only pursue collaboration, especially international collaboration, unless it helps us meet our higher targets (quality grants and papers, of course, the currency of all our obligations these days).
I put off making a decision about ExoticCountry last week because I was working at the limits of my capacity just to get classes prepped and taught (long story - it was not all supposed to be MY work, but...) without abandoning other things (like project students who NOW are getting into the lab and needing one to one support. With 5 weeks to go to project submission. GRRRRRRR!!!! Now, originally, the idea was that when I went off to ExoticCOuntry I'd leave those students with former-PDF and Incoming to support them, since we all use the same suite of techniques. Instead, Incoming's students are coming to me because he's insanely busy (and appears to have moved out of his office into the fanciest newest coffee shop on campus pretty much...), and former-PDF is on the steep part of getting into her new position a few hours away.
Today I started to make a list, and it's clear that even if I ignore the project students, I have about three weeks of teaching related work and at least two of research-related work to do in the next five weeks, as well as fitting in some time OFF (I need down time SO MUCH). Now that sort of over-fill is quite normal for academe, but I can't do it if I also lose 4-6 days on travelling long haul (there and back...), and have to juggle obligations in ExoticCountry with accessing stuff here via notoriously unreliable internet. So I have to say 'no' to the ExoticCountry visit, ignore the cringing distress of my inner nice girl who is prophesying doom all around, and just do the best I can. If they emailed back "we will never work with you again" I would be upset, but not that deeply sad, and that really says it all.
Maybe finally crossing that off the immediate list will help with the world-induces-irritation problem? Or maybe not...
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