Happy blogiversary to me!

Today is the one-year anniversary of What Now? in the blogosphere. Yay!

So let me take this opportunity to say thanks to all of you who have made my year of blogging a real blessing. You’ve made my life better in some concrete ways:

• I appreciate my job a lot more than I did, now that I have a lot more sense of what happens in other schools (one from a whole slew of examples: now I understand that our salary compression isn’t as bad as the salary inversion that some folks have)—perspective is everything! And now that I know how rough things can get at research universities, I no longer spend so much energy fretting that I’ve been left behind in the academic world, that everyone else is having a more fabulous life than I am. I haven’t exactly solved my grass-is-greener problem, but I’m doing better in this regard.


• You all have given me endless help with syllabi, class assignments, and a whole range of teaching activities, for which I am most grateful.


• You’ve even helped with housekeeping and homeowner problems! (starting way back when Mel helped with our moth problem by telling me about pheromone traps, which did a real whammy on our moth population; they didn’t solve the problem altogether but have made it all very manageable—only the occasional moth to kill).

More importantly, you’ve given me the sense that the world is full of friends, some of whom I know in real life and some of whom I don’t, and of potential friends. I think that I’m a calmer, more optimistic, happier, and more confident person than I was a year ago, and that this change is a result both of the self-exploration that comes from writing my blog entries and of the community and support that come from you all in your comments, your emails, and your own blogs. In conversation with other people, I regularly refer to you all as “friends” and “colleagues,” which means that my world is a lot fuller of friends and colleagues than it was a year ago!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!