In honor of completing my coursework, I’m taking the week off. That means no work. None. Including blogging. The closest thing I’m getting to work this week is seeing some theatre.
…and watching Smash. Hush.
Time Out
Reply
Tag Archives: vacation
I’m Back!
Alright, here we go.
You may have noticed that I took a break last week. This was inspired by the fact that it was, in fact, Spring Break for us Jumbos.
This is the problem with “breaks”: all they mean is that I don’t actually have to go onto campus. Even though I didn’t have class, I was still working every day. I was still struggling to unbury from the assortment of projects which managed to pile up on my desk. I was still getting caught up on all of the work I had shoved to the side to get through Twelfth Night.
So, as a conceit to the fact that even I need to slow down now and again, I took a break from the blog. I took a break from my diet and exercise regime. I took a single day off. And then hit the ground running.
And it worked! I woke up this morning on top of my projects (as on top of them as I can possibly be at the moment), ready to hit the world hard, and on the whole refreshed and raring to go.
The rest of the semester is jam-packed with projects: I have a lecture to give this
Look closely! Spring is really trying to happen!
week, a conference next week, a paper to submit as soon as possible, my German exam the week after next, an in-class project/lecture thing the week after that, then a final paper due two weeks from then. Basically it’s going to be a tough pace, but so long as I can maintain it I will be fine. And the good news is that, right now, the only thing on my desk is work. I have no outside projects to distract me from putting this semester to bed and, with it, the coursework for my PhD and all of my qualifying exams before my Comps!
…talk about a feat. Let me take a moment so as not to hyperventilate.
Today I’m right back in the thick of the action with meetings, class, a library trip, and an evening to review my spoils. I would normally say “bring it, semester!” but I don’t really want to encourage any monkey business. Things are going to be difficult enough without antagonizing the gods of academia. So instead, I will say this: I’m ready. Let’s do this. Gently, though. I’d really like to keep my sanity intact as much as humanly possible.
The Great Flop
Well, I’m back.
And let me tell you, being back is rough.
I’m uncertain if I’ve yet documented the condition which I not-so-fondly refer to as the “end of semester flop”. After the fall semester was over, after the last final was put to bed, and of course during the first few days of my real vacation, I was so exhausted that I felt sick. I had to take several days to just lay in bed and sleep, not talk to anyone, and let the gigantic thing that I had just accomplished wash over me and through me.
It took me a while to realize that that was what it was: sheer exhaustion from
FLOP!
the emotional and mental fatigue I had sustained over the course of the semester. For a while, I worried that I was incubating yet another unable-to-be-explained-by-modern-medical-science ailment. Thankfully, after some quality time with my bed (or, rather, the hotel bed since I was on vacation with my family at the time), I was able to shake it off and be a real human being again.
I was prepared for a similar experience this semester. Unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately), I had to meet a few publication deadlines hard on the heels of my finals deadlines. What this meant was that the semester didn’t really end. It rolled into the summer like blue rolls into indigo and, instead of being able to succumb to the end of semester flop, I just kept working. Nights candles had burnt out and jocund day stood tip toe on misty mountain tops, but there was nothing for it. I simply had to keep going.
Well, two weeks ago, the week before I left for my official summer vacation, I ran out of “gotta do it now”s. I had a few little tid bits that needed cleaning up before I could leave my desk for a week, but on the whole if I really wanted to keep working I was going to have to re-open another big project (something I was loathe to do a mere week before I left it abandoned on my desk mostly because I didn’t want to be fretting over it my entire vacation). So I took it easy. I finished my bits and bobs and made it such that I could return to my desk with a clean slate.
And return I did. Though I was technically home in the wee hours of Sunday morning, Sunday was essentially lost since I had slept for three hours and driven for the previous thirteen. I spent the day doing laundry and unpacking with just enough naps to sustain my sleep-deprived self. I woke up today and felt like I had been run over by a truck; my energy had bottomed out and I was barely able to think straight for the first half of the day.
At first, I panicked. I had to hit the ground running. I need to clean up my paper for ASTR. I need to get together some things for my Measure for Measure director. I need to learn my lines for Rosalind. I need to hit the gym because I bet it forgets how much it hurts after I’ve had my way with it.
