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There’s really nothing like an email that says “End of Year Blog Report” in the subject line to make you think about just how neglectful you’ve been of your blog. It has certainly been entirely too long.

Perhaps my lovely new PlannerPad will help me be better about capturing ideas and posting.

Isn’t it pretty?  I have a suspicion it is going to work out well for me, but I’ll save the full review for later when I’ve had a change to use it.

Christmas was fun this year, full of sentimental presents like this one.

It is a jigsaw puzzle of one of Ceausescu’s palaces. No, I’ve never been to Romania, nor do I have a particular fondness for the Communist Party, but Le Premiere Chat is named Ceausescu.

Clearly his new environment is not up to his standards.

Each year the DH and I try to get each other something fun, the result is that I often get coffee mugs of some sort. Trust me, I am not complaining.  You know how much I love my serial killer mug collection. Last year, it was a mug covered in Shakespearean insults. This year the DH dug a little deeper and ordered me this little beauty. 

Okay, so my Gilmore Girls obsession has cooled in recent years, but he did pay attention at some point, and he had to brave the wild internet to get this for me. Trust me, this is not his territory.

It was a wonderful effort, but I do think I stumbled onto Christmas gold with this $7 beauty from Walmart.

Yes.  It does say Poo Dough. It comes with a mold, two tubs of brown dough, and the truly brilliant element a small container of yellow dough.  Yellow dough is essential for creating your very own kernels of corn, or peanuts if you want to get extra creative. Yep. I won Christmas with this one. How do I know?

My mother in law sent me a text asking where I found the Poo Dough because all of the DH’s family wants some. It is exactly their sense of humor.

About this time each year, possibly because it represents the beginning of the new academic year or maybe that it also happens to be my birthday, I find myself thinking about goals. What might surprise you about this is the fact that I HATE setting goals, seriously hate it with the fire of a thousand suns.

Mostly, this can be attributed to my closet Virgo nature (i.e. I LOVE putting things in order; yet, I’m ABYSMAL at keeping them that way). This tendency means I have long track record of making plans, but not necessarily following all the way through with them, which just makes me feel like I fail at a lot of things. In my mind goal setting = setting myself up for failure.

Funny, then, that I would end up in a position that requires a lot of goal setting for me, and the program. As I think I’ve written before, I’ve figured out a way to deal with this at a personal development level. Each year at this job, instead of setting a concrete goal I assign myself a word for that year.

The yearly word, or words, operates almost like a meditative intention. I set the word and let it influence all I do. For example, my second year here my word was “Indepence.” Those of you who know me might find it amusing that I would feel the need to consciously cultivate independence (it’s pretty much mapped into my DNA); however, the first year of this position threw me for a loop for a variety of reasons, so the second year I needed to re-establish for myself and the new people around me this part of myself.

Last year I chose two words: visibility and vulnerability. Making my program and myself more visible on campus would require me to get out of my comfort zone and make myself vulerable. Given the number of partnerships I’m currently working on and/or developing, and my presence on division wide committees, I’d call the year of visibility and vulnerability a success.

In fact, it was enough of a success that I don’t want to give it up. Hot mess might not be the best way to describe my life right now, but steady simmer is fairly accurate. Change isn’t happening at this moment, but the groundwork is being laid and it could end up significant. (No, that is not just a vague metaphor for the academic job market.) Visibility and vulnerability will be essential parts of anything that happens for me this year, but they won’t be the only essential element.

At the risk of diffusing my intention with too many words, I’ve decided to add one more for this year.

From the Merriam-Webster full definition: confidence of mind or manner: easy freedom from self-doubt or uncertainty. The definition continues on to include – excessive self-confidence, but I think the visibility and vulnerability parts of my intentions will help me stop short of the negative connotations of the word.

Today’s advice at Vitae – Don’t Dodge the Diversity Question –  stuck a nerve with me. There’s nothing wrong with Nicole Matos’s advice, in fact I think you could call the heart of it common sense; as long as the question does not cross any legal boundaries, answer it.

For me, the problem isn’t necessarily people dodging the “diversity question,” the problem is the question. In the opening paragraph of her column Matos paraphrases the diversity question as “one that goes something like — Describe your experiences with diversity in and/or outside the classroom.” As someone who has been doing what I call “baby searches” for the past four years, I have one very big question of my own: “What the hell does this question even mean?”

You might notice that I’ve made some changes around here, added a few pages, and things. I really hated having my CV just copied and pasted to a single page. It was just too much text for one page, so I broke up the sections into individual pages.  I even included sub-pages with my teaching and administrative philosophies, not that anyone would really want to read them. In general, I like this new organization, and I think it will make it easy for me to keep everything updated. In the future I imagine a reversal of process where I cut and paste from my website to update and create a new CV.

After an entire day of travel (thanks to a 3 hour layover in Atlanta), last night I finally made it home after a working vacation. A week ago the DH and I flew up to spend some time with his family (Sat – Wed) for me. He flew home early Thursday morning. I stayed in the Cities for a conference. (Vacation pictures will be posted later. They are all still stuck on my phone.)

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this conference. Typically, when I go to a conference I have a built in cadre of friends to keep me company. At this conference, however, I was presenting with colleagues at a conference for their field, not mine. (At least, that is what I thought.) None of my friends were going to be there, and I expected to wander the conference halls embodying my childhood nickname, “Orphan.” Nothing is ever what we really expect. The conference was amazing, and I came home with more ideas than I can process, inspired about my own scholarship, and even new friends.

The best part of this conference was the fact that our panel presented during the first session. I’ve done that at two conferences now, and I LOVE that. There is very little time for nerves, and then you can spend the rest of the time seeing panels without rehearsing a presentation in the back of your mind.

The most surprising thing for me was just how many writing center people I met at this conference. I swear this conference was better in terms of meeting new writing center directors and exchanging ideas than an actual writing center conference. It seemed like every session there was something for me to see, and it was particularly gratifying for me to see how many other people are interested in graduate writing support, and hospitality.

At a conference there are always people you end up seeing over and over in panels, in the halls, etc. This conference I made my new friend in bathroom lines and hallways. We both stayed in the dorms, and it felt like we couldn’t leave our rooms without running into each other; and, yes, she is a writing center director/coordinator like me, for now. It was fun, amusing, and now I have two friends in St. Louis.

As fun as everything was, I am glad that I took the early flight home, since I think many people had a hard time getting flights home because of the weather. I had been away too long, and it was good to sleep in my own bed with the dogs.

As the state rep to our regional writing center association my job, among other things, is to hold events in the state.  Since I inherited this job from the fabulous Dr. Phoenix, there was already an established pattern of spring professional development events for directors, and fall events that include tutors. This spring our director’s event had to be postponed, so last Friday a few writing center directors from around the state gathered at our school. We had each read either Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers by Jackie Grutsch-McKinney, or Building Writing Center Assessments that Matter by Ellen Schendel and William J. Macauley Jr.  For the morning we split up into small groups to discuss the books, and then after lunch we all gathered together to share our small group discussions with each other. Throughout the conversation I was struck by two things: the isolation of the work we do, and the way these two texts complimented each other.