KulturFluff

The Illusion of Shallowness

2010-08-22T10:28:00.004-04:00

More on my month long absence later; suffice to say that I've been distracted. But I did pop my head up just long enough to respond to Sisyphus's post on anthologies. And in doing so, got into a familiar rhetorical spot: the one where I argue for a larger awareness of students' priorities, only to be told that others' refuse to coddle students. I'll say here that I don't know Dr. Koshary, and that she (oh god, I hope it's a she. like I said, I don't know him/her well enough to determine that) wasn't rude, abusive, or anything even resembling that. This post, then, is really not about her response, but rather the logic that underpins responses like that one.

One of the occupational hazards of teaching newer stuff, and using a lot of media (for lack of hazy identity concealing specifics), is that a common response to my classes and course content is "oh, the students must love that [eye roll]." It's a two-fer, really. Other faculty members assume A) that students immediately love the stuff that I'm teaching, and so automatically do the work and B) that there's no little to no thinking involved in doing the work. Unlike, for instance, the content of their courses, which students dislike initially, but has real relevance to the field/culture/canon, etc. On good days, this is infuriating, and on bad ones, it's depressing. Because here's the reality of what happens in my classroom: perhaps 2/3 of the students are really down with watching episodes of Sex in the City. But it's taken me years to figure out how to maneuver them through an analysis of the issues of race and class that come up in those episodes, and then to assess their own viewing practices, expectations, and see themselves as part of a larger target audience that shares and reproduces certain values. Is it the Miller's Tale? No. Is it an important set of critical thinking practices that they might use in their later lives? I like to think so. Is it easy? No. It's some of the most frustrating and difficult teaching that I do. Teaching theory is WAY easier (for me) than asking someone to critique and analyze her own predilections.

I suspect, however, that the dismissive response to the content of my courses is exacerbated by my particular pedagogical philosophy---and herein lies the logic that exists in responses like Dr. Koshary's. My take on students is this: it's helpful for me to remember that they have a number of different, competing priorities, and sometimes my class is not at the top of the list. It's not helpful because I operate with an "anything goes, it's okay with me if you don't do the work, feel free to come to class late and unprepared, have multiple absences, don't think hard" protocol. It's helpful because I don't get offended and pissed off when these things happen. They happen, there are consequences, and it all feels to me like students are making choices (consciously or unconsciously) that will determine how they move forward---in my class and in others'.

In Sisyphus's post, I linked this notion to that of her actual question, which was about course content, and perhaps that's why it all went south. But my other guiding pedagogical philosophy is this: it's okay--perhaps even advisable--to meet students where they are. Do I want all of my students to be able to read and understand complex Modernist novels or French feminist gender theory? Sure. That doesn't mean that I teach it to my first year students. As I think back over my last class of fyers, I can think of maybe two in the group who would have been able to get something out of, say, Frederic Jameson. But I would have to emphasize the "something" in that sentence. I'm not opposed to giving students content that's above their heads; but I find that it's a frustrating experience for me and them if they can't get any kind of handhold at all on the reading. What's the point of that? To show them that they're stupid? That they're bad readers? The majority of my students describe themselves this way on the first day of class---I don't have a significant need to prove it to them. They have four years to develop the skills they'll need to read and understand the kinds of work that specialists in their chosen fields read. And I hope to be part of that learning curve as they accumulate those skills.

So here's the connection that has always baffled me, although I wouldn't have thought about it in this way if I hadn't been trying so hard to make the connection clear in my own head: why is it that many of us instantaneously interpret "compassion" as "coddling"? Are there so few pedagogical models of "compassion" + "challenging"=learning that we're unable to conceptualize that idea?

On the Incredible Difficulty of Being Kind to Oneself

2010-07-21T09:33:00.002-04:00

It's a beautiful Wednesday morning here. The heat wave has broken a bit, so up until 11 or so, it's still in the 70s. I can hear the sound of the wind in the trees, the sussurations of the sleeping cats. And I'm itchy.

Yesterday, I had a beautiful moment, where I thought: "whoa. I think I'm done with the frantic itching. Yes, I was a bit scratchy when I woke up, but now that I've downed both my steroid pills and a Claritin, I feel good. Is this what concentration feels like? The utter lack of distraction from itching?"

What's changed, you ask? Because I felt good yesterday, and because I'm signed up to participate in a team athletic event in five weeks, I went for a run. Without sunblock (because it would irritate my skin---irony!). In the 80 degree, humid weather. What would inspire me to do such a thing, you ask? Well, I wouldn't want to waste the extra energy of these steroids!! Might as well get something out of it!

Jackass.

After a Benadryl last night at 10, and then another at 11:30 when I couldn't sleep, and then waking up every few hours because I was all itchy (something that hasn't happened at all over the past 2 weeks of affliction), I blearily googled "poison ivy exercise" this morning, to discover that, yes, sweating can indeed intensify the rash and make you more itchy. %$^&**!!

The real biter is this: despite the fact that I know that I'm suffering because I couldn't take some time off from working out, it's everything I can do not to go again. Or at least go to the pool. Part of that is because the steroids have the tendency to make me jumpy (ooh! look over there! shiny! what were you saying? what are we doing? I think there's something in the other room that I need to do, but I can't remember what it is. Hey, is the bathtub dirty?). Exercise of any sort tends to cure that right up. But the larger motivation, I think, is the difficulty of not doing what you think you should be. At any time.

As I was finishing up my run yesterday (which, I must say, when fueled by drugs, is a sure way to shave some minutes off your time), I was thinking about all of the academics I know, and the ways that we push ourselves too hard, even when we know we shouldn't. This tendency, I think, is even worse with academics who are also sporty---all of my runner friends (who deign to hang out with me, poky and shambling as I am) want better times, push themselves, etc. And despite all of this push push push, to a one, there's also a berate, berate, berate. "I should be doing more." "I should have done that better." "I suck at this." Accomplishment, here, is just a set-up for giving yourself a grudging pat on the back before moving on to evaluate all of the ways that you should have done it better.

Or, to go back to the cause of all of my itchiness. What's driving the self-flagellation right now? Sure, I ran yesterday, but I can't possibly take today off, or I'll have wasted everything I did yesterday. Sure, it will aggravate my affliction, but surely I have to get to training?!! If I were training harder when this started, I wouldn't be in this position! And while I'm at it, shouldn't I have gotten more work done by now? It's July already!

It's a hard thing to learn: stop being so hard on yourself. Stop pushing and give yourself room to work on something. When I listen to my friends berate themselves for all that they should have done or should be doing, over and above all that they've accomplished, I've taken to giving them a bit of crap about it. "Right, and the most important thing is that you be as hard on yourself as possible, and refuse to acknowledge anything good that you've done." It's easy for me to recognize this in others, who I consider smart and accomplished and laudable. It's less easy to recognize this in myself (as in: "well, yeah, but I'm not like them."). I need more practice. [And why haven't I been practicing this before?!!----you see the problem here...]

Afflicted

2010-07-17T07:03:00.003-04:00

Okay, so it's been more than a week since I've posted. So sue me. I've got a really good excuse. Seriously!! Wanna hear it? Here it goes! Let's start with a visual:

That's my arm, and my new favorite patch of leprosy on it. In all of the "I can't do x because I'm afraid to go out in public like this" correspondence that I've sent out this week, I'm oscillating between two different jokes about it.
1) The first rule of Fight Club is that you don't talk about Fight Club.
2) If I have to play a Jared Leto role, I would have preferred Jordan Catelano to Harry Goldfarb of Requiem for a Dream (see below):

Sometimes, just for kicks, I throw in a joke about Job, and how I wonder where in Urbania I can find some broken pottery to scrape my sores. Because, folks, that's just the one that's easiest to take pictures of! Oh yes! They're everywhere!! My left leg is the worst, but the right one is quickly catching up, and I've got a few ambitious ones on the right wrist as well.

Did I mention the itching? Because nothing really caps off unsightly, weeping skin craters like intense burning and itching. Yay! Little helps. As per info on the intrawebz, I've been using rubbing alcohol and tea tree oil to help dry these suckers up, but to no avail.

Yesterday, I finally gave in and went to the urgent care, because the bread knife is starting to look better and better. (If I had a belt sander, I'd consider using it at this point.) The nurse who took my vitals proceeded to wipe down all of her instruments with alcohol at the end of my visit. And the doctor? His first sentence to me went like this: "Ms. Fluff? I'm Dr. X. (glances at arms/legs). You'll forgive me if I don't shake hands." Wuss. You think a little pus is going to hurt you?

The diagnosis (aside from "most people can treat poison ivy at home, but you've managed to spread it everywhere"), included "gee, you've really burnt the hell out of your skin," and "tea tree oil is good for some things...like scabies. But that's about it," and "don't scratch."

Two weeks on steroids, witch hazel and caladryl. I am DONE with yard work, folks. Forevah. As god as my witness, I will never pull weeds again!!

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

2010-07-08T07:52:00.003-04:00

So, before I can even get to something vaguely substantive, can I just say that it's mothercussing HOT up in here?! It's not even 8 a.m., and it's 84 degrees and humid. In the house. Yagh. And this is totally not helping the small but virulent case of poison ivy blisters that I managed to acquire sometime last weekend. Balls. The only thing stopping me from pouring concrete over the entire yard so as never to have to maintain it would be the fact that it would really increase the heat factor. And thus, we've come full circle.

But while I've self-pityingly, with morbid fascination, watching beads of sweat form and roll down my leg while I'm indoors, sitting perfectly still, exerting as little energy as possible, I've also been trying to revise and resubmit this co-authored article that I should have finished last summer. While I was selling our house. And buying a new one. And pissing and moaning about that.

There are several things that are not helping with the r&r (and may I just say, for the record, that there is a brutal irony in the fact that this kind of "r&r" is so antithetical to the other kind of "r&r" which is what I should be doing in the height of the summer?!! ).

• we waited, like assholes, to go back to this article, and thus have to account for all relevant research that's been published since the first time we sent it out, up to and including a major revision of a primary piece that we're critiquing. Crapballs.
• in the course of examining said new research, I've pulled a couple of pieces from the journal that we're revising for. And while the articles are interesting (I guess), they're not world-rocking. There's nothing that I've read thus far that makes me sit up and say: "gee, I never thought of that!! This is totally going to change the way I think about x!"
• the above lack-of-revelation makes me wonder why we're working so damn hard on this revision.
• and then I realize that it's because my writing partner is an evil demon-sprite of revision integrity, in which she believes that anything worth rewriting is worth rewriting right, and thus we've torn this sucker down to it's pegs and started over with the detritus.
• I know that this should make me feel all high and mighty, but instead I keep wondering if we couldn't just make exactly the changes suggested by the editors and be done with the whole thing. A month ago. When we go back in our DeLorean time machine.
• I'm mighty suspicious of journal articles and scholarly publishing in general right now, and that attitude is not making me want to toe the line about academic discourse and formatting, all of which is tedious and necessary for this revision.

Whew. The real biter, however, and the inspiration for the title of this post, is that it's only in these situations when I really realize what it is that I'm asking students to do when they write and revise. Last week, I sat down with a book and two articles that I knew needed to be integrated into the draft of the article. But where did they go? Did I need specific quotes, or did I need to gloss the argument of the pieces and use that to frame my points? In the article that is most closely related to my argument, do I need to dismantle the author's conclusions point by point, or is it enough to explain in a few lines the ways that our studies diverge?

This week, I ran through all of the dreck rough material we pounded out trying to integrate this stuff, and found myself thinking: "good Christ, is there any consistent idea that holds this paragraph together? What is it's relationship to the rest of the section? Why don't we analyze this quote here? This idea is good, but really tangential to the point we're trying to make..."

Sound familiar? So was the feeling of frustration/rage that built up. Only this time, it was aimed at me and my writing partner, not at a 20 year old budding novelist. Hi! My name is kettle---did you have something you wanted to call me?

God willin' and the crick don't rise, we'll send this sucker out by the end of the week, and then hopefully I'll never have to think about it again. But I hope that I'll have some sympathy for my students when I blithely collect the drafts of their papers in the fall.

The One Body Problem

2010-07-02T08:40:00.002-04:00

Poor Kate, on whose post I left a chirpy little comment today. Her thoughts about what inspires exercise really dovetail with a number of things that I've been thinking about over the past week.

After The Epic Ride from Hades (see below), I did indeed lay off the bike for awhile. Actually, I had no choice---given that the brakes were non-existent, I had to take it in for a tune-up. But round about that same time, I started to have one of those weird "I think the universe is talking to me" moments. Early on in the spring, my super-athlete friend J had started training to do a local triathlon and had asked if I wanted to. I toyed with the idea for a minute in that "that sounds interesting! And so does hiking Kilimanjaro! And being an astronaut!" way, only to stop thinking about it when I found out that the date coincided with The Fluffs' trip abroad. But last week, it occurred to me: if the cursed paper had brought down the trip, then maybe I was supposed to do the tri? Could it be done?

So in the blazing heat and humidity, I went for my first run in months. It was painful, and more sweaty than anyone outside 300 has a right to be. But I got it done. So if that part were possible, then maybe? To really know, I'd have to try a couple of the activities back to back. So the next day, I went to the gym and swam the tri distance, got out of the pool, changed my clothes, went upstairs and ran. [For the record, I find running after swimming no more difficult than running without swimming. You just smell worse.] Chlorine-chafing aside, it was doable. Holy crap, maybe I could actually do this thing?!

I fully planned to rest the next day, since I could barely walk. But when J said that she and her awesome Amazonian partner were going to a training camp that night, I packed up my gear and picked up my bike and took out my wetsuit. And promptly had my ass handed to me. It's been awhile (high school, maybe?) since I've worked out hard enough to approach vomiting. By the end of the bike ride (which wasn't even the regulation distance), I was starting to hallucinate. I had always been climbing this hill, I would always be climbing this hill, dudes in tight shorts would always have their asses in my face as I climbed this hill... But I survived. I could barely walk the next day, but I didn't drown, and I didn't have to walk my bike. And I didn't cry. Not in front of anyone, anyway. Just internally.

By the time I had gotten up the gumption to register for the race, it was sold out. Disappointed. Relieved? It would have been a great thing to obsess over (you have no idea how complicated clothing can really be until you see people try to figure out how to do three different sports in it. This should be a Project Runway challenge. Come on, Michael Kors, get all South Beach sport with a frisson of Chanel on us!). And in the run-up (so to speak) to the idea that I'd have to train for that sucker, I started planning out what I'd have to do each day, what I should be eating (see Kate's post on this too!!), recovery days, etc.

Thinking about competition, or challenge, when it comes to exercise is such a different motivator than "my ass looks fat in this skirt." Because seriously, when it's hot, and I'm running (and I hate running), what's the motivation to keep going? Burning off another 100 calories? Bitch, please. I'll down that the instant I get back from the run! [And woe betide my running if the ipod falls on Aretha. Because then all I can think is "dude, Aretha is awesome, and she is a big woman. What the crap am I running for? I should be at home belting it out! And eating a donut!]

But doing something hard to show yourself that you can? Or because you're going to have to do it in front of hundreds of other athletes and spectators who will point and laugh if you choke? That's motivation. [They won't actually laugh. They'd probably just pity you. Or judge. But I bet the pointing would happen.] And better yet, it's a way to think about your body in terms of what it can do, not what it looks like. Any change in the latter is the side effect, not the goal. I'm never going to be tiny---that's not in the cards. But I can haul ass up that hill on my bike, yessirree bob. And that's the ass that is so happy with what it can do that it doesn't even mind being padded out in public.

Tour de Fiasco

2010-06-23T07:43:00.004-04:00

As I may or may not have mentioned, Senor Fluff and I bit the bullet a few months ago and bought bicycles---something we've been wanting to do since we moved to Urbania. After only six years of talking about it and putting it off, we finally did the deed, loaded up the credit cards, and jumped. (In a follow-up to my new-found bougieness, I must note that it's a hell of a lot easier to buy a good bike when you can put it in your garage, rather than chaining it up outside your house in the neighborhood where local thieves have been known to break into people's porches to take a bike. In our new neighborhood, people tend to leave their bikes outside their houses unattended for a few hours while they go inside to...? Fix their hair? Drink a vodka tonic? Get a fake tan?)

It's been a good decision on a number of levels: it's a kind of exercise we can do together (Senor Fluff is a much better runner than me, and attempting to run together just makes me whiny and his knees hurt); it's allowed us to see more of the area; it doesn't seem to be as much of a monumental exercise task, and so both of us will do more of it, even when we're tired, or not motivated.

So yesterday, I was scheduled to have coffee with a friend, and so I planned to squeeze in a quick bike ride and shower before our meeting. And I have rarely seen such a clustercuss outside of a faculty meeting in my life.

It started out fine. I realized early on that I had forgotten my sunglasses, but it was a bit overcast, so I didn't want to take up the time to go back. I had planned to go for about 45 minutes, so I needed to go far fast to get it all in. I did the first half of the route at a good clip, and started up the hill that marks the official apex of what I had planned to do. It's not a massive hill, but it takes some doing, and so I was mostly looking down and pedaling. When I looked up as I neared the top, I saw that a woman was parked, in the lane, with her flashers on. She flagged me down, and so I slowed up, thinking that she might need something, or that someone was hurt or something. As I got closer (still going uphill, mind you), she said "can you give me directions to D_____?" Unbelievable. You're parked with your hazards on for directions?! Whatever. I pedaled the last few feet to the top of the hill, and made to stop so I could tell her how to get there. Since I'm concentrating on her and how close her car is to the (virtually non-existent) shoulder, however, I misjudge the place where the crown of the road falls away into the dirt. And thus, unable to get my foot out of my clip, I go down like a bag of rocks. To the woman's credit, she helps me up and tries to dust me off, but still clearly wants directions.

After she goes on her merry way (with excellent directions, I might add), I use much of the second half of my ride to get the gears square, since the chain has slipped during my fall. At some point, I realize that my legs have turned to jelly. (I should say that the quads have turned to jelly. The rest of my legs turned to jelly somewhere around age 22. Ba-DUM-dum!) "I better cut this short and go home," I thought, and turned around.

As I approach the cut-off to the country road that leads to our section of town, I realize that a woman is standing on the shoulder waving me down. "No fucking way!" I thought. But yes! She wants to talk to me!! She's part of a news crew that's doing a story on the local road repairs! Full disclosure here: at this point, I have been riding for about 30 minutes. And I have fallen off of my bike. And before I got on the bike, I hadn't showered in two days. Gee, what would I like more than to give you a quote about how the road crews effect me? So, greasy, dirt-smudged me recorded a spot for the local television crew, and then they asked if they could just get a shot of me riding away. Yes indeed!! Here I go!!

As I rode away, I was both obsessing about how hideous I imagined I'd be on the local news, and worried about how late I must now be for meeting my friend. Luckily, I was cruising down this long hill. And cruising. And cruising ever faster, wind whistling in my ears, all the way down to the bridge.

There's no bridge on the way to my house.

The news crew had stopped me right before the turn off route that goes toward my house. In pedaling away from them, I had gone straight on, down the horrible horrible hill. A few weeks ago, I rode down part of this hill by mistake, and it was so painful to get back up that I swore I'd never go this direction again. A friend of mine who just did a 50k race in May "studiously avoids that hill." The hill has about 3 or 4 steep climbs, one after another. And I was down at water level---ironically, just the place that the road crews were starting to work on. Thanks alot, lady newscaster! This fucking road repair affects me now!! So I turned around and climbed Epic Hill, cursing and sweating all the way. When I got to the top, the news crew was still there, interviewing a couple in a Hummer. The intern and cameraman cordially waved at me as I went by.

Finally, I'm on my way home. I'm pointed in the right direction, and I'm doing my best to sprint, since I know I'm going to be late for coffee. And then the raindrops start to fall. And believe me, I wish I were shitting you. Racing home, I also discovered that the fall screwed up my back brake, but really, isn't that all just icing on the cake?

So much for my love affair with the bike. It's dead to me. With bike rides like these, I'll be back in the pool in no time!!

It's the Pictures that Got Small

2010-06-17T08:41:00.003-04:00

At Askesis U., we have a fairly aggressive PR department. The big announcement at fall commencement a few years ago was that we'd gotten a spot on the premiere national morning show. In the interim, a number of faculty members are called upon to participate in all sorts of local news pieces---the city paper, the local NPR affiliate, etc. I suppose it makes sense. It's a good way to get the name of the college out there, although sometimes I have to wonder if what the faculty contribute is really solidifying our reputation in quite the way that the administration might want.

Case in point: a few days ago, I was contacted by Mr. Micawber, our PR guy. [He's actually a very nice man. But there's just this slight air of despondency about him. But what the hell do I know?] A local paper--not the big city paper, mind you, but the Podunk Town Register from up the road--needed an interview with a literature prof. The writer was doing a piece on an emerging trend in contemporary fiction, and would I be willing to talk with him? Seldom has someone been so quick to participate in her own exploitation. "Sure! I'm familiar with this trend! I can talk to him!"

So I had a brief conversation with the guy. I should have known that I was in trouble when I came out of the box explaining how I thought this trend was part of a larger concern about the role of books in contemporary society. How many hours of Fox News would I need to watch to realize a loaded question when I heard one? "But really, isn't this all just really a fad?" "What do you think classic authors would think about this stuff?"

Whoa there, cowboy. You've got yourself the wrong lit girl. I think you were looking for one of my colleagues who like to pound the table about the necessity of the canon. What, Stanley Fish wasn't available? Sadly, if you want a blurb from me for your article, you're going to get the line about how books are related to movies are related to rap music. After our increasingly uncomfortable chat, I looked up his blog, only to discover that he's a 55 year old cranky white dude who, in addition to writing for the Podunk Town Register, also owns a business that sells "authentic" trinkets from a certain Western European country known for clogging and abstruse Modernist writers who spent a lot of time in France. You all know one of these guys, I have no doubt. In making his argument---I mean "interviewing me"---he said: "I don't know if you're old enough to remember these guys in the early 70's who did this kind of thing in music." There's just no way for me to respond to that graciously.

Yesterday, I got gussied up so that they could take my photo for the PDR. I hope there's airbrushing involved, but I doubt I'm going to get that lucky. I'll be curious to see what, if anything, the writer includes of my incisive theory about the books. I expect to see single words like "and" and "the" as the only ones in quotation marks. Someone remind me never to go into politics. As a latter-day Norma Desmond, I'm afraid that I'm not ready for my close-up.

Never Say Never, Now with Photos!

2010-06-12T17:23:00.006-04:00

When Mr. Fluff and I put our house on the market last summer and started looking for a new one (not necessarily in that order, which you can remind yourself of if you look here and here), there were any number of criteria that I had for a new house. A quiet neighborhood, in which we wouldn't be subjected to the sounds of our neighbors at all hours was at the top of his list. At the top of mine? A remodeled, or already halfway decent kitchen andbathroom. I was absolutely done with having the construction crews ripping up two of the most used and important rooms in the house, and having to go without them for extended periods of time. Having lived through both in our old house, I was done with major renovation. Surface aesthetic changes I could deal with, but no plumbing, reflooring, or construction crews.

The important thing, I suppose, is that one of us got what we wanted.

The new Casa de Fluff is blissfully (see earlier post on suburbia) quiet, and that's a boon to my quality of life in ways that I would not have expected. However. Like any house built in the disco era, it has some serious aesthetic challenges, at least three of which require all of the things that I didn't ever want to have to deal with again in life. Ever. Seriously---isn't there some sort of maximum number of bathroom renovations any one person should have to face?

Regardless, we chose this house, and we planned ahead, and so job one was to do something about the insanely hideous bathroom. Truly, the only thing that could have made this bathroom worse, in my mind, would have been metallic wall paper. [Scratch that. I suppose if the previous owners had been true CBGB wanna-bes, they would have installed that glass that only existed in the 70's. You know the stuff---it has the gold leaf running through it? Klassy. Thankfully, none of that.] But wallpaper you could steam off. There's somethings only a contractor or alternative licensed professional can fix.

Exhibit B: matching sink and toilet, bizarre floor tile, and a "vanity" that can't possible live up to its name without wanting to kill itself.

We lived in this horrorshow for six months (and lest you think "gee, I don't know what she's complaining about. It isn't so bad," realize that I couldn't bring myself to photograph the years of grime and mold that had been allowed to build up in the grout to said tile, and the way that the inside of the blue toilet had turned green over time. I gag every time I think about what could have made that happen). Exhibit A: the blue tub.
, Finally, at the very beginning of my spring leave, I called in our trusty contractor and let him go to town, and I spent 9 hours a day for a week enduring the constant sound of power tools, corralling my animals, having my water shut off, and listening to the same audio tape of the Grateful Dead. I'd complain here about the hours of work leading up to the actual renovation---what with the researching fixturesand furniture, tile and grout, and driving across two states to fetch it all---but really, it was nothing in comparison to that goddamned tape. Argh! Curse you, Garcia, even beyond the grave!!

Ahem. So, I spent days hanging with the renovation crew, learning about tools, listening to the Dead. We spent a weekend with an unworkable shower, and got really greasy in the meantime. In the end, however, we had new tile, a refinished tub, and white toilet (which is neither blue nor green, for which I am thankful every time I sit down to pee). And after much hemming and hawing, paint sampling and swatching, we have achieved bathroom nirvana. As evidenced below. A word of caution: because I was both too cheap and too impatient to live through the consequences of having them chip out the tub tile and replace it with something else, we left the baby blue interior tile as it was, which created some particular challenges in choosing a color scheme. I happen to think that the end result is very chic, and Yogini assures me that it's Boden-esque, which makes me hope that it's very British (pictures below, as demanded by my favorite Academic Cog). Either way, it's done, and I can rest easy. Except for the times that I spend in the dark, linoleum/formica kitchen...

The Case of the Cursed Paper

2010-06-08T05:56:00.003-04:00

At dinner with one of my favorite, if a bit awkward, colleagues the other night, I related the tribulations that I've encountered with a paper that I've been working on for the past few months. His response? "It's cursed." "Not yet!" said his sympathetic and slightly mortified wife.

So what constitutes an almost-cursed paper? Like many things, it began as a lark. Mr. Fluff and I had been enthusiastically, if not rabidly, watching a particular television series together on DVD. It's not every day that our media obsessions match up, so when they do, we go after them with a vengeance (and when it's over, he goes back to watching some crap movie on SyFy, like Mansquito, and I return to more civilized ventures, like In Treatment, or re-runs of Dawson's Creek). And, as obsessive watchers of "quality tv" do, we'd discuss the implications of a Marxist-themed episode, or the questions that the show raised about race, etc., etc. Thus, when I saw a paper call that seemed to encapsulate our interpretation, I pitched the idea to Mr. Fluff. "This should be fun! We could write it together!"

I suppose that this could be a War of the Roses kind of story, in which we destroyed our marriage and brought the house down around our ears as we argued over the paper. That part, however, went just fine. I'd do some writing and thinking, hand off a draft of the abstract to Mr. Fluff, who'd tune it up, we'd discuss the ways that our argument was trending, what kinds of secondary stuff we should examine. Easy peasy. So when our abstract was accepted to a conference in Europe, I thought, "huzzah! Clearly, the universe accepts our work together, and is pleased!" But before I could book tickets, Mr. Fluff clucked his tongue. "It's in a month. Will we be ready in a month? You just finished the semester, it's Christmas. Maybe we should wait and try a different one."

Undaunted (despite the fact that the conference was hot on the heels of some work I'd done with my grad students in the fall), I found a national conference with a panel that fit the bill, and we slid the abstract in just under the deadline. We heard back from the organizer the same day. We were in, and needed to hurry up and pay the registration fee. (This probably should have given me pause about the quality of the conference, no?) But fine. We paid up, and I started making plans for the conference, which just happened to be in my favorite of the 50 states. "Perfect!" thought I. "We'll give the paper, and then we'll take the rest of the week for vacation!" I booked the conference hotel, and then a sweet little B&B up the road from the conference city. I researched restaurants and day trips and hikes. And then, the morning before we were supposed to leave, the airlines cancelled our flight because of the terrible, horrible snowstorm of '10. And we weren't able to rebook until the following Sunday---the final day of the conference. Wah!!

