I’m grounded…

…by my boss, that is. I’m “assigned” to work at home for the next two days. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

I was supposed to have a paper ready to go out by now, but haven’t had time to do it.  All the grad students & postdocs in my lab and the two others involved in a particular longitudinal study were assigned to write papers over the summer. The entire purpose of this exercise was to bulk up a weak section in the grant application for continued NIH funding.  Everybody else is in good shape on their papers except for me. I have had many other deadlines and responsibilities over the summer, and kept running into roadblocks on this paper.

So now I’m at home for two days, and must finish the introduction & outline the discussion by the evening of Day 2. Yet true to form, it’s noon on Day 1 at home and I haven’t started working on it yet. I slept in (hooray!), talked to another alum from Big Rural University about a job opening in her department at Small Suburban Liberal Arts College, ate potato chips for breakfast, took a shower, did my hair, and sorted my articles for the paper. The file is open on my computer, but I just don’t want to deal with it.

The writing thus far hasn’t gone easily, despite the fact that it should go easily. This is essentially an extension of my dissertation, conducted with a younger sample & longitudinal data. I only need to write 3-4 pages of intro & revise what I’d already written. This shouldn’t be too difficult. So why is it so hard to really get going and just get it done?!?

…and now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

At some previous point, I stated that the intent of this blog was to chronicle my experiences as an academic with ADD. For some reason, it seems that everything I’ve written recently has been about our wedding, not academic life!

From one perspective, academia is a life-encompassing choice. When I decided to embrace the identity of academic, I knew I wasn’t just choosing a career. Deciding to become an academic also means that one’s career is inevitably connected to one’s life and vice versa. As a developmental scientist, I view marriage as just one of those life transitions that inevitably impacts the rest of life. Getting & being married definitely impacts my work & my identity as an academic as a whole. I don’t necessarily see a clear division between my work and this aspect of my life. Naturally, it could just be my tangential ADD-type thinking that has led me to this conclusion.

From another perspective, me writing about our wedding is just fluff, and nobody really cares anyway. Get to the good stuff, Addled!

Regardless of your perspective, please let me state for the record… the wedding stuff is almost entirely over. Aside from stating now that our professional pictures have been formatted on DVD, which Hubby’s mom will send to us via snailmail tomorrow. Beyond posting a link to these pictures, I anticipate just one more entry reflecting on the whole experience following our stateside reception, which will occur in two weeks. That’s it!

Without further ado, here is the planned entry about academic life & ADD.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an announcement requesting diaries from this year’s batch of academic job seekers. I hyperfocused for a few enjoyable hours while preparing my submission. Naturally it’s about my looming job search, starting with my experiences the last time I was on the market (pre-diagnosis), continuing on to my anticipated assets & constraints this time around. As this is clearly relevant to my blog, I’d post it here now, except that could lead to plagiarism concerns. I will link to this submission if they choose to publish it (under a pseudonym, of course), or will post it here myself if rejected.

In other news, the job market madness has now started in earnest. There are now officially 18 jobs for which I will apply between now and December 1. I expect that number to climb substantially during the next two months. The jobs are primarily in psychology departments, at universities and colleges of varying sizes, and are located from coast to coast. There’s a good mix, and hubby and I are pretty excited about some of them. But please let me reiterate yet again… to have so many ads posted so early is quite unusual. Usually the postings don’t begin to pop up like weeds until after Labor Day (maybe this is another effect of global warming?). I’m not complaining about the early start, because later postings make it harder on applicants to get their full packets to the search committees on time. It’s always better to be early than to be late… and as I know I have to worry about at least one letter writer being late with her materials, I’d better get my apps in as early as I can.

True to form, I’d intended to start revising my materials directly after returning home from the wedding. This hasn’t happened yet. I have revised outlines on my hard drive at work, deadlines set with colleagues who are also working on their materials, but am still procrastinating. Why can’t I hyperfocus on this important task instead of on cheap J. Crew dresses on eBay?

Last but not least, I’ve already restricted my profiles on sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook to friends only. Just as a reminder, my blog will become much more anonymous the night before I mail that first job application in approximately another month. All personal pictures & the remaining identifying details will be removed. Although I don’t list my blog on my vita, I don’t want to run the risk that somebody on a search committee will find it accidentally or on purpose. I can’t anticipate how search committee members might react to learning that I’ve struggled with depression & am being actively treated for ADD. I can’t think that it would help my prospects. It’s always just better to be proactive and cautious.