The flakey blog

Dear readers:
I must confess that I've been really remiss in keeping up this blog. Why? The simple answer is that I am no longer on leave. Meaning, I no longer have the enormous luxury of scheduling my own time in the freest manner possible. For the last 15 months the only thing I had to do was to write and read and think and work on my book manuscript. This was actually the impetus for this blog in the first place.

[Note: if you read my very first blog entry you will wonder whether I ever finished the book manuscript on passing. The answer in a nutshell is, no. But the great thing about having a year off is that I realized that I wasn't really writing about passing, I was writing about racial ambiguity. And that the things I want to tackle are pretty big and out of my area of expertise: ie, writing about sports, new media, history--things that are outside of the traditional purview of literary criticism. Anyway, the good news is that I have really found what I want to write about and have written half of the projected book manuscript.]

Anyway, the semester is well underway at Southern U. And I find, after being out of the classroom for 15 months, that it is like riding a bike. Except imagine that you haven't been doing any physical activity in the last 15 months. You might be a little shaky getting back on the bike and riding around town as fast as you can. That's what it has been like for me, which has really thrown me for a loop. I mean, I've been teaching for a good while, if you count the first teaching forays in grad school. And I like teaching--I love it in fact. I'm a true believer, and what I mean is this: I know my tenure case will be based on the number of publications on my c.v. but I believe that my work in the classroom is just as if not more valuable than the things I write. I really value teaching and try to do the best job I can.

So it's a bit surprising to find myself doing some rookie mistakes and just more to the point of it--being out of step, out of rhythm with the cycle of the semester, teaching wise.

Because my re-entry has been a bit rocky, and because I'm also still trying to edit and write my little fingers off (since I am pre-tenure) I have let some things go by the wayside: one of them being, this blog.

But fear not! I have discovered that I like blogging. It's a strange format to write in, but I have always believed that one's research is of a personal nature, and one of my chapters in the newly envisioned book project is on blogs, so I figure one of the best ways to learn about blogs is to actually be doing it. And there's so much to write about in a blog devoted to issues of race in the U.S. (and really I'm interested in race from a global perspective as well). And then there's the upcoming elections...although really, my anxiety level is so high right now in terms of what the outcome will be. I guess you can say that this one is going to be exciting no matter what happens (but I know I'm bound to end up in tears on Tuesday night, whether they are tears of joy or rage....who knows!).

So, to be the best teacher I can be, I will be slacking off on the blogging. And if one of my students is currently reading this (since I know 1 or 2 of them have already inadvertently found their way to this site), you can at least appreciate that my mental energies are going to the classroom instead of the blogosphere.