Dr. O's First Rule of Academia

Don't Be Paranoid.

I need to have this tattooed on the back of my right hand so I can see it while I type. I do fine in the classroom. But back in my office, typing away at yet another revision, the creeping anvil of doom hovers overhead. On these days I hate everything I write. I open up books or journals with my pieces in them and don't recognize my own stuff because it is better than I remembered. On these days everything is about how much I suck. I become sure that the Shadow Committee, my nightmare secret academic cabal comprised of scholars who can see right through me and who snicker at my earnest but doomed efforts, will notice that I was somehow awarded a Ph.D. in error and will have it revoked, thereby leaving me unemployable at anywhere but Starbuck's.

I had one of these days the other day. I didn't realize it at first, but I found that I was checking the online call for papers for a narrative conference over and over, to see if maybe the information had changed in the span of an afternoon. The original submission deadline had been extended. As I submitted very early, I read this as: "the abstracts we received thus far are of such poor quality that our only recourse is to extend the deadline by a month and pray God that some real scholars show up." I clicked on all the links on this site to try to glean some hint of what happened, and whether it has anything to do with me or my chances. I read the conference mission statement with the focus of a Talmudic scholar. It was sick. Then I came home and ate peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon.