Getting Stuff Done (and its exact opposite)

Spring Break, I got stuff done.

I should explain: I am gold-star motivated. That is to say, you give me an opportunity to earn some completely meaningless recognition, to check of the maximum number of things, and I'll do it. I am much more competitive against myself than I would ever dream of being against another human being. To give an example: in the sixth grade, the math teacher gave us the textbook and told us that our grade for the year would be based on how many of the pages we completed (with a satisfactory grade). I can't recall now how she combined this with actual teaching, but I can recall that about two thirds of the way through the year I had handed her back the book and said, "I'm done. What do I do now?"

So then it will be no surprise to anyone that, when I decided that I wanted to not piss away my spring break, I decided to make a chore chart:

Seriously: I posted this on my refrigerator. Like I was effing ten years old.

And it will be no surprise to anyone who knows me that this worked. By the end of spring break, I had filled in 49 of the 54 boxes. BOW DOWN BEFORE MY PRODUCTIVITY. AS GOD IS MY WITNESS, I WILL NEVER BE UNMOTIVATED AGAIN!

And then, the following week happened. I have missed all three of my exercise classes (though one of those was on accident). I have gorged on sugar and caffeine. I have written a total of 1000 words, read no new books or articles, and watched the grading pile up. I think I washed my hair once. I have spent a lot of hours that I have no idea where they went. I feel psychologically greasy.[1]

Do I need a new chore chart? Is there no way, even at almost fifty years old, that I will ever overcome my need for a gold star in order to do anything more demanding than putting on my pants in the morning?


[1] Though not literally greasy: my hair is of a type that only normally gets washed every three days, so while only washing my hair once is definitely a sign of my general apathy, the visible result is not as bad as it sounds. I may have problems elsewhere in my life, but anyone who knows me will attest to the fact that I have Objectively Very Good Hair.

On Being Nibbled to Death by Mice

Is it something about going in to the office?

Seriously: the semester is going to start soon, and there are many small things to take care of. So you go to the office with a finite list of twelve- to twenty-minute tasks. But every time you start one, something happens: A student comes in, randomly; a data something or other doesn't work and needs to be reconfigured. The account information that took you two hours to track down and configure a month ago doesn't work, and three phone calls can't put it right.

Nothing really goes terribly wrong. But you have this feeling that you are leaving the office more behind than when you arrived. It's like there's some workload-related branch of physics, and when you step into the office it all folds and bends and goes through a wormhole and you look up and it's suddenly dark and you have no idea how or when that happened and you've still only checked one item off your to-do list, and a minor one at that. And once it's past six pm on a Friday in winter, you realize you've missed your yoga class and everyone else has been gone for two hours and you think "Well, In for a penny, in for a pound; might as well stay for another hour and a half and see about just one more twelve-minutes-from-finished-but-not-really item on that to-do list."

But at least you took time out to write a blog post about it.

It's not you, it's me. (Or is it?)

"Don't be afraid to get it wrong," I tell my students all. the. time. "It's how we learn."

I'm usually prompted to tell students this in some private meeting to discuss their sinking grades in discussion (undergraduate) or seminar (graduate) participation. The same students who are so passionate and interested in my office hours, so articulate in their papers, are quiet as mice at a Quaker meeting when it comes time to bring those ideas up in class. Usually what happens is that someone says something in class, and that becomes the consensus for the class as a whole. Now, everyone is afraid to speak an opinion that runs counter to what that first person said. In some cases, they don't want to be disagreeable. But in others, they just don't want to get it wrong in public.

I've often wondered how we get students past this fear of being ignorant in public. That's not "stupid", mind you. It's just publicly exposing yourself as not knowing something. Or maybe as misunderstanding something. In the past, I have likened this to my mistakes while learning my first foreign language. I landed in Frankfurt at age 19 armed with two years of high school German, and decided that I couldn't stay in the hostel forever. I needed go out and fearlessly mangle the language and wait for someone to correct me; only this way, I reasoned, would I learn.

I'm starting to reconsider this, and I'm doing so because of a book review that I'm currently writing.

When I was a graduate student, I wrote cautious book reviews, ones that mostly summarized the book and its arguments, and made some statements as to how it fit in with/contributed to the current literature on the subject. My evaluations were always kept to a bare minimum: Who am I, I thought, to pass judgement on a scholar's work when I haven't even finished my dissertation?

