Okay, so I'm back from the wars--er, conference. I presented my papers, got my certificate for my award and such, and want now to be all bashful about it.
The thing is, I always seem to have this battle within me. On one side, there's this part that says yes, it's fabulous when people like my stuff. That's awesome. It means in part that I've managed to communicate successfully for once. And therefore revels in what I see as the utter gift of an award. After all, I know how subjective these things are, and have no idea why they chose my work (not that I'm turning it down or anything).
But there's this other side of me, which wishes to fade as far into the wallpaper as possible with this sort of thing. After all, I'm just doing what I do, and would likely still be plugging away whether or not these particular people at this particular moment in time chose to give me this piece of paper (or to respond favorably to this piece of work). I don't want to be seen as one of those grasping people who's out to get awards. Nor do I want to be one of those people.
I'm pretty sure that a chunk of this has to do with my deep beliefs that whatever I have is a gift: that I earn none of it. And that, as Eliot puts it, "For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."
What do you think? Does this make me a normal writer? An abnormal one? A normal academic? An abnormal academic?
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