After hemming and hawing, we decided we'd go to favorite state anyway for a vacation, eat the costs of the conference, and submit the abstract elsewhere. Third time is the charm, right?

Two months ago, I submitted our abstract to a conference in the UK, wherein it was accepted. We paid the exorbitant conference fee, and I've been scoping out the various online airfare sites, trying to find something reasonable. Oh, and in the meantime, I've also read a number of articles on this show, read a classic cultural/theoretical tome, and, oh, you know, written the damn paper to submit it early to their website. Last Friday, Mr. Fluff gets a call in his office, stating that his boss is quitting, and that he'll need to step into that role and run the entire office and all of its programs by himself for the next three months. And, of course, he'll need to cancel his upcoming trip.

Son of an f'ing bitch.

I think we can officially call this paper cursed. I'm cancelling the trip, and the paper, and etc. This wretched piece of work has cost me countless hours, as well as probably $600 in conference fees, and that's if we exclude the cost of the trip to favorite state which I wouldn't have taken if we hadn't already planned it. Do I just surrender, and bury the cursed paper in my yard with a tiki and an evil eye amulet? Do I let it sit, and hope that I can give it again somewhere? Is Mr. Fluff's computer build on an Indian burial ground?!!

Bougie McBougerson

2010-06-07T09:18:00.002-04:00

I'm now closing in on almost a year in the "new" house, and I find that the 10 months here have brought into stark relief the difference that location can make. There's a phalanx of people here that are hard-core proponents of the ethical obligation we have to live in the city. And they're not wrong. After all, by leaving for the 'burbs, Mr. Fluff and I have taken our money out of the tax base and the school tax base; we've abandoned the mixed (as in, both rental and owner-occupied) neighborhood; we drive slightly further to work (and can no longer walk). In essence, there's a good deal of clucking and nose-looking-down-upon that we've undergone over the past year. And I have to admit, there's a sense in which I've mapped myself onto the way of life out here that is a bit disgusting. Case in point---here's what my day has and will look like:

•make smoothie with fresh fruit and omega-3s
•peruse books for fall classes
•get some exercise---either a bike ride or a trip to the gym
•make lunch with remaining produce from CSA
•meet friend to discuss fall lecture series
•paint (not so)newly-remodeled bathroom
•make dinner with remaining produce from CSA
•watch something on TV that I'm streaming from Netflix (because I refuse to deal with the cable company)

It's a little too much, isn't it? I feel like I should be sipping tea with my pinkie finger raised. Now if only I w•as driving my hybrid SUV to and from the Farmer's Market or the PTA meeting today, I'd be fully a part of the neighborhood. Stepford Wife, anyone?

But if we look at it in another way, here's what I would be doing if we had stayed in our old house:

•go into disgusting basement to open windows for cats
•make breakfast (sure, it could be a smoothie---no real difference here)
•make arrangements to address one of any number of urgent projects that will prevent the house from falling down: new roof, flooding in the back yard, crumbling masonry, etc.
•get some exercise, but feel guilty for not doing something about the front and/or back yard, both of which threaten to overtake the house
•dream about buying a bike, but realize that it would probably be stolen, as that's the number one crime in neighborhood
•make dinner
•watch something on cable
•go to bed, only to be awakened at 2 by our neighbors' furious, drunken game of backyard beer pong.

There's just no question about which of these ways of life is better for my blood pressure and peace of mind. And if anything, this is the life of the professors that I had (minus the wine-tasting and rose-growing that seemed endemic to my undergrad profs). But it's undeniable that there's a certain amount of privilege at work here. In part, it's class-related: we could never have bought this house without having improved and sold the first one, and my parents' assistance was key to that. In part, it's the privilege of partner-dom: being able to afford living in the 'burbs is possible only because we have two incomes; being socially comfortable living in a neighborhood of families and retirees is the advantage of heteronormativity. And the fact that I've had 4 months to enjoy hanging out in this house most days is professional: the job I have has given me a significant amount of unstructured time.

So, I'm a girl of the suburbs, without a doubt---it's taken me no time at all to settle into this life, even as I recognize all of the advantages that it takes to live here. And I understand that I'm contributing to a problem with urban life by eschewing it. But there's no question that I'm happier and more calmer here. Perhaps if I just wear my "McBougerson" name tag when I'm out running errands, there will be less clucking from the hard-core city folk?

All the Smart People Want

2010-05-30T08:45:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, I had the unexpected opportunity to have coffee with someone I sort-of knew, and his wife, whom I totally didn't know, and it was great---like a little oasis of inspirational connection with cool people.

"Bully for you," you say? Right. But here's the thing: this kind of happy synchronicity is so very very far outside my comfort zone. In the face of virtually all situations, I choose not to expose myself to a potentially-uncomfortable interaction with near-strangers, particularly without a well-worked out escape route. I am the person for whom the app exists that makes it look like someone is calling you and you have to go.

I met Baldie a few years ago because he was one of a group of people that I worked with on a project. Smart guy, very extroverted (in inverse proportion to the amount of hair he possesses, thus the name). We had a number of good conversations at the project meeting, and then a couple of follow-ups over the years: I saw him at a conference or two, exchanged emails, etc. I found him to be charming and also a bit "charm-offensive" on occasion---you know the dudes who refer to themselves in the third person? As in the ones who say, about themselves, stuff like "and I told them that Baldie McShine was having none of that!" Yep. Sort of like that. [Why I'm simultaneously attracted to and repelled by these guys is fodder for both therapy and another post.]

Last week, I noticed on Facebook that he and his wife were headed out on vacation, and would be driving by my city, and on a whim, I wrote to tell him that, if they had time, he should drop in for coffee or lunch. Let me say, for the record, I never really thought that he would. Who stops on a road trip to see people?! Um, apparently Baldie does. So with great trepidation and no escape plan (he caught me really flat-footed, as in "we'll be there in about an hour, will that work for you?"), I headed out to meet them.

Mrs. Baldie, or "Hash" as I think I'll call her (reasons below), was far more delightful than I would have expected. As was Baldie. I don't know if this is his pre-vacation stance, but he was natural, and relaxed, and using the first-person pronoun. [As I think about it, it may also be the case that he has settled into a solid job at a fairly prestigious SLAC, and so can relax a little.] Our conversation, as noted before, was really enjoyable, in that "wow, you think Polanski is a douchebag too? And you are appalled by Dr. Drew? Be my friend!" kind of way. [And here's what really made me love Mrs. Baldie: I was explaining how much I missed having cable, and the lucky happenstance of catching something on it that is just crap that you wanted to see. Her reply: "That's my favorite thing too! Who knew that I really needed to see Independence Day again, for the eighth time? What I really wish I could do is settle down with it with a big bowl of hash, and eat the old ice cream, the kind with the ice crystals in it." You want to be friends with her now too, don't you?]

Toward the end of the conversation, the topic turned to the "now what do we do with our lives" topic that is so much a part of my mental geography of late. Both of them laughed and talked about how they'd been thinking about getting new degrees, although it was difficult to support that idea---not for the reason I thought (cost, application, time commitment)---but rather because they have the skills to read something hard in a particular field and use secondary criticism to get more out of it. If that's the case, then why go to a program? "It's obvious," said I. "We all just want to have great, focused conversations with smart people."

As I walked them back to their car, it became clear to me that outside of the academic programs that I've been in, which really helped to engender those kinds of conversations, I would really have to be focused about creating them. I wonder if, in fact, that's one of the reasons many of us choose this profession: because we imagine that it's as close to a guarantee of those interactions as we can get. Baldie, it seemed, was making an effort to find these kinds of things too, or else he and Hash would have kept right on truckin' up the freeway. There are many things that I have thought I need to spend more time doing, now that my leave is up: write more, read more, get more exercise. But this seems like something I need to practice and develop an intention for as well---getting myself into social situations with smart people. Why has it taken me so long to figure that out?

I'm going to see if I can find a copy of Independence Day. Happy holiday, y'all. Go find a smart person and see what they can tell you.

So Random that I should put "Random" in Quotation Marks

2010-05-26T09:04:00.002-04:00

In the grand tradition of RBOC, I offer you "R"BOC, or better yet, URBOC (Unbelievably Random Bullets of Crap):

• We are headed for a record high today. It is not even June. I am unprepared for this kind of heat, as it scrambles my brain and makes me want to nap in the cool downstairs part of the house all day long. I remember when we were looking for a house last year, and finding nothing, and I thought that air conditioning was negotiable. It is not. We have air conditioning, and yet can barely hold the upstairs to 82 degrees. But it's a dry 82 degrees, I suppose. Regardless, I think it means that I should have someone come out and look at the system. Le sigh.

• I need to post a paper for a conference on Friday. The limit is 8 pages. I have five beautifully polished pages, and an additional 10 pages of crap/notes/musings where the real meat of the paper is. Balls.

• Having melanin sucks. I'm happy to go with being pale, and am for about nine months of the year. But despite regular usage of sunblock, it takes very little for me to acquire weird tan lines, and they last forever. To wit, my bathing suit tan lines just faded in March, after the summer spent in the pool. Meanwhile, I went on an early bike ride on Friday, which lasted for about two hours. And now I have the farmer's tan. Two hours! That's it! So, do I slather sunblock half way up my arms and do yardwork tomorrow in an attempt to get it to even out? Do I embrace self-tanner? Do I just suck it up and live with the ghost of a white t-shirt for the next eight months?

• My cats, who are cute and fuzzy, want to eat early in the morning. Like, at 4. We have tried any number of tricks to get them to leave us alone. Feeding them late has no effect---they get on the bed and paw at us, purring, until we get up and feed them. Closing the door has no effect---they claw at it and rattle it in the frame. Putting sticky tape on the door worked for exactly 6 days, and now they've apparently decided that sticky paws are worth the trouble if it means they can eat. I am running out of ideas. Save us. I beg of you.

• I am signed up for not one, but two group athletic events, one in August, and one in September. Despite that, I have little to no motivation to train in the actual sport that I will be doing. Where's the panic? I could die in this sport, you know. (there. there was a slight frisson of fear there. Maybe that's what I need: I should spend time visualizing my own death in a watery grave because I failed to train. problem solved via gruesome, worst case scenario thinking!)

You can see what I mean about unbelievably random, right? Back soon, after I whip that paper into shape.

Faculty Behaving Badly

2010-05-08T09:39:00.003-04:00

Do you think I could make a million dollars by pitching a show to a cable network that's based on highlighting the most egregiously-awful faculty behaviors? Could I be the Chelsea Handler of higher ed?

I think the pilot might involve the abuse of the campus-wide/whole-faculty email function. I'm sure that some IT guy, when he programmed this function into the mail service, figure that it would be a crucial function. There ARE announcements that the entire faculty needs to hear: graduation speakers, faculty governance issues, all-school calendars, etc. And actually, I like to know about speakers, concerts, class presentations, even if I can't or don't plan to attend. Hell, I don't even mind the occasional "I left my thumb drive in Classroom 117, has anyone seen it?" message. What I cannot abide, however, is the use of this communication feature as a means to castigate others publicly and/or pontificate. And really, how often is it one without the other?

Case in point: weeks ago, a committee sent out an announcement about a program they had designed for the campus community, and very kindly were inviting people to take part in. And then the email responses begin.

•Cranky Western Civ Guy: "I don't approve of the content of this program. Shouldn't we instead be forcing students to take part in [ideology A]? Your program contributes to the downfall of Western culture."
•Young Hipster Dude: "on the contrary, I've taken part in a corollary of said program, and it is works as a sincere questioning of the make-up of Western Culture. Which would be obvious if you'd read anything about said program."
•Dr. Can't Let A Conversation Go On Without Him: "I'm also concerned about the status of Western Culture. Kids nowadays. What are we going to do with them? I suggest that all take part in a a multi-hour re-training program that supercedes the one that this committee planned."
•Professor Literacy Advocate: "Based on this fascinating discussion, Western Culture is something we're all interested. The suggested program, however; approaches this in new and exciting ways which I support."
•Dr. Gravitas: "I think the point here is that the initial committee got off its collective ass to plan something, and thus it's their show. If you all want to plan something else, do it your damn selves."

Thank you, Dr. Gravitas!! If only you'd included the phrase: "now stop cluttering up my inbox with this crap, you pompous windbags!" That endpoint notwithstanding, the "conversation" finally died down, based, I think, on the reasoned position of Dr. G, as well as the relative weight of his seniority and stature.

BUT THEN!! Weeks after this has all finally gone away, Dr. Endowed Chair chimes in! As if none of this has happened! He too has concerns about the effects of said program, and the way that the students will interpret the implications of "our" decisions to run said program!! Oh, wailing and gnashing of teeth! And we're off, again, into round four thousand of faculty who see this as their opportunity both to express their individual opinions about the state of Western Civilization as we know it, and to offer their own brilliant suggestions about what the campus as a whole should be spending its collective time thinking about. [Thankfully, this last round ended in what I can only imagine is a shared sense of incredulity that shocked people into silence. Dr. Insano suggested, based on recent ecological events, that we all carefully examine and discuss this Malcolm Lowry novel. Sweet Jesus on a popsicle stick.

I'm floating a new suggestion amongst my colleagues who are equally suspicious of this abuse of the campus email, and it goes something like this. There should be some sort of non-negotiable, semi-punitive sacrifice that community members must make if they want to use this function. Non-negotiable, no exceptions. I suggest that they be forced to give up a toe. Then we'll see how important you REALLY think your contribution to communal discourse is.

A Tale of Two Taskmasters

2010-05-01T08:30:00.002-04:00

As I read around the academic blogosphere, I see that you all are coming into the home stretch. You're reading papers, managing student freak-outs, and switching into summer mode: simultaneous relaxation and research. So congrats to all of you. While you're busy feeling both exhausted but accomplished, I'm relaxed and freaking out: my leave is OVER!! And what do I have to show for it?!!

As per usual, I find myself oscillating between two opposing poles. On the one hand, my inner sadistic schoolmarm is flagellating me. What's worse that wasting a three month leave? That one is ostensibly given for research? Shouldn't I have mapped out a fabulous book project by now? Or drafted three articles? Or painted the Mona Lisa, trained for a marathon, and cooked my way through all of Alice Waters' books?

On the other hand, my inner overly-compassionate voice (who I imagine as an old school, baked, middle-aged hippie) is talking me down. The origins of sabbatical, after all, lie in "sabbath," as in rest. And I've done a lot of resting, that's for sure. I've traveled, I've reconnected with friends and family. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the kinds of bad work habits I've accumulated over the past five years. I've become pretty conscious about the consistent, negative talk in my head that goes on (see sadistic schoolmarm, above), and convinces me that it's not worth starting anything. For the record, it's sort of shocking, when you really write it down. Here's a sampling:

•"I didn't follow-up trying to publish my diss, so I've wasted all that work."
•"I didn't continue my diss research, and now I'm so far behind I'll never keep up."
•"I've given far too many conference presentations and failed to turn them into articles."
•"It's too late for me to pick a research field now."
•"Everyone I know has done/can do x, and I have tried and I can't, so I should just give up."

What a total and complete bitch that schoolmarm is! And just so you know, I totally recognize that this is textbook, and that I sound like a case study in a "pathetic academic psychoses" review.

I'm trying to go with the baked hippie, here. (Please don't ask me where these characters come from. Why can't the hippie be a Buddhist or something? Beats hell out of me. But he's a hippie, for sure.) For as much as the arguments that the schoolmarm are making aren't wrong, exactly, I think that for me, the last three months have been about slowing down enough to realize the accumulation of crap that I've built up during the tenure process in a toxic department. (The schoolmarm narrowly missed being a nun, but that would make her so close to an actual colleague of mine, whose discourse is so close to this kind of negativity, that if I had her talking in my head, I'd have to quit my job and move to Woodstock.) Sure, it would have been great if I could have just jumped at the chance of a leave to dive into a pre-established project that was a natural extension of the work that I'd done on the diss and continued doing throughout my years as an assistant prof. But that's not what my career trajectory looks like. Instead, it's a messy testament to getting interested in a number of topics and ideas that are loosely aggregated around a couple of consistent big ideas. I'm still learning how to focus those and describe their relevance. And more importantly, I think I'm figuring out who I want them to be relevant to, and that might not be a strictly academic audience.

So suck it, sadistic schoolmarm! You can have my spring leave, but I've still got my hippie summer! Here's to hoping for some compassionate, productive research in the coming months, that comes out of peace, love and folk music, rather than pain, suffering and judgmental silence.

I'm Number Two! I'm Number Two!

2010-04-20T15:43:00.003-04:00

So, I took off to visit the in-laws (which is a story in and of itself, let me tell you). And on the one day that I managed to sneak off and get myself some internet access, I discovered that I was the runner-up for the unexpected job interview I had a few weeks ago. Oh mixed feelings, how I love you! It's been so long!

I didn't say much about that job, as it was both full of promise (involved lots of the kinds of work I love to do and don't get to do as much of as I'd like: brainstorming with faculty; implementing pilot programs; talking about pedagogy; using other people's money to try shit out) and, simultaneously, full of problems (an academic job of sorts, but not at a college; negotiating with the new people and my existing job to bounce between them; expectations that I'd spend a lot more time in the office and on the ground at the new place). It was weird---the details of the new position would have been hellish, and yet I was so absolutely drawn to the idea that I could do the other stuff that it almost seemed as if sorting through them would have been worth it. Finding out that I didn't get it was both a disappointment and a relief.

Disappointment=why don't you love me? and also, to be honest, a little bit of but I was hoping that you'd save me from going back to my real job and the wretched interactions with some of my colleagues!

Relief=I teach two days a week in the fall and I don't have to spend the summer prepping for another job

In addition to these two feelings (which were somewhat expected), I find myself awash in a couple of surprises. The first is an unexpected sense of "if you really wanted that, then I'm glad you didn't pick me." The chair of the committee wrote to let me know that everyone really liked me, but that they ended up going with someone who had a very different academic background than me. It was such a delightful experience to be able to think: "wow, it really has nothing to do with me. If you all wanted that, then I'm not your girl." As I mused on it later, I also found myself thinking that I think they've made a mistake---given the way that they described the position and its role, I think they've chosen someone who can propel the few far, but will leave the many behind----something that's pretty antithetical to the way that I think about my goals as a teacher and as an administrator. In comparison to my experiences on the academic job market, this is a pretty clean and heartening rejection. And it's weird--but hopefully not crazy--to think that I'm not a big loser because I didn't get the job.

The other big surprise, I have to say, is that I think the process may have led me to some thinking about a new project. I'm a bit nervous to say that out loud---I might kill it just by whispering it. But it may be the case that in the day-long, adrenaline-filled rat race of applying for a job, I began to articulate a position that has some potential in it. Maybe. Stay tuned.

While you're waiting, take a look at a golden oldie, and the one that inspired the title for this post (the scene starts around 2:35)

Writer-phobia

2010-04-09T10:28:00.002-04:00

Last night, I went to a reading by one of my favorite authors of all time (and this includes the dead ones). He's someone I wrote part of my dissertation on, someone I teach rather frequently, and someone I have been calling "My (insert ethnicity here) boyfriend" on Facebook in the run-up to his talk. The more that I anticipated seeing him up close and personal, however (and the more that I indulged in fantasies of him picking me out of the crowd and sweeping me away to his private love nest in New Jersey), the more uneasy I began to feel. What if he proved, in person, to be so much more disappointing than the man-myth I'd built him up to be?

I think this fear is based on at least two crushing experiences I've had with living artists. The first, and less devastating, was hearing a Fresh Air interview with a pre-Hulk Edward Norton. Remember when people thought EN was going to be the next DeNiro? He was writing, directing, dating strong (semi-crazy) women like Salma Hayek and Courtney Love. All of this worked to build up the closest thing I'd had to an actor crush since Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank ("my psych profile fit a certain...moral flexibility"). In the interview, he talks intelligently about working in Fight Club, about being related to one of the first American city planners. So everything is well and good until Terry asks EN what his favorite book is. Wait for it. Catcher in the Rye. CATCHER IN THE RYE? What are you, sixteen?! (Look, I've got no beef with CitR, but I don't think you can be an adult and claim it as your favorite book. If you have to go Salinger, than at the very least go with Franny and Zooey. Better yet, don't go with Salinger at all. And CERTAINLY, Big Ed, don't start talking about your affinity with Holden Caufield.)

Game over.

Later, I had the opportunity to hear a famous lyrical novelist read his work and answer questions. Loved him. Wanted to have his babies. Hot Sri Lankan man who had a way with words and a deep baritone voice? Sign me up! During the Q&A, being the nerdy little graduate student that I am, I asked him about a pet theory of mine: that his first novel, an invented biography of a jazz legend, was in fact structured like jazz music---seemingly improvisational, variations on a central melody, etc. The answer? "I'm a poet and it was my first novel. I just couldn't hold the structure together."

I hate everyone, and particularly authors who are incapable of judging their own works.

I spent the entirety of the Q&A last night waiting for My (insert ethnicity here) boyfriend to tell some inane or horrifying anecdote about his process, or his reading list, or his unselfconsciousness of his own work. Thankfully, none came. He was articulate and charming, and lovely; neither solipsistic nor incapable of self-questioning. Whew. The crowd was small, and I could have easily waited in the short line to talk with him and get a book signed. I dallied for a minute considering the option, but headed to my car instead. I was too afraid to ruin it.

It occurs to me that I really should stop working on living writers, if I have to live in fear that their work is so much less impressive than they are as people. Is it unfair to ask artists to be as smart in person as they are on the page or screen? Would I be willing to hold myself to this same standard?

Making Doors

2010-04-02T10:13:00.003-04:00

In the continuing saga of my mid-life, mid-career crisis, I had the opportunity to talk with two people from my academic past: my undergraduate advisor and my dissertation advisor. Honestly, I'm still impressed that these two pick up the phone when they see that it's my number on the display, because nine times out of ten, I'm always calling with these weird, not-really-academic questions. And yet, the kinds of advice I get: out of the mouths of the patriarchs!!

My undergrad guy, who I will forthwith call Rainer, in deference to his advanced age, gravitas, and love of all things reich, was quick to tell me that this discomfort with the profession---and what I do now---is nothing new. "Totally normal, Fluff. Even pedestrian!" Always the metaphoric thinker, he first suggested that post-tenure is a "pivot point." Which way did I want to turn, now that one foot was stationary? Some, he noted, turn to administration for a new outlook, while others find a new angle on their research. All this image gave me, really, was agita. It could have been because I was picturing myself in a shiny basketball uniform, complete with long, saggy shorts, desperately pivoting trying to decide which way to pass the ball.

"Think of it this way," he continued. "You're looking down a very long corridor right now." Yep, I thought, about 30 years long. "You have to figure out some ways to make some doors for yourself." Is that not a bleak image? Jeeeeebus. Without some imagination and creativity, I'm going to be stuck in this same goddamned hallway for the rest of my life? Noted, there are way worse hallways---hallways where you shovel shit or sit in a cubicle and have someone yell at you, for instance---but 30 years of hallway is still 30 years of hallway.

Diss advisor had similar advice, although a bit more of an open approach. [Dude, in the misty past, did I ever give DA a name? He needs one. And since the hallmark of writing the diss was our mutual distraction by Sex and the City episodes, his name henceforth should be: Dr. Big?] Big, who happened to visit a few years back, was careful to remind me of what a great corridor I've got myself on. "Look, Fluff. It's clear that you're valued, and you get to teach stuff you like. I've got students right now who are fighting for 4/4 positions at Idaho State with a three-quarter load in comp." (And again, I have to ask myself: am I the last generation of academics who could get a semi-decent, not outrightly exploitative job? Damn! That is some f'ed up shit right there.) "Take another look at what you've got," Dr. Big said, "but you might start thinking about other ways to work. What you have to ask yourself about any opportunity is: 'when I get in the car to go to work in the morning, am I happy?'" And then he delivered some incredibly sage advice about a position I'd been turning and turning over in my mind for a week, since my informal lunch.

All of this to say, there's something about the corridor image that works for me (the pivot? not so much). So what are the doors that are available to us, post-tenure? How do you make a door out of a wall? Or at the very least, how do you decorate your damn hallway so that it gives you something interesting to look at while you traverse it?

I had lunch with one of my newer colleagues yesterday, and she mentioned that one of the benefits of this job is that she can choose her panic---as in, she can decide when to apply for a conference or a seminar, and thus light the "must write and be smart now" fire under her ass. It made me realize that pre-tenure involves managing panic, and making it work for you. Outside standards push you down the corridor, sometimes at breakneck speeds, and you're desperately trying to stay in that hallway. Once the hallway is your fate, I think the propulsion changes; what I'm looking for is the thing that will pull me down the hall---where I'm running toward something, not frantically away from it, and as an added bonus, I'd like the pull that's so strong it opens up a door.

I think I've now officially exhausted all of my metaphors for one day. More soon.

On the Importance of Maintenance Shopping

2010-03-22T08:40:00.003-04:00

Two weeks ago, I had the delightful opportunity to meet my good friend Frenchie in the big city to do what we do best: gab, eat, and shop. It's something that we try to do once a year, and this time it was enabled by my wonderful, miraculous leave. Generally, we have to wait until the summer when both of us are available, but this time, we were able to go on her spring break.

As we tooled around the city, I found myself in the clearance section at Ann Taylor (hey, it happens). I tried on a bunch of stuff, from the feathered to the spangled, but found myself at the register with three items: a black cowlneck sweater, a black cardigan, and a black tweed skirt (a departure, actually, given that it's got pockets and pleats). Not exactly my most fashion-foward moment. As I waited in line, I defaulted to the rationalization of "maintenance shopping."

What exactly is maintenance shopping, you ask? Strangely, I'd never articulated it that way to myself before, but it's the utterly necessary task of buying and/or replacing the must-have items in your closet that you go to again and again. Black cardigans aren't exactly exciting, but when the one that you have is little but a collection of fabric pills and mended holes, it's time to do some maintenance shopping. I should note as well that it's easy to let maintenance shopping become a rut---and you'll know when you're there when you get home, stow your new purchase next to its brethren in your closet, and then when you go to wear it, you can't tell it apart from the others---but it's not a task to be neglected. It's not exciting, but it's necessary.

An academic leave does not engender maintenance shopping (at least not for me). This is the time when I realize how shallow other parts of my wardrobe are, in fact. I'm now wearing jeans that have been idling at the bottom of the stack for years, I keep running out of clean t-shirts, and my sweat pants are on permanent rotation. My array of professional clothes are hanging in a deserted end of my closet, all lined up with nowhere to go (and I'm just hoping that some of them will fit when I have to put them on again). Given that my sartorial experience for the next 4 months will involve the same t-shirts and sweatpants, maintenance shopping was pretty far down on my list of necessary expenses. However, Frenchie's visit goaded me a bit. "If nothing else," I figured, "it will be less I'll have to find and pay for come fall."

The bigger lesson here, however, is that maintenance shopping is important for exactly the reason that fashion experts tell us to always have one LBD in our closets----you never quite know when you're going to need it, and when you do, you can't guarantee that you'll have time to go and find something. Case in point, when a semi-random employer that you never really expected to hear from calls you and asks you to come for an "informal lunch" the next day. 24 hours notice is barely enough time for me to check in with every person who's ever given me advice about this kind of thing, let alone to go through my closet to see what fits and isn't stained. Thank you, maintenance shopping, for ensuring that I at least looked cute on short notice. [I just mis-typed that as "shirt notice" which would be a far better title for this post...]

Oil Me.

2010-03-16T08:32:00.002-04:00

I can't help feeling a bit like the Tin Man as I return to this blog---I'm so rusty I'm frozen in place. Perhaps some girl with cute shoes and a dog will come and rescue me? And then I can go and get a heart! Or discover that I had one after all!

In the spirit of full disclosure, I really hate The Wizard of Oz. I know it's heresy to all of you Garland-worshippers and members of the Lollipop Guild, but I've never been able to get on board the train (flying house? whatever). But the metaphor remains, I think, and since I appear to only be able to think in metaphors, it will have to do until I can find another.

