anon it’s me, i absolutely always have thoughts. it’s nice to have a reason to reflect tho; my thoughts are almost always forward-facing!!

I have one very important truth that deserves a spot right at the top here. whether you have 2 or 12 hours of “work time” a day, the human brain can only do focused, mentally-draining work for 3-4 hours, maximum. like, scientifically speaking, that’s the range. I came into this year like, wow, I can get so much work done. and I did! I got way more writing & research accomplished this year than I could have ever managed if I’d been working as usual. however. academia’s subliminal (sometimes not so subliminal tbh) message of it’s never enough can feel particularly pernicious when you have this Magical Year of Research. for me, it actually made me anxious—like, I have no excuse for not being groundbreakingly productive this year; there’s nothing else competing for my attention. remembering that 3-4 hours is the biological limit for deep brain work helps me feel less frustrated about the fact that I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to (an amount which is frankly stupid and unattainable anyway; academic labor expectations are  insatiable). it also makes me think about the other kinds of accomplishments that I made happen this year, outside the Deep Brain-Work category!! which is important to do, i think.

what would I do differently?

focus on my own work. I spent my first semester finishing up solicited work instead. If I could do this again, I would have started saying “no” a little earlier, so all of those solicited pieces were cleared off my desk by the time I started the fellowship year and I could prioritize the thing that needed to be prioritized, right from the jump.

plan a bit more intensely at the start—I didn’t get really serious about establishing (flexible!) timelines for different projects until February, maybe? and then i got really really serious over the summer. things were fine but I think I would have been more efficient and intentional about how I worked, if I’d been more on top of that.

what would I absolutely do again?

set up a routine. if you’re used to teaching, regular committee meetings, or other firm schedule obligations, the thing that feels craziest about starting a research fellowship is how much wide-open, unstructured time stretches out in front of you. I know that I work best with more time constraints than with fewer, so I built out my own weekly schedule where I made perfectly negotiable activities (gym! coffee shop! dog walk! office time!) non-negotiable scheduled commitments. I adjusted as I went, but treating them like Real Events made sure that I never felt adrift even in a new place with new people and very few required appearances.

take advantage of the chance for a new community. this depends on the nature of your fellowship and also the vibe of whichever institution is running it, but especially in Wisconsin, the vibe was super friendly and supportive. plenty of people were essentially ghosts (which is fine! I assume they got a ton of work done) but others, including me, made a concerted effort to show up for things. making it a priority to spend time, either at institutional events or just hanging out, was so, so rewarding, both professionally (invaluable conversations abt work, academia, etc.! mentorship opportunities, in both directions!) and personally (new friends!!!)

figure out what the fellowship affords that your regular job doesn't. if you’re at an archive using rare materials, that can be obvious. In Wisconsin, it was library access—my home institution’s library is a sort of distressing nightmare, tbh, and it was a total gamechanger to be able to ILL a book and have it ready for pick-up 24 hours later… and I rarely had to ILL, because their collection was so good, especially in history of medicine. it might also mean people (who’s working there that you can grab coffee with?) or geographical proximity (what’s around the area that might be helpful to you?). you might also think about personal stuff too!

... El medio de la citada palabra no se reduce a las gentes campesinas.  Para muchos puertorriqueños el vocablo nuera pertenece al léxico de los libros y de las escuelas.

this sort of does suggest that 'yerna' exists mainly as an informal word or at least a word limited to speech but even then, this quote is from the middle of the 20th century, so the presence today of the word 'yerna' in more formal contexts might indicate that it's more normalized / not purely understood as formal (which makes sense based on the anecdote from the original post - my boyfriend (sample size 1 lol) wouldn't recognize nuera as something that belongs to his dialect. let's look at some of the examples from puerto rican news sites (warning that some of these examples are from articles about violent crime):

from el vocero:

De acuerdo con Ramos, las tres personas que resultaron heridas son el vecino, el hijo y la yerna de Torres Canales. (source)

Wilda Correa Gracia relató que llegó desde Canóvanas a buscar a su yerna a quien le dieron de alta, a pesar de estar en su séptimo mes de embarazo con una condición que le requiere estar hospitalizada. (source)

Al momento de su deceso, se encontraba acompañada por su yerna, Lucy Medina. (source)

from primera hora:

A través de la página oficial de Facebook del cantante Tony Vega, su hijo Javier y su yerna Karem, compartieron una foto del salsero en compañía de su familia durante su convalesencia tras la operación de corazón a la que fue sometido de emergencia a principios de la semana pasada. (source)

La occisa fue identificada en la escena por una yerna. (source)

interestingly enough i have to presume there are zero results for 'yerna' on el nuevo día, because every time i search it i get this error message that doesn't come up when i search 'nuera' #yernagate exposed

i searched 'nuera' on all three sites and there are for sure results, but a lot of them are from articles from news syndicates, aka not written by puerto rican speakers, so i avoided these articles. that isn't to say 'nuera' never appears used by puerto rican journalists, because it does, but i think it could indicate a difference in perception of formality - as we can see in example 3 from el vocero and example 2 from primera hora, 'yerna' coexists with words we'd adscribe to a more formal register, like 'deceso' and 'occisa'.

example 1 from primera hora is also super interesting because in the opening text under the headline 'nuera' is used, while the example is the first sentence of the article