I had one of those horrifying moments of self-awareness this morning when, after dropping AJ at preschool and heading out to run a couple of errands, I realized that I was sitting at a stoplight with the windows rolled all the way down singing the �Hokey Pokey� at the top of my lungs. I�m pretty sure the guys in the construction company truck next to me were snickering. But in my defense, I was singing along with Dan Zanes and Friends performing what is, by far, the grooviest rendition of the song I�ve ever heard.

AJ has returned to Dr. Jekyll form, thankfully. The first thing he said to me when he woke up this morning was, �I�m sorry, Mommy.� �For what?� I asked. �For yelling at you yesterday.� He was perfectly angelic this morning, sitting in a corner reading quietly to himself while I took a shower instead of running in every two minutes demanding, �Play with me!� He sprinted happily into his classroom this morning, where he promptly grabbed a bucket of Matchbox� cars and started handing them out to all of his friends, in hopes of organizing a collective demolition derby. Tuesday is his last day of school. I think he�s going to be crushed to learn that he�s not going to get to go back until September.

I will be spending some time today considering my future in academia. The process of getting the Ph.D. and getting a job is full of reminders of your own weaknesses. In my program at least, most of us were accustomed to being the smartest one in the room through much of our schooling. Every time I stand up to lecture or give a paper I am afraid someone will discover that I am a fraud, that I have no business being there. Reminding yourself of your confidence in your own abilities becomes a full-time job. I have a friend who now has a tenure-track job at a prestigious university to which she applied for graduate school, but was refused admission. How, she wonders, can she be teaching at a place that wouldn�t admit her. Rather than consider that her work has been dazzling, she is constantly worried that someone will find out that she doesn�t belong there. The anxiety is, I think, inherent in the system, and I believe it�s extremely important as a teacher and a scholar to be aware of what you don�t know. But we also need to remind ourselves of what we do know, of what we can learn and of what we can do. Time to give myself a pep talk and move forward.

[There were three entries yesterday. Click back if you missed one.]

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