So what have I been doing since, oh, JULY 31st? (good grief.) Mulling. Wandering, sometimes in the desert. I did effectuate a house move, which really threw me for a loop (I don't recommend it, kids, I really don't. Especially not the weekend before classes start). I taught my first semester with tenure. I backed out of a major conference at the last minute because I couldn't finish my paper. I pulled off a pretty tremendous athletic feat, only to beat myself up about it later. I weathered the pedagogical nightmare of the most severely disabled student (and her team of resource people) I've ever had. And, as you might imagine, I complained. A lot.

Here's the part that's going to be tricky: garnering your sympathy, even as I reveal my incredible, incredible privilege. Because here's the deal: I'm on leave this semester. For good behavior. And it is everything you might imagine it to be: lots of time to read, and think. Weekends are mine own. I've seen movies, I sleep through the night, unplagued by anxiety dreams. I work out when I want to (and because I have to, because leave=fatness, let me tell you). Bliss. Thank you, oh gods of academe, for this most excellent of job perks.

In the midst of all of this goodness, then, what could I possibly have to complain about?! Truly, bitch, wtf? Feel free to do some slapping around, if you must; it's nothing I haven't said to myself already. The economy has tanked, taking the profession with it. I'm lucky to have a job, lucky to be tenured, incredibly lucky not to be furloughed. And yet, I'm plagued by this rudderless feeling. Call it mid-life crisis, call it bourgeois pseudo-nausea...I attribute it directly to the post-tenure moment, and I'm stuck between wondering if it's a professional problem or it's one that I've just created for myself by running my career in the wrong way. Basically, it goes something like this: work work work to get into college, work work work to get into graduate school, work work work to finish dissertation, work work work to get a job, work work work to get tenure, work work work to? for? Bueller?

I think that I've always imagined that I was a pretty independent thinker. I've been lucky to have been in situations where people that I admire and respect were willing to listen to some pretty hare-brained, cockamamie ideas that I had and to help me to go forward with them. This post-tenure, academic leave situation, however, gives the lie to that whole idea. For what feels like the first time in my life, I'm without an inspirer/mentor, and really, without a clear goal. And without those things, all work seems arbitrary. Could I write an article on this contemporary novelist that no one is publishing on? Sure. Could I research a famous columnist who needs more academic attention? Yup. But I could also learn to play an instrument, or build a website, or practice my armpit farts. They all seems equally valid and exciting on any given day. All this directionlessness is making me absolutely fucking batshit crazy. And sendentary---because without a direction, I can't bring myself to move at all. I'm going to assume that someone would tell me if there were an albatross hanging around my neck, right? [Look, Ma, from The Wizard of Oz to Moby Dick in 10 paragraphs or less!]

My return to the blog, then, is a bit of a flail, but one that I'm hoping will be productive. I've missed this little thing, and those of you who remain (and how impressed I am by those of you who continue to write! Kudos! I bet you have goals and shiz!). Let the navel-gazing begin!

F'ing Finally!

2009-07-31T09:52:00.003-04:00

Well, folks, I think (I hope, I cross my fingers that I am not jinxing myself by writing this sentence) that it's all over. I just heard this morning that the sellers of the house we'd like to buy, and are deep in to negotiations with the mortgage company about, have agreed to take less than our formerly agreed upon price, based on the low assessment. It's taken about a week to get to this accord (think Yalta), but here we are.

It occurs to me that there are two ways of looking at this all-consuming, debacle of a summer project that we've engaged in.

1) If you subscribe to some sort of deterministic, happy-go-lucky, faith-based universe, someone could argue that this has all turned out for the best. Despite the fact that we are selling our house for less than we think it's worth (and, perhaps, at a loss, given what we've done to it in the past 5 years), the price reduction on the new house will actually give us a narrow margin of overage that is the beginning of a renovation budget. Or, in the eternal response of my parents: it all worked out in for the best, right? Well, sure, if you don't count the hours of sobbing and nail-biting, and my continued intense hatred of the buyers of our house. [Just between us: I'm far more lax about spills on the carpet than I was a month ago. It may even be the case that a small yacked-up hairball sat in a corner of the carpet for a day or two before I did something about it. And in the meantime, the weeds continue to grow, because I'll be damned if I'm going to expend one ounce of energy on behalf of the buyers. Note to future homeowners of America: it's not the best idea to piss off the people who are going to live in "your" house for a month before you settle.]

2) If you subscribe to an O.Henry, pain-is-entertainment universe of dramatic irony, however, I'll simply note that we've resolved our summer housing project on precisely the last weekday before I go back to teaching.

Choose your own adventure, kids. I'm tempted to spend the day doing whatever I damn well please as a sad substitute for the past two months of summer that I've missed out on.

Holding Out

2009-07-26T11:45:00.005-04:00

Look. It's not like I'm purposely holding out on you or anything. It's just that I can sum up the last three weeks of my life like this:

No LOLz here, my friends. I mean, sure, I got to take a much-needed and delightful break to see friends in the big city. But the tenor of July, for the main part, has been a combination of rage and despair, hope and dashed hopes, flavored with a soupcon of "seriously, this has to be over soon, right?"

Tense updates in the negotiations about selling our house continue. The going consensus of our realtor and lawyer is that the buyer's realtor is invested in squeezing us for every penny she can. My favorite quote from Friday: "it's clear that they're not going to do the work on which they're basing this estimate. It's just about getting you to give them the cash." To wit: despite the fact that they based their original offer on visible structural issues, they now want us to take more money off of the final price of the house for those same issues. I spent much of the weekend entertaining various revenge fantasies, in which both the buyers and the realtor have infestations of mold in their respective houses. But those, I think, are probably healthier than the whining that I often find myself falling back on: what is wrong with these people? Is there absolutely no point at which they'll consider, even for a second, acting in a way that's honest and/or fair? And when did I turn in to such a Pollyanna? As my contractor likes to say: "People are scumbags, Fluff. Haven't you been around long enough to figure that out?"

Meanwhile, we found a house we're very interested in. Does it need aesthetic updates? Yes. Does it violate my requirement for a post-'84 kitchen and bathroom? Yep. In addition, I'll just say one word: paneling. But, bless its heart, it's on a half acre plot and it's a 12 minute commute to work. The owners accepted a very reasonable offer with no haggling, for which I thank them profusely. Forge ahead, says I. Pay for yet another structural inspection (on top of the one for the house we lost to contingency). The result from the inspector: it's sound, and it has a nifty, brand-new furnace. The result from the appraisal: it's worth $10,000 less than you think it is, which will affect your financing.

Thus, on this happy Sunday, I wait to hear whether the owners want to amend our contract to adjust to the appraisal. Meanwhile, however, the house we're living in is going to go, assuming that there's not some other way the buyers have of nickel-and-diming us to death. Rock and a hard place, anyone?

My summer class begins in a week, and will be immediately followed by a very full fall semester of teaching and service, and a couple of conferences to which I've committed. Of course, I had planned to spend the summer drafting out those conference papers, so that the fall wouldn't be so hectic. Instead, my entire summer has been consumed by the house. Assuming (and this is a big assumption at the moment) that the purchase of our house-in-need-of-renovation goes through, we can also assume that I'll spend a good part of this coming year, and perhaps the much fought for sabbatical coordinating reno rather than writing. All of which, I think, leads up to a big career FAIL on my part. My big post-tenure plan was to reinvigorate my research agenda, and not only have I f'ed that up for now, but seemingly for later as well.

Truly, I hate everything. Except you, readers, despite the fact that I've made you wade through my solipsistic whinging above. I'll be back with some sweetness and light, I hope, or at least some of the snarky sarcasm I'm too self-indulgent to locate right now.

Ain't No Drama Like a Housing Drama

2009-07-04T10:46:00.002-04:00

'Cause a housing drama don't stop!

After eighteen days of maintaining a perfect showroom of a house, we were told that someone was going to make an offer on it. And that was good, because at the same time, someone had made an offer on the house we wanted to buy, and so we'd have 48 hours to close the deal on our own house and thus maintain our contract with the sellers of the house we wanted. "Well," I thought. "This is either all going to fall into place, or it's all going to fall apart."

In this, as in so many things, I'm painfully naive.

Because when the offer on your own house is $20,000 below the asking price, it makes for a long and tense negotiation. And when you're staring down a ticking clock on buying a different house, it can make for a particularly nerve-wracking scenario. As a friend said to me: this is the REAL 24, yo. Where's Jack Bauer when you need him to waterboard someone? Of course, I seldom see JB figuring amortization schedules on the fly. (In truth, I seldom see Jack Bauer at all----I hate that show.) Finally, with 20 minutes to go on the deadline, I told the lawyer to drop the contract on the house we wanted. The offer just wasn't going to clear the amount that would make me feel comfortable with the mortgage and closing costs. (Oh, and BTW: living in the state with the highest closing costs is no picnic. Just saying.) The lawyer, in his pithy vernacular, calls this "killing the deal," as in "Fluff, don't call me at 10 of to tell me to kill the deal. I need more time to write up the letter." or "Fluff, the clock is ticking. Should I kill the deal?" Yes, goddammit, kill the deal, and with it my last month of fantasizing about having coffee on the sunporch of that house, looking out into the wooded backyard. Kill my vision of a small, pristine turquoise office with white furniture. Kill it all.

Ah, but it the midst of that, another decision still needs to be made!! What about the offer? Hello, long night of the soul, and thank you to the 3 people who were patient enough to listen to me running them through the various considerations governing the sale. I'll spare you the outrage, the sobbing, the sleeplessness. We'll just say that it's done, and that I'm confident it was the right decision, even if a disappointing one. Oh, and that when my cat missed the litter box this morning and peed on the floor, I was sorely tempted to leave it there to soak into the floorboards in all of its cat-pissy odiferousness.

So now, we're frantically looking for a house to buy before we're turned out on the street. Now, of course, I remember how hard it was to find something that I liked in the first place. Now, I'm considering living in places I've never thought twice about, because it appears to fit our bizarre criteria. Would it have been better to have let the deal live and have eaten ramen for a few years? I suppose we'll find out in the next month or so. Meanwhile, keep your eyes open for a house that's really quiet, but within easy driving distance to work, that has a post-1984 kitchen. Preferably mid-century modern. With a combined living/family room. And a fireplace. And hopefully central air. And hardwood floors.

How hard can it be?

Working Hard or Hardly Working?

2009-06-14T22:19:00.002-04:00

It's at times like these that I realize that I've spent far too much time around old codgers who speak in cliches. Because I can't think about working hard without the accompanying "or hardly working? Hyuck, hyuck." It occupies the same mental geography as "hot enough for you?" and the answer to the question "is today Sunday?" (which is, of course, "all day!"). I'll just put on my sans-a-belt pants now and call it a day.

The point of this meandering, however, is that I've been rethinking my attitude towards work. In part because I've just spent the last week and a half putting in a goodly number of 10 hour days of manual labor getting our house ready to go on the market. Which, as my friend likes to say, sucks donkey balls. I painted, I cleaned, I painted, I moved stuff around, I found clever hiding places for all kinds of crap, I packed and moved stuff to friends' garages and basements, etc., etc., etc. Then I've meticulously maintained the cleanliness and uncluttered nature of our house for the last 4 days that the house has had showings. Much of this has been a solo effort, too, because Senor Fluff was away at a conference. Let's just say this for the record: it's been a long time since I've had sweat running in my eyes inside the house. This morning, I crawled out of an upstairs window onto the roof of my house with a broom to sweep up a pile of vegetal detritus because the realtor noted that the guy coming today asked specifically about the age of the asphalt. I've got some nasty form of tennis elbow from painting trim and windows. I've taken to wiping my cats' feet with a wet paper towel to prevent them from tracking litter dust across the tile floor.

Aside from my whining here (and internally), I've spent much of my time reflecting on my relationship to hard work. It occurs to me that for the majority of the last four years (give or take), I've been half-assing a lot of things. Class prep, research projects, home improvement. You name it. I have any number of reasons for this: I'm tired; I hate everyone, and particularly the person the work might benefit; hard work without a definitive payoff is akin to pouring sand down a rat hole. This last one is a particularly powerful rationale for me. I'm seriously unwilling to do something unless the payoff is clear, reliable, and valuable. But how often does that happen, really? And what the hell am I doing if I'm not working hard? (Lamenting the sad mis-use of Isaac Mizrahi on The Fashion Show for one, but that's a different story.)

So putting the house on the market has been a new experiment in hard work. There's a payoff, sure, but it's far from guaranteed, and at best it's going to be very probably a long, drawn-out ordeal. I'm hoping that by reminding myself what it is to work hard on the house without a definitive reward is to acquire some inspiration to work hard on my research. Meanwhile, my inner old man tells me that this is character-building. And wonders if it's hot enough for you?

Frenzy

2009-06-05T07:14:00.002-04:00

Well, the 'rents touched down, and I took a few days to travel with them. Things were, as usual, not nearly as bad as I expected they might be. Part of it, I think, was having the ability to identify the source of my animus toward my step-father, so thank you, blog! The other part was probably due to the fact that I consciously told myself, over and over again, that the number of vacations that I have left with my parents is probably limited. They're not geezers or infirm, or anything, but I couldn't help but notice the ways that they're slowing down a tiny bit, need more bathroom breaks. That realization became my mantra when, for instance, we drove across an entire island at 30 miles an hour and read every business and street sign aloud, a la Rainman.

If anything, what I discovered on this trip was that my parents and I share a fundamental habit of mind: thinking that each of us knows best. I, for instance, kept trying to tell them that I didn't want to hit the highway during rush hour near a major city renowned for it's insane drivers. "How bad can it be?" Oh, I don't know...multiple people driving on the shoulder like it's a lane bad? Meanwhile, my stepfather barked at us for taking out a map on a walk to try to assess the best way of getting to our dinner location. "People will know you're not from around here!" He's not wrong, of course, but we happened to be in a suburb of the city where kids routinely pay $50,000 a year to go to college. If someone's going to be mugged (which isn't likely), it's not going to be us in our schlubby clothes. And finally, my mother refuses to take any money and gets all aggressive about it. We're all right, all the time. Except when we're not.

But now I'm home! Glorious home! Let the fantasy summer begin! Oh, except that while I was on vacation with my parents, I sorta bought a house. And now I have a month to sell mine. And it has to go on the market next week.

If you need me, I'll be in a frenzy of painting, cleaning. decluttering, putting on switchplates, painting, gardening, painting, and moving furniture. Keep your fingers crossed...

High Drama

2009-05-30T10:24:00.006-04:00

I've spent the past week doing anything but working on my essay, which I at first attributed to deep personal failings. Because, you know, who wouldn't? As of this morning, however, I've been wondering if there is a far more reasonable happenstance to blame.

My parents are arriving tonight for a week-long stay. Now, my parents, as a pair, rarely stay with us. They're people who like hotels, and I'm happy to let them stay in one (honestly, our humble little abode doesn't really compare to a schmancy hotel by the airport. It's just no contest). Furthermore, they're not even going to stay long in the town; as die-hard Westerners, they come to the East to look around. That looking, however, has taken on all sorts of possibilities over the last two weeks: a variety of states, coastal and mountain destinations, big cities and small villages. To protect the innocent (namely me), I'll use Western U.S. geography for an allegory. Imagine if you lived in Phoenix, and you had visitors who were going to stay for a week and wanted to rent a car and see San Diego, Santa Barbara, Catalina Island, Utah's national parks, and maybe Mexico. In theory, they could do it, right? In practice, however, as the local, you imagine that it might be a bit taxing. That's been the on-going conversation with my mother for the past two weeks. Almost every day. For an hour or so at a time. Mr. Fluff's joke is that at breakfast tomorrow, they're going to announce that they want to go to North Carolina.

As I went into emotional overdrive this morning while making oatmeal and planning to clean the house, weed the front lawn, etc., I realized that the issue with their visit and my unfinished essay is not, as you might imagine, the sheer number of hours that I've spent on the phone with my mother. The issue is the way that this instance is entirely representative of a family dynamic that we've inhabited since I was 12. My mother and my step-father were married when I was 14, and were together for years prior to that. Inheriting a growing teenager could not have been a picnic for him, I have no doubt. And while I'm reasonably sure that I made all of the appropriate noises about welcoming him into the family, etc., my guess is that I was less than accepting, and pretty passive aggressive about it (because that's how I roll, yo.).

It's always been the case, I think, that my mother has had to negotiate between him and me, that we have little ability to communicate with one another, and that each of us demands that she put our needs and desires first. Mr. Fluff, always the Freudian, pointed out to me this morning that regardless of the biology, it's a pretty classic Oedipal conflict here (without the need for the penis, of course). And I can acknowledge that, even as I recognize that there's a slight twist: I think there's a good deal of anxiety on the part of my step-father, as well, that he might be the one forced to separate from the mother. I think that it's incumbent upon me to realize that, and yet it's difficult to do when his needs or desires condition everyone else's actions (case in point: as of yesterday, my mother cancelled reservations at City A so as to spend more time near City B, because she was pretty sure that that's what he wanted, although it had not yet been approved. Twelve hours til touchdown, plan still in progress...). There's something else in the mix too, that I can't quite wrap my brain around: my step-father was the only adult in my adolescence who was deeply invested, I think, in proving me wrong, or making sure that I was punished. He was the one who questioned my motives, read my diary, grilled me, etc. All of which, of course, put my mother in the enviable position of having to defend me, or to carefully consider whether he had a point (which, to be fair, he sometimes did). He may or may not have consciously thought that this was his contribution to parenting. It's also the case, however, that these may have been attempts to tip the balance of my mother's regard and affection toward him and away from me. Which is a pretty shitty thing to do to a 14 year old kid. To say that there's some lingering resentment and habit of suspicion, then, would be an understatement.

In other words: I think part of the trouble focusing on the writing this week has been because I was cranking through all of the turmoil that this situation creates, and they haven't even shown up yet. And all of this is a crying shame, because I so enjoy seeing my mother, and to the extent that it's possible, I think my step-father has attempted to radically revise his relationship with me. What that might suggest as a way forward, however, eludes me, except to say that I suspect its the case that I need to find a way to communicate my feelings directly to him, without involving my mother as the third, mediating party. In other words: I think I need to be the person that my 14 year old self couldn't be.

Maybe that's the point at which the essay will miraculously write itself.

Fantasy Summer

2009-05-20T08:53:00.002-04:00

After two years of teaching a summer class that began the week after spring classes finished, I finally declined do a frantic May term class. No May term class, no bizarre faculty workshop in the Midwest. None of it. And thus, my fantasy summer could commence.

The fantasy summer is not exactly the most exotic or radical of fantasies. I don't dream big here. I don't, for example, imagine running wild in a field of wheat in Italy, all Room with a View style. In fact, I said no when my mother suggested renting a villa in Italy this month. (I'm still debating the wisdom of this decision, but every time I consider the vision of being trapped with my parents in the countryside, the "no" seems smarter and smarter.) Nope, none of the big world-traveling fantasies for me. Rather, the fantasy summer has lots of things like: get up and drink coffee leisurely, and then watch Rachel Getting Married on the DVR before 11 a.m. Re-up my subscriptions to Elle, Vogue, and Bazaar and read them all at a local coffee shop every month. Go to weekly guitar lessons. Wander the farmer's market and experiment with complex and very tasty recipes.

As fantasies go, it's not a bad set.

Despite the fact that I'm not teaching during this month, however, there is no fantasy summer in sight. Since the completion of finals, a mere two weeks ago, I have done the following:

spackled, primed, and painted the downstairs hallway and it's three doors
spent 28 hours in the big city (including travel time), so that I could see this
cleaned the house and cooked brunch for eight
spent a quality 6 hours with the tub refinisher, his toxic chemicals and humming machinery
clocked approx. 15 hours on the phone with my mother to work through 18 different plans for their last minute trip to visit
written the first 8 pages of an essay due May 31
began writing the syllabus for one of my fall classes
began reading the textbook for another fall class

And lest I think that the fantasy summer awaits, the next 6 days require:

calling and reserving hotel rooms for parents' still undecided travel plans
grocery shopping and baking for friends
36 hours in Green State to cheer on marathoning friends (for the record, this isn't a burden)
getting oil changed in car for said trip
getting a hair cut and pants hemmed in preparation for parents' arrival
changing dentist's appt. because of conflict with parents' arrival
let's not forget that essay, shall we?

After all that, then the fantasy summer commences? Well, no, then the parents arrive. But after that? Hmm, but then we're into June, and I should really start researching for my fall conference paper, and revising and resubmitting an article. July, perhaps? Doubtful, as I signed on for a short pre-fall semester class, as well as prepping the fall classes.

So, to my non-academic friends on Facebook who say things like: "wow, get ME an academic job so I can have summer break," I say to you, fuck right off.

It is truly bliss to have three full months without being accountable to students--truly, it's the mechanism that allows me to like them come fall. But it suddenly occurs to me that the fantasy summer can only happen if I give up writing and researching, at which point I'd be unaccountable (and I mean that in many ways) to myself. There's a special kind of irony in the idea that, post-tenure, my fantasy summer is further away than ever.

Maximize Inefficiency

2009-05-12T08:03:00.003-04:00

I was sitting on the couch yesterday, reading an article, and I had to pee. And my first thought was: "If you wait until you're hungry, then you can use the bathroom on your way to the kitchen to make lunch." This has got to stop.

I don't know at what point I fell into this Fordist mind-set, but it suddenly strikes me that it's a logic that rules my life. I have to get a pair of pants hemmed, but the tailor is by the Target, which is by the grocery store, and the post office is on the way---I should just save up all of my errands and run them at the same time. Don't waste a trip! There are weeds in the yard, and there are maples that need to be dug out, and while I'm out there I should put down mulch and put weed killer on the ivy---do it all at once, don't waste the motion! In this essay, I need to talk about the historical background, and then I need to find a couple of quotes from a document in the basement, and then I need to consider what my colleagues have said---I'd better figure it out before I start to write, I wouldn't want to waste a word!

What I'm realizing, of course, is that this kind of thinking is detrimental in two ways. First, the procrastination researchers would say, I'm setting myself up to fail. If every task is huge and seemingly insurmountable, then I can't ever start. By saving everything up to do in one fell swoop, I'm making every molehill into a mountain. Second, the effect is one of two things: either I do nothing, because I can't stand the idea of beginning such a huge set of tasks, or, when I do work up the wherewithal to dig into a project, I'm exhausted and spent by the time it's done, and then I never want to begin again.

If I had to guess, I'd venture that all of this is conditioned by some wonky idea about "efficiency," in which I think it is, literally, "a waste" of time, energy, gas, an extra step, if I were to not do everything all at once. As if I'd like to be some sort of cold fusion automaton who never runs out of energy because its system is so perfect as to conserve fuel all the time. Instead, what I should be trying to do is burn fuel like it's going out of style (which, eco-apocalyptics, it is, n'est pas?). I think I want to expend as much time and energy and thought as possible and see what happens. I know what efficiency looks like, and it bears a striking resemblance to paralysis and apathy. Let's try exuberant waste for a change and see what happens.

What's the worst that can happen? Maybe I pee before lunch?

All Over (without much shouting)

2009-05-09T08:40:00.003-04:00

I finished up the lion's share of my grading by Monday, which fell at the very beginning of our finals week. I've been piddling through a few final grad projects and independent studies this week, while spending hours painting over the hideous paint left by the previous owners of our house. Three coats of primer gives you plenty of time to reflect on the semester, and also to shake it off like so much dust from the bootheels (apparently, it was a very Western spring).

I had spent the two weeks prior to Monday in a grading frenzy. In fact, from Friday to Monday, I read 16 research papers, 15 portfolios, a number of short revised assignments, and a class batch of informal essays. Suffice to say that I was no fun to be around; Mr. Fluff can attest to that. In one instance, I found myself enraged by a particular student's paper (which included 1/3 of the required sources, and the ones that were there were the foundational essay I recommended and provided, and 4 web sources of questionable authorship). If you had bugged my room, you'd hear a slashing Pilot rollerball and a lot of " can't believe I even have to read this shit waste of my time ."

Righteous indignation, much?

If reading across academic blogs is any indication, this is a pretty familiar feeling at the end of semesters. Faculty are both exhausted and outraged at student behaviors (last-minute pleas to pass despite having botched the entire semester; plagiarism; grade challenges, etc.). And I'm anything but immune (see above, and imagine many many hours of grumbling much like it). The advantage of finishing on Monday, however, is that it gave me the freedom to step back a bit and watch the righteous indignation play out across the blogosphere and my colleagues.

And at some point, it finally hit me: our anger and frustration at these 11th hour behaviors are grounded in the idea that they're unusual, or that they violate some universal principle of the teacher/student compact. But they happen EVERY semester. How unusual can they be? If anything, I think I'm beginning to see how they're perfectly natural. The student with the horrendous paper above? I know from my colleagues that she's writing research papers in their classes too. Like us, students reach the end of their semesters exhausted and in a panic about their workload, and it should be no surprise to us that they fall back on all sorts of coping mechanisms that they don't employ when they have more time or less to do.

The effect of this realization, I think, is not to confuse compassion with clemency. It's not about making unsupportable exceptions to my policies, or allowing a student to try to make up for the entire semester. What it can do, I think, is to prevent the wave of self-righteousness from swamping me, to grade the work without getting irate about the student. Because, really, he/she is doing exactly what we can expect h/er to do.

Remind me of this come December, okay?

Gifts of the 80s

2009-04-21T14:21:00.002-04:00

Don't say we didn't learn anything from the age of Reagan.

Case in point? Today, I had to figure out what would rescue a slightly-too-tight pencil skirt. Answer? A really over-sized sweater. All hail Belinda Carlisle. Sadly, I didn't have time to cut the neck out of it.

Write to Teach?

2009-04-21T08:02:00.004-04:00

You know, when I gripe about faculty at Askesis U. who haven't picked up a book in their field in 20 years, or who want to base their promotion to full professor on the article that they published 16 years ago in order to be promoted to associate, it's grounded on the fuzzy idea that in order to be an effective faculty member, you have to be in touch with how your field has evolved, and with the shifts in academic thought in general. Over the past year, however, I'm beginning to see a different compulsion for faculty research and publication: compassion.

I've had two upper-division classes this year, both of which require a big ol' research paper. And because I've been working closely on a number of projects with Yogini (writing teacher extraordinaire), I've been spending a lot of time scaffolding assignments that help the students get to the final product. Let me say what we already know: the big research paper? Intimidating. Scary. A Project with no Clear System of Approach. The Measure of Your Worth as a Major and perhaps as a Human. I don't want to put words in my students' mouths, but when I joke around with them about the paper, these are the ones that I use. I also find myself saying, over and over again: "Don't Panic." and "Come see me." and "let's think about how to adjust the assignment to fit you, rather than adjusting you to the assignment."

And where does all of this warm fuzziness come from, when we have plenty of evidence that I'm often a cold hard bitch of a grader? (True confessions: I called myself "a hag for close reading" in class yesterday.)

As any reader of this blog knows, I am not a confident or effortless writer. Pick any month from the archive and you'll see my predictable reaction to any writing task, which includes the words "paralysis," "self-flagellation," "procrastination," "self-doubt," etc. etc. Last week, a student showed up for her conference in a hairshirt---all, "my problem with research is that I have to read everything or else I'm not really true to the ideas," and "I've got so much information I don't know what to do with it," and "I have all of this stuff to say that I can't get it out."

When I said the word "paralysis" to her, she looked at me like I had just explained her whole life.

If the injunction to doctors is "physician, heal thyself," for academics it might be "professor, become your student." I certainly don't want to project my difficulties onto my students, but I see their struggles in a whole new light when they so closely mirror my own. Maybe somewhere out there, there's a professor who has no problems writing---her shit just writes itself. But for the rest of us, it's a useful reminder that we may have some significant, personal insight into the question "why can't she just write the paper?"

Of course, we can only have that insight if we've struggled, ourselves, with the difficulties of argument, of organization, of projected expectations of how our peers will judge our work. All of a sudden, the necessity of an actively researching faculty at a teaching institution is not just to mimic the expectations set by R1 schools; it becomes a pedagogical exigency. To really teach students to write, you have to write too. (And then you have to be able to see that you're not all that far away from your students, I suppose, but that's another post entirely.)

