I have not yet found the rhythm of my semester. In my day job (a misnomer, if ever there was one) I’m a professor. The semester started just over three weeks ago, and I find myself scrambling to get things done at the last minute, and severely neglecting the music part of my life that is what usually sustains me. Earlier in the year I developed a lot of great music habits; I played guitar every day, did the exercises (and regularly got massage therapy) for my injured shoulder, set aside time in my week to work on songwriting or at least arranging and performing. I regularly submitted materials for consideration for gigs, blogged on a reasonable schedule, and kept my music website updated. All of those habits have recently gone out the window and I feel like (to continue the mixed metaphors) I’m barely keeping my head above water. In part I blame the summer. I had an unusually busy summer, with far-flung gigs, collaborative (cross-college) course design, and writing a book. All of those things were great (and even mostly enjoyable), but they were extremely time-consuming. Although no one who actually knows a college professor would make the mistake of saying “0h – so you get your summers off?,” it’s true that summers are usually less-intense than the academic year (in a “I work only 40 hours a week instead of 80” kind of way) and more flexible in how I arrange my working hours. But that wasn’t true this summer. And that also meant that by the time I arrived at the semester, I was working on a sleep deficit and had already – in the final push to finish the book – started ignoring music to get other things done, and didn’t have time to prepare for the approaching semester either. The semester has started, complete with several floods from various weather events, now necessitating major basement de/re-construction, a sick dog (with something that should be fixable but hasn’t yet been fixed) who wakes up between 4 and 5 a.m. every morning, a new course on a subject I know little about and more students than I’ve taught at one time in years . . . This past weekend I escaped it all and went to a writing workshop. (Expect a blog post about that in the near future). It was absolutely wonderful to put all of those things out of my mind, and I was inspired and renewed by the weekend (and drafted a new song). But a weekend away means 150 urgent emails awaiting my return, and a 4 a.m. waking to grade and prep today’s classes . . . . Better to have gone to the workshop than not to have gone. But what I need to do is create a rhythm for the semester in which I can write songs without having to leave everything else behind, in which I play regularly, and blog on a schedule and keep up to date with my music publicity. I don’t have the answer to how that is going to happen. But I decided that blogging right now, despite the long list of things that have to be done before tomorrow, was at least a step in the direction of reclaiming my groove. And perhaps I’ll pick up the guitar and try to sing a little, right after posting.