Holding Pattern

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.

The Comfort of Metaphors

It could be my background in literature, or it could be my secret, corny love of cliches: whatever it is, I love a good metaphor. There's something about its ability to bring unlike things into comparison with each other. And on their best days, metaphors show us something about one thing that we didn't know, all by virtue of its surprising similarity to the other thing. And so last night, I found myself drifting off to a semi-peaceful sleep with the image of a manual transmission.

The story is this: the meeting I dreaded brought about the unhappy decision I knew was coming. It has consequences that are far reaching for two different projects that I'm involved in. To wit, because of some people's complete hubris and narrow-minded ideas of what contemporary intellectual work looks like, two years of hard work building programs (i.e., recruiting students, developing curricula, integrating technology, negotiating with faculty, designing courses, etc.) may well all go right down the drain. My initial reaction was to spend the evening oscillating between terror (I'm not even quite sure why it makes me afraid, quite frankly) and despair. It's not so often that I spend years working on the same thing; the idea of all of that time and energy going to waste makes me sick to my stomach.

So where does the manual transmission come in? Well, on Thursday, I had the great pleasure of drinking with Dr. Marxy, who has the great misfortune of having to watch over a lot of these kinds of decisions without really being able to intervene. That pretty much makes her the impotent goddess of the clusterfuck, in my view. And as we discussed the ever-growing conservatism of faculty decisions, she very wisely said that this was one of the reasons to be thankful for, and nurture a great family life--so that you don't get overly-invested in the crap.

She's exactly right (and was even more right after two G&Ts). I tried to remind myself of that when I heard the news. All well and good, but how do you stop from getting invested, or as I worded it to myself "engaged"? Suddenly, I had the image of a a transmission engaging--the way that you push the clutch in to change gears, and how, with the clutch engaged, the engine revs but won't go anywhere, whereas when you let the clutch out, the car zooms off in fifth. So as I wandered off to sleep last night, I kept visualizing the image of keeping the clutch engaged; just hold it there and let the engine rev without making progress. I haven't quite unpacked all of this yet. Does it mean that avoiding engagement equals holding myself in and letting it all transpire? Does it mean that I'm somehow hoping to prevent wheels from turning elsewhere? I'm not sure. All I know is that the image of the gears being unable to turn was the only thing that let me get some rest.

So there you have it, folks. An unanalyzed love of a bizarre metaphor for faculty engagement. Don't you all have some grading to do, instead of reading this stuff?

Words of Wisdom; George Michael Edition

I could whine endlessly about all of the things that have prevented me from blogging for the last 11 days, but I'll spare you. Suffice to say: grading! writing! grading! driving to the DuPont State! eating! grading!

More important to say this, perhaps: I'm sitting in my office, contemplating the great wisdom of George Michael. No, I'm not planning on propositioning an officer of the law in a public bathroom, but I am humming (to the extent that it's hummable) that great paean to modern life: Monkey. If you don't have on your fluorescent shorts right now, let me remind you of the first stanza:

Why can't you do it?
Why can't you set your monkey free?
Always giving in to it. Do you love the monkey or do you love me?

Ah, George. Wisdom for the ages. Applicable in so many different situations, but particularly this one. I'm sitting in my office being stood up by a student who has missed 3 weeks of class. I'm on my second day of a headache. In a meeting this morning, the apparently invisible, throbbing railroad spike in my eye was making me nauseous. A quick trip to the student center armed me with Advil, chips and a Dr. Pepper (caffeine and fat being key to holding back the full-on migraine). In an hour, there is a meeting that I've been dreading for three weeks. Dread of the "wake up in the middle of the night sweating, shaking with a combination of fear and indignant anger" variety.

So why, dear readers, am I still here?! Because I just can't get enough pain and nausea? Because I'm two teeth above de Sade level masochism? Because inertia is the most powerful force on earth? All true. But I think I'm going to let George speak to me. For today, I'm going to let my monkey free. Because, dammit, I don't love the monkey more than I love me. If you need me, I'll be at home watching Oprah.