Lounging on my Laurels

2009-04-07T14:11:00.002-04:00

Apparently, along with tenure comes lots and lots of requests to observe other people's courses. This completely makes sense to me; the number of senior faculty members that I trusted to write observations for me---which go in the big binder from hell---were few and far between. So this is not the kind of request where I even think about saying no.

Observing other good teachers is, on the one hand, a delightful experience. It gives you something of a student's eye view to the classroom. It can show you how your own content and pedagogy connect with your colleagues. It can make you privy to a whole different side of your colleagues--even the ones you thought you knew pretty well. And, for me, it can make me realize how lazy I've become as a teacher.

There are certain things, I think, that have prevented me from getting hit in the face with the consequences of my own laziness. For the most part, students tend to not hate my classes. I suppose I'm relatively entertaining, and the classes are pretty interactive. And I'll stand by this til I die: letting students know that you actually give a crap about what they think goes a long, long way.

So, without any mutinies or absolutely horrendous classroom experiences, I haven't really been all that attuned to how totally boring I've become. But going to other people's classes sure have. One of my colleagues has convinced students to do some marvelous multi-media projects. In spite of the griping and moaning that they did while they were working, the final projects were great fun, and they were all aglow about everything that they had learned. In another colleague's class, the students had developed these terrific patterns of interaction with each other; it was just a great conversation to watch.

Visiting other classes reminded me going to class with a list of passages and depending on my conversational skilz to tie everything together is just not really enough. In general, "enough" isn't really enough. What am I doing to get excited about the text? What am I doing to get them excited about it? What should I be doing to engage those who aren't already hooked, and what am I doing to push those who are? I fear that this is the kind of habit that creeps up on you, particularly when there are no checks in place (hello, no post-tenure review!!). And I wish, in some ways, that my students were harder to please (not in the Marcia sense, but in the "we're not willing to settle for "you're not sadistic or insulting so we love you!"). But in the absence of these external motivations, I'm going to have to muster up my own.

Registration is upon us, and I'm watching my courses fill pretty quickly, but this is a reminder to myself to do better by those students. Let's see what I can do to be a more engaged, and engaging teacher.

[And a quick note to myself? The theme for the post-tenure year is clearly "self-motivation."]

One Per Customer

2009-04-03T10:13:00.002-04:00

Every semester, I get one. And I suppose I should be happy that it's only one. I should be happy about more, actually; for instance, I very seldom get the student who wants to argue about their end-of semester grade. Full disclosure here: a few years ago I moved to a spreadsheet model for student grades, which I now distribute early on in the semester so that students get a sense of how they're overall grades stack up. I've found that this really cuts down on the squabbling. But apparently, the unintended effect is that one student a semester (and please Lord, let it only be one) wants to argue with me about a discussion grade. And often, it's not the entire semester discussion grade, it's one or two days of it. Math is not my strong point, but it does shock me, I have to say, that they're focused on something that represents .03% of the final grade as opposed to the assignments worth, say 20%...

I thought that I was meeting with, hmmm, let's call her Marcia, for reasons that all you Brady Bunch fans will recognize. Right, so I thought I was meeting with Marcia to discuss the upcoming assignments. Which we did, in detail. We chatted amiably about the class, the readings thus far, about particular ways of approaching the assignment, etc. And then after about 2o minutes, she whips out a spreadsheet from a month ago, informs me she's unhappy with the grade and that she's already seen the dean about it. Hello, ambush!

I'll spare you the details here that are specific to Marcia's case, because they're utterly cliched. One of the things that shocked me about the Marcias of the last few semesters (other than their fixation on the detail) is the refusal to admit any form of wrongdoing whatsoever. At all. In the slightest bit. Marcia 2009 is, to my mind, a particularly egregious example of this: when I made it clear that her grade for the day reflected the fact that she had caused someone else to get a bad discussion grade because she prevented her from participating, she looked me dead in the eye and said she would never penalize another student for someone else's behavior. Whoa.

The Marcias, I find, are consistently good students. They pay attention, they participate, they do the work, they work hard. They scrutinize the f'ing syllabus. At Askesis, they all happen to be from the exact same major, which really makes me wonder what goes on in that department. And they share this singularly unattractive quality of refusing to acknowlege that there might be the slightest bit of responsiblity that accrues to them.

Right before the waterworks started with Marcia 2009, she made the defeatist (and to my mind, manipulative) comment that in the end, I was the teacher, and thus what could she do? My initial internal reaction was to contradict her, but I said nothing. And an hour after our tear-laden ambush meeting, I really considered compromising between the grade I thought was fair and the one she wanted.

After a night of fitful sleep, however, I've revised my view. Of my many afflictions, two are at war here: my deep, visceral need for justice, which manifests in the "just say you were wrong!!!"; and the namby-pamby desire to have everyone agree. The spirit of compromise is clearly rooted in the latter, while it deeply offends the former.

But what I realized at 4:28 this morning is that Marcia is right: I am the teacher, and with that role comes the need to exercise power, as much as I want to deny it. Trying to compromise is about, I think, wanting to pretend that the student-teacher power dynamic doesn't exist, or that somehow it would represent the acknowledgment of wrong-doing on her part, which would ease my guilt at applying power. But there's just no reason for it, other than to make me feel better, and to fool myself into believing that we've seen eye to eye, in some way. If I had to guess, Marcia feels empowered to have these kinds of "conversations" because they've been effective for her in the past, and I'm not down with reinforcing that lesson.

So, thanks, Marcias past, present, and future, for reminding me that sometimes I need to acknowlege, question, and apply the power of my station, no matter how uncomfortable that may be. [And everyone keep your fingers crossed that there's only a really ugly course evaluation to come out of this, and not an official grievance lodged. K Thax Bai.]

Because Some Things, You Just Don't Post to Facebook

2009-03-16T08:10:00.002-04:00

It's been years, thankfully, since I've had a UTI, but surprise! Here it is! Hey there, old friend! I wasn't really looking for you, and yet here you are!

Gee, it's been a long time. I thought I was getting really good at making sure that I drank enough, avoiding e coli, peeing before and after sex. You know, all of the things that I'm supposed to do, and do consciously, just to avoid you. But apparently something went wrong, because here you are. And here you stay, despite the fact that I've now drunk half my body weight in cranberry juice, shelled out $22 at the natural food store for cranberry pills, and halved my coffee consumption. In fact, you seem to be a particularly tenacious version of yourself, since none of this is putting a dent in you. Which is odd, because in the many many times that you've come to visit in the past, I could basically cut you down to size in a matter of hours. But you're apparently moving your furniture in and stocking the fridge---you're thinking you're here to stay, I imagine.

It's not that I don't enjoy having you around. Really. I mean, I'm probably better hydrated than I've ever been in my life. And hell, I'm really clean. The kind of clean that comes from scalding hot baths at 2:30 in the morning in an attempt to flush you. Nothing says "good morning" like urethral-pain insomnia!

So, thanks to you, I'm going to renew my relationship with my doctor. Hooray! You and me will just have to sit here and stare at the phone together until the office opens at 9. I suppose we can sing a few verses of Kumbaya if you'd like. Since we're such close pals and all, having spent the last 36 hours together, do you think you could prep for my two classes today?

Spanking my Inner Moppet

2009-03-15T09:35:00.003-04:00

So, clearly, I need to work on this whole "blogging consistently" thing.

Many thanks to y'all for your kind welcomes back and congratulations. I'm happy to be back, and happy to think about rejoining the ongoing conversation. Since a couple of you mentioned that you're interested in the immediately post-tenured musings, I thought I could share a couple of the things that I've been thinking about (because otherwise, you'll have to hear about my spring break, or my marriage, or the exponential growth of my giant ass).

When I think back on my time here at Askesis U., I'm struck by the eternal recurrence of two particular observations involving some of the tenured professoriate. The first is the universal screed: how can that person (changeable with circumstance and context) be such a undermining bully/solipsistic nutjob/abusive, sneaky jerkface/(insert your own description-insult here). The second, of course, is the flip side of that coin: why doesn't someone shut him/her up, or, at least, advocate for the junior faculty who are getting whacked on by him/her?

I think I'm at an institution where we have an ingrained culture of the dyad described above, bought by years of power-grabs and tag-teaming and cults of personality. And I've certainly been on the receiving end of the abuse, while I've watched many of my friends/colleagues go through the same. My sense, then, is that my shiny new tenure comes with some significant responsibility. The first, is, in some ways, the easier and more visible of the two: figure out how to set up a situation for untenured faculty that doesn't mirror the gauntlet that I felt I had to run. I don't want to get some sort of bizarre martyr complex here, I don't think I need to save people, especially those who don't feel like they need saving. So for now, I'm hoping that it's enough to listen when people come to talk to me, and to look for ways to make things like committee appointments, departmental busywork, and course rotation more fair.

The other one is the one that troubles me more, as it seems more insidious. My additional responsibility, I think, is to avoid becoming a self-satisfied, authoritarian baby tyrant who thinks that she knows everything and holds people hostage to her own ideas. Part of me hopes that some of you are saying: "no way! you could never become that person!" [If you're not, skip ahead a few sentences.] Oh, but I could! I really could! Look, I'm basically already that person in certain situations (buying housewares, for instance). In many ways, I think the tenure system, with its complete lack of checks and balances, is a set-up for the production of tyrants. Yogini and I have already discussed two of our courses that aren't going so superbly this semester, and ended by saying: "hey, at least no one is reading the course evals anymore." You SEE?!!

In short, tenure, it seems to me, comes with a set of ethical responsibilities that are the least of your worries when you're assembling your materials. As an inveterate self-flagellator, spending 30 years in a system without many consequences except opprobrium is a recipe for potential disaster. I'm keeping my eyes open for some good role models, and some hidden mechanisms to keep my inner tyrant bound up. In the meantime, if you hear me getting too big for my new britches, start yelling, would you?

Not Dead. Just....Thinking.

2009-03-02T21:39:00.002-05:00

Um, hi there. Remember me?

Once upon a time, I was a snarky tenure-track faculty member, full of vim and vigor (some might even say piss and vinegar), armed with a killer fashion sense and her very own blog. So what happened?

Oy, last semester was a doozy. When last we saw the Fluff, she was in a swirling pit of rage and resentment, some of which was unbloggable for confidentiality reasons, and some was just a never-ending screed about how pissed off I was at the world, and thus, nothing that needed to be unleashed upon the unsuspecting blog world. In other words: some of what I wanted to talk about I couldn't, and some of what I couldn't help saying needed to not be transcribed. So, sorry to leave you out of the loop, and you're welcome!

As a point of re-entry into the academic blogosphere, let me say this: I think something weird happens to one's brain in the semester of tenure application. [In the grand tradition of universalizing my own experience, I'm going to assume that this is true for someone other than me.] Once I turned in the binder from hell, I spent the rest of the semester trapped between the inevitable (but unnecessary) existential fear of being fired, and the anticipation of how burningly resentful I would be of everything I had done for the last five years if I were denied. If you were trapped in my cranium in December, you would have heard this:

"I know everyone gets tenure, but this is a horrible economic year. What if I'm the first ever to get fired?"
"Oh, puh-leez. You're not going to get fired."
"Dude, if this place doesn't give me tenure, I'm going to kill someone. I've done five times the amount of stuff that I'm supposed to have done. None of which was done by some people who were recently tenured. Fuckers. Why on earth have I prostituted myself for this crappy job?! I hate everyone who's ever asked me to do any form of service, and I hate myself for doing it."

Charmant, non? Again with the "you're welcome."

Suffice to say, now that I've gotten the good news and it's actually starting to sink in, I find the entire mental merry-go-round ridiculous. Ha! Good one, tenure system! Funny! I guess the joke's on me!

Now that the resentment is diffused a bit (and strangely, it's only a bit, for reasons that I may blog about later), I'm struck by the ways that I'm constantly being brought up short by the recognition that I don't HAVE to do certain things in order to feed the great gaping maw of tenure application. Example: the form for committee self-nominations just came out last week, and despite the fact that I currently sit on the most contentious and crap-slinging committee on campus, I grudgingly perused the list of open seats on other committees. And then I remembered: I don't need to pad out an end-of-year faculty report. I can do it if I want to, or I can sit this round out.

And thus, I think I'm entering the unmapped territory of intrinsic motivation. For the entirety of my career (such as it is), motivations have always been clear and provided by the accepted trajectory of academe. Apply to graduate school, get into graduate school. Finish coursework and write prospectus so as to begin dissertation. Pass prospectus defense so as to become ABD. Write dissertation so as to finish degree. Finish degree and publish so as to apply for jobs. Get job and teach, research, serve so as to get tenure. Get tenure so as to have a job into perpetuity. Get a job into perpetuity so as to...? What goes here?

It's not the case that I didn't enjoy myself along the way. In fact, I might seriously look back at this train of milestones and make the argument that I managed to get them done because I did what I wanted, as opposed to ignoring what I wanted or thought was most engaging. However, even in the best of all circumstances, when my own desires overlapped with a particular stated goal, it was always the case that any given project or undertaking was a two-fer. I'm interested in researching this topic AND I need to give a conference paper for my tenure file. I'm invested in co-sponsoring this series AND it looks good for my college service.

Aside from the carrot of promotion to full professor (which seems a LONG way off), the two-fer is off the table. So. What goes here? I'm genuinely interested to figure that out.

Danger: Rage Level Rising

2008-11-17T23:22:00.002-05:00

In general, it would be a lie say that I'm not an angry person. I may not be some kind of Sam Kinison figure (AHHHHHH!!!), but I'm not exactly all sweetness and light. I like to think that I've moved to address this character flaw by somehow making my anger at the world both conversational ("Hey, aren't you mad about x?") and humorous (picture hands flailing here. It's a visual thing.). This week however---and yes, I realize that it's only Monday---seems to be the moment at which I can make issues neither social nor funny.

Issue #1: the not-new but consistently unbelievable situation in which people who work together have no respect for each others' disciplines, even as they profit from the involvement of those same people. Somewhere down deep, my code of ethics simply requires that I have a baseline (no matter how low) for a modicum of belief that my colleagues do something important. Even if it's not important to me, per se, it's important. That seems like a given, right? But this week, I got an earful from a school colleague who talked to a member of the granny mafia, and she gave him an earful about how useless--nay, detrimental!--mine and Yogini's research and teaching foci are to the field. Meanwhile, our department rolls out a new concentration in said field, and when the administration asks: "what's new and exciting in your department?" my colleague brings up this minor every chance she gets. Damn! That's cold as ice!

Issue #2: The students in my media class are moving into their final group projects. For the past 12 weeks, we've been viewing, discussing and writing about the conventions of a genre, and discussing what makes that genre work. Each week, there is a specific individual assignment wherein the students analyze the relationship between the viewing and the ideological impact of the text. As they design their final projects, then, we've been talking a lot about the ideological message they want their film to put forward. Now, after two conferences, I have a group that is simply making an incredibly homophobic project. Under the guise of "social critique." If it's social critique, then I'm going to have to go back and re-examine Amos and Andy. They insist that it won't come across that way when they actually make it. Sigh. [Senor Fluff's solution is to suggest to the group that it's reflective of their own deepest fantasies. Tempting...]

Issue #3: I've been having a long-standing conversation with a student about her research paper. First she couldn't come up with a topic; then she couldn't arrive at a text. Throughout, I encouraged her to come and meet with me. No dice. After several concerned emails and draft comments in which I essentially wrote three sample arguments based on her meandering thoughts collected from informal writing over the course of the semester, she locates a school of critical thought and a primary text. But we're not out of the woods yet! Multiple emails and questions about sources. The school of thought that she's interested in (we'll call it shmeader shmesponse) has a 30 year history, give or take. Yet she can't seem to find any sources on it. Or on gender criticism. Or on the author of the text. I just read another draft of her paper, which gives me six pages of her own ideas of what shmeader shmesponse is, with absolutely no reference to the critics or their theories. Because she still can't find sources---"do you have any more ideas for search terms?" The good news is that this is the capstone course, so the fact that she's so lost means that she's learned nothing in the program, and that she'll soon cycle out of it. Except that she's registered for another of my classes in the spring. Wherein I had planned to recycle a lot of material from this course.

God help me if there is some sort of Hegelian synthesis at work here. I prefer to think that they are isolated and passing incidents (except for the first, which is consistent, long-term, and unsurprising). But man, if someone has a ray of hope to shine on my swirling pit of rage, bring it the fuck on.

Student Autonomy?

2008-11-11T21:53:00.002-05:00

Today, I stole one of my previous colleague's excellent ideas: I took my seminar students on a field trip to the research library.

In a million years, it never would have occurred to me to do this. As much as I want to see my students for the people they are, I can't help but fall back, sometimes, on assuming what they will or can do---because I did it when I was their age. As an undergrad, I happily drove all over hell and gone to various bookstores and libraries to get what I wanted. But students at Askesis, I have to remind myself, are different. Despite the fact that Big Research U. is 5 minutes up the road, many have never been, and are intimidated by the entire process of navigating the campus, and then actually using the library once they get there. As we rode back on the bus, there were a number of comments like: "We've been moving for 5 minutes and we're not even off the campus yet!" and "The most impressive thing is that they have a Wendy's on campus." :)

One of the things that I loved about the trip was the way that they rather effortlessly shared their knowledge with one another. C. knows the bus system because she uses it all the time, and so she made sure we got on the right one. T., who drove there on her own so she could go straight to work afterwards, got there before the rest of us, and so she was all too happy to explain how we needed guest log-ins for the catalog, and how the reference librarians could help us. M and L and K found that their books were in similar sections, and so I saw them roaming the stacks in packs.

One of the refrains that's emerging in this course is one that always takes me by surprise: "I've never gotten to choose what I wanted to write a paper on before."

?!!!

On the one hand, I can't imagine that that's true. But maybe? It's certainly the case that some of my colleagues are dictatorial about student research. [My favorite is the one that requires students to read all of the course material BEFORE the class begins, and to choose a paper topic in the first week.] When pressed on the point, the students adjust their statement: "Well, I could choose between some options, but not just anything I wanted." [For the record, they do have specific parameters in my class. It's just that they're based on genre, not on time period.]

I've been turning that refrain around and around in my head all afternoon. Because, really, what's the frickin' POINT of being an English major if you can't write about what you want?! Honestly, if you're going to have to write what someone tells you to write, then you may as well be a business major. And yet, as I think about their experience navigating Big Research U., I have to revise my views a bit. Writing what you want is a lot like going up the road to Big Research U. for the first time. You don't know what you're doing, it's confusing, you have to constantly ask people what to do. You have to be willing to wander, and to live in the wandering for awhile, until you begin to make your way toward the knowledge you came there for. As many of my students said, before we went: "I need someone to hold my hand, or else I won't go."

It's certainly true that some of them are still in the wandering stage. Perhaps more realistically, some are in the I've-been-lost-in-the-wild-for-weeks-and-I'm-hungry-and-tired-and-panicked wandering stage. And if I'd been more dictatorial, they'd be further along in their research and in their drafts by now. But to listen to them work through ideas that are really their own, for what they perceive as the first time, feels well worth the price of progress.

If I'm to take my own metaphor seriously here (that's the one in which library visit=independent research/writing process. You got that, right?), then I would need to think carefully about how to set up more intellectual "field trips," in which they can get a buddy and try something new and scary together. Where they figure out which person knows the bus system, which person knows the campus, and which knows how to work with the librarians, and pool that collective knowledge to get to their own individual goals.

Somewhere in the pedagogical landscape, there is application of the perfect amount of handholding that gets students to their own work. Until I figure that out, I highly recommend the field trip. Pack a lunch, and keep your hands and arms inside the bus at all times.

Testify!

2008-11-05T09:42:00.002-05:00

Whoa.

I've been obsessively watching cached video from CNN, MSNBC and YouTube this morning, as well as reading the NY Times, Politico, and the Huffington Post; I still can't quite believe Obama is our next president. I even performed the digital equivalent of face-slapping: I looked at Fox News online.

Slowly, slowly, it's sinking in, and the proclamations are out in force: this is an historic end to racial barriers; this is a decisive victory for the Democratic Party; this is a victory for democracy, which hasn't seen so many participating in voting since women's suffrage was on the ballot; this is a victory of hope over fear.

My cynicism prevents me from buying into all of those, even as much as I want to (and as much as they make me secretly weepy---don't tell!).

But I just watched Obama's victory speech, and I can decisively say this: it is a victory for grammar. A victory for syntax and enlarged vocabulary. A victory for diction, and for language for all Americans, and every global citizen who comes within earshot of a Presidential Address.

Of the many things to be thankful for on this post-election day, let's not forget the small things.

Nuggets of Student Wisdom

2008-10-31T10:39:00.002-04:00

Oh, this is a list that can go on forever, since I'm reading draft after draft after draft of papers. However, I'll just share two that came up in class this past week:

1) Kfluff: "So what do you make of this description of character? What would it mean to be a 'B+ student of life'? What do you associate with B+'s?"
Student: "Average. A B+ is average."
[sound of jaw hitting floor as many students nod in agreement.]

2) Kfluff: "So what are you finding in the questionnaires you've distributed about that book?"
Student: "Well, everyone loves it. Lots of middle-school girls love it, but I also found a blog by a woman who loves it. And she's a 31 year old middle-aged woman."
[sound of now-bruised jaw hitting floor.]

In other news, however, two of my seminar students did a dramatic reading of the climactic scene from a novel we read for class. The dirty novel. The one I was totally worried about teaching, that three of them are now writing their research papers on. I'm so delighted and charmed by the idea that they're so engaged by the book that they're still thinking about it, and wanting to transmit it to others. And I imagine that it's the first departmental event at which the world "dildo" was used multiple times. Go me.

Bullets of October Crankiness

2008-10-28T09:03:00.002-04:00

In trying out a new teaching schedule this semester, I have chosen one that is, apparently, not conducive to consistent blogging. Obviously. Derrrr.
This is compounded by the fact that I have assigned too much work in my classes. I have never been in this kind of grading trench before, and I may never get out.
Snow before Halloween? Seriously?!
Every year, we hire new faculty members in my department. Every year, they inevitably (and probably wisely) take the stance of neutrality, in which they refuse to hear anything bad about the granny mafia. There's often an air here of "I'm Switzerland. And you should know better than to try to drag me into your petty squabbles. I will stand above the fray." They sometimes sit complacently by in meeting after meeting and watch while other members of the department are condescended to, discounted, or attacked. And yet, sooner or later, that same attention is turned toward them, and then they decide that they want support from the people who they were quick to judge earlier. On my better days, it makes perfect sense to me, and I'm glad that they see the ways that some issues are structural, not personal. On my worse days, I want to tell them to fuck right off.
I have a couple of projects that are on that I'm really excited to work on. That's just not going to happen anytime soon.
I desperately wish that I could figure out how to have an intellectual argument with someone in such a way that I didn't take it personally. I know that people can do this; I just can't get the knack.
I'm just getting over whatever horrible plague that's ripping through the Northeast. That sucker is a doozy. I've seldom been so consciously grateful for my own wellness.
I have to go to the big ol' conference in December to interview for a new faculty line. On the one hand---Yay! It's in my favorite of favoritest cities ever! On the other hand---Boo! This is totally going to screw up any and all holiday plans. On the other hand---yay! the school is going to pay for me to get withing spitting distance of my family! On the other hand---boo! It's the big ol' conference. I have four hands and a wishy-washy demeanor.
The amount of time I'm now spending reading political coverage on multiple websites and television shows a couple times a day in a desperate attempt to get more information about what's going to happen in this election is a real time suck, and only serves to increase my worries about it. November 4 cannot come fast enough.

I don't know if it's the October blahs or the election season or if this is the inevitable anti-climax of turning in the binder from hell. I'm tired and burned out and find myself with very little to look forward to right now. Deep ennui. Mariana trench--deep.

Really?!!

2008-10-12T11:11:00.002-04:00

Apparently this is the blog meme of the day---as seen at Dr. Crazy's and New Kid's and Maggie May's.

I have to admit, given the options, I just assumed that I'd be a Bette. You know, like the "buckle your seatbelts, we're in for a bumpy ride" kind of girl. But Marilyn?! How To Marry a Millionaire Marilyn? Happy Birthday Mr. President Marilyn? Who knew?Actually, for the record, the descriptions below aren't half bad---and lucky you! They come along with a care and feeding manual for moi!

With that in mind, I'm off to save a few wild mustangs before chasing some uppers with a couple slugs of vodka.

Your result for Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? Or Someone Else? Mad Men-era Female Icon Quiz...

You Are a Marilyn!

You are a Marilyn -- "I am affectionate and skeptical."

Marilyns are responsible, trustworthy, and value loyalty to family, friends, groups, and causes. Their personalities range broadly from reserved and timid to outspoken and confrontative.

How to Get Along with Me

* Be direct and clear

* Listen to me carefully

* Don't judge me for my anxiety

* Work things through with me

* Reassure me that everything is OK between us

* Laugh and make jokes with me

* Gently push me toward new experiences

* Try not to overreact to my overreacting.

What I Like About Being a Marilyn

* being committed and faithful to family and friends

* being responsible and hardworking

* being compassionate toward others

* having intellect and wit

* being a nonconformist

* confronting danger bravely

* being direct and assertive

What's Hard About Being a Marilyn

* the constant push and pull involved in trying to make up my mind

* procrastinating because of fear of failure; having little confidence in myself

* fearing being abandoned or taken advantage of

* exhausting myself by worrying and scanning for danger

* wishing I had a rule book at work so I could do everything right

* being too critical of myself when I haven't lived up to my expectations

Marilyns as Children Often

* are friendly, likable, and dependable, and/or sarcastic, bossy, and stubborn

* are anxious and hypervigilant; anticipate danger

* form a team of "us against them" with a best friend or parent

* look to groups or authorities to protect them and/or question authority and rebel

* are neglected or abused, come from unpredictable or alcoholic families, and/or take on the fearfulness of an overly anxious parent

Marilyns as Parents

* are often loving, nurturing, and have a strong sense of duty

* are sometimes reluctant to give their children independence

* worry more than most that their children will get hurt

* sometimes have trouble saying no and setting boundaries

Take Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? Or Someone Else? Mad Men-era Female Icon Quiz at HelloQuizzy

Ever Have One of These?

2008-10-11T12:17:00.002-04:00

I just finished up reading a novel with my seniors---one that they didn't particularly like. So I gave them my speech about it: "look, it's a novel about the elision of the desire and sexuality of young women. It's about how they get others' desires projected on to them, and how any number of people then benefit from those projections. In a moment at which we're fascinated and horrified by Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus, I think this novel is telling us something important about how and why those young women behave the way that they do, and why we care so much about them." At which point, one of the two young men in my class responded: "but it just doesn't have anything important to say."

Sigh.

I'm reluctant to make my students into archetypes, because I really run the risk of erasing their personalities (see above critique of novel). And yet, it occurs to me that this young man fits neatly into a category that I've encountered a number of times at Askesis. I'd say that the defining features are as follows:

significant interest in high culture male authors (Joyce, Pound, etc.)
significant interest and desire to imitate 60's era male authors (Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, etc.)
inflated sense of self and abilities
deeply convinced that his own writing---both creative and analytic---is excellent
rejects criticism and suggestions for revision
disdain for/ignores female classmates
girl/boyfriendless

Do you all get this type? In addition to the specific student quoted above, I've had at least 4-5 of these in the last few years (admittedly, many of them were grouped together in a 2-3 year span). Is this just a new phenomenon, or have I not been paying attention?

I'm tempted to link the maintenance of these boys' positions to the rarefied atmosphere that they inhabit at Askesis. Because the population of the college is about 70% female, they find themselves in a strange position. On the one hand, they're vastly outnumbered, particularly in literature classes. It's not unusual at all for them to be the only male in a classroom of females. (Even in my course this semester, the dude is one of two, and the other male student is out. Really out. "Explained the mechanics of anal sex to the class" out.) And the young women have little to no compunction about discussing their own oppression vis-a-vis the media, or the ways that "guys are," etc. I assume that that holds true across courses as well, since we have a surfeit of female professors in my department, and in others throughout the college.

At the same time, the young women tell me that these young men also occupy a particularly privileged place in the romantic economy. They are vastly outnumbered, true, but that sets them up to be fought over by the young women. According to my graduated girl-moles, guys who would be mediocre in a different pond end up being pretty big fish at Askesis.