Then, I realized. This was it. The end of semester flop. It had graciously delayed itself by about two months to give me the stamina to get through the first two thirds of my summer, but this was it.
And like it or not, I was down for the count for the next few days.
And I should just accept it and be grateful that I was going to be well-rested for September because darn it, I was going to rest.
So I took it easy Monday. I did countless loads of laundry (finishing all of it that I came home with), took care of my tent which I had packed up while moist so it needed attention, sorted through a bunch of stuff in my basement, finished a few crafts projects, made dinner for a friend who had stopped by, cleaned my room, learned some of my lines, did a bit of writing, and attended to a few neglected household chores (yes, believe it or not, this is my life on easy mode… you don’t want to know what my hard days are like).
self-portrait taken during hour 6 of writing a paper during my Master’s
And tomorrow I will open up those projects and hit them hard. I hope. End of semester flop is nothing to joke about; it’s a necessary evil for the wanna-be-sane graduate student and without it, there’s no way I could be prepared for September.
The moral of this story: everyone deserves a break. Especially after six months of consistent sixty to seventy hour work weeks. I earned this flop with every till-midnight paper session and every Saturday that I said “sorry, I have to stay home and work”.
Enjoy your flopping!
A Brief PSA
Hello ladies and gentlemen!
I am writing you from my phone while on the road to adventure (otherwise known as a “vacation”). As a result of this adventure, I will be going off the grid for the week. I may check in, but in case I don’t fear not, noble reader! I will return next week!
Cheers!
The Blahs
Whether it’s the lazy, hazy days of summer that have hit us here in Boston, a general sense of overall fatigue from the semester that I haven’t given myself a chance to recover from, or the moon being in the seventh house and Jupiter aligning with Mars, I’ve found myself deep within a case of the “blahs”.
You know the blahs. That thing that happens that makes you want to do nothing more than sit on the couch and be a lump. That thing that whispers lazily in your ear telling you “just one more episode, you didn’t actually want to go to the gym today”. That thing that puts a fire-blanket over productivity and makes it nearly impossible to keep up with your “gotta do it now!”s (forget your “should do it soon”s).
For people with conventional jobs, while annoying, the blahs aren’t exactly life threatening. 
You’ve still gotta get up, go into the office, do your basic functions, and come home. You’re still accountable for your responsibilities to a boss, supervisor, team, company. There’s going to be someone asking questions if your productivity takes a nose-dive for the bottom of the bar graph.
Unfortunately for me, summertime in academia is a very very difficult time during which to get the blahs.
Not only is there no one besides myself to whom I’m accountable, but I don’t even have any hard deadlines to work towards. I’m awash in a sea of amorphous, ambiguous, and very large tasks which all require attention and diligence, but also provide the illusion that succumbing to the blahs could be alright.
My to-do list is no shorter than it has ever been, I’m just working on things that are long-term goals. I’m trying to maintain better gym habits. I’m putting a lot of effort into personal projects that fell by the wayside during crunch-time. I’m trying not to give myself heart attacks while accomplishing my summer tasks, and I’m also trying to get in some of that rest that’s so crucial to being prepared for the fall.
But the blahs are not sated by ambiguous improvement, nor can they be fought with small accomplishment.
To help myself beat back the blahs, I’ve tried to create visual guides and land-marks for the things I’m doing. I’ve created physical flash cards for my German vocabulary so that I can actually see how many words I know now that I didn’t know yesterday, a week, a month ago. I’ve started stacking my used-draft-papers again to (hopefully) find some convenient fire in which to burn them when I’ve submitted the paper I’m polishing. I’ve created a cheat-book of song chords for my ukulele so I can A) localize the songs I know and B) see how much I’ve learned since I took it into my head that I should learn to play a ukulele at a friend’s wedding a month ago. There’s not much I can do about the gym other than pat myself on the back and have a nice shower when I return home, but endorphins and a few hours of temperature control (my place has many virtues, central AC isn’t one of them) are reward enough, no?