When You Know You're in Trouble

• When it's still dark out when you get up, and you're in Daylight Savings time.
• When you think to yourself: do I need a cup of coffee before I start grading?
• When it's 10 a.m. and you're ready for a nap.
• When you still have two papers to grade, an article to read, and classes to prep in the next 3 hours.
• When you haven't showered yet.
• When you woke up formulating arguments against the faculty members who passive-aggressively dismissed your field and blamed it for the downfall of an entire core curriculum requirement during a meeting with the Provost yesterday.
• When your plan for the weekend is to both catch up on grading AND write an abstract.
• When your birthday is a week away and you haven't had time to play for it.

Anyone else know she's in trouble?

Note to Self

Never read your email before going to bed. What good will come of it? Honestly, it's not like you're going to be informed that you've won the lottery. It's much more likely that you'll find an email that can, in one fell swoop: rub your nose in your misguided attempt to make a suggestion to your colleagues; show how that suggestion was perceived as you misrepresenting the idea of another faculty member; endanger your good working relationship with said faculty member, which you've been building for four years; document that faculty member's response, in which he disavows having said such a thing (because he didn't, and you didn't either, but that's what got written on your behalf); embarrass and malign your integrity to as many people as possible using the crucial group mail function.

That's much more likely to be sitting in your inbox. And then you'll have to cry out of both rage and despair, and wonder why it is that some people are so deeply invested in being mean just for the sake of it. Or perhaps they're mean as a way of showing you that really, you have no power, and you'd be better off just shutting up. And then you'll have to contemplate the deep karmic toll of deciding that it's okay to hate someone. Particularly if that person has a long history of using these kinds of tactics to bend or break individuals in order to maintain power. And even then, you'll have to wonder if you can truly hate the person, or just yourself for allowing yourself to be treated this way.

Then, I suppose, it will be a long night spent churning over the idea of whether it's better to suck it up and hope that this will die down, in the way that once a predator establishes dominance, he'll leave the weaker animals alone, or whether the predator will continue to press the attack, because the weaker animals are even more vulnerable when they're down.

And I know this is whiny and pathetic and sad, but it's true. Once, just once, I wish someone would speak up to defend me in a public forum. I like to think that I do it for others. I'd like to call in a chip, if I have one. Because I'm really tired, and I'm really sad. And I don't want to become a disfigured, bitter person who's scared of taking a chance. But much more of this, and I'll be well on my way.

Year of No, Part II

There seems to have been relatively little fall out from instituting the Year of No; I got a surprisingly neutral response about dropping off a committee from the chair, and while I haven't yet heard from the person who asked me for a letter, I'm hoping that she's just not the responding type. In my more optimistic moments, I imagine that this is how real people roll---how they manage to protect their time, and thus they engineer rational responses. My inner Eeyore, however, keeps expecting the other shoe to drop any minute.

All of this "no-ing" has made me think about the other things that we assent to in this job, perhaps without conscious thought. I had a beer with a former student this week, because he's interested in going to graduate school. In my head, I often call him "Sideshow Bob," because during a large part of his tenure at Ascesis, he sported an enormous 'fro:
The thing is, I never would have picked SB as one for graduate school. He's very bright, and, although I realize it's a cliche, he's what I would call "intellectually curious." He read all sorts of books and poems on his own, would come to my office to chat about them. Despite all of this, however, he never really liked to do things on other people's terms. I find this to be an admirable quality in people in general, but I worry about how it suits one for graduate study. What really got me was the moment he told me: "I want your job." "No," I said. "You really don't." Because when he said that, all I could think of were the various arenas in which I'm told that I'm wrong, or that what I think doesn't matter, or that I need to show my work to someone to make sure that it's right. "Sometimes in this job, and in preparation for this job," I told him, "you have to be able to eat shit. Do you think you can do that?" Talk about an unfair question.

