Belated Week 1

Albert said (if memory serves me) that true genius is the ability to focus on one thing at at time. What a luxury.

One of my favorite anecdotes from the Cold War is that a general advising Stalin during one of our episodes of brinkmanship counseled caution based on the time he spent in New York City: "Comrade, if we go to war now, it will be chaos, and the Americans will win, because they live with chaos everyday." While it is likely apocryphal, it sure does capture American life--we're either busy or bored, with no in between. Last week I piled on this internship with the Florida Historical Quarterly on top of my full time job with Florida Virtual School, and two boys, ages 2.95 and five-months (I'm compensating for my uncited anecdotes with pedantic precision on the ages). So naturally, I'm wrapping up my first week on Tuesday of the following week. I'm sure I'll be all caught up by Friday (see picture above).

My first project is copy-editing an article for the Fall 2017 Quarterly--it gave me a chuckle last week to learn that the journals of state historical societies are notoriously back-logged. For example, the Journal of Mississippi History last hit its subscribers with an issue in the summer of 2013*. I believe Dr. Lester when she says we will be caught up by the end of 2018, but I think Mississippi might need to think outside of the box. (That said, it is my fervent hope that sometime soon they release an issue titled "Fall 2013" with no comment.)

I typed a substantial paragraph on the article I am reviewing, and then realized that I am uncertain whether or not my bosses would be pleased with me providing a preview of the content we will soon release, even if this blog's readers are likely to number in the single digits. I'll confirm that this is okay, and put that into my second post. I can think of no more fitting way to conclude my first reflection than to note that I now need to switch to the task of logging my hours for the first two weeks of December for the fine people of Florida Virtual School (the full-time job).** You don't want our chaos North Korea.

*http://www.mdah.ms.gov/new/interact/subscribe/journal-of-mississippi-history/
**To be clear, I did not have credentials to the system to log said hours until the end of last week, and was just told that I need to perform some personal anthropology on what I was working on--still too fitting with the theme not to share.