This changed a bit after I had published my first book. I had come to think that I knew enough to judge. I knew how to make connections between a book and its progenitors. I knew the difference between incremental contributions (most books) and the truly pathbreaking (rare), and how to praise both. I knew what was a legitimate criticism, and felt expert enough to level those, though I like to think I did so fairly.

But this book...

This book that I'm currently writing a review for has me out of my depth again. There are many things I understand, in terms of time, place, and context. But the approach is something that I'm wholly unfamiliar with. And frankly, that I find myself confused by. And this has me feeling like one of my undergraduates again: Are other people confused by this? Does the emperor have scanty clothing in some places? Or is this just my inexperience in this area, and everyone else who reads this book will immediately understand these things that I find confusing? Is the author eliding terminology? Or am I just not grasping the distinction?

I already feel myself retreating into that "cautious book reviewer" pose. But I'm going to give myself one more chance to try to understand what is going on here, to figure out who is responsible for the confusion. And then I'll write my book review as bravely as I can. But that may not be very much.

Picking Up the Thread

I don't know why, but today seemed like the day to pick up the blog again. Wait: I do know why. More on that below. But first, what have I been up to in the past... forever? Well, since my last post, which was basically a bitch-fest about notarial documents, I've done a few post-worthy things that I hope to pick up on soon (if anyone still has me on their blogrolls... if anyone still reads blogs):

• Finished a trip to Blerg City in which, for the first time, I had some fellow US researchers who are also friends, and so was not a complete hermit.
• Procrastinated by poking around in a place where absolutely nothing of value to my project would be, and thereby stumbled on a Document That Explains Everything.
• Moved back to Grit City Beach, discovered the abysmal state of the rental market, and ended up moving into The Beehive.
• Had a lovely two-day roving visit with SquadratoMagico
• Begun planning courses, even though two of them were only for-certain locked-in three weeks before the semester started; panic ensues.
• Appalled myself by getting bent out of shape in a way that clearly has to do with some privilege issues I still have.
• Began work as member of the organizing committee for a smallish annual conference (I'm in a minor role)
• Quit smoking (again)
• Signed up for a yoga intensive workshop

Anyway, that's a lot, and I plan to write about it all over the next couple weeks. But here's what made today the day: Today, I opened my book file for the first time in over three weeks. I'm the person who has said over and over that walking away from a big writing project for more than a few days is a bad idea, and will make it difficult to pick up the thread. Yeah, well: I'm discovering that for myself. Again. Today I managed to map out what I need to do next, and "wrote" a short section on what a certain mendicant has to say about merchants ("They're AWESOME!" -- yeah, that sort of surprised me), mostly by stringing together some quotes with a bit of connective tissue and analysis. And it felt good to add to the word count again. And I've looked into downloading a plugin that will allow me to read notarial files from home. (um.. yay?) But starting again after a long hiatus is hard.

This seems to be the theme now: relearning lessons about how slacking off for a day or two turns into a week, and month, and suddenly you're not writing, not blogging, not exercising, and smoking. Gah. So: today I try to pick up the thread. Let's see how this goes.

The University of All Our Besties

I just found out that a good friend of mine is going to be in Blerg City this summer. We were supposed to be there together last summer, but she had to cut her trip short for very good reasons. So: she will be there, and will need a pseudonym. And Osito, another one of my favorite folks, will also be there for a couple days. And a couple other folks just up the road.

And I thought about something that occurs to me quite frequently: as academics, we move around a lot. If we are lucky, every place we land we have some good colleagues, and at least one friend who truly "gets" us. And then we get thrown into other professional situations -- seminars, conferences, even blogospheres -- and we meet other people who get us, on a real, deep level. People who you can make up silly songs about washing underwear for, and who will sing along. People who will suggest ice cream for dinner. People (in my case) who think it's perfectly appropriate for a middle-aged spinster auntie to swear like a sailor.

BFFs. Your Tribe. Besties.

Wouldn't it be nice, then, if we could just found our own university, and pack it with our besties. Jesus, we'd never get anything done for all the giggling and eye-rolling. But it would be a whole hill of fun.

