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Kathleen Fitzpatrick
2024-12-21 12:24:34 -05:00
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<subtitle>The long-running and erratically updated blog of Kathleen Fitzpatrick.</subtitle>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/feed/feed.xml" rel="self" />
<link href="https://kfitz.info/" />
<updated>2024-12-20T19:04:19Z</updated>
<updated>2024-12-21T15:00:16Z</updated>
<id>https://kfitz.info/</id>
<author>
<name>Kathleen Fitzpatrick</name>
</author>
<entry>
<title>Rest</title>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/rest/" />
<updated>2024-12-21T15:00:16Z</updated>
<id>https://kfitz.info/rest/</id>
<content type="html">&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m back to my all-too-slow reading of Oliver Burkeman&#39;s &lt;em&gt;Four Thousand Weeks&lt;/em&gt;, and am finding myself a bit haunted this morning by this passage:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-improvement. It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Haunted, because I &lt;em&gt;at least in theory&lt;/em&gt; started a vacation yesterday -- or, rather, two days of vacation followed by my university&#39;s relatively new December 24 to January 1 closure. But I&#39;m having a super hard time actually turning work off. Partly because the needs of my colleagues have not stopped just because I&#39;ve taken a couple of days off. Partly because I cannot get myself to stop reflexively checking all of the various messaging systems through which they ask me for stuff.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;That&#39;s on me, not them. I&#39;m thinking a lot this morning about what it would take for me to genuinely shut everything down and walk away from it all, even for a couple of days. It&#39;s tough to imagine.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, Burkeman goes on from this passage to talk about the &amp;quot;pathological productivity&amp;quot; inspired in no small part by the collision of Calvinism and capitalism, and the ways that one&#39;s &amp;quot;tendency toward virtuous striving and thriftiness&amp;quot; were -- ahem, &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; -- imagined to be a sign of one&#39;s state of salvation. Which rang all kinds of bells for me, and made me go in search of &lt;a href=&quot;https://kfitz.info/rest/outward-and-visible-signs/&quot;&gt;this blog post from 2012&lt;/a&gt;, which reminded me how little I&#39;ve learned in the last twelve years, or rather how much I&#39;ve had to learn again and again and again.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Rest for its own sake. Rest for purposes that are non- -- or even anti- -- instrumentalist. All of this requires the ability to understand the value of the human in the world as about &lt;em&gt;being&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;doing&lt;/em&gt;. And this is hard, hard, hard.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Preservation and Care</title>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/preservation-care/" />
@@ -141,15 +156,6 @@
&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve been having these flashbacks to getting started at the MLA, however, and how exhausted and overwhelmed I felt for months on end. As our executive director, Rosemary Feal, told me back then, the exhaustion is real: learning that much every moment of the day will wear you right out. The challenges inherent in any profession built around ideas of knowledge, mastery, expertise, and so on, coupled with the million daily moments of not-knowing, both large and small, that come with any kind of new job (how do we handle this kind of request? who worked on this process last year? do I have the authority to sign this document? where do we keep the sticky notes?) add up to spending a good bit of time getting really intimate with one&#39;s own sense of feeling stupid.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I just keep reminding myself that it&#39;s the nature of new jobs: you haven&#39;t done these things before, so of course you don&#39;t know how to do them. I&#39;m learning more every day. And it&#39;s an enormous privilege to get to spend this time learning, and to have the chance to work with amazing people in support of a college whose purpose and vision I really believe in.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;That doesn&#39;t fully mitigate the feeling-stupid parts, or the general exhaustion and overwhelm, but it does help me remember that I have been in a position like this before, and that I can learn what I need to know to succeed.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Links</title>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/links/" />
<updated>2024-07-19T20:52:40Z</updated>
<id>https://kfitz.info/links/</id>
<content type="html">&lt;p&gt;A thing that I have only just realized that I &lt;em&gt;loathe&lt;/em&gt; about newsletters: when links in the newsletters have self-referential preview URLs. So when I hover over all the many clever links in “Your Newsletter,” they show up as taking me to yournewsletter.com followed by a hash that only on the server resolves into the actual URL, leaving me with no sense whatsoever about what I’m going to get myself into if I click. In the year of the internet 2024, this is some bad privacy and security practice, man.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;For the love of all that’s holy, get a blog. I have an RSS reader and I’m not afraid to use it.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
</entry>
</feed>