So is it this odd power dynamic inspired by their minority position that creates so many of these vexed young men? I'm often struck by the consistency of their literary tastes as well. Is there a handbook somewhere that they're all getting on the sly--the "How To Be an Ass and Alienate Women" Anthology (coming from Bedford in 2009!)?

And last but not least---why do they keep ending up in my courses?!! It's definitely the case that I teach the new stuff, but there are an up-and-coming bunch of young manly men profs in my department. Are they going to them? And do they treat them the same way? Because, ironically, this is what I get from the group. They're just on this side of sycophantic. Not in an obvious way (I don't think), but they like to sit near me in class (which allows them to participate by ignoring the other people in the room); come to my office hours; mention books in class that no one else has read. In general, I think there's a whole predictable bag of tricks that have the desired effect of publicly intimating/performing a camaraderie with me that doesn't exist, but that the other students clearly notice. The irony, of course, is not lost on me: the very girls that they're ignoring and looking down on are the ones that I was, 15 years ago. I'm fascinated by their ability to ignore that connection.

Over time, I've found that my most effective strategy is to ignore them; to constantly attach their ideas and comments to those of the young women in the class; to gently poke fun at their ridiculous comments (see above). I imagine that it's better to refuse to take them seriously than it is to entertain their positions like they're valid.

Redemption via Facebook

2008-10-05T13:17:00.004-04:00

Yes, yes, I've got a whole post about the wrap-up and triumphant turning-in of the tenure package, which I know you've all been waiting to read, on pins and needles, but it's going to have to wait, as I'm dying to talk about the mindfuck that is Facebook.

For the record, I only got on that damn thing because a colleague made me realize how useful it is finding out where alums have gone---not in a "creepy, I'm looking at your binge drinking pics" way, but in a "hey, didn't G. go off to some snazzy grad school, and wouldn't his input be useful for our current students?" way. And so with great caution, I waded into the (cess)pool. And thus the mortification began.

It's been discussed virtually (hah! "virtually." Get it?) everywhere that the social interactions on Facebook are tricky. Who's your friend? How do you treat your students? How do you maintain a professional face? Blah blah. Complicated, no doubt. [Basically, I try to stay out of people's faces, unless I know them pretty well, or they approach me first. I'm an advocate of Facebook passivity.]

So there I am making careful choices about who to friend and why, what kinds of applications to add [What philosopher am I? Check. What sexual position am I? Not so much.], and then they blow the doors off Facebook. There was once a time when it was a pool limited to institutions and businesses. I felt okay with that. Now it's a giant swirling cataract of everyone with computer access. Thanks for upping the ante, Facebook. There's nothing I'd like better than for my students to see what my high school boyfriend wants to say to me after 15 years.

Aside from the complications raised by self-presentation, however, there was also the question about social networks and friends of friends. Because Facebook is the Amazon of social interaction: "other people who like Jack also like Jill! Do you like Jill?" And if you and Jill share 20-25 friends, you see her damn face every time you go to the site. don't you think if I liked Jill I would have friended her by now?!!

And here lieth my 3 month seething social dilemma, and its surprising culmination, pace blog post title. It goes something like this: my hippie college has a thriving Facebook community. Like, there are more members for the teeny tiny program than there are for the entire college of which it is a part. So there's a whole lot of friending, wall-writing, good karma sending, picture posting, etc. The problem is this: once upon a time, I had an ugly, ugly run-in with a friend (Nutsy) and her ex-boyfriend (Werther). You know the kind. Like the two of them break up, he and I hook up, and then she threatens to kill me? In great detail? Like she's written up a flow chart to make sure she recalls what comes after the dismemberment step? Meanwhile, he's suddenly decided that I've betrayed him, and then the two of them get back together? [Lauren Conrad's SO got nothing on me.]

That was pretty much the last I saw of either of them, for a decade. A decade in which I periodically beat myself up for being such a horrible person, a bad feminist, a wronged woman, etc., etc. ( You know, writing it out like this makes it seem like so much less of a big deal. But it was! I was the worst person in the world!!)

So it was particularly horrifying to see Werther pop up on Facebook, daily, as friends of friends. For months. And I just kept thinking: cripes, he must be seeing me all the time too. How uncomfortable. Obviously, he's barely containing his hatred of me---however does he stand it?

You see where this is going, right?

Long story short: last night, for god only knows what reason, he friends me, and we've been having a delightful little interaction ever since. WTF, I say unto you, dear reader. WTF?!! Option A: he's decided to let bygones be bygones. Option B: he was perhaps also embarrassed about his behavior? Whatever the reasoning, the bottom line is this: I've been flagellating myself over this for the past 10 years, and now suddenly, it's no big deal. Think of the time and energy I could have saved myself. Dammit!!

New resolution: get some perspective about your behavior.
AND
Try not think that your at the center of the universe.

Cement Boots in Quicksand

2008-09-20T14:50:00.002-04:00

Somebody shoot me. Please. I've been writing my tenure letter for the past three hours, and I'm only on section three of six.
--Surely, Fluff, that indicates that you've been carefully crafting your prose, and that the sections you have written are lovely and a study in clarity!

--Why no, actually, it's just a vomit draft, thus far.

--Then obviously, Fluff, you have been consciously selecting the most important parts of your teaching, research, and service and describing the import of these for committee members who may not be conversant with the conventions in your discipline!

--Actually, I'm sort of winging it, writing my way into the relevance of any of the elements that I'm describing.

--Well, Fluff, if nothing else, there's precious little trouble you can get into when you're tied to your computer all day!

--Tell that to the empty candy wrappers that surround me.

Holding Pattern

2008-09-19T11:23:00.002-04:00

It's like this: every time sit down to write, I get stuck trying to focus on a single subject. That's not just because I should be blogging more often; it's also indicative that there's too much going on right now. So what's the solution? Bullets!!

First and foremost: thanks for the kind words, all. I'm much calmer now about the whole tp situation (in fact, thinking of the binder as toilet paper, and it being used for similar purposes, helps tremendously). I was lucky enough to get talked down by at least three different sane and empathetic people. But let me say this: there is an administrator on campus who has always irked me, in large measure because she has a voice like a foghorn and she's not afraid to use it. But she's also the one who was willing to give me a read on my cv on a Sunday night. So, note to self: take back everything bad you've ever said about her, and don't get distracted from people's innate competencies and compassions by petty outward characteristics.
Second: you know departmental life is bizarre when you find yourself watching 300 late at night and drawing comparisons to meetings. This is not Sparta, and I'm am certainly not sporting Gerard Butler's abs, but damn if it doesn't feel as if we're being asked to kneel and acknowledge the godhead. [This is made even more apt since the party in question once told me that she had always wished she could be "one of those really tall black women." My department: all about cultural awareness, us.] This week, we'll enter round four of the same "conversation" we've been having since last semester---one that has been effectively wiped from the meeting minutes twice. It's clear that the granny mafia is in full-effect; one refuses to look at me when I speak, and another is actively doing research to "disprove" claims about the content field in question. In my best moments, I have to hope that this is the death throes of an empire that can no longer stand--death throes, in fact, that make its manipulations ever more visible. After all, one of my most sedate and even-tempered colleagues said to me, in the last meeting: "She is evil. I see it now." In my worst moments, however, I fear that the longer it's dragged out and the more tactics employed, the more likely it is that they'll find a chink in the armor. Stay tuned.
Third: You all perhaps remember teaching? The pasttime for which I got into this gig to begin with? The one that technically pays the bills and shit? Well, two out of three classes this semester are rocking my world. The poppiest of pop culture classes is off to a running start, and who knew that giving them MORE theory would get them on board faster? And, the class that was giving me the most agita---the seminar with too many requirements that I couldn't pick novels for---those kids are rocking my world. They're excited, they're funny, they're engaged. They're making fun of themselves for "geeking out" and finishing the novels before they have to. They're using quotes from the novels on their Facebook pages. They're talking about Nixon era politics and pornography and courtly love like gangbusters. Even the bane of my existence student---the serial plagiarist---asked a good question yesterday.

It never ceases to amaze me that the teaching is the thing that makes me love my job. For all of the complaining and griping that faculty do about their students (insert cliche characterization here, e.g., "kids nowadays..."), I'd rather face a mob of them any day over the vast majority of my colleagues. And as that is my constant and ever-present refrain, I'll stop here.

Paranoia May Indeed Destroy Ya

2008-09-14T15:14:00.003-04:00

It's Sunday! It's a beautiful (if humid) day outside! I've completed a few onerous tasks that have been hanging over my head, and have some less taxing ones to go, but in general, less work than I should! I'm teaching an incredibly dirty book on Tuesday, and my students are all excited! Life should be super!!

Instead, however, I've spent the entire weekend bouncing between a state of panic and one of resigned exhaustion about the status of my tenure file. The first wave hit me two weeks ago, when I realized that I didn't actually have all of the documents I needed. A quick email to the department secretary and a graciously resigned-and-sent document later, I was all set. And feeling pretty good---until I attended the tenure q&a that the school schedules yearly at this time.

Now, let me just say for the record that since I'm at a teaching institution (and one with a fairly significant load), the story has always been that your work in the classroom and your service to the college were the benchmarks. And luckily, I've got that stuff pretty decently wrapped up. The second part of the story, or at least the way that I've always interpreted it, was that any scholarly work you could manage to do on top of that was good. Going to conferences, maybe an article, all to the good. Here again, I thought I was on top of it. And then I fell down the rabbit hole.

It should be noted that this meeting was populated, primarily, by scientists and social scientists, and so the terms of engagement were disciplinarily specific. There was one voice that noted that the research criterion is written with the singular---as in one---as its default. From there, however, the discussion moved to questions of refereed journals, the importance of multiple authors, and the possibility of a point system (?!!). While this last was denied by the tenure committee member, it did point to the fact that there is an operant hierarchy of research in the minds of the committee. What the crap happened to "it's all to the good"?!! Did I miss something along the way?!!

All of this is complicated, of course, by the fact that one of the pieces of the file I must submit---a piece that contextualizes the work represented in the file and attests to the stuff that doesn't necessarily appear in it---has to be written by a specific administrator. Which is fine and good, except that the person currently inhabiting that role has been there for precisely two months, during which she's met me twice. And during our first meeting, she had no idea how our tenure system worked, but assured me that "someone told her that research was most highly valued." [Oh, wtf, my friends. Wtf, indeed.] She was also in the meeting above, during which she confused two related, but separate processes leading to reappointment and tenure. [In her defense, it's a confusing system, but she has about two weeks to figure the whole thing out.] And lest you suggest that I make one more appointment to discuss this with her, let me let you in on a secret: she's just not a listener. She's charming, and she insists that she's an expert on particular things. But she also seems bound and determined to make her previous experiences the context in which our local procedures are read. Which would be fine, if her previous institutions were teaching colleges with 4/4 loads and high service expectations, and not Research 1 universities. I'm just saying.

If I had my druthers, I would greatly prefer not to be the fodder of an administrative turnover. Of the times in my career when I could really use someone to go to bat for me, this would be a big one. Barring that, I'd settle for someone that has a sense of anything that I've done over the past five years of my life. If that's not an option, how about just a person who isn't holding me to a completely different standard than those that my colleagues experienced? I'm not completely helpless, just in case you were wondering. I'm sending out gentle feelers to other administrators, etc., just to get on the radar in the event of the worst-case scenario. Not sure what all they can do, but here goes nothing...

The four-month window between submission and decision announcement is a long span in which to sweat, folks. Keep your fingers crossed.

Freakazoid

2008-09-08T09:55:00.002-04:00

You know, it's not that I haven't written posts since I saw y'all last. I write them, but they're both unfocused and banal, whinging without being specific, and I don't want to read that, so why would you?

In the sea of weirdness and disappointment that was the second week of classes (beginning to prep the tenure materials, meeting--twice--with a new administrator, following up on the progress of an a leftover proposal from the ACUN that's now 2 and 1/2 years old), there was a gem. I had dinner over at my colleagues' house, and it was delightful and tasty and relaxing. At the end of the night, the two of them were fussing over sending home leftovers with me, and debating who would perform which of the doggie-bag-packing tasks. One turned to me and remarked: "We're still trying to figure out which of us is the control freak. Right now, we just trade off." Now, these two could not be more calm and easy-going if they tried. Often, I feel guilty for my Eeyore-inflected, angry/resentful/sarcastic vibe and its possible long-term effects on both of them. Control freak?! I wanted to say. I'll show YOU a control freak!!

In a nutshell, that's what my last week boiled down to: all of the many things that I have little to no control over. I'm far from my best in these situations, and I think I have a terrible tendency to continue on, even as the signs read "stop." Worse yet, the bleaker things look, the harder I push. I'm only a few years away from being that screaming harridan that every faculty member hates. Need a visual? Try this:

Let that be a warning to all of us. My new resolution for the week: the only thing I can really do is articulate what I think (and most of the time, I can't even do that. Ba-dum-dum! Take my wife...please!). I can't hold back the tide, nor change what people think, nor sneak up behind them in a dark alley and hit them over the head with a trash can lid. To embrace the cliche of the day: the only thing I can control is myself (but only with a whip and a muzzle...Thank you! I'm here all week!).

Someone remind me that I said all of this as the week of contentious meetings begins.

Notes from the First Week; Tabulation Edition

2008-08-30T09:24:00.003-04:00

On Teaching

Scheduled for new, snazzy office computer (+3)
Said computer does not arrive until halfway through the first day of classes (-2)
When computer arrives and is set up, it doesn't print (-2)
Did not finish syllabi until hour before individual classes began (-5)
Students in first class notice not in the least (+3)
Students in first class, while a bit reticent to speak, have a collective sense of humor and exhibit ability to engage in something they nothing about (+3)
Students in second class are a mixed-bag, consisting of various majors with widely-divergent skill sets and expectations (-2)
Students in second class also willing to go with me, and have good things to contribute to discussion on first day (+3)
Teaching a second time makes me realize that I know what I want to say and pertinent concepts to signal to them (+5)
Having filed all handouts and originals from said class, it didn't matter that I couldn't locate the book that I would have needed to photocopy (+5)

On Extracurriculars

PR "loses email" with details about flyers for pedagogy series, for the second time in two years (-3)
PR pulls it out of their collective asses, providing flyers in time to hand out (+4)
Print shop unable to print said flyers (-2)
Colleagues back out of first session of series, due to emergency surgery (-2)
Different colleague, often the crankiest one ever, agrees to fill in (+3)
In turn, cranky colleague twists arm to guilt me into serving as faculty rep for athletic team. Me. (0)
thought there was a meeting scheduled on Wednesday, only to discover that there wasn't, and thus was done at 2:30 in afternoon (+7)
2 hour department meeting on first day of classes, in which granny mafia asserts its dominance by a) interrupting and dismissing new colleague 5-8 times b) trying to pressure me into taking on the KRAZY grad student c) whinging on d) ignoring the result of a hard-won battle from last semester because it didn't like the results (-20)
consistent air of rebellion and barely-hidden mocking amongst members of department during meeting (+5)
bringing itouch to meetings, so that everything is one step removed (+5)
saying no to KRAZY grad student (+3)
New colleague is already thinking up ways to confuse/annoy granny mafia, including but not limited to the singing of Billy Idol songs (+5)
"volunteered" to be on search committee, which will have 300 applications (-3), one of which from an internal candidate (-7), includes a number of sane people (+3), and will involve a trip to San Francisco (+7)
delightful happy hour with colleagues, in which everyone played nice (+5)

Okay, I'm not going to bother to add all of that up. Just from a quick scan, it's clear where the major suckfest of my week comes from, but it's also clear that there are any number of things that ameliorate its effect, somewhat. In true procrastinatory form, I put off finishing syllabi and prepping for class because I wasn't feeling it; for the first time in a long time, I had no jolt of excitement about getting back in the classroom. That lasted through my first classes; I was rough around the edges, babbling, etc. But once they had read a bit, things started to change. I'm utterly amused by some of my students already, and the ways in which they are reluctant to engage with some of the materials is an engaging conundrum for me too. So, yay teaching.

There are a number of zeppelins on the horizon: the search committee; the departmental situation; new administrator; tenure file; request for sabbatical; and the ever-present "who am I? What do I want to be when I grow up?" trauma, but there's no use rushing it. Plenty of things to blow up in their own time.

I'd say that as first weeks go, I came out slightly ahead, and I'd like to maintain that lead for as long as I can. Hello, labor day!

Boyz

2008-08-22T10:19:00.002-04:00

At one of the many pre-semester events yesterday, not one of which included a visit from the syllabus-writing fairy, I found myself in a cheery little conversational circle with a bunch of boyz (some of whom would revel in this designation, and at least one who would probably resist it). All of them were hamming it up to some degree; someone had made a comment about how he might be called upon to dance while giving a presentation in Big Sky Country next week, and that kicked off a series of jokes about everything from the Cabbage Patch dance (remember that one?), to Brokeback Mountain. A VERY senior faculty member walked as we were hamming it up and remarked: "I love this! One, two, three, four, five (counting the menz) to one!" and walked away. My just-hired colleague turned to me and said: "I don't think she meant that the way it sounded..." Another remarked: "She thinks we're your posse!!"

It's certainly the case that there is a surplus of women on my campus. It's an issue in the student body (almost 80/20 women/men), and it's also reflected in the faculty---particularly in my department. When I first got hired, I remember thinking that this was a great thing---such a woman-centered department! Since I'd just left Cornfield College and it's network of old guys in blue blazers, I thought I'd arrived at Amazon Island. Five years and many bruises from the granny mafia later, and I've revised my ideas. A female-heavy faculty does not make a female-friendly faculty. I've got friends and colleagues here who are sisters of the first order; and I have colleagues here who run the gamut from "my feminism says you're bad" to "I'll throw you under a bus to make my own star shine brighter. Bitch."

And so I have to pause for a moment to give the boyz some love. They are bringing an energy and an irreverence to my academic life that is sorely needed, and in doing so, letting me be less focused on the number of upcoming shitstorms and more on planning happy hours in the coming weeks. Huzzah for the y-chromosome in the xx pool. Now someone get me a beer.

Internal Time/External Time

2008-08-16T08:36:00.003-04:00

On Wednesday, I met with a colleague to discuss our capstone course, since both of us are teaching it in the fall. Er, in a week and a half. When we had set the date for our meeting, he mentioned that scheduling it would inspire him to work on his syllabus. Two days later, he arrived at my house with a draft. I, on the other hand, had to search for my book order to remember what I planned to teach.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who reads this that I'm no good with deadlines. What I excel at, really, is the performative self-flagellation and denigration that precedes finishing any task. I've got varsity letters in the "waking up at 4 in the morning" event; and I could compete at the Olympic level in the "number of ways to call yourself a loser/punish yourself rather than actually do the work" race.

As my colleague left, he was quick to console me about my as-yet non-existent syllabus: "you have plenty of time, don't worry." And strangely, I wasn't. I know that I have about 8 days to produce three syllabi. One of those is a repeated class with minimal change-ups, but the other two are new, and so will require some work. I can fuss and overthink syllabi as much as any person I know, and yet I just can't get too worried about this. The syllabi will happen, and I'll be damned if I'm going to waste my last few golden remaining days of summer wearing the procrastinator's hairshirt. Remind me that I said this, of course, next Sunday when I'm up til 3 finishing the class schedules.
____________________________________________________
While I'm grasping at the final days of summer, of course, I've already received two emails from my department chair about meetings and projects for the upcoming year---one of which apparently needs to be discussed on the first day of the semester. I am fully aware that administrators and chairs run on different times than faculty. HOWEVER. I am steadfastly refusing to respond until the beginning of next week. After 7 years as a faculty member at different institutions, I've only now resigned to the idea that the week before classes is work too---filled with obligatory meetings, social events, etc., in which I need to put on my dust off my happy mask (which has been moldering in a box all summer long, since my actual happy face has been working for me) and interact with people. I can accept that, with minimal grumbling. But that's the limit! No more! I refuse to relinquish the TWO weeks before the start of the semester! You can't make me! [throws self on floor, kicks and screams.]

Water, Water Everywhere

2008-08-12T09:46:00.005-04:00

Right, just a quick follow-up to the whole "I think I'm a swimmer! That's the exercise for me!"

I'm in that charming part of the northeast that's got more water than it knows what to do with. While the flooding hasn't been too bad, it does smell like a swamp in my basement, and the low lying areas around our house are getting washed out, making the task of getting across town a test of my internal GPS.

Who would have known that so much wet outside would disqualify getting wet inside?

First, the indoor pool at the gym was closed because their pumps were overloaded (water damage at a pool; who knew?). It opened yesterday, and I trotted down there, put on the suit, the cap, the goggles. They delayed the opening for 15 minutes, but then, miracle of miracles, I had arrived at the natatory nirvana: three people, six lanes, and my fellow swimmers were actually going to do laps. The long way, rather than walking across the short length of the pool. [Don't laugh: that was my last experience. And the biddies were all huffy, like I was getting in their way and wetting the polyester petals of their caps.]

All right, so I was about 20 laps in, had worked up to heavy breathing, and was beginning to think about how I might configure strokes and drills for the remaining 50 laps or so of my workout, when the lifeguard ordered us all out of the pool. Because there was a thunderstorm. ???!! Last time I checked, thunder and lightning happened OUTSIDE. They were expecting, perhaps, some sort of freak accident, all Final Destination style? Like someone left a metal rake on the roof which is just touching a support beam which leads to the shower wherein someone will drop the golf club she happens to be carrying which will allow a stray lightning bolt to enter the building and arc into the pool? WTF, my friends.

So apparently, the rule is this: whenever a clap of thunder is heard, the lifeguard clears the pool. For 30 minutes. Unless more thunder sounds, at which point they have to wait 30 minutes from the last incident. And the pool closes in 45 minutes. Needless to say, I was back in the car and at home 10 minutes later.

Thinking that I was willing to shed my last vestige of pride (because students + me in a bathing suit=end of any and all authority) , I called the campus aquatic "center" (think: pool and office), only to discover that the pool is closed for maintenance until classes begin.

It's a horrible thing when you're willing to prostrate yourself on the altar of exercise only to be rebuffed.

And so my dreams of phelps-like similitude are on hold for two weeks. I have to assume that my mutant body will still be there to take up the challenge.

In Which Michael Phelps Gives Me Hope

2008-08-10T14:28:00.002-04:00

I've never really been one for Olympics mania, although this year is a bit of an exception; if all the buzz about Dara Torres and her sick, 41 year old, post-baby body can't do it for you, what can?

My current interest in Olympic swimming isn't, I suppose, a huge surprise. Once upon a time, I was a competitive swimmer. In sixth grade, I joined the swim team for the best of all possible reasons: because the cute boy that I liked was a swimmer. Of course, he had been doing it for years, and so it's not as if I got to practice with him, which is just as well. What kind of love-struck pre-teen strategy puts you in close contact with your objet de amor while you're dressed in a swimsuit, for crying out loud? [Also quite sadly, the cute boy went on to set regional records, attend two practices a day, and develop a wicked case of tendonitis as a teenager. By the time I met up with him in high school, he was doing coke on weekends with friends.]

I stuck with swimming through junior high. Looking back, I think I approached it in a totally uncharacteristic way; I had little interest in winning or competing. I went to the pool, ground out my 100 laps, went home, showered, ate, and fell asleep doing homework. I was utterly surprised when I went to meets and won, and didn't think much about it afterwards. I was generally too caught up in what a complete spaz I was: in one meet, I managed to cut my knee open on a lane line during a 100 meter backstroke (I'm still not sure how that's possible). At the end of the race, I was standing on the lip of the pool, panting, and one of the judges asked me to get out because I was bleeding in the water. In freestyle, I had a wretched dive in which I always managed to lose my goggles in one way or another---they'd either end up around my neck, or better yet, they'd flip down, fill with chlorinated water, and flip back up onto my eyes again. These incidents loomed much larger in my mind than accumulated medals, and so once I had satisfied my high school phys ed requirement, I happily quit.

I didn't start exercising regularly again until I was studying for my qualifying exams in college, and thus began a flirtatious affair with elliptical machines, weights, kickboxing classes, at-home walking tapes, running, and yoga. Some of these have been more long-standing than others. I caved to some sick form of peer pressure when I was at Cornfield College and surrounded by runners. In successive years, I ran a 5k and a 10 mile race. After the second, I promptly discovered I'd depressed my immune system so badly that I broke out in hives eating things that I'd always liked (jalapenos). Note to self: not a runner. Don't love it, suck at it, although given the appropriate motivation, I can make it work.

Yoga was the same way. Urbania is rife with yoga studios, and with enough urging I was convinced to go for two years. Thought it was good for me, felt pretty good doing it, but never quite committed all the way. There are certain things about yoga that make me frustrated: my arms are too short to bind well; I don't love the idea of other people breathing around me (I hear that misanthropy may go against yogic philosophy); then there's all the touching---hate the touching.

So where does swimming come in? Well, I picked up my cap and goggles a few weeks ago, and took myself to the indoor pool at our gym. It's a short pool, but mostly empty (since the outdoor one is the big draw). After a session or two, I've managed to work up to a mile, which seems like a decent distance.

Swimming as an adult is deeply solitary; there's no noise except that sound of your breath and the water. It involves both monotony (lap after lap of the same view) and constant attention (to form and the relationship of your limbs to the water). Then there's this description of Phelps, from the NYTimes article "Built to Swim":

But he is a type within that type, with a bizarrely long torso and short legs -- an inseam of just 32 inches -- that help him ride high in the water like a long, thin sailboat. The body below hip level is what tends to sag in the water, creating drag, or resistance, so Phelps, relative to his overall height, has a short lower body to keep afloat. ''He has the upper body of a man who is 6-foot-8 but not the legs to go with it,'' says Jonty Skinner, USA Swimming's national team director of technical support. ''It's an advantage.''

I hereby nominate Michael Phelps as an honorary Asian. This is the body type that has plagued me forever. Why do I wear heels, people ask? Because my legs are freakishly short. From hip to head, I'm 5'8", but from hip to ankle I'm 5'. As my favorite colleague (NOT) has said to me: "Well, that's just the stereotypical Asian body, isn't it?" Perhaps, and fuck you.

Regardless, it's delightful to think that the body type that I've always perceived as freakish and unsuitable for sports (believe me, it makes running and biking that much more difficult) actually gives me a leg up somewhere. I'll let you know when I'm breaking my own world records. And in the meantime, it's nice to see that Phelps and I share one more quality:

Phelps has one glaring weakness as a swimmer, and predictably, it is a land-based movement: he is consistently slow diving off the starting blocks. At the Santa Clara meet, the crowd gasped as he slipped off the block on one start and all but belly-flopped into the water -- a typical racing dive for an 8-and-under in his first Saturday morning meet but shocking for someone at Phelps's level.

External Validation (or early onset Alzheimer's)

2008-08-07T16:06:00.003-04:00

I tried to log in to the U's secure site today to look at a document, and found that I'd forgotten my school ID number.

I like to think that this is the sign of a summer vacation well spent.

I'll ignore its potentiality as a sign of my genetic inheritance sneaking up on me.

What NOT to Do After Finishing an Article

2008-08-07T11:22:00.003-04:00

Oh, so many things not to do. Consider the following:

Minutes after finishing an article, DO NOT:

Save and send to the editor.
Write a 100 word biography.
Hit "send" without attaching the latter.
Write new email apologizing for not attaching your bio, and then send AGAIN without attaching.
Throw clothes in a suitcase for a weekend in the Big City with your husband's family.
Get in the shower and try to shave your legs quickly, thus necessitating extra time spent staunching the bleeding.
Drive in a frenzy to the train station, park in the overnight lot, do a funky run/walk through the parking lot to the station, only to arrive 20 minutes before the train leaves.
Get to the city, walk to hotel, check into two very expensive hotel rooms for husband's family.
***do all of the above without eating.***

In the days following finishing an article, DO NOT:

Spend two days in the biggest tourist destination in America with four children.
Take them to the tallest tourist attraction in said city, which involves several thousand people all trying to get up or down in 6 tiny elevators.
Forget to do research on kid-friendly restaurants in said city.
Drag them all through the major, massive train station in said city with their panoply of luggage, and then onto the train, to convey them back to Urbania.

