I should, I really should. I started a new job at the beginning of the month, a full time one — no more 4-day weekends for me — as a full editor. Bilingual, no less.
I am astonished, saddened, and shocked at how out of practice I am with it. I mean, a lot of it’s muscle memory, neural pathways burned like screens left on too long. You put words in front of me, I fix them! Or I try. Usually I’m pretty good.
But it’s been a while since I’ve done this for pay, for several hours straight, in a facility dedicated to this purpose with equipment that is not mine to do it on.
I love it.
But my brain isn’t used to this kind of thing. Again, like a muscle, it’s out of practice, it’s gone soft from under-use (even with working on the doctoral research). And that scares me. It worries me. I try to to think too hard about it, but I wonder if it’s just a matter of getting older, or if it’s because I’ve experienced more and I know more and I can feel the difference with better granularity when things aren’t up to par, up to speed.
It also means that my mind takes longer to slow down. It shouldn’t be that way, again because of the research. I read academic journals fairly often, and that’s not light material. But the kind of turning over that happens from that is distinctly different from what happens when I spend a day checking for errors and massaging the muddiness and awkwardness from language. Maybe it’s because there’s a kind of nimbleness required in tackling academic thinking, even though there’s a lot of persistence required, too. With editorial thinking, my mind feels more like a heavy train on a track that takes a while to slow down.
The upshot of this, then, is that editorial thinking so far hasn’t burned me out on academic thinking. I was a little concerned that might happen but the movement and interaction of ideas is functionally different.
Anyway. I dropped this here in the hopes that it would shed weight from the cars, let the rail brakes do their job better, because tomorrow is another packed day at work and I definitely need the rest.
Good night.