I recently watched the film Julie & Julia, about a NYC public worker who is inspired to write a blog chronicling her year-long journey through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking: 571 recipes in 365 days. Apparently Child herself was unimpressed by Julie Powell, calling her blog a “publicity stunt.” Stunt or no, it garnered her a book deal and a movie based thereon. Not bad!

Anyway, watching the film made me realize that I need to pay more attention to working on my own blog. Therefore I pledge to be more regular in my posting, writing a new blog entry every weekend, talking about the past week.

To be honest, one of the reasons I haven’t been posting is that I’ve been avoiding writing in all forms. This “dissertation-thing” I’m supposed to be writing is proving difficult mentally: switching between the practical, everyday stuff I’m doing (teaching English, cooking, cleaning house) and the academic, theoretical-style thinking required of this project is really challenging. It’s like switching gears with a worn-out clutch! (KA-CHUNK!) So I figure if I “don’t have time” to write on my diss, then I “don’t have time” to write on the blog, and I retreat into web-surfing and watching DVDs. But I know this is self-destructive behavior, and I have to stop.

I’m sitting right now in a coffee shop in Erlangen, as I have a few minutes before my first class at 9. This is the trouble with my current job: the crazy hours because of relying on public transport. While I love teaching the classes, I’m really frustrated by running all over the Nurnberg/Erlangen area! It typically takes me longer to get to and from a class than the class itself, which is particularly disheartening. This means that my effective hourly rate is cut in half, since it becomes more and more difficult to add in more classes, and I end up working less than half time, even though my schedule is pretty full.

I was just offered a new class last week, which would be really interesting to me if I weren’t already teaching a class at that time. And I’m COMPLETELY fed up with teaching evening classes — when a class runs 5:00 – 7:30, it’s usually after 9pm when I get home, which means pretty much straight to bed, then up in the morning to do it again. Now, if I were making a good salary, it wouldn’t be so bad. But for around 1000 € per month, it’s not worth it. Ah well. Maybe that will change. (Cross your fingers!)

So, enough for today. I’ll post again this weekend. I have a lot of things I’ve said “I need to blog about this” that I never get around to, maybe this week will be different.

Ciao!