Woke up at 3 am with one of those horrible, pit-of-the-stomach feelings of:

a. I'm not doing enough towards "productivity"

and

b. How on earth am I going to get done what I AM doing?

I need to avoid thinking about the fact that I will be applying for full professor in another year or so. That's what gets to me. While my productivity is probably sufficient, I look at it and go, "But there's so much more I could have done!"

And then I feel guilty for knitting. I feel like "maybe I should devote every waking hour outside of class to somehow pushing research."

And then that makes me angry. There's a lot that I do (the Youth Group, some of the volunteer work with the local beautification committee, some other volunteer stuff like work with the food bank) that is stuff that I enjoy and that I consider important, but it doesn't count on the whole campus-evaluation process. And that frustrates me. Because I don't like feeling like I SHOULDN'T be doing something I value because it's taking time away from something else.

So I'm making a chart of all the projects I have going on and what remains to be done on them, and I'm going to check the steps off as I finish them. (And remind myself that for some of the projects, I have to WAIT for the field site to 'wake up' before I can do anything this spring).

I did do one thing this morning - emailed a journal editor about a manuscript I submitted more than six months ago and hadn't heard anything back about. (That may mean it's lost in the shuffle or it may mean that just rejected it out-of-hand). But if they don't want it, there's another journal that might, so I need to know.

I was also somewhat cheered up by the fact that the little germination-under-allelopathic-conditions experiment I'm running is starting to show results. And they are results that, at least at this point, support my hypothesis.

But it's hard. Not having anything finished - having all these projects up in the air makes me unhappy. I like finishing stuff, I like being able to mark things as "done" in my mind and move on to the next thing. (And it's the old "How you do anything is how you do everything" - I feel the same way about the knitting projects that I should-not-be-working-on-in-favor-of-research right now).

I could also e-mail a coauthor on a long-stalled paper and ask him what's up with it, whether he's had a chance to look at it again. But I don't know. This is a co-author who, six months into another project (and a lot of work on my part) decided that it wasn't worth submitting anywhere. And since it's his data, I had to abide by that. So I'm kind of twitchy that it will be the same with this one. (Although in this case - the data are mine, so I could claim custody of the paper and insist on submitting it. I don't know if that's a fight I want to have.)

Some days, I think it would have been easier to have had flesh-and-blood children rather than these research-projects-as-children things.