Ugh…depression
So everything’s getting sidetracked this week…or I’m letting that happen…I guess I’m writing this cause I don’t want that to happen!
Yesterday I got a rejection letter for an article I’ve been working on for over a year. The reviewer was pretty brutal & actually threw out the observation that the women I was writing about “weren’t that obscure” cause they’re “featured prominently” in one of my discipline’s histories. I guess being “featured prominently” is having one of the three women included in one group photo and 2 out of three being mentioned in passing on 4 other pages of a 300-page book. I guess that’s about all the attention this reviewer thinks these women deserved after all their work behind the scenes of our national organization 100 years ago. Yeah, I’m bitter. There are some useful suggestions in the review that I can use to revise so I can submit the article elsewhere, but it’s clear that I’m going to hit a lot of elitist @$$holes out there who don’t get why it’s important to recognize what the women academics were doing at this time. I guess that’s useful information too.
On top of the rejection, one of my students passed out in the hallway on her way to class, paramedics were called. Apparently she has problems with seizures & they’ve been adjusting her medication. All reports have it that she just dropped to the floor & hit her head pretty hard. She was out when I saw her. So that’s depressing, but it gets worse: when I told her group they could present on Wednesday so that this girl wouldn’t miss out on the presentation & grade, well, they pretty much threw this poor girl under the bus ambulance, and said, “can’t we just go ahead and go today without her?” Apparently she missed their meeting last week, so they were angry with her & didn’t want to present with her anyway, but it didn’t occur to them that she may have missed their meeting for a pretty sound medical reason. & it was pretty obvious: on top of the fact that I told them their group mate was being attended to by paramedics, the damn stretcher was out in the hallway, as obvious as can be. Finally, in frustration, I asked them, “what would you do if you were me?” & they admitted they didn’t know the fair thing to do. So I said, “fine, you’ll present with her on Wednesday & I’ll email to let her know she needs to get in touch with you.”
On top of that, the site we use for our online classes was down all weekend so 1/2 of my students didn’t do the assignments. This was the first weekend they had an online class (they finish work online over the weekend rather than coming to class on Friday), and it’s always a mess anyway the first weekend with them getting to know the technology, but this was the worst. First, one of the linked sites they had to read went down on Saturday, then the whole damn site went down on Sunday so they couldn’t see the assignment, much less post it to our classroom. So there was already a lot of nervous tension in the room (on top of them giving their first presentations on their first projects) & my teaching was off, way off. I was really, really bad. What a crappy day!
Yesterday’s food looked like this:
breakfast: usual
teaching, from hell
lunch: salad
letter arrives
lunch 2: cup of cheese soup & a pint at the brew pub
lunch 3: 2 of those round chocolate dealies, 12 pretzels & hummus, 1 cup of peach cobbler
dinner: beef stew with French bread
snack (gee, didn’t I earn one?) another beer.
Exercise: at least hubby got me out there: 2 mile walk. That was a good idea, not just to try to burn some small amount of calories, but because it cleared my head.
Clearly I’ve structured this food report to suggest a clear cause–effect relationship, but it’s eating to deal with stress that I’m supposed to be working on here & part of that work requires that I recognize that I’m not a helpless victim to stress-eating. I can say no. I can find other outlets. Yesterday, clearly I decided not to do that, but it was a decision I had control over.
The walk cleared my head but I was already feeling better about the rejection earlier in the day when it hit me that as shitty as I felt, at least my bad day at work wasn’t because I screwed up and an innocent person went to jail or someone died or my inability to argue well ended up in an important social safetynet being eliminated for people who really need it or a building collapsed cause I didn’t do the right kind of math or a plane crashed or…Yeah, I guess I prefer my kind of crappy day.
Okay, hubby’s making a godawful noise in the kitchen, time to investigate.
I’m already feeling better & thinking about reivising the title of this post.
Happy day chicks!
I wrote a children’s story about adoption right before we adopted our first child. Held onto it forever. Illustrated it myself just to have a copy to give to my daughter. Sent it (w/out said home made illustrations of course) to publishers, nothing. Finally, one small publisher expressed interest. Wanted revisions done. So I fixed it and was pleased and she was pleased. Then I waited. And waited. And nothing. She changed her mind. Wasn’t sure how to market it, she said. It was devastating to me and it was just a little picture book and I am not a real writer. I can’t imagine doing real writing like you do and having to deal with editors. Ugh. Hopefully you will eventually find the right person who sees it like you do. I am in awe of your career right now!
Elitist @$$holes suck. I’m sure that reviewer was a man. I’m sorry it got rejected, but don’t give up!! Take those suggestions he gave you and run with them.
Sounds like your day totally sucked. And I probably would have had the same reaction (I have in the past). Oh, something shitty happened - let me go eat a whole pizza. Hard to stop old habits.
Sorry about your rejection. Stupid editors.
At least you didn’t go to McDonalds…
Arghhh, sorry you ran into one of the many nitwits out there. Unfortunately, there are plenty of them to go around. Don’t let them stop you!
HMMMM…… my first thought was that it had to be a man, pretty knee-jerk of me, I suppose. Anyway, my advice, as if I know anything about this, is to make the revisions you think can improve the article and keep submitting it over and over elsewhere until someone sees its value.