Right now, with a level of desire that verges on becoming a problem, I really, really want to work on my TTRPG and my submission for the Kanghas Khan Fear of Clowns anthology. Alas, I’ve got a bit more grading to do before spring break arrives and presents me with some sizable chunks of time, so today I’m spending my semi-free lunchtime minutes to add to the blog instead.

Today I’m thinking particularly about Academic Time, which is a peculiar thing. It tends to sprawl in odd and unexpected ways, though perhaps not odd to those folks who’ve chosen to be parents and raise kids., for whom the odd and unexpected can be the norm. Quite a lot of time is invested in students, and I view that as a pleasure and a privilege. Could I live without responding to a few of the “Did we do anything important in class today?” emails I receive each week? I suspect I could, but the fact that I get to field them speaks to a certain kind of existential pleasure.

It’s worth noting that, in terms of the administrative imagination, most professors where I work are subdivided into four units of human. Three of those units each semester are committed to teaching, and the fourth is reserved for all those scholarly and creative activities that contribute to the mission (and greater glory) of the university. The STEM folk will notice that the 3/4 + 1/4 gets us to 4/4, which means that anything else I’m asked to do must be reckoned in some more imaginative way.

The blobular time I tend to resent is academic service time, in part because it more often feels like a self-inflicted cut that’s become infected. The grodiest wounds come from spontaneous delegation, when a critter who is very well paid to take on a job decides to offload some of their responsibilities to parties who signed on for some other adjacent gig. Similarly, we experience subcommittee proliferation, when a group entrusted with some smallish responsibility decides that responsibility could be handled better by divvying up the work between several even smaller groups at their own ad hoc meetings distributed over the course of the week outside the regularly-scheduled time. Perhaps the vilest time sink, at least in terms of feel, comes from higher-order administrative tasks one has chosen to take on but which might benefit from collaboration or delegation (which is on my mind because I know a kind, skillful adminacritter who takes on oodles of work herself because the alternative is pairing up with someone who will require a great deal of management and handling). It’s often easier to do the thing oneself than beg for a collaborator to do the thing properly and on time, but that comes with a cost.

All told, this has taken me about 3/4 of a bowl of jambalaya to write, which I think is time reasonably well spent. I say this, of course, knowing full well that my WordPress host is currently in talks to sell user prose to some large language model engine to churn up and squeeze out some word sausage down the line. I win today, in that I keep the promise I made when I posted the last entry and get to tick off a box on the day’s to-do list, but I’ll probably cut my losses on the blog if I learn that I can’t opt-out of the slaughter prior to the sausage-making process. A little bittersweet, that, but rather than dwell on it I’ll think about gameplay mechanics and sweet, sweet murder-clowns.

A proper post is on the horizon, but whilst there’s still time on the calendar I thought I’d point y’all toward The Lesser Key of the Sandestin, another zesty zine collaboration with the fine wizardfolk over at SuperheroNecromancer to round out ZineQuest at Kickstarter. The project is already funded, but there’s still time enough to climb aboard if you’re so inclined. We’ll see you over in The Rainy City!