Dear administrators of various departments and offices.

I was distressed to receive your recent email informing me that due to a number of factors causing a delay in various processes (which means that I cannot pinpoint a nameable person whose fault this is) my contract will not be through all of the necessary administrative hoops in time to pay me this month.

If I were not at the very bottom of the academic ladder, it's unlikely that I would be in this position (either with my personal finances, or dealing with the consequences of your delays). It seems that Big Named Academic brought to the University using the Magic Money Pots has signed his contract, which is, I have no doubt at all, going to be processed in time to pay this Big Named Academic as they agreed. Big Named Academic would create a bigger stink about this than I am able to do.

I understand that I will be paid for two months at the end of the following month, but by that point I will have been teaching for 7-8 weeks, and marked a quiz, an exercise and a batch of essays. I will also have had to pay two months' rent, bills, and travel to work expenses, none of which will accept a note that says 'I promise to pay you as soon as my employer, with whom I have not yet signed a contract and thus have no enforceable way of making them give me any money, actually pay me'.

I know my bills are not your responsibility. But processing my contract on time IS.

And it strikes me as slightly unfair that I will have done my job this month and I will not get paid. You will get paid in full, whether this part of your job is completed or not.

In the dark

Because I liked it, today I'm sharing with you a short passage from Jo Baker's novel The Telling that I'm reading - and thoroughly enjoying - at the moment. (No spoilers in the comments, please. I haven't finished it yet...):

"Sally and I made our bed up on the rug, and lay down. She fell instantly and deeply asleep, and began to snore.

A light continued on upstairs; it filtered down between the floorboards. I lay awake, looking up at it, my eyes gritty with fatigue. Dad knew, and Mam knew, and Sally knew, and Thomas knew, and everybody knew what was going on, everybody but me. It was not a pleasant feeling, to be alone in the dark."

Tempting...

This year, at the beginning of the academic year, I thought I'd try to stamp out my problem with student abbreviations of my name very early on. So, in the very first class when I introduced myself (sorry, the pseudonym makes this hard, but bear with me...), I said: "Welcome to First-Year English Lit. I am [Dr. Autumn Song]. I'd like these seminars to be quite informal so please call me [Autumn]. If I get you to call me [Dr. Song] you won't talk to me. Please don't call me [Aut], though, I'm not a big fan."

They seemed to accept this in the first group. In the second a very bright young man said "Can we call you [Dr. Song] if we want to? It sounds really cool."

I'm not supposed to say, "Yes it does!" at this point, am I...?

Across a crowded room...

The other day I was sitting at the back of a coffee shop in the City where the Castle is also a Prison, checking some transcription work I've been doing (I'm not good at working at home at the moment, and the Department is mid-move so I have no office). I'd just finished a section and I looked up from my papers, catching the eye of a very attractive man who had just come in.

I smiled at him and he walked to the back of the room, and put his bag down at the table next to mine. He then seemed to change his mind, and moved to the front by the window on the main street. He looked over to me again; I smiled, again. He smiled, left his bag where it was and walked towards me.

He stopped at my table, and I'm starting to think that the amount of time I've spent sitting in coffee shops might be about to pay off in a big way, and then he asked, "Are you Alexa?"

Well, no. I'm not.

And now I'm also kicking myself for giving in to the thought that eyes meeting across a crowded room might actually happen to me.

Tricks of the academic conscience

I often have vivid dreams and I have, before, woken up screaming in a nightmare, or found myself out of breath when I woke up from shouting at someone in a dream.

On Sunday night I dreamed that I was trying desperately to finish my thesis before the deadline, and no matter what I did, or where I took my papers and laptop, I couldn't get it finished. Some people tried to help; others just kept getting in my way - not deliberately, just unthinkingly. And I wasn't sure whether I'd be able to persuade Registry to take it after the deadline. And I'll never know now, because my alarm went off before I got it there. And it took a good 20 minutes after I woke up from this panicking dream for the panic to subside and for my heart rate to get back to normal.

This would make sense if my thesis was due, but it isn't. Those of you who have been reading Falling Leaves for a while will know that I submitted my thesis over twelve months ago, and that submission day was a nightmare. But I didn't have such vivid panic dreams about thesis submission before I handed it in, and I haven't had them since. Until Sunday night.

Now, I have a couple of small projects that have to be completed soon, and I wonder if this dream is a way of making my get on with those things. When you are in state of perpetual finger crossing, motivation is hard to find. My academic conscience can't convince my subconscious to care about whether I get this book review finished on time, so it resorted to reminding me of a time when I really did care that something was finished on time, and it almost wasn't, and the panic I felt then.

Seems a little drastic though, for a book review deadline (extended twice though it may be). Nevertheless, it was a good trick; I'll be getting on with the review now.

I don't want to get any more reminders of a deadline like that one.

Spooky...

In light of my previous post, I think it's quite funny that my horoscope this week contains these words:

"Career matters also demand your attention. Getting back into your old work routine feels blissful. It's also possible you will be offered a promotion or pay raise. Your employer may not have realised what a wonderful contribution you made until you left for your holiday."

I neither entirely believe nor absolutely deny the veracity of horoscopes. But still, this one goes with the perpetual finger-crossing, doesn't it?

State of perpetual finger-crossing.

Reading September Blue's post on academic glass cleaning, I entirely sympathise / empathise. Finding motivation to do any research this summer whilst not really being attached to any academic institution has been nigh impossible for me.

I have also spent a fair amount of time completing job applications for Institutions several of which not only did not short-list me (fair enough) but did not even bother to reply to my application (I know this is standard practice, but that notwithstanding, it is still very rude, and unnecessary in the modern world of inexpensive email communication). I also put a tremendous amount of work into a funding application which in the end I could not submit because of a variety of problems with the electronic submission system. That did not fill me with inspiration to continue with such fellowship applications. And the sense of being set adrift this summer has hardly been motivational.

That said, my colleagues at the University in the City Where the Castle is also a Prison have been very supportive and encouraging. And I have never been sufficiently down or hopeless about all this to give up on academia as a career path. I have a friend whose academic CV is shinier than mine who is thinking of giving up; her work is excellent and innovative, and I hope she reconsiders. I do understand her frustration though. I try to be positive about the job market picking up, and continue to hope that something will come up for me, but some days it is very hard to keep up that sort of optimism. Some days the effort to stay optimistic takes all the energy I can muster, and that doesn't give me much enthusiasm for research. In fact, it leads mostly to watching box set DVDs of American TV shows.

I have been offered some TA work for this academic year. On the plus side, this will keep me attached to an Institution, return my library borrowing rights, give me a shared office space on campus, and, I don't have to move house and try to half-settle on a short term contract again somewhere else. On the other hand, it will not cover even half of my monthly rent, it will not pay the electricity bill (which I am told by letter today has just gone up), or feed me and the Little Dog for the next twelve months. So I need to find an alternative source of income, that hopefully will not take up so much time that I can't make research progress (which is an advantage of not having full time teaching).

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Again.

Still.