The Best Advice I Can Give to Women in Academia

Yeah, there's lots of great advice out there about networking and how to navigate sexual harassment and women in academic leadership positions and work-life balance and long-distance marriages and feminist pedagogy and all this. There are special issues faced by women of color, trans women, lesbian women. And probably someday I'll touch on some of these. And if I don't, be assured that there is a cottage industry out there in advice columns (hand over heart for Ms. Mentor, probably our first adviser) and books. And it's all good. But if I had to give just one bit of gendered advice, it boils down to something pretty simple:

Build and treasure friendships -- real friendships -- with other female academics, especially those a few years further down the personal and professional road. [1]

[really large chunk cut out here because I realized in retrospect that I was lecturing, and thus burying the point in excess verbiage]

Of course you should have male friends and non-academic friends (as many of the latter as you can get). But other women in the biz know how the personal and the professional overlap and swallow each other and such in a very special way.

Why write about this today? Because in the past week, I have e-mailed back and forth with Historiann (who I've spend lots of F2F time with), and have spent an hour on the phone with former blogger Squadratomagico (thanks, internets!), and there are the others who don't have online personas so I won't presume to name them (but I hope they know who they are). But after each of these interactions -- ones that are mentorly but also personal and funny and irreverent and snarky and sometimes swear-filled (okay, that's mostly my contribution) -- I remember how profoundly grateful I am to have these wonderful women (among others) in my life, and how we have kept each other sane-ish through some trying professional and personal times.

So, I guess this is really a mash-note to the lifeline that is a circle of lady-friends, a thank you to all you glorious, fun, irreverent, and really intelligent academic women, and a hope for myself that I can be a part of making things better for other women in the way you have for me.


Yours in sisterhood,

--NPhD

[1] Corollary: be open to being that further-down-the-road friend to others.

External Review: The Gatekeeper vs. the Advocate

I've just finished my first external review for a tenure case. I'm pretty sure that saying that doesn't violate any sort of confidentiality, but I won't go any further to name institution, field, department, or anything, much less what the content of that review was.

So, if I'm determined not to say anything, then why the Vagueblogging? (Yes, I just made that up. Yes, it's horrible.) Well, it's because it got me thinking of what our roles as midcareer and senior faculty are.

There are lots of times that I've been part of an anonymous review process: article manuscript reviews are the most frequent, but there have also been book reviews, and now a tenure case. We've probably all had the experience of getting back a review that convinced us that the person writing it saw it as their job to shred us to bits. Rationally, I don't think that's ever the case. No one, in their heart, is Darth Vader. Ideally, we'd all like to think we come to every review a blank slate. But I've found that there is always one of two voices whispering in my ear.

One of these, I call The Gatekeeper. This entity says that it's my job as a reviewer to make sure that everything meets a certain standard, else the phrase "peer reviewed" means nothing. The Gatekeeper knows that "a certain standard" is entirely subjective, but she refuses to talk about that.

The other, I call The Advocate. This one reminds me that I never know whether my verdict is going to make or break someone's career. I should actively look for ways to say yes. The Gatekeeper sneers, pokes her in the gut, and accuses her of having no standards and watering down the profession as a whole. The Advocate tells the Gatekeeper that maybe a "no" should be a "revise and resubmit," because that, at least, lets someone improve. She speculates that the Gatekeeper gets a kick out of crushing young scholars due to her own insecurities. Voices are raised. There is an unseemly scuffle.

I would be surprised if there was anyone in a position to review (even signed book reviews!) that hadn't heard both of these voices at one time or another. And the scuffles are only going to get more frequent as we advance in our careers and come to be regarded as people with the Authority to Pronounce. We've probably encountered folks who we think are pure Advocate or Gatekeeper, yet we see ourselves as always a little of both, and constantly hope for an objectivity that we know doesn't exist this side of the grave.

So, out with it: Advocate or Gatekeeper? Or do you have totally different voices in your head?

A Month in Moving pt. 5: In Which I Abandon Everything

A while ago, in part 4, I wrote about lightening the load. I'm proud to say it was a success. Other than clothes and shoes (packed for shipping to FPU City), books (stored or shipped), and a bed and couch that my friend with the garage agreed to keep indoors, I've narrowed my worldly possessions to this:

Now, I just hope the garage doesn't flood, or I'm gonna lose all that nice furniture from Target.

Leaving it all behind also refers to the neighborhood I've called home, and the apartment in which I have hosted fellow bloggers Squadratomagico (come back and blog with us again, Squadrato!!!) and Historiann, where I finished one book and started another, and where I lived next door to Voice of Reason from our first months as first-year proffies up to the time she got married. I guess her husband thought the two of them should live together. Whatever. Anyway, it's been a good home, but today I locked the door behind me and dropped off the key. On to new things.