In the calm psychic space that follows from finishing an article, DO NOT:

Try to become a different person around your husband's family, who are genetically pre-disposed to being happy, positive people who see the best in everything while you are genetically determined to be an evil, cynical Eeyore.
Try to convince yourself that you like children.
Be overly mindful of your relatives' Christian values, because you can't control where the Museum of Sex is, nor the fact that its window displays feature hippos and rhinoceri humping, sometimes in groups of threes.
Obsess about your own fears of bacteria, as everything you consume is available for others to taste, sip, or try.
Imagine that any semblance of a time table will be cohered to.
Continue to collapse into bed every night, with the thought that it's only a few more days, and you can tough it out.

And WHY should you NOT DO any of these things? Because they depress your immune system, yo, and then you end up with a sore throat and body aches. On the positive side, this does excuse one from visiting the Baseball Hall of Fame, which is DEFINITELY on the NOT DO list. One bullet dodged, many more to go.

Geeks R Us

2008-07-27T22:05:00.003-04:00

First things first: a link to the Sunnydale tee for Ashley, who's been deserted by her "google fu"---a term that is now my very favorite and I shall use it often and only cite her part of the time.

Next: a funny thing happened to me on the way to the checkout at the grocery store today. I'm waiting for my turn behind the dude who's clearly doing the weekly shopping for his family of 300, when I hear a voice:

it's really the case that it's always day, because that's in the name. Sun-DAY, Mon-DAY, Tues-DAY. All of them! See, so that's why I always tell people 'have a good day' even at night. Because it's always DAY, since it's in the word. So when the correct me, and tell me that it's night, I tell them that it's in the WORD, right?

The eminent source of this linguistics/logic lecture is, of course, the bag boy, who looks like he's related to McLuvin', only not as nerdly cute. Or as tall. With more acne. His target audience, it appears, is the poor checker, who looks to be all of 15. [Sidenote: aren't there child labor laws? And shouldn't at least one of them involve not exposing young folk to the great unwashed of the local grocery store? I'm including myself here.] Miss Thing looked like a deer caught in the headlights---a deer with a box of cereal in one hand and an avocado in the other. Clearly, this firehose of wordage had been going on for quite awhile. She never looked at him directly, and occasionally answered non-commitally, in some sort of Churchillian appeasement strategy.

There was a brief respite for all involved when Not-McLuvin' was called away to another lane, but he returned to us when I got to the checker. He was talking as he approached, so imagine this with a Doppler effect:

...when it's on a show. I don't think anyone in real life talks like that. No one I know talks like they do on tv. The language people use comes from tv, not the other way around. I think that writers sit around in a room and decide what they want it to sound like on MTV or whatever, and then we all start saying it.

Do you think that's the way it is?

I can't remember the last time that I had a moment of intergenerational oneness, but when the checker handed me my receipt, I met her eyes and commiserated with the length of her shift, the way that this incarnation of the Comic Book Guy on the Simpsons was all over her. She got it. I hope she also got my telepathic message that these guys grow up.

Not-McLuvin' knew that something had happened. No dummy, that kid. He was particularly subdued as he told me to "have a good day" (I choked down my desire to tell him "goodnight."). I so desperately wanted to grab that kid by the arm and tell him: "Look, I'm a 33 year old woman, and I LIKE geeky boys, so let me give you a few pointers. Maybe you could try asking her what she's interested in. I know, it's totally out there, but give it a go. First the net, then the trident."

I thought about my little imaginary speech all the way back to my car, where I loaded my groceries, cued up the soundtrack to the Buffy musical, and drove away.

RBOC, Haters Edition

2008-07-24T12:44:00.003-04:00

•If my backyard is any indication, then any second now Morgan Freeman is going to show up and demand that I build a very large wooden conveyance for the animals. Even if he required that I grow the Noah beard, I'd do it, and for two specific reasons: first, I could get Lauren Graham as my wife, and then I could give help her get in a major motion picture that's a hit, which she so richly deserves, because she's super, and we could be the bestest of friends because I too love Amy Sherman-Palladino and can talk really fast. Second, because building a fucking ark is preferable to finishing this god-forsaken article.

•What the crap happened to the bulleted list function in Blogger? Did it disappear? Do I have to hand-code it or something? Screw that!! Although, again, preferable to
finishing aforementioned article.

•Clearly, I need to get writing, and I'm looking for inspiration. So, I've been thinking that upon the increasingly-slim chance that I ever finish, I am going to fully embrace my (not so inner) geek girl and buy this t-shirt, despite the fact that it has cap sleeves, which have the delightful tendency to make my arms look like stuffed sausages:

•You people who write all the time and are super productive? What's your stinkin' secret? And what's the deal with nothing ever being done? I keep finishing stuff, only to have to do revisions. Writing is like No Exit, only with words.

•I really really need to buy an external hard drive and back up my computer, but damn things are expensive. In the Fluff calculus, they're roughly equivalent to a really beautiful pair of fall boots. Who chooses storage over that? The people who don't lose their documents, that's who.

•Dammit. I'm running low on hatin' and thus it must be time to write.

Jinx!

2008-07-18T11:36:00.005-04:00

As I left my office yesterday afternoon, I said the fateful sentence: "The internet has ended my scholarly activity." Well, sure, because if you surf the web for two hours, it doesn't leave you a whole lot of time to work on your article, now does it?

So, the Fates must have been listening, because as I sat down to work today, the modem died. A quick call to a humorless 'net provider yielded the "emergency visit" of a technician to decide whether the modem or the signal are at fault. The protocol for the emergency visit is this: sit by the phone and wait. They'll come today, but we can't give you a time. Not even a window. They'll call 15 minutes before they come, but if you don't answer, they'll take you off the list.

In the meantime, of course, it's come back on, but since I had this exact same problem last week, I'm gonna let them come. Will it cut out again? Who knows!! All I know is that half of my sources are online, so writing without internet access should be approximately four times as frustrating as it usually is!

In the never-ending saga of the painters and their music, did you know that Depeche Mode has made it onto the soft rock channel? Be still my 80's lovin' heart! I'm drowning it out with The Goldberg Variations, which is weird in two ways:
1) It's kinda pretentious, don't you think? "Oh yes, I've been listening to Bach to drown out the simply dreadful clamor of the workmen's music! Heaven forfend!"
2) It's ironic, as it's essentially a tool to enable my progress on a work about the poppiest of pop culture topics.

There should be 32 of me.

Homeowner Walk of Shame

2008-07-17T10:12:00.002-04:00

Once I got out of college, I pretty much assumed that I'd be done with the Walk of Shame. You know the one: wander back to your dorm in the early morning hours wearing the clothes you left in last night, except now they're rumpled and stained, and you have indentations on your face from someone else's pillow, and inevitably some goody-goody who lives in the room next to yours is up and working on her thesis and chirpily asks you where you've been? [This is just a fer instance, feel free to add your own humiliating details to get in the psychic space.]

Right, so I thought all of that was done. No one told me that owning a house would set you up for reliving those precious college moments of deep and abiding semi-public humiliation. Because it's one thing for your neighbors to whisper behind your back that the paint is peeling off and the gutters need to be cleaned and the driveway needs to be re-paved and you don't take care of your yard (front or back) and check their children constantly to make sure that they haven't been consumed by the man-eating plants that propagate like Jurassic Park 15--Vegetal Revenge. I can mostly live with that.

It's another thing altogether when the painting crew, humming along to Bon Jovi's greatest hits, has to clear brush in order to get the job done. I was desperately trying to get out of the house this morning before they arrived, but since the head painter arrives (along with the Eagles) at 7, there's no way I'm out the door before then. So instead, I sheepishly slink out the front door and come face to face with the carpenter who has essentially downed the three feet of scrub maple in our side yard so that he can get to our rotting rafter tails. Later, I hear, he's going up on the roof to trim back the overgrown tree that is growing over our roof.

And then there's the fact that I haven't cleaned our windows since we moved in. Five years ago.

As I look back on it, dorm life wasn't really so bad. At least I wasn't responsible for the exterior of the room.

How Can You Talk to an Angel?

2008-07-15T09:18:00.002-04:00

That's what I've been asking myself since about 7:30 this morning, when the painter arrived to start work on the exterior of our house. I've also contemplated Sailing Away, whether my neighbors would like to Hit Me With Their Best Shot, for being awakened by this kind of music, and now I'm "enjoying" Whitney Houston's remake of "I'm Every Woman." When did that happen? And more importantly, if Whitney is everywoman, then I gotta go get more drugs and an egomaniacal husband.

Over the past four years of living in our ramshackle fixer-upper, I think I've learned a good deal about different kinds of handydudes---contractors, tile layers, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, and now painters. Apparently what holds this brotherhood together is A) their collective preference for big Ford trucks and B) a devotion to soft rock of the 80's and 90's. [Spirit in the Sky, anyone?]

Is this an occupational hazard? Is it required for the contractor's license? Moreover, in this, the age of the iPod, is it necessary to broadcast it to the universe?! Don't, don't they want one? You know I can't believe it when they say they don't need one? [Cue the switch to the Human League, which I could totally get behind, if it were midnight at the local dive bar on retro night, but it's 8:45 a.m.]

The irony, of course, is that virtually every single one of these dudes has commented on what a quiet neighborhood we live in. Right. UNTIL YOU GOT HERE!!

Savage Idols

2008-07-10T10:18:00.002-04:00

Over the holiday weekend, Senor Fluff and I took a drive around the surrounding countryside---you know, while we still have meager petroleum resources to flaunt. [Let me note, for the record, that we drive a 3 year old Japanese car with 20,000 miles on it. We are not in the same class as the Hummer-driving jackhole I saw the other day with a bumpersticker that read: "Buy a hybrid---I need your gas!" Fuckwad. If there were ever a need for a consumer-grade rocket launcher, that would be it...]

Digression aside, after we had exhausted an ipod playlist, we listened dug into the stream of podcasts that I've been downloading forever, but seldom listen to. For the first time, then, I had the great pleasure of listening to Savage Love in audio form.

Everyone knows Dan Savage, right? The guy who writes the sex column for Seattle's The Stranger, occasionally appears on This American Life and Bill Maher's Real Time? I know that he squicks some people, but I lurve him, lurve him. [And I particularly love listening to him talk about the positions, accoutrements, and psychological issues surrounding anal sex while driving through the most Stepford of East Coast towns---but that's a different story.]

I find myself at times shocked, delighted, and moved by Savage, and if the size and variety of his audience is any indication, I don't think I'm alone. And as I try to put my finger on what it is of his that does it for me (does everyone who writes about Dan Savage begin to realize that all of her metaphors sound dirty?), I think it's his bizarre combination of incredible ability to withhold judgment about those things that American society is often SOOO judgy about, while at the same time having very definite ideas about what he thinks is healthy and "right." For instance, in the podcast I listened to, he fielded a call about disability and sex, in which he addressed the idea that "everyone wants to feel like an object sometimes." Whoa. Beware the lightning strike of disapprobation and ethical reproach! And yet he delivers this statement as if it is the most banal of ideas, the most basic of concepts. Earlier in the show, however, he responds to a 23 year old man asking about sex on his wedding night with a rant about how no one, gay or straight, should be getting married at 23. Amen, brother!

It could just be the case that I tend to agree with Savage's bent, however, it's perhaps more the case that I adore his ability to embody what I have always imagined to be opposite impulses: the avoidance of judgmental behavior and firm beliefs. Savage does a fabulous job negotiating between these two positions. If there is some sort of complicated emotional calculus that underpins it, I'd love to know the formula.

Come to think of it, the other person that combines these traits well? Tim Gunn. Should I be worried that my two idols of ethical behavior are gay men in the media?

There's No Place Like Home

2008-07-03T16:04:00.004-04:00

Someday, I'll write about something that matters, but right now, all of my brain power is wrapped up somewhere else. (If you're guessing "in your article?" you'd be wrong, btw.)

It occurred to me a few days ago that I'm going into my sixth year of living in Urbania. On the career side of life, this is a crucial year: it's the tenure application, it's the promotion application, it's the "who am I and what am I doing with the rest of my life" year. I'll have all year to panic and obsess about that.

Year six is also significant in another way: it marks the longest span of time I've spent in any one place other than my city of birth. I was holding off on this realization and its import by playing the rationalization game: well, technically, my first year I didn't live in Urbania proper; it was more like an outlying town. So I don't have to count year 1. That means that it's technically only been 4 years, going into 5, and thus, I don't have to really consider this until the end of next year!

But let's get real: the outlying areas of Urbania are, to some extent, suburbs of Urbania. Call it. I've lived here longer than undergrad town; idyllic post-grad city with the Big Red Bridge; Mid-Western podunk grad school town (for which I'm not complaining; I couldn't get out of there fast enough, and I wouldn't go back if you paid me); and even longer than I spent in teensy weensy Dissertation Village, where Senor Fluff had his job. [Dissertation Village is the home of what Frenchie has named Cornfield College, which is just too right.]

So what does that mean, exactly? Does that mean that this is now "home?" Certainly birth city, the neon jungle, no longer counts. If linguistic conventions tell me anything, I suppose it's significant that I tell people that "I'm going to neon city to visit my parents" and when I'm there, I tell people "I'm going home in a few days" (meaning Urbania).

But I've written about this before, (and whinged incessantly about it to everyone I know)---Urbania certainly doesn't feel like home. I've never quite gotten over the way people talk, the pronunciation of words, the social conventions. And then there are the other things: the seasonal lack of fresh produce that is abundant in the West year round, the creepy summer fecundity of plant life here. I miss desert, and mountains, and dry air. I miss Valley Girl talk and excessive use of the word "like" and sometimes, deep in my heart of hearts, I even miss women with obviously fake breasts. They're ornamental, you know?

So is "home" defined by duration or by affinity? And is there a point at which the first becomes the second? Or is it just a matter of course that I will always feel a bit like Dorothy, dropped into this place and wanting to go "home", only to discover that I was "home" all the time?

[And you were there, and so were you!]

I Be ILLin

2008-06-30T08:15:00.002-04:00

To ILL or not to ILL? That is the question, my friends. Does anyone have a reliable litmus test that determines the books that they order from ILL and those that they order from Amazon?

I'm gearing up to write this article---which I think I finally have an angle on, for which I am eternally grateful---but I find, like many projects, that it involves a number of sources that I don't possess, and neither does our library. (To put in a different way: there is a vast and useful library that is made up of everything that our own library does not have.) And so I find myself in a quandary: which do I want to own, and which can I just borrow for two weeks? In the past, I've been pretty loose with this: I like to own my books, dammit. I like to write in them, to have them on hand, and I've never mastered the trick of copying just what I need from a book and then returning it. In fact, when I do that, I have a terrible tendency to return it and then figure out later that I need something else, only to borrow it again.

Thus, in the past, I become a glutton of Amazonia, ordering willy nilly. This has, of course, resulted in books that I use for a particular project and never turn to again. Given the economic downturn, and a concurrent (although seemingly not a cause and effect relation) desire to de-clutter and to use what I have, I'm wary of replicating this pattern. I've bought a few books used, and I've been trying to be good about using ILL for articles, and to try out books before I decide to order them.

But time is short, my friends. I don't have the weeks it takes for ILL to come in, and then to decide whether or not to order a book. Lay it on me: how do you know when a book wants to live with you, and when it wants to live in the library?

RSS Burp?

2008-06-29T11:57:00.002-04:00

Assuming that anyone still uses Bloglines as her reader, and not some new-fangled thing that will let you access every blog in the free world, launch the space shuttle, and establish new life on Mars, did anyone else's feeds have a recent burp? I just looked and at least three of my feeds suddenly list 200 posts (exactly--on the money, 200), dating back to 2004. And I'm a spotty reader, sure, but I have read posts between 2004 and now.

Just wondering.

So Easily Daunted

2008-06-26T10:25:00.002-04:00

3 a.m. revelation: the difference between school year sleep and summer sleep (other than sweatiness) is the frequency of the wide-awake fretting sessions. During the year, I have these at least once a week. This summer, there have been relatively few. Until last night, wherein I realized that I'm quickly backing myself into a corner with this research project. If I don't get it off the ground soon, I'm going to have to offer the editor sexual favors. Normally, I'm not above that kind of thing, but it does put a cramp in my professionalism (and other parts, depending on the favor...).

So, I finally lowered my 4 a.m. pulse rate with the promise that I would start today, even if it were something small. One page of text, regardless of how good or bad it is. Start with the primary text, just to see what you're dealing with.

Now, I should note that my primary text is a set of videos. No, not like the Truffaut collection, but rather a collection of YouTube videos. When I first proposed this article, there were a small set of them (maybe 15). I've been sporadically favoriting them all spring, with the idea that I'd return to them as a data set. Well, well. I looked at the folder this morning, and realized that 3 of the 15 had been removed. Horror! So I typed in the keywords to the YouTube search, just to see what else came up. 373. !!!!!!! Guess what I'm going to be doing this morning?

You know, when I was but a nervous and wary graduate student, my plan was to become a scholar of British Modernism. Somewhere along the way, that morphed and morphed again. There are times when I'm happy not to be writing about something that has been written about by thousands of other researchers who are undoubtedly better readers and writers than I of those canonical primary texts. But occasionally, I just wish that my new/emerging primary texts would stand still.

Advice to Blog-eagues

2008-06-25T09:08:00.003-04:00

At least two of my colleagues (probably more) have blogs. Neither is particularly psuedonymous, which is fine, and their choice. In a bizarre twist, I actually found the first one via a mutual student, and the second via the first.

Now, there's no denying that reading a colleague's blog creates a kind of frisson of voyeuristic pleasure. I know both of the bloggers---one is in an allied department, and we're passing friendly, the other is a new faculty member with whom I sit on a contentious committee. What's interesting, of course, is to see the ways on which they reflect on particular events at which I was also present; how they characterize their own involvement, etc. For all of my years of blogging and reading blogs, it's really difficult in these moments to remind myself that everyone sounds like a narcissist in this format. That being said, it is definitively the case that the first blogger exhibits these same tendencies in her daily activities. [To wit: when she writes a post about how she alone worked her ass off to put together an all-campus event, ignoring the hours of work that other faculty and staff put on, it's not just a convenient writing position. It is, in fact, the way that she represents that work to her colleagues and administrators.]

There's little advice that I can or would offer to Blogger #1; she's not one to listen to advice, let alone take it. Blogger #2, however, is a different story. Here's the situation: her blog is not only NOT psuedonymous, it's easily googled by her name. She's got prominent pictures of herself, her children, etc. on the blog. None of this is an issue in and of itself, of course; lots of people have professional blogs. But the content of this blog---that's what scares me a bit. I've read posts where she logs her daily activities (down to loading and unloading the dishwasher). What's the big deal, you ask? Well, if we were a different kind of institution (e.g., one that actually placed a good deal of emphasis on faculty research), this kind of log could be read as a "lack of commitment." [Don't laugh; a well-known practice at my previous institution was the dean's habit of driving by the faculty office buildings at night to see who was still "burning the midnight oil.]

More pressing, however, is the other kind of information that she includes. Marital issues, mental health issues and documenting of her various experiences with different kinds of medication... For the record, none of these things are bad; in fact, the blogosphere is a great place to share these experiences. And maybe she's invested in all of that being public. But I fear for her. I'd be worried about my colleagues and, in particular, my students, capitalizing on that information. [In my eyes, it's made her more sympathetic, for sure, but I've also begun to seriously doubt her when she discusses the impact of the internet on students and teaching.]

Part of me wants to pull her aside and just double check: "hey, so I came upon your blog. Have you thought at all about who might be reading it?" And then part of me thinks that I should just leave it alone. I have no desire to open up a more friendly relationship with this blogger. And who says that she wouldn't resent it?

Still, I can't help but think that SOMEONE should check with her...

The Dean of Rub

2008-06-23T11:22:00.002-04:00

[Note: this post is a desperate attempt to get some real work done. Does blog writing inspire that? Let's see!]

When last we spoke, gentle reader, I mentioned a rather physical run-in with a certain administrator at another school. I'm feeling very ambivalent about it; I think I should be irate, and I'm reaching for that. In actuality, however, I feel sort of perplexed, a bit amused, a skosh grossed-out and surprised. Here's the story:

Two years ago, Yogini and I trotted off to a conference that was closely aligned with our collaborative service project. Of the many panels that we took in there, one was a keynote presentation by a group from a small college that has really pioneered the use of a particular technological tool. We weren't the only ones who were interested: the room was packed to the rafters with at least 75 people, all oohing and ahhing over the examples they were showing. As we watched the presenters, Y. and I got more and more excited; this seemed to be an tool with potential for many of the things going on on our campus! And it could help students! And it was right in line with things we'd been toying with for awhile! Yeehaw!! Because we had come in late, Y. and I were sitting across the room from each other, but the mind-meld was in effect and we were already decided: these presenters were only about two hours away from Urbania. If we could hook our wagon to their star, we were all over it.

[I fear that this next section is going to sound like I'm some sort of egomaniacal narcissist. That may be true, but it's also the case that these events have external verification. If you think I'm getting too full of myself, I'd be happy to create a bulleted list of my shortcomings and physical deformities.] As the presentation wore on, I made with the smiling and the nodding and the obvious note-taking. And the main presenter--then the assistant dean of the college--made eye contact with me. And continued to do so for the rest of his portion of the session. Which was weird, but I attributed it to my enthusiastic listening face (really, I fear that it's quite aggressively enthusiastic; I like presenters to know that I'm paying attention).

When they finished up, Y. and I met up and planned strategy. She's the networker, I'm the clean-up crew in these situations, so she approached one of the women in group and began to tell her how interested we were, asked some good questions [you know, she did the networking thing. How does that work? I have NO idea, but she rocks at it]. As we're talking to the woman (okay, Y. is talking, I'm wearing my enthusiastic listening face), Dean-Dude finishes up his own conversation and comes over. He introduces himself to me, I take the "we're so interested" page out of Y's book, and awkwardly try to network. Not necessary! He's all over it---he finds out what I do, let's me know that he was a co-founder of a ground-breaking project in my field, offers to lead a team to little Askesis U. "if it could be helpful to us" and then hands over drink tickets to Y and me for the reception that evening.

I prefer not to think about how that could have played out if we had gone. Needless to say, we holed up in our hotel room and compared notes.

Last year, we contacted the school about making a site visit; after much wrangling, we made arrangements. At the last minute, Y. had to cancel because she was sick. I ended up going with Senor Fluff, actually, because of a kink in his job description. We spent most of the day in workshops with the school's faculty, and met briefly with Dean-Dude in his office over lunch. While there was a bit of sizing up, the tractor-beam gaze/hard sell thing he'd had going at the conference was gone. I figured that perhaps that was only his conference persona/behavior. Once he was in the office, he was the administrator dude.

Oh-ho! She speaks to soon! Last week, I attended a conference at the school; a part of their grant program to teach people how to use this tech tool. There's a team of peeps from my college---once again including Senor Fluff---that have been going down to the school once a month, but this time they needed others to whom they'd present their work. So an additional three of us showed up for the morning session. Dean-Dude gave his presentation to all, and I thought there might be a bit of the tractor-beam going on, but maybe I was imagining it? Who knows.

How about I shorten this up? At the end of the day, we were supposed to meet with our group, come up with a plan, and then report out to the rest of the groups. We were the last group to go, and I read our mediocre brainstorming. Break for lunch is announced, and as people start to break up, Dean Dude comes over to me. Well, perhaps that's an understatement: more like, "sidles up to me so that we're standing shoulder to shoulder." We have a strange conversation in which he tells me that he purposely put us at the end, because he knew that we'd have good ideas to share, that he was impressed with what I had said in a certain point, that our team was very smart. And I assume that I said the right things in response, but I was going on auto-pilot, because I was totally distracted by all of the touching that was happening. There was the initial handshake--all within the bounds of propriety. But as he talked, there was arm-rubbing, there was hip-bumping, there was more arm-rubbing. I couldn't help but look around in wonder; is this just how these kinds of things go? Am I the only one who is freaked out by this?! Is everyone else getting the rub-down, and I'm just hopelessly naive?

Note to the uninitiated: I don't like it when people invade my personal space, and that extends doubly to touching. I don't like hand-shaking, I don't like hugging, I hate the fact that the chairs in the college auditorium are so close together that I can't help but brush a colleague's shoulder with my own. If I could, I'd exist in a bubble with a two-foot radius all the way around me.

Why all of this didn't send me into a paroxysm of screaming I have no idea. I think was paralyzed by disbelief. This can't actually be happening; this is a professional environment; you're touching my arm. No, seriously, you're rubbing my upper arm---for an extended period of time. Is anyone else getting this?!

So that's the story: my association with this school, and in some ways with this tech tool in general is that of getting felt up by the internationally-known administrator who is the mastermind behind it all.

I feel as if the appropriate sentiment is outrage: who is this guy?! Why does he feel entitled to touch me?! Instead, as I said, I'm just sort of bemused. As in "really? Seriously, dude? This is what you're going for?" And the larger question: why?
And the second larger question: why me? [Oh, the therapists I've had that would tell me that my inability to create boundaries are visible...] Is it me, not him?! Am I sending the "please come and give me the academic rub-down" vibe? Is my enthusiastic listening face interpreted as "she wants to get with me and my tech tool"?

And finally, there's a special kind of weirdness to being at a conference and getting felt up on one side while your spouse, engaged in a different conversation, is on your other. That, my friends, is a post for another time.

Substitution

2008-06-20T00:11:00.003-04:00

Oh sure, I could tell you all about spending three days in Metropolis. I could talk about how I fully intended to work on the article of impending doom, bravely lugging 80 pounds of photocopied articles and books down to the city with me, only to spend my time walking around various neighborhoods. I could even tell you about being inappropriately touched by the Dean of a school sponsoring a big grant initiative that my institution is taking part in. I could do lotsa things.

Instead, however, since it's midnight, I'm going to ask a question that betrays how fully behind the curve I am. Here it is: what the crap is up with Vampire Weekend? I know they're getting press in the Times and even NPR, but seriously, anyone want to give me the skinny? I mean, I get the whole "we're preppy, Ivy League dudes who play faux reggae with clever lyrics" and I'm all about the cheap pop hook. I'm down. Really.

More specifically, what to make of the lyrics to "Campus"? Assume, for a moment, that they're not just throwing together phrases that sound cute together (and the oft-quoted "spilled kefir on your keffiyeh" might contradict this idea). Is this seriously a song about having an affair with your literature professor with a penchant for Arab fashion? Really?! Or is the more tame NPR interpretation correct: "the thrill you get from seeing your crush walk to class..."

I don't know whether to be stiff with shock, winking at the cleverness, or amazed that it's taken this long for someone to immortalize the professor/student hook-up taboo in popular music...

Slack

2008-06-13T11:41:00.002-04:00

Slack. noun. Origin: Latin. def 1: part of something that hangs loose, without strain. def 2: something of which I've been cutting myself too much. def 3: a paticularly hideous word for pants, associated largely with polyester stretch, which I avoid at all costs.

Slacker. noun. Origin: Southern California/Valley. Def 1: my current identity, particularly in the face of the things that I should be doing/have done. Related words: loser, lazer, irresponsible...

Somewhere post-April (and after the article/conference paper/grading bonanza blowout), I lost my will to care about deadlines. I used to feel terrible about these kinds of things, and the idea that I would be late, and thus be revealed to others as someone who is irresponsible and doesn't do things would be all of the motivation I needed to get stuff done. I'd wake up in the middle of the night worried about deadlines, about getting things to people, about all of the things that I hadn't accomplished.

I think April broke me.

It's the 13th of June (hello, Friday the 13th! Welcome to M. Night Shyamalan's world!). I have an article due for a collection in 17 days, and I just started the research for it yesterday. [In my defense, I laid out a preliminary outline that makes use of a number of sources I've been using in papers and my last article, so I'm not starting from scratch. Still. Procrastinate much?]

