When am I going to get mine, is what I want to know. When will the powers-that-be recognize my genius?When will the book agent clamour outside my door, anxious and eager to get me signed? 

I am not normally an envious man. I do not care to have the next best thing, the biggest house, the newest car, the academic vice president’s sharp grey suit. Indeed, the simple life for me, mates. But when I hear that one of my colleagues has done something wonderful, I feel a certain pang. When I learn about the book contract, the article in the top journal, the triumph at the academic conference, I am taken back a step. 

I want mine too.

But what’s funny about our game is that, in fact, I don’t take it particularly seriously. The world can do without my next publication. The world can do without another university press book. It will go on, without so much as a blip or a burp. The publishing most of us do in the humanities, so singularly masturbatory (and far less fun), holds very little appeal to me. And yet again, I want it.

The question is why. Has my field of vision been so narrowed that only a contract for a book that no one will read will satisfy? At what point will I truly leap over to the other side where everyone lives and breathes, so that when I hear that my fellow traveller–whom I truly wish to succeed and do well in whatever endeavor–has made another big splash in this small pond, I don’t feel that it could’ve, should’ve been me?

I’m almost there, I think. I make a pledge: I will try to celebrate the successes of others as deeply as I feel that green-eyed monster.