Finally, I'm temporarily abandoning Grit City altogether.  In a few weeks, I'll be on a flight for a year-long adventure at Fancy-Pants U.  At the moment, however, I'm sitting in the international terminal, waiting to board a flight to Blargistan. A month of research, friends, and excellent food. I'm also bringing my Fancy Camera, which I have named Vera, in the hopes that if I name her, I won't neglect her. Expect dispatches, lavishly illustrated.

Good bye, everything! Hello, everything new!

A Month of Moving, pt. 4: Lightening the Load

I talked in a previous post about how a long stay in a single address allows one to gradually accumulate great piles of stuff without even realizing it. But the pain/joy of moving is that one is forced to confront such things and decide what to do. Usually, the choice comes down to: box it up and move it, or get rid of it.

This month, I have been making the choice to lighten my load. A week ago, I took out a bunch of good clothing I never wear: a leather jacket, two suits, a faux-leopard coat that I used to wear a lot, that sort of thing. "Still good! You like this!" warred with "You haven't worn this in 3 years/5 years/10 years/ever. Donate it." I've approached neighbors, friends, and random acquaintances and asked them whether they want some object or other, many of them quite nice. Yesterday, I saw a neighbor going by, and I dashed out of my door and asked "Do you need a blender or a drip coffee maker?"

The result? I've been slowly getting rid of everything that I don't use regularly. Every thing I give away is one more thing I don't have to pack.

Today, I explained this, in excited tones, to a friend of mine. He pointed out that I could have sold them online and gotten lots of money for them. Undoubtedly true. But right now, "lightening my load" also means not spending time doing things that I don't want to or have to do. Getting an account online, photographing and listing items, corresponding with buyers, taking shit to the post office -- NOT something I want to be doing right now.

I've also been attacking those stacks and stacks of articles with my marginal notes and syllabi and reading lists that I've saved. I wish I could tell you that I'd just ditched them all, but the fact is that about 20% of them are still with me, waiting to be scanned. But none of it will be done now, and none of it is getting moved with me. I've gone through the drawer in my office full of publishers' catalogs and just tossed it all in the recycling. Likewise for old notepads full of things that I figured that I might one day want to transcribe. The general philosophy here is the same: If I haven't needed it for this many years, I don't need it now. Or ever, probably.

None of this makes moving a pleasant experience, but I feel like I'm getting something good out of it: a lighter, more portable life.

A Month of Moving, pt 1: Pulling up Roots

Honestly, I should have started this post a few days ago, when my Month of Moving really started.  Here's the deal: I leave for Blargistan at the end of June and will be there through the beginning of August. I leave for FPU somewhere in mid-August. It seemed beyond silly to pay six weeks' rent (not cheap, even in Grit City Beach) for 10-days' residency.

The upshot of this is that I'm giving up my apartment at the end of the month, and will be living out of a suitcase and a PO Box for about seven weeks.

"How Exciting!" say my friends.

Well, yes. Sort of. But so are plane crashes.

If you knew me a little well, you'd know I am in many ways a homebody, even a little bit of a nester. I like "my space" -- everything just so. I have a particular table in every coffee shop that I like to sit in (and this includes the coffee shops in the foreign cities I pass through). I like to recognize and be recognized by people in my neighborhood.

But if you knew me very, very well, you'd know that I am, paradoxically, very uncomfortable with anchors. Anything that might inhibit my freedom to move more or less as I pleased would make me twitchy. Even though I don't often take advantage of that freedom, I just need to know it's there: that I could be halfway across the world in a matter of weeks or months at most. That I don't have to negotiate my choices.

In other words, the essential paradox is that I freak out at the threat of being anchored, but I get nervous if I'm completely unrooted. And now I'm going to spend almost two months without a fixed address, anywhere in the world.

This should be interesting.

Shedding

I have shed a grad student.

A person with lots of enthusiasm and a great idea for a thesis, but who struggled with writing and organization. A person who could not meet deadlines and who dropped out of contact for months on end. A person who spent a year learning an obscure language in order to be able to work with the required sources. A person whose personal life seemed to be a neverending series of crises, probably all quite real and serious, but all of which coincided with work deadlines.