Meanwhile, I have yet to order books for two of my fall classes. The bookstore guy, who is the chillest human ever, is going to have my head. I'm going to have to turn in hard copies of the order forms with a dime bag stapled to each of them. At 5 this morning, I was worried about this. Right now? I'm realizing that it's noon on Friday, so I might as well plan on getting it to him on Monday---hell, he's not around on the weekend!

I can't manage to work up enough mojo to get worried that I'm not worried enough: I'm so meta, it hurts! I think I have to assume that this is the natural consequence of doing too much for too long. Last year at this time, I was attending a summer workshop in the Midwest after having taught a summer class after having attended a tortuous graduation ceremony aftern having taught new courses for the full year. Next week will mark my triumphant return home, and the anticipation of the nasty, itchy skin condition that lasted for a month. Basically, it boils down to this: I'm tired, bitches. In fact, if I could incite myself to move, I'd channel the queen of tired, Lily von Schtupp, linked here for your viewing pleasure.

I'm off to locate my motivation. If you see it anywhere, send it packing, will you? I don't want to have to put its picture on the back of a milk carton.

Zombie, Minus Hunger for Brains

2008-06-10T09:04:00.003-04:00

As you can imagine, I finally got over my "I'm bored now and need to work," and thus managed to fritter away the rest of my time at my parents' house by eating, seeing a number of summer blockbusters (all of which were mildly disappointing), and doing the occasional sudoku puzzle. And on my return home (to the sweatbath that is the Northeast right now), I have undertaken the requisite zombie time that is a consistent feature of my west-to-east travels.

I don't know what kind of f'ed up circadian rhythm problem I have, but at least it's predictable: going east to west, it takes me two days to get onto a regular sleep schedule. After a day or so of getting up at 5 EST and falling into bed at 8EST, I fall quite happily and naturally onto a more reasonable (and adult) time frame---say up at 7, asleep by midnight? Coming back, however, is a more painful experience. I'm now on day two of a planned and semi-rigid sleep adjustment schedule, which required caffeine ingestion by 7:30 so as to assure semi-wakefulness. This is despite the fact that I'm going to bed at 3 a.m., give or take an hour. The heat and humidity are enough to make me Mrs. McGrumperson, but with sleep-deprivation, you can multiply that by a factor of 10. I'm wandering around the house glassy-eyed, pulled to soft, flat surfaces. No brains for me, thank you very much, but I'd say that any outside observer might be reminded of Shaun of the Dead. Get out your cricket bats, just to be safe.

I've never understood why it's so easy following the sun, and so difficult following the jet stream. What the hell? It's three hours, either way. I tend to chalk it up to having spent 22 years of my life on the left coast, but then again, I have a habit of using that as a reason for everything that I don't want to change...

Despite that, things must be accomplished! I'm setting the bar rather low today, thank you very much: a trip to Target; some easy, entry-level reading for an article; sending some overdue emails and a perhaps a trip to the Apple store to exchange an item that was purchased during my trip. [Note to self: when the horoscope expressly makes the point that you should not buy any big ticket items, particularly electronics, listen, will you?!!]

Get a Job!

2008-06-03T11:33:00.002-04:00

So for weeks, nay months now, I've been whining and complaining about work. "It's too much!" "It's too hard!" "I don't have time to think, or read for pleasure, or do anything I want to do!" [Cue the orchestra of the world's tiniest violins.] So it was with great pleasure and anticipation that I was looking forward to coming to my parents' house. My plans included: eating, sleeping, watching movies, eating, and perhaps some shopping. Then maybe some high-intensity laying around.

So I've been here for three days, and I've done all of the above. I've done the laying around bit at least 4 or 5 times. I finished the new Joshua Ferris book. I've read the paper. I saw the incredibly mediocre Indiana Jones movie (it was my parents' pick, y'all). I've eaten God knows how many 3,000 calorie meals (thus precipitating the laying around).

And now I'm bored.

What's up with that, my friends?!! I thought I'd love this kind of torpor! I'm all about the laziness and the time-wastage and the doing nothing!

But damn, I'm bored. Who knew I'd miss being productive? How is that possible? Yesterday, in fact, I found myself wanting to get home to DO things (work in the yard, get started on my article, etc.).

If y'all see the pod that my real self is stored in, feel free to break me out of it, will you?

Academic Groupie?

2008-05-31T08:33:00.003-04:00

I have a friend who is an academic rock star. Not of the home-garden variety, like local celebrity. Like internationally-known, exhibits at the Whitney and then runs off to do an interview with the Chronicle, kind of celebrity. I just friended him on Facebook the other day, and I realized (which I should have known, but just didn't really internalize) that he's friends with people that I forget are real, embodied humans. All this time, I thought that they were simply word machines who existed for me to quote.

The irony, of course, is that I don't know my rock star friend via academic channels. In fact, it's only in the last few years that I started getting into his work, as my own research grew in that direction. No, instead, I know him because we were close friends in college. You know this kind of friend: you went camping together on spring break; took late night trips to the diner; had multiple soul-searching conversations with; put him to bed drunk when he broke up with his girlfriend; accidentally saw his uncircumcised junk and were freaked out for days (not because it belonged to him, but because of all of its additional...um...material).

If, at the time, someone had told me that he would go on to be a world-renowned scholar, I would have snorted. Was he brilliant? Yes. But he also drove the wrong way up freeway exits, and forgot where he put things. He had a dorky laugh, and unwittingly manipulated women. [Suddenly, these characteristics are making him sound more and more qualified for scholarly Valhalla...]

The point of all of this is...well, I'm not really sure. ARS is often the guy that comes to mind when I think that I should be something else. He's the physical embodiment of my "why aren't you a big time scholar? You should be on your second book by now!" internal screed. And then logic kicks in. That's just not who I am, nor is it the kind of life I want to lead. [Truly. The last time I had a conversation with ARS, he looked sort of odd and nostalgic about the opportunity to teach a seminar of undergrads. That's certainly nothing that he gets to do at his big fancy R1 job. And it's not disengenuous: he was a great teacher of beginners, as I'm sure he is of up-and-coming grad students.]

Perhaps, however, the answer is that there is a significant part of me that wants a bit more prestige than I have now. That's a wee bit uncomfortable simply settling in to see whether my podunk institution can drag itself into the ranks of decent SLACs over the next 20 years. More to ponder. Meanwhile, I'll go stack up ARS books, and eat my heart out.

Imaginary, not Imaginative...

2008-05-26T11:04:00.002-04:00

Via Prof Grrrl, and instead of working on program assessment, I give you my results for the Sesame Street Personality Test. For the record, I've always thought of myself as more of a Statler and Waldorf kind of girl, but I suppose that would call for a larger universe of Muppet personality choices.

Your Score: Snuffleupagus

You scored 58% Organization, 43% abstract, and 62% extroverted!

This test measured 3 variables.

First, this test measured how organized you are. Some muppets like Cookie Monster make big messes, while others like Bert are quite anal about things being clean.

Second, this test measured if you prefer a concrete or an abstract viewpoint. For the purposes of this test, concrete people are considered to gravitate more to mathematical and logical approaches, whereas abstract people are more the dreamers and artistic type.

Third, this test measured if you are more of an introvert or an extrovert. By definition, an introvert concentrates more on herself and an extrovert focuses more on others. In this test an introvert was somebody that either tends to spend more time alone or thinks more about herself.

You are somewhat organized, both concrete and abstract, and both introverted and extroverted.

I bet you didn't think you were Snuffleupagus. Let's find out why.

You are both somewhat organized. You have a good idea where you put things and you probably keep your place reasonably clean. You aren't totally obsessed with neatness though. Alloyius Snuffleupagus (and all Snuffleupagus') is not sloppy by nature, but he moves so incredibly slowly that it is impossible for him to be totally organized.

You both are about equally concrete and abstract thinkers. You have a good balance in your life. You know when to be logical at times, but you also aren't afraid to explore your dreams and desires... within limits of course. Snuffy generally has very basic interests, but he explores his abstract sensitive side when he plays his snuffleflute.

You both are somewhat introverted. Originally Snuffleupagus was very shy and was only Big Bird's invisible friend. However as he has aged he has started to build new friendships with new characters. Like Snuffy, you probably like to have some time to yourself. However, you do appreciate spending time with your friends, and you aren't scared of social situations.

The other possible characters are

Oscar the Grouch

Big Bird

Cookie Monster

Ernie

Elmo

Kermit the Frog

Grover

The Count

Guy Smiley

Bert

Link: The Your SESAME STREET Persona Test

The Rest of my Life

2008-05-24T08:50:00.002-04:00

Done! Done! Finally!! [Or, as my sixth grade classmate mis-read in the famous MLK speech: "thank God immediately, done at last." Hee.]

Of course, done is never really done; there are books to be ordered, an article to write, a tenure file to assemble, and more pressingly, programmatic assessment to be done. Sigh. Regardless, all of this comes with the blessed benefit of NO INTERACTIONS WITH STUDENTS, which I desperately need at this point. I love them, for the most part, but damn, I need a break from having to work to understand and nurture their ideas.

So as summer really descends upon me, I find that I'm asking myself the question I always hit during this spoke in the academic cycle: what am I doing with the rest of my life? Generally, my angsty articulation of this question runs toward the long-term trajectory, i.e., where am I going to be in 20 years? But the summer brings about the other meaning of the question, i.e., what am I doing with the parts of my life that aren't my job?

There's something about the 9 month academic cycle that prevents me from engaging this second one with any amount of significant attention. Throughout the year, I tend to oscillate between two metaphors, both involving enormous boulders. I'm either A) pushing the giant boulder up a hill, a la Sisyphus, or B) running frantically as the giant boulder comes rolling down the hill behind me, pace Indiana Jones. Neither of these bouldiferous situations lead to careful consideration of activities outside teaching; research; service; p2p trauma; utter torpor/escape into fantasy to recover from the previous activities.

But with the prospect of two months of "free time" on my hands (even with the caveats above), I am pestered by the idea that I had better figure out what else my life consists of, what other proclivities, interests, hobbyhorses I should nurture so as not to become so attached to my job that it becomes the entirety of my life.

And thus, I dedicate the coming week to locating the rest of my life. [Hey, I like to start small. Maybe next summer will be devoted to building the rest of my life. Let me just find it first, okay?]

Jazz Hands

2008-05-19T23:02:00.003-04:00

If you see a crazy woman driving around your city singing at the top of her lungs in her (thankfully) enclosed car, it's probably me. Wave hi, or feel free to join in.

I have no idea what's spurred this, but I've been obsessively listening to a particular pop culture musical all weekend long, and loving it. I put it on repeat while I cooked for some friends and cleaned the bathroom. I warbled along in the car on the way to and from my dentist appointment this morning. I've been singing it to myself for days, trying to remember the lyrics.

It could very well be that I've lost my damn mind, as this is my 18th week of teaching, or some such nonsense like that. [Three more days and counting.] It could also be that I'm atavistically returning to my high school fixations. Don't tell me it never occurred to you that I was a total drama queen in high school. [Only in high school, you ask?] Indeed. Loved the musical theatre, despite the fact that it was totally ridiculous, and if the constituent population was any indication, totally gay. I was, as Tyler Durden reminds us, the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the universe. I even yodeled, you'll be delighted to know.

God only knows what's bringing all of this on. Just be happy that you're not within earshot.

Hot Night Ahead

2008-05-15T19:18:00.004-04:00

O ho, yes indeedy, I has me a hot night ahead. I came home from class, fed the cats, worked out (not in any real way, you understand, just enough to get some of the stress hormone out of my system). Now my big plans include: putting on flip flops and fetching some take out for dinner; watching Season Six episodes of Buffy until Gray's Anatomy comes on; watching G.A., and then more episodes of former; falling exhausted into bed. If I get ambitious, a shower and lackadaisical teeth-brushing may be in order. Look out world, she's on a roll!

In the hours of intensive brain turning-off that lay ahead of me, there will be NONE of the following: thinking about my course; thinking about writing a grant; obsessing about my end of year review; grousing about available classroom technology; fixating on a single negative student evaluation out of 55; anything resembling my job.

Senor Fluff is out of town and I just finished my first week of intensive summer school. Give me a break, will you?

Let the Countdown Begin

2008-05-12T22:02:00.003-04:00

Yup, once the first day is over, you can officially begin the countdown. Seven more days of summer school! Only seven!!

As much as I'm not relishing the experience of getting up and going in to school tomorrow to teach, and then doing the same thing the day after, and then the day after that (repeat four more times), there is something significantly different in the summer-school vibe. I don't know how to explain it. I'm in the classroom; I'm teaching. I'm doing the dance. But I'm not exhausted at the end, I'm not gritting my teeth through some classroom discussions. [I was ravenous by the end of class, but I suppose that's to be expected.]

We'll see how this goes as I continue on, but for right now, it could definitely be worse. And why is that? A number of reasons, heretofore described as the rules governing "if you're going to teach summer school, do it like this."
Rule #1: Teach something you know.
Rule #2: Teach something you've taught before.
Rule #3: Carefully consider what can be taught in a shortened period. For instance, I wouldn't be teaching a class on the 19th C. novel right now. Not that I would be teaching that anyway (see rules 1 and 2).
Rule #4: Be realistic about what the students can absorb and how. For instance, my class by rights should meet 5-6 hours a day. How many of us could discuss or write about something for 6 hours straight? I moved part of this class online, and that has made a world of difference, both for the students and for me.
Rule #5: If possible, limit the number of students. Last summer, I taught the class with 12 students. This summer, it's 7. That's largely due to a registrar error, but boy, 5 fewer students is 5 fewer chances of random meltdowns. (Of course, a student did tell me this morning that she might have to leave class because her boyfriend was attending a bail hearing. !!)

What else makes summer school teaching less painful?

Sunshine-y Day

2008-05-11T11:43:00.003-04:00

It is certainly sunny and beautiful here in the Northeast---for about another day, before the rain descends. All of my neighbors are out, taking advantage of the weather, so the air is rent with the sounds of lawnmowers, weedwhackers, and anything else lawn and garden-related. It must be all of the Vitamin D that's fueling our collective sense of anticipation of good things coming up.

That same sense is being echoed in our household, it seems. I start my summer class tomorrow, and I'm sure that there's a hint of dread about that, but it's tempered by the short duration (8 days!), and decent paycheck that accompanies it. Check back in with me three days from now and see if I'm still in that psychic space.

I get the feeling that Senor Fluff is also feeling the springtime magic. I know it's been a hard year for him: new job; new job turns into another new job; new job requires that he suddenly know all sorts of things he didn't previously know; new job means new responsibilities, higher profile, more chances to screw up publicly and disappoint people who he feels believed in him in the first place. A hard row to hoe, and let's face it: Senora Fluff is not exactly Little Miss Mary Sunshine to come home to after a hard day.

So how do I know that he's finding his way out of the new job funk? Well, this morning I came downstairs to a significant clue. For many people, their spouses' well-being is probably demarcated by a change in discourse, outward or marked enthusiasm, engagement in hobbies or social activities. Senor Fluff's interior can be a bit harder to chart, so I like to wait for the obvious, which I document, for your enjoyment, below:

That's my man---frustrated artist. I want to assume that all of you awake to impromptu mixed-media sculptures, but if not, here's to the weirdness that is the Fluff-household in spring.

Land Speed Record

2008-05-08T08:56:00.002-04:00

If you heard a sonic boom yesterday at about 5, it was me and my turbo grading pen. Just in time to meet my students for their last class, I graded 16 reflective papers, four group projects, and 4 extra credit response papers. [For the record, I'm usually averse to e.c.; in this case, there were bizarre extenuating circumstances.]

I do not recommend this kind of binge grading to anyone. It melts your brain, and brings on carpal tunnel symptoms, and has the tendency to inspire rage both murderous and suicidal. There is also no margin for error. If there had been any suspicion of plagiarism, for example, I would have been hosed---no time to start googling random passages here, the clock is ticking!

But it is a sweet, sweet thing to hand back a stack of papers to students, complete with their final grades. There is, of course, always the last minute hail mary pass, the tearing eyes, the whining. But---and this is a huge but (like mine is, now, if the giant ass groove on my couch from whence the grading marathon took place is any indication), once that happens, it's generally over. As in, I get very few---like two per semester, if that---emails or phone calls disputing the final grade. It doesn't hurt that I also hand out a spreadsheet to them with every single grade they've received over the course of the semester, including daily participation. [For that, I thank a little program called Micrograde, and Lee, who introduced me to it after she moved away and no longer programmed my Excel spreadsheet formulas for me.] There was a moment at which I was afraid that giving students the numbers would give them room to negotiate every single point (but I made THREE comments that day, not TWO!), but I've found that for the most part, they are either awed by the sheer volume of numbers, or else by the fact that I quantify everything. It's a bizarre thing: I'm not one for quantification, but it seems to calm student fears that everything is arbitrary. On some level, I think that the managing the psychology of student teacher power dynamics is more important than the grade itself, for all that we criticize students about their focus on grades.

I originally intended this as the celebratory post of "I'm mostly done!" [Mostly, because of course there are stragglers, and random tasks. Like departmental assessment of seniors. F*&$.] Instead, it's turned into a post on how I manage to reduce the post-class grade panic and the unsavory interactions that usually accompany it. I think I'd account for the slippage in this way: we're not really done until the students accept their grades. And thus, sometimes, grading is not the end.

Good luck to all! The end is in sight!

I Just Can't Contain It...

2008-05-01T22:37:00.003-04:00

Okay, I'm sorry, I know that this is the result of grading 10 portfolios and 18 final exams from my class, but I can't stand it. I'm usually not one to rip on the students, but here's my list of uncontainable annoyances:

1) "Loose" instead of "lose." When did this start happening? As in "The character will loose her identity." I just keep getting this image of a floating identity, wandering around in the ether. Identity, thou art loosed.

2) Fully 68% of the class thinks, randomly, that you put an apostrophe in Americans. Now, if we were all thinking about Native Hawaiian languages, and they wanted to do something interesting with it, like put it after the A (A'mericans), forcing us to have a collective glottal stop, then that might be fun. However, I keep thinking they mean that it's possessive (American's go to war), and it's making me nuts.

3) There is rampant, rampant confusion of ethnicities. Craziness. As in, the author of a memoir about American internment camps is identified as Chinese. Dude.

4) The international student to whom I gave a big fat generous "do-over" to at the beginning of class [she plagiarized on an exam. seriously. but then Senor Fluff, who works with, and was an, international student(s) reminded me that this could conceivably be a significant cultural difference]. So let her rewrite an essay question I did. And now? Fabricating discussion posts!! As in "turn in the list of your comments" and she's made up 7 of 22! And I had to take the time to check! Dammit, I hate it when I get taken for a ride!!

5) Apparently, I wrote the monster final, as I have one student who scored a 98%, one with a 91%, and everyone else in the 70's and below----like they're spring temperatures or something. So do I curve? Do I even know how to curve? Do I just spot everyone some points? Do I not wimp out and have them suck it up?

That's all for now. In many ways, they've been a fine group. But damn, all of this is chapping my hide. As of tomorrow: one down, two to go.

Eureka!!

2008-04-28T22:10:00.003-04:00

Or, if you're from Northern California, Yreka! [Just a little in joke for you West Coast types.]

So there I was, panicking about a new project. And then as I was reading a novel this morning (one that I got, btw, free from a publisher who wants me to review it on my blog---not this blog, of course), I came across a truly bizarre sentence that got me thinking about two topics that I've always been interested in (one from the diss and one from the reading that I did to escape the diss), but have never been able to bring to fruition. And then I got in the shower, lamenting the fact that I two years ago I taught a book that was about topic B, but couldn't really make it work. And then I thought that I'd just been talking with The diss director, Z., about something related to topic B, but didn't think there was much new to say about it.

Suddenly, between lather and rinse, it came to me: if I thought about topic C, it would bridge A and B! The sky opened up and the beam of light shown down upon me. Holy crap, could it be? Could I actually have a new project? And while I slathered on the conditioner, I outlined the three constituent chapters, and started brainstorming all of the secondary sources already in my possession.

Hot diggety! I'm still in that first blush of love with an idea, where I realize that somewhere in the near future, there will be the awful drudgery of figuring out complex relationships among disparate primary sources and constructing a theoretical framework, but none of it really registers because I'm so excited to get started. Yay reading! Yay researching!!

I know that I shouldn't have this reaction, but I do, so deal. I can't help feeling a bit of relief---look, Gepetto, I'm a real academic! I'm not out of ideas at the grand old age of 33! Thank goodness! That's the academic disease, isn't it---fear that we're going to discover that we're stupid or past our prime?

The other moral of this story, however, is that projects don't come from the ether. Despite the description above, it is definitely the case that this project builds off a small nugget of work for the diss (a really small nugget---like 5 pages---but one that also played a key role in my job talk). It's also building off of some ideas that I've been cooking on for a few years, but didn't see as connected. And finally, it will involve the kind of research that I love to do best [hint: it's the kind that involves renewing subscriptions, as opposed to visiting archives...].

So, if you need me, I'll be rolling around in the warm squishiness of my new idea. After that, I'll be rolling around in the warm squishiness of grading, but that's a warm squishiness of a totally different kind.

Project Panic

2008-04-26T09:42:00.002-04:00

This morning I got one of those charming, emails from Amazon.com, in which they show me books that I never knew existed but that I of course want to buy. I want to buy them and all of their little friends that everyone else who bought the book bought. I am a capitalist pig of the first order, and I buy to live.

It didn't help me to notice, however, that said book treads dangerously close to matter that I worked on in the diss, as does one of the other recommended books. In fact, both are put out by the same publisher that reviewed my manuscript. [At some point, I need to write up that delightful little experience, wherein the reviewers couldn't agree, and the editor asked what kind of revisions I'd be willing to do. I was so befuddled and frazzled by my job that I didn't respond for 7 months. The moral of this story? Don't send shit out until you're ready...]

Last spring, I started to panic about publications, as the loud ticking of the tenure clock finally registered in my ears. It's not that we need a tremendous amount of publications here, but there's enough agita involved with the entire process that I wanted to have my bases covered. Unconsciously, I think my strategy was this: it doesn't matter what you publish, as long as you do it.

At that point, I had failed to follow up on the manuscript review for the diss, and I had also turned down the offer for a monograph on a particular writer on whom I had once been very keen, but had not worked on in years. In retrospect, I don't know if all of this sounds like career suicide, but it seemed right at the time. Devoting myself to writing a book that I wasn't really invested in, when I already have to nail my feet to the floor to get writing done, seemed like an exercise in despair.

So, I've been concentrating over the past year to get stuff done and out, in whatever way I can. This has meant working on some insane projects---a collaborative piece with a group of people from a previous institition on a book that makes me batty; a collaborative piece with my colleague in a field that's not really mine, although it touches it; and upcoming---a piece that moves in a direction I'd like to shift my research, but one that's new to me, and with a press that I'm not particularly sure about.

Somehow, all of this has worked in my favor. Wonder of wonders, it looks like a respectable press is going to put out that first piece (I think there was bribery or blackmail involved. Seriously, it's the weirdest shit ever.); Gawd willing and the creek don't rise, the second piece has been accepted by a decent journal, pending peer review; and the third, assuming I can finish it, has been accepted and should wend its way through the publishing machine next year.

While I'm now sufficiently set for the local requirements, it does leave me with a bizarre CV. There's no central theme, no particular evidence of a consistent line of research or thought, except that "gee, she knows a bunch of people." It's no wonder that the diss has lost its place in line, and its not something I'm willing to go back to at this point, as it feels so removed from me and my current thinking. But what exactly IS my current thinking?

I think it's time for me to find a new project---one that's indicative of the kind of work that I've been doing, and that I'd like to build the next stage of my career on. I'd like it to take into account the kinds of interpretative work that I most enjoy and do best, I'd like it to have stakes that I think are relevant, and I'd like it to reference and resonate with the stuff that I've been reading and I think matters in the field.

Having said all that...I have no idea what that project is. I've spent so much time making sure that I have publications on the docket in time for tenure application that I haven't cared so much about what I actually want to do. In ways that I had never intended, I've pushed my deep-seated intellectual singularity to the background in order to foreground the immediate, the marketable, the do-able in a short amount of time. If this year's theme is completion, then it might be time to complete that cycle and move on to remembering how to find what it is that most excites me, even if it's slow in coming.

Let Me Do Your Work for You!

2008-04-22T21:48:00.004-04:00

Okay, interweb, riddle me this:

I have a colleague that I don't know from Adam. I've never met her in person. I've never communicated with her by phone or email. I've never actually set eyes on her, except, maybe from afar (if she is indeed the person I think she is). Despite this lack of interaction, we have a consistent and common link: every semester for the last two years, I've gotten emails from 3-5 of her students at about this time, asking me to answer their questions via email or interview me in person about a particular topic.

Seemingly innocuous, right? But these are not questions about my particular scholarly expertise---after all, these aren't all students who need to know about Asian American shoes for their research projects. No. Instead, they are all taking a liberal education course, and are doing projects on a very universal topic about which a simple internet search would yield a good deal of reliable research. So why does she send them to me? Well, two years ago, I was one of 6 faculty members who received a teensy internal grant to participate in a institutional initiative on this topic. Let's pretend it was "teaching with chalk." So the students want to ask me about my experience teaching with chalk. Except that I'm hardly an expert on it---and there are plenty of experts out there who have studied the ramifications of teaching with chalk, the best practices in teaching with chalk, what kinds of students and activities are best taught with chalk, etc. Furthermore, I teach with chalk in very different ways than many of my colleagues (and are they inundated with student requests?), and that often gets me into trouble with my department and the IT people.

So, tell me, y'all: what's the appropriate response to this? Am I compelled, by collegiality, to respond to her students requests? Is it okay to tell them to look that shit up online? Should I send them some links to key resources? Can I write her and tell her to call off the damn dogs, since they always write me in the final two weeks of the semester (often with phrases like: "please take a few minutes and answer these questions: why does someone teach with chalk? what are the benefits and what are the drawbacks? What have your student responses been? etc., etc." Right. I can totally answer that in three minutes. And those aren't questions that the LAST set of you asked me last year!!!!).

Perhaps the best idea would be to turn the tables. Maybe I'll tell this to my students:

I know that many of you have a difficult time formatting your final papers. Please feel free to contact Dr. X, who teaches on the computer. She's our local "expert" on document design. Just email her for help!

Embiggening the World

2008-04-20T17:24:00.004-04:00

Over the past few weeks, I've found myself having a series of interactions that are pretty far outside my comfort zone, all to positive effect:

Via a certain infamous social networking system, I located one of my most favorite people from college and have scheduled a phone conversation with her.
I've had a former student who is now in graduate school email me to talk about a book that she'd been assigned a presentation on. Sick to death of typing, I told her to call me at home so we could chat about it.
I've had a publisher contact me about one of my class blogs and ask me if I would review a book for them.
I know this guy (let's call him Smokey), vaguely through a book project I've worked on. He's someone that I had a great conversation with last summer, but never followed up on. On a whim, I've asked him to discuss the design for my monster seminar in the fall, and now we're carrying on a delightful little correspondence that is exactly what I hoped it would be: smart, funny, and giving me good ideas.

I think I've written, in the past, about the ways that I tend to keep my social circle pretty small. As in, it was my mother, Senor Fluff, Yogini for a good number of years. I think a couple of my colleagues have worked hard to bust me out of that---all to the good (heads up, Dr. Marxy and Frenchie!). Left to my own devices, however, I'm all too often mired in a tiny set of social relations, and drained by interactions with others. Because hanging out with people who don't know you? Socially awkward and painful. High chances that I will say something and make an ass of myself, or they will say something that will make me disappointed. There's a line from a song by The Story that goes "And in the end you choose someone, somewhere/ Others fade from view/ And the world outside your life exhausts you..." Yup. That's it, in a nutshell.

But then I found myself at a soiree at a colleague's house---someone I like very much, and would like to know better---and I found it almost impossible not to talk to him about work---and not even the good things about work (yes, Virginia, they do exist), but the crap business and outrages of work. What else did we really have in common? [It doesn't help that he's a slow talker and I'm a nervous bunny rabbit.] Horrors!! I don't want to be this person, for whom human interaction revolves around work.

