My year in review

While it was horrible for the world at large, 2014 was an amazing year for me personally. I rang in the New Year wandering the streets of Paris, and I’ll end it in The Girlfriend’s new apartment in Minneapolis, where she has secured a job that uses her recently-completed graduate degree. In between, I travelled more than I ever have in a single year, visiting great museums in Paris, New York, and London. I lived in San Francisco for the summer. I lectured at Harvard and Birkbeck. I wrote Creepiness and put together a co-authored essay collection with Colby Dickinson entitled Agamben’s Coming Philosophy (which was finally submitted to the publisher this morning). I got through a first draft of half my translation of Agamben’s Use of Bodies. I taught the primary source material for my devil project twice, once at Shimer and once at Chicago Theological Seminary. I expanded my teaching competency to include Islam. And of course, I watched a ton of Star Trek.

As I often do, I’ve tried to set things up to “clear the decks” by the end of the calendar year. So far, I’ve finished up all the writing I’ve promised for this year, and this week I’ll finish the grading for my CTS class and have the final faculty meetings for the semester. After that, it will be a matter of holiday obligations and getting ready for The Girlfriend’s move — and trying to find a couple hours a day to begin reconnecting with the translation, which has fallen by the wayside amid the end-of-semester rush.

My hope is that next year won’t be so frenetically busy. Teaching an extra class on top of my full-time load at Shimer was a challenge, and not something I’m likely to attempt in the near future. I have a few talks scheduled (all either on Creepiness or the devil) and have agreed to do a book review (on the devil) and an article (on Star Trek, since now I’m bereft of a pop culture project), but I’m mostly trying to leave myself free to complete my two big projects: the Agamben translation (manuscript due August 1) and the long-promised devil book. It seems doable, especially since I’m looking at another monastic summer (in Minneapolis this time), and may be able to arrange a monastic fall as well.

In any case, next year at this time, I should have the good fortune to be in utter listless despair, facing the yawning abyss of freedom. Maybe I can even go into workahol detox. “Lord, make me non-obsessive — but not yet!”