My image: A new kind of planning for Fall 2025
It’s “Time”. That’s the name of this post. But also, it’s time for me to return to blogging from the front page of this domain.
For the last six months or so, I have been blogging about my cancer treatment journey that started in December and ends, in a certain sense, tomorrow with my final “check-up” appointment. I have been sharing the posts with friends and family, but I’ve been keeping them on a category that did not push to the front page of my blog. That was a calculated decision; I didn’t know how intense that journey was going to get, and I didn’t want to start writing about it in a very public way and then have to scale back. I also didn’t want my domain flooded with a medical narrative that maybe not everyone wants to follow. Either way, if you’d like to see any of that, feel free to read those posts here.
The last six months for sure, and maybe the last year has me thinking really differently about time. I started keeping a handwritten journal again (a regular practice through my teens and 20s), and I often title the entries by naming which we’re week we’re in and what day of that week. For instance: this week is the 31st week of the year, and it’s the third day of the week (31.2). Is this weird, yes : ) But it does help me think differently about the progress of a year.
Also, this week August begins. I’ve decided that I’m going to experiment with sending out an email on the first of the month for the remainder of the year to the community of people that I hang out with and host at my house. I’d like that monthly email to remind people of any events that I have coming up in addition to it being a space to suggest ideas and projects from anyone receiving it. (In keeping with my growing concerns about data privacy, whenever I send these emails out, I do as a blind copy, or bcc, to everyone on my list so that I’m not giving away a large batch of addresses.)
I’m calling these emails “Rabbit, rabbit.” Are you familiar with this saying on the first of the month? I had friends in high school that tried to follow this practice with a kind of religious fervor, but it wasn’t until the web that I could look up its origin. Have a look. Either way, if you’re in my Atlanta community, you’ll be getting my first “Rabbit, rabbit” email in a couple of days.
This week, I reconnected with Randy Nichols, a fellow scholar who graciously invited me to start co-chairing the Communication and Digital Culture area at the annual Popular Culture Association academic conference. We’ve been discussing the theme we want to wrap around our call for proposals that’s due this week, and it will surprise no one in my life what topic we’ve chosen (more to come on that).
Lastly, I’ve been in the gym for six weeks and back on my bike for two since feeling strong enough after treatment. I completed my first bike/bus commute to Kennesaw last week (though, I have to admit, I had to walk part of the last hill on my home in the afternoon). I’ve been up early in the morning to start on work for the last two days (submitting final summer grades yesterday and drafting our CFP this morning). I won’t call it a return to “normalcy”, 1) because I’m not a fan of normalcy in general and 2) because there are things I would like to do differently in my life coming out the other side of my health journey. However, time feels like it’s speeding up and falling into a familiar pace.
I wanted to share that here to remind myself (and you) that we have more mindful agency around the time we spend than we usually assume. That we can drone on doing things mindlessly, feeling like we’re on a conveyor belt, or we can step back and make more thoughtful, mindful choices.
Happy-almost-end-of-July. Get your “rabbit, rabbit” ready for Friday morning!