So I'm slowly, ever so slowly, venturing out into new pastures (hmmm. bad metaphor? does that make us all cows?). In truth, it scares the beejeesus out of me. It's not like the fear of social awkwardness and disappointment and self-ass-making have gone away. It's just now governed by the idea that the world is a big big place, potentially full of wonder and joy and the quirkiness that makes people fun, and that I've been actively, but unconsciously, engaged in making it very very small for a long time. And that if keep that up, I'll be a wizened, cranky old hag much sooner than I will be otherwise. That's the model that I see in a certain type of academic woman, and one that I'm hell-bent on trying to avoid.

I'll let you know how the experiment goes.

Bodily Functions

2008-04-17T15:28:00.003-04:00

With that title, this post could be all kinds of gnarly, but I'll spare you. It's a beautiful day outside, I only have two more drafts of my grad students' papers to read, and I'm looking forward to seeing a friend later this evening. Yeehaw!

Now, there's certainly no end to the amount of things that I need to do: I owe letters of recommendation to 3 students; multiple short reading responses and group drafts to a class, etc., etc. However, it's also the case that for the next week or so, there should be a lull, thanks to my awesome revelation that I was going to be exhausted and a basket case by the time I got done with article/conference/diss advisor.

So I'm just about the reap the rewards of my stupendous (no irony, for once) planning. For the final two weeks of the semester, two of my classes are workshopping and working on final projects. The third is watching a movie, discussing said movie, and studying for their final exam. All of which is making me feel like I can take a deep breath and start loving the world and everyone in it.

The true sign of this, however, is just at the end of my fingers. For the past two months, I've been biting not just my fingernails down to the quick, but also the skin around my fingernails. Yup, I know: totally gross. Disgusting habit. Makes me prone to illness. I get it, but that's what anxiety and oral fixation equal in my world. Y'all just be happy I never took to smoking.

That being the case, I realized today that I have fingernails. They clack on the keyboard, they get stuff stuck under them, and they scratch my itches quite nicely.

Until earlier today, at which point I was idly scratching my hip and I took off a mole. Can you believe it?!! Just sliced that little bugger right off. It was hanging by a little piece of skin. Once I cleared the blood away, I had to just take a deep breath and pull the rest of it off. Say it with me: "EEEEEEEWWWWWW!"

So there you have it. That's what I get for being semi-relaxed---bodily disfigurement. Does anyone know if a mole removed so inexpertly comes back?

Skimmity skim skim

2008-04-16T10:16:00.003-04:00

Speed grading sucks. And don't let anyone tell you different. I'm going to get a stamp that says: "do you want it fast, or do you want it good?"

My fear is that it will be misinterpreted by some as offering of sexual favors.

Back to exams!

Starz

2008-04-13T10:38:00.003-04:00

Just when you think astrology is all a bunch of hooey, you get something like this in your DailyOm, which so perfectly nails my mental morass over the past few days:

Praise from a family member or recognition from a professional superior can delight and energize you. You can make the most of this acceptance by allowing it to fuel your self-confidence rather than writing it off as an anomaly. As people in your home or workplace acknowledge your skillful execution of your tasks or comment positively on the poise with which you handle crises, you’ll likely discover that you feel driven to earn more of this type of admiration.

The acknowledgement and praise we receive from peers and superiors can be a potent motivator and one that inspires us to joyfully strive to outperform ourselves. Validation can make already sweet accomplishments seem even sweeter because they feed our pride. Provided we do not sustain our enthusiasm solely on the recognition we receive from others, it is wholly possible to find incentives to succeed in people’s reactions to our endeavors. Praise, furthermore, enriches our lives by showing us that we labor not in isolation but in the supportive embrace of a network of individuals who take pleasure in seeing us triumph over the challenges and adversity we face each day.

It's taken me about 4 days to come down from the high of Z's visit. "Delighted and energized" don't quite do it. It's more like "hyper and obsessive;" that's a bit more accurate. It didn't help that I got a brief uptick on Thursday when he wrote to thank me, and repeated his now unrepeatable compliment. So I have it in writing. And don't think I didn't go back and read that shit 40,000 times!!

What I like about the above horoscope is this line: "Provided we do not sustain our enthusiasm solely on the recognition we receive from others..." That's the tricky balance that I've been trying to hit over the past week. Because as super as it is to get some love, there's a kind of craven quality for reveling in it for its own sake. In my ideal world, I have some sort of vault of self-esteem that I return to in order to get through projects, try new things, etc. Sadly, this situation with Z. is the kind of thing that sends me into a tailspin, chasing the root of praise. Seriously, I've spent a bit of time over the last few days contemplating all kinds of things that I've put on the back burner for awhile: I need to get a new book project! I need to read more in x field! I should be watching more of x kind of films!! [**I do need to do these things, but I don't need to do them right now. And I really don't need to do them in order to impress Z.]

All of this has, of course, made me realize certain things about myself---shameless need for positive reinforcement, dutiful daughter syndrome, etc. At the same time, it's also totally revealed to me the utter LACK of praise that comes from other sources. I haven't bothered to transcribe the inner working of my department of late, but I have had any number of off-hand conversations with my colleagues about the ways that their work goes unacknowledged at best, and criticized needlessly at worst, by my department chair. We exist, for the most part, in an internal culture of denigration, which has the long term effect of collectively beating us down, and, if I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say of "keeping us in our places." I have to imagine that this has a chilling effect over the long-term: why should you do anything, if all you get for it is grief?

So, again, I'm poised between two extremes. What I've learned, of late, is how absolutely necessary the occasional shot in the arm is. The self-esteem vault isn't a perpetual motion machine; it's got to get a fresh infusion every once in awhile!! And yet, how necessary to figure out how to refill it on your own, periodically. How one might move that from a personal level (hey there---nice teaching!!), to a cultural one remains a mystery to me, but one that needs solving unless I want to work in a department of drones who would rather invest their time and energy elsewhere. (And I count myself among these future drones.) Let us not labor alone, but rather "take pleasure in seeing us triumph over the challenges and adversity we face each day."

Recap

2008-04-10T13:05:00.003-04:00

All right, just because you've all been on tenterhooks since my last post, here's the skinny on my diss advisor (Herein known as Z.) and his visit.

First things first: I worked myself up into a tizzy for nothing. By the time I had met him at the airport and gotten him squared away in the car to drive to him to his lodgings, I remembered that I had always wanted to get a chance to hang out with him, because he's so fun to talk to. I checked him in, chatted awhile, and then promptly went home and spent 2 hours writing the introduction for his lecture. This, of course, guaranteed that I spent the next day---all 13 hours of it---hanging out with him in serious sleep deprivation mode. C'est la vie.

Z. had everything to say about his own projects, about mine, about the students and colleagues that he met, advice about my upcoming tenure bid, about the ways to negotiate the tense relations with some of my colleagues. With reference to the latter, in fact, he told me a couple of hair-raising stories about his own experiences at my alma mater in his days as a junior faculty member. Words to the wise: academia never changes. Same insults, different mouths.

But here's the big moment, and the one that I've been turning around and around in my mind since he left yesterday: he thanked the College and the department and me for inviting him, and then proceeded to call me "the single most brilliant graduate student he'd ever worked with." Holy of the holiest of craps, my friends. My friend Hz, who was sitting next to me, insists that I didn't move for the next 20 minutes. That might be because all of the blood in my body rushed to my feet. I felt a bit faint, for sure.

So, what to do in the face of that kind of compliment? I've been trying to come to terms with it in some authentic way. Let's face it: I'm charming and can rub a few brain cells together, but the "most brilliant"? Hardly. At the same time, I don't want to entirely discard the comment---not just because it feels awesome, but also because Z's not an idiot or a liar. He does indeed think that I've got something going on, even if it's hyperbolic.

This is the story I'm telling myself now, and it's the best I can do to make sense of the situation. What I see now that I didn't see when I was a graduate student is this: Z and I have interlocking neuroses, which enable us to think that the other hung the moon. The first match looks like this: I met Z at a time when he was persona non grata in my department (truly, I had to hunt him down). I think the fact that I chose him, in opposition to the movers and shakers, was deeply gratifying to him. On my end, that meant that he was invested in helping me more fully realize what I wanted to do, as opposed to guiding me into a project that fit his own schema perfectly. The second match is more personal, and probably sicker in a way that embarrasses me to articulate. Z. has, as I often say, a passel of daughters. In fact, when he was working with me, he had a college-aged daughter who was quite rebellious. She couldn't have been much younger than me, really (maybe 7 years?). And as for me, let's face it: I've got father issues. In ways that have only recently come to light for me. And I'll spare y'all the dramaz. But unconditional positive regard from man 20 years my elder? Oh, it made my heart sing.

The latter dynamic was ridiculously clear when he was here. From the "let's sit down, you're wearing heels" to the moment leaving the restaurant when he first asked me if I had my coat, and then helped me on with it---it's such a dad move.

So, while I'm riding the high of his comment (and let's face it, I'm going to put that quote on as many things as I can. I might tattoo it on my arm, in fact), I'm also aware of the ways in which mentoring relations are deeply invested by all of the various psychic wounds we bring to our work. I'm lucky that it's such a positive spin on all of mine, and I hope that it's the same for Z.

I'm off to read papers til I puke. And try to strategically avoid re-creating any bizarre childhood dramas with my own students.

Note to Self, #768

2008-04-08T07:17:00.002-04:00

Dear Self---

When possible, try to avoid letting your mouth run out ahead of your brain. Get that kid out of the street before it gets hit by a car! If you need a reminder of why not to do this, think about this moment, when you tied yourself in knots of social anxiety because six months ago, like a total meathead, you volunteered to invite your dissertation advisor to campus for a lecture. Sure, it might have seemed like a good idea at the time, and yes, he's a wonderful person and a great person for the students to meet. BUT. Remember that it makes you batshit crazy to worry about hanging out with him all day, and that he's going to finally figure out what a sham you are. Then you'll have to worry about having written a truly crap, embarrassing introduction for his lecture, which neither hews to the form of the official introduction, neither does it get at what you really want him to know about the impact that he's had. And the fact that he'll still be nice about it, no matter what kind of disaster it is will simply serve to make you feel worse, because there's nothing like having someone you adore watching you make an ass of yourself.

In short, remember this moment when you were the architect of your own freakitude, and zip it.

Love,
Fluff

P.S. One more thing: try not to schedule too many nerve-wracking, high stakes events in the same week. Honestly. Article + conference paper + advisor? What are the chances you can survive that kind of thing without totally fucking up? Really. Get some sense...

Girl in the Bubble

2008-03-30T19:00:00.003-04:00

So, I did it. Finally finally. Two hours ago, I sent off the draft of my article, complete with a short abstract and a bio. We won't mention the morning of trolling the web, looking at the other way of citing secondary sources. What's up with those people, by the way? Why on earth is it so important to put the year?

Anyway. The point of this is that I feel like the dirty, stinking, rotting carcass of an albatross has finally fallen off. After worrying about this article since the New Year, spending two days a week working on it for the last three months, having sweaty, panicked dreams about not finishing it, the mofo has been submitted. Praise Jeebus, hallelujah.

It's not that I don't have another deadline looming (hello, unwritten conference paper to be delivered in 3 days). It's not that I don't owe my students papers that have gone weeks ungraded, or tips about how to take an upcoming exam, or comments on their journals. No, all of that is still there. But the overwhelming relief of having this thing off and gone has overwhelmed my finely-tuned, over-active freak out complex. That's how strong it is! If I knew it felt this good, I would have written articles years ago!!

In my conscious mind, I know that the bubble is paper thin, but I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts. Completion, she is an cruel taskmistress. Cruel, but fair.

One Cheek

2008-03-25T15:36:00.002-04:00

That's right, folks, I am officially and self-consciously half-assing everything from now until April 3.

That includes, but is not limited to: class preparation; grading; committee work; the department-wide student extravaganza; negotiations about new curricula; personal hygiene; correspondence; cooking; cleaning the house; laundry; wifely duties; advisee requests, and anything else that should crop up in the next week.

Why? I'll tell you why. Because I'm not designed to teach three classes, revise two articles, and write a conference paper all in the same month. I have no doubt that there are people out there who can do it. I'm sure that it speaks to my fundamental insufficiencies. It probably makes me a bad person who's going to the ring of hell wherein the damned swim in a pool of dog snot for all eternity (at least according to my 8th grade geography teacher's take on The Inferno).

Do my students, my advisees, my colleagues, my friends and family deserve better? Damn skippy. Are they going to get it? Probably, but not in the way that they deserve.

I just thought you all should know.

If you want me, I'll be here listening to "No Sleep Til Brooklyn" on infinite repeat.

My Morning, Animated Edition

2008-03-23T21:47:00.001-04:00

Have you ever wondered what daybreak looks like at the Fluff household? Behold, the brilliance of animation, and its ability to hit the nail (and the owner) on the head:

NASCAR? Nobel.

2008-03-21T10:24:00.003-04:00

Oh, I wish there were a way to let you all be flies on the wall in my classroom. Although that would be kind of gross, and a bit too much like The Exorcist. But oh, to have someone witness this exchange (presented to you in MadLibs form, to protect the ignorant):

Fluff: Next week, we'll be starting [major Amerian novel]. The reason we're reading [major American novel] is because it's the [ethnic group] equivalent of [other major American novel.] In many ways, [author] is the [ethnic group] equivalent of [monumental author].

Student: [monumental author]?

Fluff: Yeah, [monumental author].

silence.

Student: [monumental author]? Is he a NASCAR driver?

Fluff: Is he a NASCAR driver?! SHE'S arguably one of the most important twentieth century American writers! Her [famous novel] was voted by the New York Times the best book of the twentieth century?!

silence.

Fluff: [monumental author's first book]? [monumental author's second book]? Pulitzer Prize winner? Nobel Prize winner? OPRAH?!!

Student: We don't read.

Look, folks. I'm usually not one to bust on the kids for their lack of cultural capital. In their defense, they're taking this class to fulfill gen ed requirements, so all of them are math, or science, or art, or education majors. But holy crap on a cracker!! Is [monumental American author] a NASCAR driver?!! Take me now, Jeebus! I'm comin' home!

The saving grace of this incident is that my department chair is thankfully coming next week to observe my class. She would have shit a pile of bricks if she'd been in the room for this one. Doubtless, my students will bring it up, along with my recent mini-lectures on Spam [the ways that food reveals historical and economic materialities] and Rock of Love [who can forget the words to the national anthem and not be punished for it].

Why Not Just Say "Don't Get Out of Bed?"

2008-03-15T09:57:00.003-04:00

Here's a choice quote from my horrorscope for the day:

That's it. The end of an era. The last act in a long drama. There's no going back.

Jeebus. Thanks. Bed is looking better and better all the time. As if I don't have melodramatic tendencies to begin with? Like I need some sort of astrological omen to make me more paranoid?

If you want me, I'll be laying in bed reading the latest issue of Elle, with Amy Adams on the cover.

Or else having lunch with Senor Fluff's graduate school girlfriend. Just the thing to do on a day with a horoscope like the one above.

That Clinches It

2008-03-10T20:38:00.003-04:00

Oh, goddamn it, Eliot Spitzer. Why do you have to go and do something so godawful stupid?!!

I should probably have more of a problem with Spitzer calling a high priced call girl from an interstate prostitution ring---on a political level, and as a feminist. But that's not the part that's really bugging me. It's the way that this incident figures in the dream of Eliot Spitzer---defender of the people, the icon of ushering in a new period of ethics in state politics, this totally smart, conscientious guy who's got a good enough sense of humor to show up on Colbert. If Spitzer had been just some run of the mill politician, then this would be a blip on the radar. Chalk one more up to the dudes who can't keep it in their pants; what else is new? Instead, Spitzer was an avatar, and this NY Times story tarnishes him in a way that it wouldn't have some other random elected official. I feel sad, and disappointed, and a bit heartbroken because it's an example of the ways in which these people in whom I've invested a good deal of hope and belief and trust aren't the people I wanted and expected them to be.

Truth be told, the Spitzer incident is just a national allegory for my own small circle right now, in a number of ways. A distant family member, who's been of such help to me in the past, has just sneakily bilked my step-father out of an inheritance; a colleague that I knew and admired from afar seems evermore affected by the swirling politics around her; etc., etc.

In many ways, I don't think that I'm particularly realistic or pragmatic when it comes to my relationships with other people. If I'm honest, I tend to create a narrative about people I know and view their behaviors and motivations through that narrative forever. And on top of that, I think I' m a bit of an inflater; if I like you and respect you, than I generally think you can do no wrong. In essence, I'm confessing to owning a psyche that is the equivalent of shooting myself in the foot. Or setting myself up to be hurt? Which crapped-out cliche is it that I'm reaching for, here? I'm looking for the one that succinctly describes the way in which it's a mistake to think that anyone is perfect, or lives in harmony and accordance with his/her stated principles. [It could be that I've been watching too much In Treatment, but I'm sure that this has something to do with my childhood... Perhaps Gabriel Byrne would like to talk to me about it?]

In situations like these, I find that it's becoming easier and easier, over time, to withhold judgment. Because, after all, I couldn't be more fallible if I worked for it. I'm a ball of contradictions and insufficiencies and as much as I like to think that I'm working hard to be a person of integrity, I'm also small minded and vengeful and easily swayed. Big glass house, that's me.

But even without judgment, bearing witness to others' shortcomings is painful and sad and disappointing on a global level. Not to sound like a 5 year old, but if no one is capable of consistency with their principles, then what's the point? Who is there to model my sad little attempts after?

So, thanks for nothing, Eliot Spitzer, except the reminder that good people are fallible, and that they can still do good work. Maybe that's the model I need to start taking more seriously.

Combustion upon Re-entry

2008-03-09T11:08:00.002-04:00

Thank you, Daylight Saving Time, for making my last, crowded, too-much-to-do, too-little-time day an hour shorter. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that.

That tone, above? Dripping with sarcasm? That's me all over. I can't imagine why three days in a major metropolitan city, in a swanky hotel, eating cupcakes in the village, far far away from all of my pressing tasks and the psychological clusterfuck that is on the horizon would conspire to make the return home and back to the realities of work such a difficult event. Nope! Just can't figure out why!!

It was lovely to be away, it really and truly was. Even walking 80 city blocks a day was fun, although before I do it again, I really have to figure out a shoe solution. Here I thought clogs were totally going to do it, but not really. What do cool kids wear to walk?

What I realized yesterday, however, was that I was saving up all of these grunt tasks---massive amounts of grading, writing up a major end-of-semester assignment, a few recommendation letters, a few lingering program admin things, my contribution to a grant proposal, doctor's appointments----for break. In addition, while I was working on the dreaded article, I put off all of these tasks as well. So here we are! At the end of break! And my list is long and arduous! Suck!

I can't remember the last time I felt this despondent at the end of a break. Forget rest and renewal. I just want to crawl in bed and sleep. With a few cupcakes.

Stinky McDirtPants

2008-03-05T08:32:00.002-05:00

I have to hope that this is neither a local nor an individual happenstance: the inverse proportion between writing and cleanliness. Anyone?

Since the dawn of our spring break (which, for me, started on Thursday), I've been frantically working on an article due at the end of the month. To complicate matters, I've got a co-author, so the work entails a combination of individual writing and research, swapping of drafts, meeting to reorganize and restructure, more writing and researching, etc., etc. There's much to be said about weighing the advantages and disadvantages of co-writing; I'll save that for another post. For right now, let's just say that it's convenient that the two of us live close to each other, and that we're both apparently more and more forgiving about what she calls the "slippery slope of personal hygiene."

Honestly, I just don't get it. I LOVE to shower. I love to be clean!! Despite the previous post about the difficulties of scheduling hair washing, or perhaps BECAUSE of the difficulties, I tend to obsess about bathing. And yet, this "break" finds me in serious disarray. What is it about the process of writing that makes me avoid the shower? Is it punishment? Is it held out as a reward? Is it that I subconsciously believe that my funkiness will incubate any good ideas that I have?

In truth, my guess is that it's the schedule. The past few days have looked like this:

drink coffee
revise section or read relevant source material
get up
call co-author and decide on tasks
write til lunch
make lunch and eat
call co-author and check in
meet with CA and/or write more
if the sun isn't down, get some exercise, or at least get off the couch, wherein I have been making quite an ass groove for myself

You see the problem here, right? Where do you fit a shower in there? At least going to the gym necessitates cleanliness, but by the time I workout and and eat dinner, it's 9, and all I want to do is lay supine and have television signals beamed directly into my brain.

You'll be happy to know that this assault on world hygiene ends today; Senor F and I are on our way out of town for a brief break. Solely for the good people of Gotham will I make sure that I cleanse myself daily. My skin won't know what to do with itself. If you hear "I'm melting, I'm melting!" you'll know who it's coming from.

I've Got Your Oil Crisis Right Here

2008-03-02T10:13:00.003-05:00

I know that there are far more important things happening in the world, but this is the one that gets to me on a daily basis: oily hair.

Here's the situation: I need a haircut, and I keep putting itoff because it requires a conversation with the fetus, and making an appointment and going down there, etc., etc. All things I dread. In the meantime, however, my hair is ridiculously long. As in, I just saw the department secretary the other day and she said: "Wow! Your hair got really long!!" Right, thanks. Give me some letterhead.

So the hair is too long, and I'm putting off doing something about that. Meanwhile, the hair is, and has always been, ridiculously thick. Like, perhaps thinning is not such a bad idea. Like, when I was in high school I shaved the back of my head and still had plenty of hair to cover it up (and in many ways, that was one of the best haircuts I ever had, except that it was a bitch to grow out).
But thick hair and overly-long hair means only one thing: way way too much time to dry it in the morning. As in, dryer arm goes numb and shoulder aches, too much time. As in, dryer begins to overheat, too much time. As in, gee, I could either prep my class OR I could dry my hair this
morning.

No problem, right? Just don't wash it every day! Right, except that, well, you remember Exxon-Valdez? Ducks and waterfowl and sea creatures slicked in oil and struggling for life? That's pretty much the state of my scalp after 36 hours. So I've been experimenting with that window, but it's a tricky one. If I shower late in the day before one evening class, I can just about make it through the next evening before the inevitable moment when I run my hands through my hair and leave tracks. The better option here is either to pull it back or enter the wide world of hair accessories, but both seem troubling. A bit like the moment when you cover an enormous zit with concealer, and thus make it even more visible. From space. Look over here!! I'm accessorizing my incredibly greasy head!!

So what I really want to know is this: has anybody tried this stuff?

Hair powder? Really? Am I intrigued just because Bumble and Bumble make it? Is it really some sort of bizarre throwback to Versailles? Next thing you know I'll be wearing a wig and telling people to eat cake?

Thoughts, advice, mockery are all accepted here.

Pre-Oscar Poser

2008-02-24T20:30:00.002-05:00

From Senor Fluff:

"If you had to go to the Oscars, and you could get anyone to design your dress, who would you choose?"

"Oooooh. Would I get input, or would have to wear whatever I got?"

"Does it matter?"

"Of course. This is a hard one. I have to think. I suppose if I had to choose blind, it would be Armani. You'd run the risk of it being boring, but it would be pretty at the very least, and probably pretty flattering. But if I could choose? Maybe Gaultier? Chloe? Patrick Robinson? This is tough. Give me a minute... Oh my God!! Whoever it would be, it wouldn't be whoever designed Rebecca Miller's dress designer! Holy crap! What is that monstrosity?!?"

Just thought I'd share. Feel free to weigh in on the question at hand. Once you recover from Miller's unfortunate digestion by taffeta. Turn away quickly.

Toothpaste and Orange Juice

2008-02-24T09:38:00.003-05:00

You know the litany of world's worst combinations? Toothpaste and orange juice, neon and spandex, T&A, heat and humidity, Whitney and Bobby, etc., etc. I'd like to add to this list my own, most-hated combo: writing and grading.

I knew, this semester, that it was going to be a problem. I have an article due at the end of March (eep!!), a conference paper due at the beginning of April (double eep!), and another article due at the end of June (too far away to worry about). That double whammy in March/April, however, coincides with the run up to the end of the semester, which is always the prime grading moment before the deluge of final papers, exams, and projects. I did my best to work my schedule around those dates, with the knowledge that it was just going to suck. But I'd forgotten that I'd have to deal with the mid-term grad-age right at about the time that full-scale writing panic sets in. Which is yesterday.

So, the good news is that my co-writer and I got a decent start on the article Friday and Saturday, and I mapped out an idea for my conference paper that will draw on some work that I've done before. (Somehow, the online conference program has me listed without a paper title, and I'm taking full advantage of that fact to write a slightly different presentation than the one I had planned. Which sounded awesome when I wrote the abstract----in May. But sounded less do-able when the paper was accepted at the end of September. If they'd just told me in July (a reasonable two month turnover rate), I could have actually written that paper, but c'est la vie, bitches!) The point here is that I've gotten a good amount of writing done this weekend, or at least enough to hold off the 4 a.m. "I'm going to move to New Mexico and run a goat farm because I'm about to be drummed out of the profession" panic attacks that I know and love.

The bad news, of course, is that I should have been spending this weekend working through the grading backlog that I promised my students to return to them on Monday. I have a set of early portfolios and a set of exams, and cranking some mid-terms grades to do, and that's just for one class.

You know that screed about "teaching and doing research simultaneously is hard"? Yeah, well. I think I'll brush my teeth and have some citrus for breakfast.

Holding Back the Snark

2008-02-22T08:56:00.005-05:00

I've been, as the title says, Holding Back the Snark, as sung to the tune of Simply Red's "Holding Back the Years." I've gotten about this far in rewriting the lyrics:

Holding back the snark
Thinking that it's better in the long run
But what I'd rather do
Is speak it awfully slow for you

But I'll keep holding on
I'll keep holding on
I'll keep holding on

The inspiration for such a masterpiece of revision? Student emails, of course! I actually have quite delightful classes this semester, including a brand new film class that is a challenging mix of senior English majors who are all about the theoretically-informed critique of films, and students taking it as an elective who want to talk about their love for particular actors. I've committed to having them do weekly writing in this class---short papers in which they apply the secondary work we're reading (either an article about the genre, about the time period, or a film textbook) to a very specific element in the film, and move toward a larger argument about effect and ideology. No, it's not easy, but that's why we practice, eh? Attached to the syllabus is a description of the assignment that students can follow. This puts me in the unenviable position of reading and commenting on 20 of these a week, but there's nothing like weekly writing to embed some habits of mind (and, sadly, make students take a film class seriously).

So my student R. is a well-meaning and dedicated student. She's an adult who's got kids, and she's taken film classes before at the local community college. So, three weeks in, she writes me to tell me she's concerned about her grades on these papers (on which she was receiving B's, for the record), and asked me to clarify what I want. Right---on TOP of the comments that I give you each week? Okay, so I construct a sample for her---a "this is what I would do if I were going to write it, but this is only one of many models" type thing. Since it took me about 45 minutes to do that, I figured I should post it for the entire class so that everyone could see it, effectuating the creation of a course website to do this on, but whatever.

Okay, so this week, after having posted the example. Virtually all of the papers are better, and start moving toward the kind of analysis I want. They're not perfect, but they're in the ballpark (and not largely made up of "gee, I saw this movie when I was 14 and my sister and I thought that Andrew McCarthy was the hottest thing. And then we went to the mall and bought glitter socks. But back to the movie..."). Of course, virtually all of them are on the same topic as the example that I posted, but they all worked through it in their own way. So, I'm not complaining. And, like those of her peers, R's paper is better too---she got an 87.

Her email to me, sent the day after class, reports that she's disappointed and wants to know if I have any suggestions, because she thought she was doing what I asked.

And here's where I have to start singing my little song. Because seriously----other than write it for her, what else can I do? How do I respond to that email without saying, "Well, R., did I perhaps say anything in the comments that would specifically explain how to make it better? I don't have your paper in front of me, but it so stood out from the other papers that I can practically recite it verbatim, and thus here's what I would suggest, over and above what I wrote in the comments. Because usually, that's how I roll: I refuse to tell you what to do differently next time unless you specifically write to me. But good on you! You figured out my secret code, and thus I'll give you REAL feedback now!"

You can see why the song is necessary, no? For your viewing pleasure, here's the video. Sing along, if you're so inclined, or suggest more lyrics. And picture me with that hair...