the strange condition of my labor

My teaching obligations ended last Tuesday, more than a week ago. Since then, I've only been holding office hours and waiting for my students to write their final essays so I can mark them.

I've got a number of writing projects on my plate, including a syllabus competition and write-up fellowship applications. The deadlines are hanging over my head. April is hell: it's the month when we, grad students who are funding ourselves from year to year, scramble to find a way to keep body and soul together over the coming academic year. (Never mind the odd predicament of syllabus competitions, in which the prize one wins is the privilege of working...)

I haven't needed to be on campus much, and I find myself slipping further into some old habits from the field. When I wasn't at one hospital or another or one meeting or another, I would sometimes roll out of bed and sit down at my computer with a cup of tea for a couple of hours, only bathing and dressing later in the day.

Maybe this sounds Proustian; to most people, I think it looks at least slovenly if not downright slothful to be wandering around with shower-wet hair at half past noon. (This was even more so the case in Botswana, when the working day begins at half past seven, or even seven.) But how to explain I work from home, I sleep in the same room in which I work, and I've been up since a reasonable hour, working away at something-or-other without even breakfast inside me? No one takes my fleece pyjamas as working attire.