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The midday demon5/28/2023 I would go sulk on the couch, joylessly playing a game on my phone that I had already beaten the summer before. But I’d hit some obstacle in the writing – a loss for the right word, doubts about an argument – and I’d leave my desk. I did try to work summer, I told myself, was my best chance to write a paper and thereby contribute to scholarship, something that was near-impossible amid the constant demands of my class schedule. It’s not as if I was hard at work, either. I never wasted a whole week in a hammock. I never took a long vacation to Berlin or Bali. In short, I had no work obligations to keep me from doing whatever I wanted to do – or nothing at all – for a solid third of the year, even as my paychecks kept coming in. I could have – and some of my colleagues did – set up an email autoreply to say I would be out of the office until late August and that the sender might consider trying me then. Not only did I earn a respectable middle-class salary, but, as other people liked to tell me, I had “summers off.” It’s true that for those three months, not to mention another month in winter, I had no classes to prepare, no papers to grade, no meetings to attend, no electronic forms to fill out for the registrar. For more than a decade, I worked as a college professor.
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