Three Things Thursday: Running toward the Fire

I’m pretty excited about the start of the semester. This semester is going to be crazy busy. Not only am I teaching five classes for the first five weeks of the semester, but I have a ton of little (and not so little) projects coming at me from conference papers (and travel), to Digital Press books, to grants, and larger book-length manuscripts. Here are three things that I’m thinking about as the semester beckons (or is it looms?). 1. Hectic is Fun. When I was in my 20s, I admired the culture that developed around the first dot-com companies. I was drawn the intensity, the bustle, the shared commitments, and the excitement of working on the razor edge of exhaustion. I got to experience a version of this doing archaeological work where time constraints, limited resources, and the stress of constant decision-making created the same kind of energy. I suspect that I’ve been chasing that kind of “high” since the 1990s and have worked (sometimes unconsciously) to create situations where I…