Good news, and what to do?

So here's a nice thing: I've won an essay prize! Yay!

Now, it's not a big prize or anything. It's the "Best Publication of This Past Year in Our Small Niche Journal That Few People Read" prize. But still, I've never won an essay prize before, so I'll happily take it! And I'll sure as heck take the $300 check that comes with it.

And since there's a part of me that has been thinking of that particular article as my last explicitly academic publication, it's nice to go out with a bang. Not that I'm hanging up my writing shoes, but I don't see another 38-page scholarly journal article in my future. After I won the prize, I pulled out the article to reread it ... and dang, it was kind of dreary! And I think I've got a very lively tone in my scholarship, and still it all just seemed a little tedious. So perhaps I've lost my taste for academic writing (a hunch supported by the dreariness I'm finding in reading an academic history text this week), and have instead moved toward the "serious nonfiction" point in the spectrum, which is probably where I'd have liked to be all along. Or perhaps it was simply that dread I always feel on reading my own published work (so many ways it could have been better! why did I say that this way instead of that other way?), which is why I usually actually don't read my stuff once it appears in print. Anyway, the point of all of this is that writing that article was serious hard work that rarely felt rewarding, and so it's very nice to have a prize at the end of it all. Plus there's the little fact that I think the article opened up a new realm of scholarship in this little niche area, and I feel very good about that. I first tackled this article in the heady days immediately after leaving St. Martyr's, when I had a short-lived notion of reinventing myself as an academic in a different field, a notion I abandoned fairly quickly upon learning that the job market in this new field was much, much worse than in my old field, which seemed like the wrong direction to be moving in. But by then I'd already gotten a grant to fund the research, so I had to go through with it; four years later, the article finally appeared in print. All in all, the prize feels like nice closure on my academic career.

But here's the "what to do?" part of this blog post: The award is announced at the big dinner of the annual meeting of the historical society that publishes this niche journal, and they'd like me to be there for it, understandably. The editor (who I spent two years thinking was pissed at me, but who it turns out simply has poor social skills) finally made it clear in a follow-up email yesterday that they would actually like me to attend, which was something that I had presumed on limited evidence from his first email about the prize last week. But the annual dinner is in two weeks, in another state! FGS would probably give me $$ to pay for traveling there, and the location of the annual meeting is only about an hour from my family, so I could do a little combo trip if I really wanted to.

But the fact of the matter is that I don't actually want to go. The thought of hanging out for the evening with the members of the board of this historical society does not thrill me. At all. I don't want to be rude to them when they're giving me this nice prize, but surely it's not unreasonable of me to change plans on two weeks' notice (well, three weeks if the editor had been clearer in his initial email) to attend a distant meeting that I otherwise would have had no reason to attend. Right? It is true that this journal and this board might eventually decide to review my biography if it ever gets published, but that's several years down the line, and I hardly think that some future reviewer would include in his or her review the fact that I hadn't attended a dinner back in 2011.

But there's another piece to all of this, and that's family. When I told my mom about the prize, she said that if I came down for the dinner, she would come too so that she could see me get the prize. This seems like a very embarrassing option to me, but I can't quite see myself telling her that, and I guess maybe I'm feeling like it's mean of me to deprive her of the opportunity to see me get a prize, now that I've let the family down by no longer being a professor. (I'm kind of joking there and kind of not, at least as far as my mom is concerned.) And also if I go down to the meeting, I'll have to expand the visit a little bit to see my family; on the one hand, it would make sense to get a trip back home on FGS's dime, but on the other hand, I'm not really up for such a trip. I went down there at spring break, and my nieces are coming up this summer for a week to stay with us, and maybe if it were later in the summer I'd be happy to see the folks for a few days, but the thought of taking this trip only one week after school ends just makes me feel very, very tired.

Maybe I'd be less tired at the thought if I asked FGS for $$ to fly rather than to drive the 10 hours each way, which is how I usually travel there? And maybe I could really go just for the weekend: fly in on Friday, go with my mom to the event on Saturday night (a thought that makes me shudder), hang out with the family on Sunday, and fly home on Monday? I guess that wouldn't be so bad, although, really, I just don't wanna. Do I sound whiny enough?

I can't decide if I'm being an ungrateful brat who runs from the responsibilities of adulthood or a self-actualized adult with healthy boundaries who doesn't feel an obsessive need to be a people-pleaser. These are really different narratives, of course, and I keep going back and forth between them!

In further complications, I pretty much should decide today, both to let the editor know and to make plane reservations. Sigh. I just don't know what to do. Any advice, blogosphere?

Comments

[Janice]

That's a toughie. I'd be inclined to go ONLY if I could fly. That's too much of a drive for an award!

If you bring your mother to the event, it's a wee bit embarrassing, but also gives you a built-in excuse to parachute in and out. And it would probably give her a positive memory to chatter on and about.

But that's looking at it all from the outside - I can't really know what it's like for you.

[Dame Eleanor Hull]

It sounds to me like you really don't want to go, and that going/not going doesn't make much difference in your life.

It's okay not to do things you don't want to do. Also, it's your life, not your mother's.

[susan]

ask for the money to fly.
10 hours is too far to drive!

[meansomething]

I'm inclined to vote for the go if FGS will pay for the plane ticket option, on the theory that the end-of-school feeling is generally against this kind of thing, but that you'll be glad you went IF you don't tire yourself out doing it. How does that sound?

[Jackie]

Congratulations! I would probably bail, but then, I tend to go the self-protective route when it comes to spending my limited reserves of social energy (which are always depleted at this time of year!). Good luck either way!

[Bardiac]

Congratulations! (I'm lousy with advice, sorry.)

[nik]

Congratulations on winning the award. That is awesom. I'm going to vote with don't go but only because my knee-jerk response is that one "should" go and one should work against "shoulds." How is that for convoluted, circuitous advice?

[medieval woman]

Oh, wow - a much belated congrats!!