This semester, I fear I may be reaching a kind of saturation point for how much it is possible to do without being in a constant state of anxiety. In addition to my regular teaching and administrative duties at Shimer, I am teaching a graduate seminar at Chicago Theological Seminary and attempting to make progress on my translation. On top of that, I have agreed to do the following:
- Attend a conference for the Association of Core Text Colleges on secular vs. religious core curricula, as Shimer’s representative (end of this week, paper already written)
- Give a talk on Zizek and religion at Portland State University (Monday, October 13)
- Write a chapter on the ransom theory of the atonement for a reference volume
- Write an essay on religion and politics for a special journal issue
- Write two reviews on devil-related books
- Do various editing work toward the previously mentioned co-authored essay collection on Agamben with Colby Dickinson (which I had so hoped to finalize this summer, but alas…)
As an added bonus, I need to at least get a book order ready for a new course entitled “Reading the Qur’an” and for a Shimer core course I’ve never taught before (though the beauty of the Shimer system is that I can basically carry over what was done last time, which is my general policy for teaching those courses for the first time).
All of this is a little more manageable than it might seem, because my Shimer teaching schedule is fairly convenient — I’m done with classes by 1pm MWF — and I’m teaching two sections of a course I did just last year. And of course, some of this stuff can overlap with each other and lead more or less directly into the drafting of my long-awaited devil book. I should be largely “out of the woods” by the end of October, but in the meantime, certain activities (such as blogging) are taking a back seat, though other, more procrastinatory activities (such as Twitter) may suddenly become very prominent, for a short, intense time period.
One thing I’ve dealt with a lot more this past year has been travel, both for conferences and for personal reasons. In grad school, I used to absolutely dread trips, and I think a lot of that had to do with a feeling of vulnerability related to my abject poverty, etc., in addition to a bad track record for travel in my early life (either suffocating family vacations or oppressive church stuff — or sometimes both, as when we went to “camp meeting”!). Now I seem to be approaching more normal levels of stress, which is probably ineliminable for people without the sociopatic detachment of George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air. Yet that character’s approach to travel nonetheless remains a kind of ideal for me, and as I ponder it, I wonder if it’s because he’s actually the ultimate homebody who has made the generic trappings of business travel into a kind of omnipresent home. He’s so good at travel that he effectively never travels.
An und für sich 
I really appreciate your sharing your experiences as a travel-phobe. I have similar issues, as a late-stage grad student, and often feel entirely alone in my dread of jetsetting.
Looking at the events calendar for Portland State, it looks like the Zizek and religion event is scheduled for the 31st, not the 13th. I’d like to attend, but now I’m unsure which day you’ll be speaking.
The 31st is Zizek himself. I’m more of a warm-up act on the 13th.
Radical. In that case I will be attending both days. Thanks.