Monday is my “13-hours-away-from-home” day.  I leave in the morning, see the chiropractor (have I mentioned how amazing he is at adjusting my sinuses?), arrive at work, attempt to do work, get interrupted 25 times, get stood up by a student and end up missing my only opportunity for lunch, teach from 5:30-8:15PM, come home, cuddle with H, veg.  The only advantage to my crazy Monday schedule is that Rob gets some special time with Holden where they bake chocolate chip cookies and watch Thomas the Train videos until I come home.  It’s very sweet, really.

I got too busy today and didn’t have a chance to tell my boss that I am withdrawing my application for the position.  I will do it tomorrow.  I don’t look forward to it, because she’ll be disappointed, and I don’t want to disappoint her.  I also don’t want her to think that I don’t appreciate the tremendous opportunity that it’s been.  But I also don’t think that satisfying other people’s wishes is the best reason for me to stay there.  Having an awesome boss and co-workers is fantastic, but it’s not everything.

I do have ideas about the next step.  It’s going to be a long, risky process, but if I can pull it off, I will be impressed.  I am going to start my own business. It’s such a weird thing to write, say, or think, because it seems so antithetical to my academic persona.  Based around my research and analytical skills, and what I know about cognition, I am going to start a business where I conduct research on usability—essentially, I will examine factors that allow for the most efficient design of web sites.  The most closely related field to this is human factors psychology, which has as its foundation, much of the same training that I already have.  The difference is some of the research techniques (eyetracking, surveys, etc.) are ones that I would have to acquire.  But having gone through 4 years of graduate school, 4 years of a postdoctoral fellowship, and teaching countless coursework that is all way outside of my area of expertise, I am convinced that this is just another thing I can teach myself.  I have no desire to go back to school, and I know that this is something I can do without further formal credentialing or licensure.  Right now I am reading everything I can about usability—what I am finding is that the holes in my knowledge are primarily in the areas of graphic design and programming for the web.  If I can get myself at least a rudimentary understanding of these areas, I can fill in the gaps by consulting with those around me who know better (ahem, Rob).  I have some leads on community-based organizations that provide mentoring and training for future business owners, and assist with all aspects of business planning.  It seems daunting to take an idea and essentially turn nothing into something….but because I’ve seen some people do it (and quite successfully), I feel more confident that I can do it too.

I am starting the research for this transition now, but it will be slow-going because my overwhelming academic job will get in the way.  Classes are done at the end of April, so I really don’t have that long to go, until I am free to be a researcher again.  The irony is that I never would have stumbled upon the idea to do this, if I hadn’t taught Cognitive Psychology.  Boy, teaching that class has given me a lot of ideas about how I can leave teaching:)

I will be a researcher, in Vermont, and I don’t care if anyone thinks this is a fucking crazy idea.  It *is* a fucking crazy idea.  And I am doing it anyway.