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content/blog/2019-05-13-summer-2019.md

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+---
+title: 'Summer 2019'
+date: '2019-05-13T07:23:05-04:00'
+permalink: /summer-2019/
+tags:
+    - work
+---
+
+I’m titling this post “Summer 2019” in part as a way of reminding myself, as firmly as possible, that the summer has begun, in order to get myself focused on a new set of priorities as quickly as possible.
+
+The transition from spring into summer has always been a bit of a challenge for me. On the one hand, there has often been this sense of my calendar opening out into vast stretches of unscheduled time — freeing, but with the seeming result that I go to bed one night in late May and wake up the next morning in late August, with the stretch inbetween passing in a dream-like blur.
+
+On the other hand — and particularly in periods like now when some significant percentage of my time is dedicated to administrative responsibilities — there is also this sense of the spring and fall terms creeping like kudzu into the summer: just one more set of meetings, one more report, some final paperwork, and then perhaps we can start taking up planning for next year.
+
+Last year I handled the spring-to-summer transition brilliantly, if a bit by accident: we left town as soon as finals week was over and spent [two weeks in a lakeshore cabin](/3037-2/). That two weeks was designed to allow me to jumpstart the revisions of [*Generous Thinking*](https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/generous-thinking) that I needed to get through in short order, but it had the knock-on effect of clearing my head and jumpstarting the summer, a clean transition into a different mode of being.
+
+This year, we’ve scheduled the summer’s travel differently, with the result that the transition into summer isn’t as clean. Last week — the first week after finals — was filled top-to-bottom with meetings. This week’s schedule is less full but still contains a few stragglers. So I’m having to bring a somewhat more purposeful attention to the transition into summer work. Hence this post.
+
+My goals this summer include both some exciting [Humanities Commons](https://hcommons.org)-related developments (about which more soon!) and some preliminary work toward what may or may not turn out to be a new book project.
+
+That last is potentially the most important, but also the easiest to defer, interrupt, or otherwise sidetrack: mostly what I need to do is to Sit Still and Read Things. Lots of things. And it’s hard to convince my spring brain — jumping from one thing to the next, with a long list of tasks in hand — to slow down and take the time to focus.
+
+In any case, a post to remind me to do so. And the promise of more posts to share how it’s all going: I’ll post on significant ideas as they develop, but I’m also going to try to post a more general weekly roundup as well, just to keep myself on track. (We’ll see how that goes.)
+
+Happy summer, in the meantime!
+