It's time I made myself useful 'round here

I had an idea, and I'm going with it. I talked with my department chair yesterday, and I'm going to develop and manage a blog for my department. (I'm not crazy--I am looking for a few others to help manage it, but it's not like we'll be trying to generate traffic or producing much original content.) It's really just going to be an extension of our department's website, which is embarrassingly outdated. The chair says that they've been slowly overhauling the university's website, and they haven't gotten around to us, yet. It's 2012--no excuses for all these useless pages, dead links, and outdated calendars. As a new student I've been pretty frustrated by how events and reading groups and the like are all advertised word of mouth. If you're not talking to the right people at the right time (or friends with the right people on facebook--God forbid you don't have fb), you'd never know what's going on. Plus, we have a large faculty, most of whom I've never met, and I want to know who is working on what. (You'll notice this is turning out to be about me, naturally.)

And (ahem, speaking of me) my philosophical work is nowhere near publishable, and I'm not confident enough to speak up at conferences just yet, so I've been racking my brain for something I can do to contribute to the philosophy community here and in general. These are my people. This is my career. (Right? Always a little insecure about the career bit.)  I do have a couple papers that I'm reasonably sure would get accepted at grad-conferences, and I need to push myself to submit something somewhere, but I'm just not proud of those papers. I don't want to pretend that I think they deserve attention. If I'm going to scare the living daylights out of myself, I want it to be worth it. I need to put my work out there. Soon. But, for now, I think our department needs this. Maybe it'll be a big flop, no one will use it, and it'll just be a major distraction for me. Now that I've committed to it, I'm getting nervous, and I'm trying to stop envisioning all of the ways this could go wrong. Gotta save some of that anxiety for the summer, when I actually start working on it.

For now--no anxiety to spare--it's paper season! Kant's moral philosophy and certain accounts of narrative personal identity (you know who you are) should be shaking in their boots, because I'm fixin' to put them in their place.



p.s. See, I'm a lover and a fighter.
p.p.s. Paper season=pep-talk/inspiration season. Expect some tears or inspirational music here soon.