A day in the life (summer edition)

Alarm, up, out the door to walk to the cafe while reading. (Currently I am reading Ruha Benjamin, People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier. Once I got past the intro, which was a bit dense, it became hard to put down.)

At the cafe: Try to write for at least an hour before checking email or otherwise letting myself be distracted by non-writing work. After the hour (when I manage to last that long), rotate attention between:

• Writing and related activities (e.g. making notes about books and articles, which includes writing how they relate to my work, what I can use from them, where I agree and disagree, etc.).
• Language lessons on DuoLingo (Spanish and Turkish) and Rosetta Stone (Turkish).
• Email. It's much slower in summer than during the academic year, but I still get things like student requests for letters of recommendation (three medical school recommendations in process right now); emails from bioethics research collaborators about a grant proposal, or an article we're writing; messages from Susan about the design projects at DiPi; questions from students interested in my fall class; slides from the organizer of a workshop I attended a month ago; and so on.
  
  For several months I've been working on keeping email from sucking away too much of my time. So far two strategies seem to work reasonably well: (1) if I can respond to a message in under 30 seconds, I do so immediately instead of leaving it for later, and (2) if at all possible, I limit my answer two two sentences.
• Course prep. I will be teaching a new class this fall, and teaching another for only the second time, so I am spending a lot of time thinking about how to structure the quarter, trying out different topic orders and assignment combinations. 

After a few hours I usually walk home, taking an indirect route so it's a couple of miles instead of half a mile. 

Afternoons I spend working at home, usually the same stuff as in the morning but with the balance shifting away from writing and toward note-taking and planning activities.

And evenings... I am trying to not work in the evenings, at least not as much. Eight years of graduate school and six years working toward tenure left me with a fanatical work ethic, but a year after getting tenure I've started to realize that the frantic pace of the last 15 years isn't necessary and also isn't necessarily good for me *or* for my writing.

Orhan and I have been to a few summer movies (Me: "Wanna go watch shit blow up?" Him: "Yeah!") and I am reading three different novel series. My friends Pamela and Ellen (both retired from UC Davis) gave me a copy of Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend and it's phenomenal. It's also a bit too intense to read right before bed, so I am working my way through two light-weight mystery series (Jackqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs books, and Charles Todds' series about Ian Rutledge).

And that's the daily routine, with some variations: Lunch every Tuesday with Pamela (and usually Ellen, but she is out of town for most of the summer), a trip to Martinez on the train every other weekend to meet and write with a group of professor friends, a Wednesday reading group with some UWP colleagues. But mostly unscheduled time to read, walk, write, think, repeat -- and watch shit blow up at the movies with Orhan.