It's June, and what have I done?

Yesterday, unable to sit around and wait for more bad news about my sister, I took a walk to campus to pick up my Folgard and check my mail (more dissertation chapters!). Naturally, I ran into a senior colleague who asked me about the summer--what's going on, what I'm working on, what LG is going, etc. Surely, she said, something good has happened, glancing not so subtly at my waist (she knows I'm ttc only because she asked me point blank a few months ago and I'm a very bad liar). No, I replied, it's been a really shitty summer.

That it has. So all my big plans about what I was going to accomplish have pretty much fallen by the wayside. I did, fortunately, manage to get my book manuscript in the mail last week. And my classes for fall are in decent shape, at least until late August when I need to copy/scan things. Which leaves the writing that I'm not doing. Oh, sure, I've written in my journal and on this blog and kept up with my regularly-scheduled non-academic project. What I haven't done is finished the damn article I started working on in April or made any real headway on other short essay revisions. In other words, I'm writing but seriously lacking discipline. Same goes for reading: I'm in the midst of Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, a couple scholarly books relevant to the article, Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, and the constantly growing stack of lit mags I ignore during the academic year. I returned Dove's Sonata Mulatica to the library yesterday because it was too overwhelming; it's a BOOK not a collection of poems I can read one at a time while I'm sitting in the waiting rooms of various offices or in the line at the grocery store.

I'm not going to say I wasted this first quarter of the summer, because it really wasn't my intent to lounge on my porch and watch a lot of movies. I was pregnant. I was grieving. I needed that time. And now, I think, I'm ready to work.