I, like this sheep, feel droopy about the ears
In my experience, productivity expands and contracts in direct correlation to the amount of time at one’s disposal. Have A MILLION BILLION THINGS TO DO RIGHT NOW!? No problem, you will get them ALL done. Have a lot of time on your hands and just a few projects with a bunch of space in which to accomplish assorted random other tasks? Meh. You’ll get done what you need to get done, but no more.
So as I struggle through my case of the blahs, I have every expectation that I will accomplish what I absolutely need to accomplish… but likely not so much as I had wished to accomplish. With any luck I’ll be seeing some sunshine at the end of this gloomy tunnel and be able to kick my summer into overdrive as soon as I find some inspiration to do so.
Podcast of the Black Swan: Episode 5
When we last left our heroes, they had been broadcasting from a quasi-functional blackbox in a hotel room in Orlando, fondly reminiscing about the now-defunct “Jaws” attraction at Universal Studios, Florida, and only occasionally interrupted by the blackbox’s previous contents. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, the hotel room was infiltrated by a group of surly pirates who promptly attacked with their advanced technologies and rendered our heroes unconscious. For the full low-down, check out our last episode here!
Today, the adventure continues with the exciting new installment of our Podcast mini-series: “How We Spent our Winter Vacation”. Click here to check it out.
As always, many thanks to the ever-talented Matt Rosvally and once again thanks to the voice talents of Billy Maloy.
Enjoy!
Podcast of the Black Swan Episode Four: Jaws
So here it is, the long-awaited first installment of our Disney and Universal vacation inspired
Left to Right: Matt, Jaws, Yours Truly
podcasts! A special thank-you to my ever-talented brother the incomperable Matt Rosvally as well as the lovely Billy Malloy for her voiceover talents.
Click here to check it out.
Enjoy!
Thoughts on the New Year
Good evening good friends!
I’m breaking the radio silence this evening to bring you greetings from sunny Orlando. I have a great deal to say about what’s been going on down here, but frankly the much-needed break has been so good for my semester-addled brain that I’m having trouble convincing myself that breaking the sanctity of “vacation” is worth the amusing blogal anecdotes. Don’t worry, I’ll get around to describing my antics at some point, but for now, I’m going to rest up, spend some time with my family, and forget that I’m an educated person.
I’ve read four books since the end of the semester, all of my own choosing, and I started on a fifth this morning. None of them have anything to do with theatre, Shakespeare, or my comps list. This, if anything, means “vacation” to me.
I wanted to take a moment at the dawning of a new year to reflect on how far the past 365 days have taken me. Last year at this time I was just finishing up my PhD applications, struggling to steel myself for the final semester of my MA, teaching ballroom dance in New Jersey, karaoking several times a week for lack of anything else to do with my time, and in utter and complete life limbo as I couldn’t plan anything until I heard back from my programs. Though I knew my life was about to change drastically, there was no way I could have any inkling as to how and where those changes might lead me.
This next year, I have a much better idea of the trajectory of the next twelve months. That being said, the past year has been a reminder that even when one has plans, one still needs to allot for drastic change in them. As much as has happened in the past year (and more!) could happen in the next year. The illusion of consistency (the hobgoblin of little minds) is limiting at best and devastatingly crippling at worst.
I do have some plans for the next year. I have at least one conference lined up, my first ever academic publication forthcoming, and another year of coursework ahead of me. I will be learning another language over the summer to fulfill degree requirements. I will be ramping up for Comps. Next fall, I will be teaching at least one class.
I’ve never taken much stock in New Years’ resolutions. To me, they mostly wind up being over-rated hype that more quickly turn into empty words than fulfilling promises. Then, at the turning of 2006 into 2007, I realized my problem.
Start small. That year, I resolved to finally finish reading Pride and Prejudice. It worked.
This year, I’m resolving to memorize a better toast for next year. Inevitably people look at 
me at midnight and expect something witty or wise or funny or some combination of the above… inevitably I come up short (either because I’ve had a few too many glasses of champagne or because I’m tired). Somehow people are aghast and agog that the Shakespeare scholar can’t think of a single set of sage words to ring us into the next year.
