I hope this doesn't turn out to be a capricious resolution:

15 minutes a day.

That's all I'm asking. Commencing tonight, at approximately 10:55 PM and forty odd seconds, I resolve to spend AT LEAST a quarter of an hour a day on a MEMORY³⁹ journal entry.

There's a reason for this.

My job, like that initial difficulty of putting finger to keyboard, often sucks, and I've come to the realization that I've accomplished about as much as I can as an "Academic Technology Liaison" here at UNC. There's only so much technology one can forcibly (and creatively) implant into a teacher, student, and/or classroom before life melts into a gooey puddle of laptop-innards, smoking cables, and flaring tempers. And while I can't say that I'm totally burned out, I'm starting to smell the fumes of that darkly simmering electronic tarpit up ahead.

I'm stagnating - professionally and intellectually.

So, it's decided. I'm to be an academic revenant. (See? Already getting reading for the GRE). Please, no barrage of questions as to when, where, or what because those answers are swimming in the oasis just past La Brea. In the meantime, though, I'm going to start gearing up for the Graduate Record Examination, which I'm tentatively planning to take -for the first time since 1993 - early this summer.

That said, if you've got any study tips, erudite and/or never-seen-outside-the-exam vocab, esoteric mathematical incantations, or old and worn study tomes, please feel free to send them my way. It takes a village (and lots of money) to raise an academic. Donations are gladly accepted, and I'll be setting up a PayPal link soon.

Why 15 minutes a day?

Oh, yeah. That. Should I, in fact, make it into some poor, unsuspecting graduate program, I can expect sisyphean amounts of writing, hopefully culminating in the ever-dreaded dissertation. (I need the challenge at this point, so I'm setting my sights on a brand new, shiny, 2-door Ph.D. with air, cruise control, fog lights, and a juice bar.) Hence, the fifteen minutes are really just a push for discipline and ritual -- a nudge to get me into a productive habit.

I have it on good faith from Joan Bolker, Ed.D., the author of Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day that one CAN actually enjoy writing a 300-page scholarly treatise, and now, after 4.5 years of doing repetitive and lackluster technical support, I'm starting to think a lengthy dissertation would be a most-welcome panacea.