NCA

NCA=National Communication Association.

Deadline for submissions for the 2007 conference (which takes place in November, by the way) is the middle of next month. February 15, to be exact. My goal is to submit three papers for consideration. Turning three papers into conference submissions in three weeks is a challenge, to say the least. I take solace in the fact that I don't also have final papers due this time of year.

Also, it looks like my comparative ed. final project might just work itself into Dr. Dixon's new intercultural book. Keep your fingers crossed on that one, gentle readers. As an added bonus, my philosophical foundations class might serve me well as a feeder into my dissertation prospectus. I'm just a killin' two birds with one stone MACHINE!

Back in the saddle again

The new semester has begun! As I watched my semester break slip away day by day I felt more and more apprehensive, tired, skeptical, and generally negative about starting back up. Then, Friday, I took the morning to myself to read and drink coffee at our local caffeine hole. As I listened to some swell tunes, the singer's words hit me:

Love the life you choose.
keep yourself feeling brand new.
And love your strife with life.
Everyone wants to know why.
And love your strife with youth.
Keep yourself feeling brand new.
And love you strife with god.
Yeah, everyone wants to know love…

I stopped, rewound the digits and listened again:

Love the life you choose
keep yourself feeling brand new.

This week isn't a time to be feeling tired, run-down or depressed! This is a week to reinvigorate myself, to take the semester by the horns, to write run-on sentences like there is no tomorrow, to engage my classes, my colleagues, and my work, to love the discovery that comes with study and the challenge of learning new information and engaging new concepts and arguments. I get to introduce a whole new crop of students to fantastic and interesting communication concepts, to take them from what they learned in high school speech and deepen those concepts with research and theory.

I've chosen this life as a masked doctoral student...and this semester I'm going to face it like a brand new person, eager to accept its challenges.

-M.D.S. AWAY!