I tried structure. I tried letting go and waiting. I mixed and remixed compassion and strict guidance. I sent a long, kind e-mail telling this student that a graceful exit was okay, and had no reflection on them as a person; that it was okay to admit they'd gotten in over their head; that there was no judgment. Finish if you can, but get out if you need to; there's no need to punish yourself. All to no avail. Even the impending seven-year up-or-out deadline (set by the university) had, in the end, no effect. There were apologies, and professions of really wanting to finish, but...

And now this student has realized this, just as s/he has run out of time. Yesterday, with my concurrence, the grad director sent a kind but firm "no" to a request for another extension. And I know that's the right thing to do. But I still feel rotten.

Saying Yes to Adventure Time

Remember when I said something a while back in my mid-career crisis about how one of the ways we set ourselves up for crisis is by spending 10+ years ignoring what we love in favor of The Job? And how one way to start feeling better, post-tenure, was to reconnect with all that stuff?

Yeah, well, apparently I talk a good line, but am really bad on follow-through. Part of this is that, as I've aged, I tend to like more and more to spend time alone, just recovering my resources. I get easily overwhelmed by too much activity. I can do a four-day conference of nonstop people everywhere (Hello: Kalamazoo?) or go to a party if such is required. But then I shut myself away for a while.

But the other part is that I'm still convincing myself that spending an! entire! day! doing nothing but recreation is somehow going to put me horribly behind on what I need to do. That, given the choice between Something Fun and work, I should choose work.

Case in point: Historiann is in town for a bit. Or rather, not too far away. I invited her & the family down for an afternoon of fun. She countered with "Let's go on a day-long adventure to [fun place I've never been but have always meant to go]!"

My first reaction was to immediately decline. Because that's a whole day. And I should be grading. Or revising my Kalamazoo paper. Or whatever.

And then I remembered that I used to like fun.

So, to sum up: I'm going on an adventure tomorrow, with Historiann! All day! To a place I've always wanted to see but have told myself that I just don't have time, and maybe next month. And honestly, I have this feeling that all will be well. Better than well, even: Fun. Which is not something you're supposed to feel guilty about on the weekend.

But, because I am who I am, I'll be doubling down on the work today.  Baby steps, after all.

Getting promoted, and getting older

The process of going through my promotion file has gotten me focused on dates -- Can I count this? Was it published after I submitted my last review? When was that, anyway?

And thinking about dates and eras of life and milestones in between, and I was struck by something -- well, two linked somethings, actually:

a. I hit all my major career accomplishments in my thirties: PhD, job, tenure, book (published a month before I turned 40). My thirties were also the last time that I ever got a raise, and the last time that I was in any sort of romantic relationship.

b. My forties (I'm a decent chunk into them) have been marked by zero milestones: no relationships (hell, no dating even), no home purchase, no promotions, no children, no raises -- none of the external markers that tell you that your life is on the right track. It's also so far, the decade of my life in which I have been most consistently happy.

Seriously: it's kinda weird.

The Grand Experiment

I'm unplugging.

No, not from the blog (though it might seem that way most of the time lately). What I'm doing -- brace yourself -- is disconnecting my home internet.

The spur for this decision was financial, as my home internet bill recently rocketed up to sixty-three dollars a month. That's just the internet. I knew that if I called the local monopoly and tried to cancel, they'd lower my rates. But then the more I started thinking about it, the more I wondered what my life would be like without internet at home.

Here's the thing: Having home internet allows me to do things like look up stuff immediately, download and upload student papers, order library books, maintain my course website, answer e-mails from my students and other assorted university folk -- all without having to go into the office. I can do it any day of the week, any time, day or night. That's a good thing.

Except when it's not, right? Being available 24/7 is a decidedly mixed blessing.

And then there's all the stuff that's just a drain: too much time on the web, watching TV shows I don't care about, watching videos of nothing important, checking Facebook gods only know how many times a day. Yes, I tried the thing where you install limits on the biggest time-suck sites. Except that I now just go in and dismantle these things. I have no self-control. And I figure I spent 15 hours a week, at least, doing things that don't matter, and that I can't remember 15 minutes later.

In short, for me, home internet provides marginal convenience at considerable expense, in many senses of the word. Hence, the grand experiment in unplugging. Yes, I'll still have internet at the office (I'm there four days a week), not to mention at various coffee shops that I frequent a couple times a week, as well as via my phone. It's not like I'll be out of touch. But what I won't be able to do is come home from work, turn on the computer, and piss away hours every evening. I'm interested to see what happens. What will my brain do without the constant distraction? What could I do with 15 more hours a week?