Next year, I won’t be stuck fumbling around for such things. For now, though, you’ll have to count yourself satisfied with this:
What is love? ’tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
Have a happy, safe, healthful, fulfilling new year folks! I’m going to go bury my head in the sand for another week. I’ll catch you back in Boston!
Turkey Trot
Ah Thanksgiving. A time to relax, ponder those things in life which we are grateful for, eat some delicious food, take a nap after dinner, and spend time with the family. It’s the little break before the last leg of the race. Just a breather before we launch into the final stretch.
Almost there.
So close.
It’s dangling right over my head, I can see it, I just can’t quite reach it (even if I jump).
Panic? … …. …. PANIC!!!!
At the end of the semester every semester (and sometimes at the beginning depending on
Desk avec whiteboard. It literally looms over me as I work.
how overwhelmed I’m feeling), I dig out my giant whiteboard. I list all of the assignments standing between me and the semester’s end. I list their due dates. Then I make a big check-box for each of them.
The whiteboard’s been out for about a month now and, while I can see that I’m making headway on all of these things I have to do, the big three (namely: papers) are beginning to loom ever-more-menacing.
It’s funny because I kept telling myself that, since I didn’t have class this week, I could get SO MUCH DONE and be in the BEST SHAPE EVER for that final push. Well…. It’s Thursday. So far I have managed to chip away at things, but no great or drastic improvement yet. I don’t feel armed for this fight, I’m still waiting for them to alter my chain mail to fit me since I’m not amazonianly proportioned and, oh wouldn’t you know it, they stopped making chain mail in “short and stumpy” so they’re going to have to custom it and can’t fighting that dragon just wait another week, because they’ve got all these backorders due to black Friday and nobody gets work done during the holidays so it’s either go out there unprotected or wait a bit longer to get suited up and darn doesn’t it look like whatever pivotal equipment they need is going to fail horribly just in time to make my life incredible inconvenient?
Anyway, enough about that. Let me take a moment and bow to the wishes of today’s holiday spirit and put some positive juju out in the air in hopes that it will come back to me when I need it in these coming weeks.
Let’s start with a heart-warming Thanksgiving story.
I wasn’t going to go home for Thanksgiving. Driving down to New York to have dinner with my family, while appealing, was simply going to take too long. I couldn’t spend what would amount to three days away from my work at this critical time in the semester. So I regretfully tapped out of family dinner and went to start making arrangements as to how I could find some turkey to eat at my desk with my man Will.
My family is pretty much the best, because they decided that this meant (since I couldn’t come to them) they would drive up to Boston to spend the holiday with me. My mom’s bringing a full turkey dinner. My dad’s bringing bags and bags of high quality whole-bean coffee that he can’t drink anymore due to health reasons. My sister is bringing her lovely self. I’m really excited to see them.
So, while I still got up early to bang some things out today, as soon as they get here I’m putting the books down for the evening and taking a mental vacation for twelve hours. I don’t care how far back it’s going to set me. I have a lot to be thankful for this year and that pumpkin pie isn’t going to eat itself.
Ah the turkey. Nature's ugliest animal. Eating them is like beautifying the world, one drumstick at a time.
If you, like me, are still sitting at your computer frantically trying to put your affairs in order, I hereby give you permission to set it by a while. There’s nothing you can accomplish in this twelve-hour span that’s going to be more important, or more rejuvenating, than a good turkey dinner, some booze, and good company. Think about how lucky you are to be in the program you’re in, thank the fellowship gods, and then forget about it. Life’s too short to let finals stand in the way of enjoying dinner.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I’ll catch you on the flip side with tales of the bloody battle to come; honor and glory; valorous victory; crushing defeats; injurious blows; and how to avoid death by library books.
Stay tuned.
A Vacation
I am in Maine. Smack dead in the middle of Acadia National Park. There is hiking and sailing and eagles and seals and porpoise.
…and the longer I am here…
…the more I am convinced…
…that if some higher power were to chose to send me to heaven (a dubious prospect at best given my choice of vocations… actors are no better than professional liars and scholars, well, just ask Samuel Johnson about how well they tend to do)…
…it would look something like this.