But it really got me thinking about meetings and procedures and interactions in the professorial life that I engage in, yet think that they are unjust, debilitating, unethical. Sadly, I can't really say no to these in the way that I'd like, despite my fantasies of walking out, screaming "BULLSHIT" at the top of my lungs, throwing things. But surely, if the Year of No is in effect, there have to be other ways to register negation? How do you say no to manipulation, passive-aggression, power-trips, infantilization, narcissism, and your other run-of-the-mill academic interactions?

In a bizarre twist, I think it might mean saying no to no, both for myself and for others.

• "You can't do that because...": Well, actually, I think I can, and here's why.
• "We've been doing it this way forever.": That's super, but here's why change is necessary.
• "Isn't his insistence on this practice funny? [institute round of sniggers.]": No, it's admirable.
• "You're bringing about the downfall of [choose one: the English language, the university as we know it, the rigors of our discipline, the educational project, human life as we know it]": in actuality [choose one: already done, began happening a long time ago, what rigor?, see current research, maybe it's only life as you know it, etc.]

What's that old adage about two negatives making a positive? Who would have thought that you could work for a Molly-Bloom like "yes" via "no"? Not me. And yet it feels like a necessary part of the Year of No. I say no to myself and others being negated. No. And perhaps, when I'm feeling particularly fiesty, "No, bitch." [I might have to work myself to that one.]

Who Moved My Cheese?

Because I need some to go with this whine! (Take my wife, Please!) All of this is indicative of my humor level right now. Ways in which things are sucking right now:

• In a nod to MaggieMay's universe, our own local Forces of Darkness (here, we'll call them the dementors, so as to draw as many Harry Potter readers as possible to this site) are gathering for what, I think, they hope will be a committee-level smackdown next week. This follows on the heels of the faculty level smackdown that they delivered pre-Spring Break. Honestly, I'm about at the point of challenging them to a game of dodgeball or something. If we're going to work this out like children, then let's do it with a contact sport!
• Re: the above: what I really want is to be able to ask the blogosphere whether they find these kinds of seemingly-giant-but-actually-minute differences cropping up at their own campuses, particularly between and among divisions that should, inherently, be on the same damn side. But such is the fate of the academic blogger, that she cannot copy the latest string of emails from her colleagues for public dissection.
• I'm in the middle of a job candidate search, preparing for an all day departmental hootenanny, about to receive a batch of papers, getting ready to attend a local conference this weekend...I don't have time to scratch my ass.

Ways in which things are NOT sucking:

• I am closing in on my contribution to a group publication that has been two years in the making. I think, with my co-author, I have found something to say about this truly bewildering novel. I read it with my class this semester, and they rocked it out. Not only did they dig deep and find threads that are crucial to understanding the novel, but they worked together, and they pointed me toward new ideas about the ending. I love you, class!
• The schedule has just been posted for a conference I'm attending at the end of the semester, and whoa, there are some great people on the docket. I'm excited about the paper I am delivering; I'd be even more excited if I could find the time to write it. (see above)
• The wonderful, fabulous, Frenchie F is coming to visit this weekend, ostensibly for a conference, but really to drink wine and hang out. Love that!
• My other class, which has been one of the most sisyphean teaching events of my life, finally picked up steam yesterday. I have no idea what caused it, but this phrase floated through my head about halfway through: "Oh. THIS is how I used to teach!" Yay!
• In interviewing people for this job, my ACUN and the department that are working together have created quite a collegial working process. I hope I'm not speaking too soon, but we've turned what could have been a contentious and bitter process into a careful and empathetic system of finding someone who will work and prosper within our respective curricula.

Hmmm. It seems that there's significant overlap between list #1 and list #2. What is the only thing that doesn't appear on the second list? (If I could find a Mp3 of the old Sesame Street classic "One of These Things Is Not Like the Other" I would so embed it here!)