I'll be sure to use some of that extra time to keep you updated. From a coffee shop, that is.

Another year, a new direction

I'm approaching my fifth blogiversary (June 5, I think), and it’s time to admit it: my secret identity is the worst-kept secret in pseudonymous blogland.

On the infrequent occasions that I’ve posted in the past semester, I’ve mentioned that part of the reason is that I’ve been teaching an overload, and so haven’t had time to read others’ blogs (so sorry!), much less write my own posts. That’s true, but that’s only part of the issue. The other part is that my eroding pseudonymity means that so many of the things that I’d like to write about I just can’t. University politics? Nope. A huge fight with a colleague (including me completely losing my cool and getting near-shouty in front of students)? No way. Getting cranky about all my grad students at one point or another? Off-limits. My constant rethinking of my career as I near a promotion bid? Nuh-uh.  I didn’t even feel like I could mention that my book won a major award this past year — it did! — because “it would make it too easy to figure out who I am.”

Well, guess what, Notorious? Half your readers already know.

What does that mean for the future of this blog? After nearly five years, is this the end of Girl Scholar? I’ve been thinking about that, and I’ve decided — provisionally — that the answer is no. But the fact that my identity is widely (though not universally) known means that there are many kinds of posts I can’t do. All of the above stuff about my employer, for example: if I wouldn’t say it to their face, I shouldn’t say it on the blog. And you know what? That’s maybe not such a bad thing, because the line between “necessary venting” and “wallowing in negativity” is a bit fine.

On the other hand, not worrying about people finding me out means that I can talk more concretely about my research and teaching. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed making up pseudonyms for people and places, and I may still do so to amuse myself. I’m also going to continue to use the pseudonym, because I just like it.  But I’m not going to be overly concerned about you finding out who I am. I can talk about something I’m researching, something I’m writing, or even about that book award (yay, me!), and it’s cool.

So here’s the first thing: I’m going to Italy today. In, like, just a few hours. I’m going to learn Italian — but only after a good, solid week and a half of utterly self-indulgent vacation. Pictures — and posts! — to follow.

Let’s see how this goes.

Mulling the fate of this blog...

...as I approach my fifth blogiversary.  By that point, it will either: (a) transform into something newish, or (b) cease to exist altogether.

Of course, there's always option (a-prime) in which I announce a format/theme change, then slide into doing what I used to do. Actually, that seems pretty likely.

Whatever happens, a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm only just barely pseudonymous anymore, so this simultaneously constrains and frees me. More on that soon...

Ahimsa for the High-Strung Scholar

[NB: in this post, I am all introspective-meditative-blogger again.  So if that's not to your taste, you might want to skip this post.  I'm sure I'll be back to something bizarre and random again very soon.]

As long-time followers know, I have a few extracurricular passions that ebb and flow with my schedule.  And as even more recent followers know, my post-tenure life sees me constantly struggling to carve out time to devote to them, to be a more balanced human being.  It's tough.

And it's been even more tough of late to maintain balance in the mind.  Grit City U., like every other public university out there, lately is living and dying by nickles and dimes. I shan't enumerate the many things we've lost over the past few years, but it does seem that just when I find a bit of peace with the "new normal" (are we all getting tired of that phrase yet?), a place where I can, as the yogis preach, not struggle, something new comes up, and I'm fighting tooth and claw again.

Add to this the fact that my body is now betraying me.  Nothing horrible; just a combination of age and mileage. But it means another two weeks of near-inactivity for me, and accepting that short-term frustration (two weeks of very limited activity) will prevent long-term injury.

One of the things I'm having to give up for those two weeks is yoga.  This is a blow: yoga not only keeps me physically fit, it was helping me counteract the eight or so pounds I put on when I quit smoking.  And it has the added bonus of keeping me from killing people.  Plus, there's the vanity thing: there's some thing very cool about having a perky butt and awesome shoulders when you're forty-something and used to being slightly pudgy.

So, I'm putting into practice one of the yoga principles: Ahimsa. It's usually translated as "non-injury." Now, I haven't killed anyone yet, though sometimes it's a close thing. But I tend to forget that non-injury has to be directed inward as well.  And like most scholars, I demand a lot of myself. And it makes me cranky, and makes me feel like a failure, which results in more self-directed violence, etc.

So, I'm going to try to practice Ahimsa the first week of the semester.  It seems like a good time, especially since the word can also be translated to mean "compassion," and I've been tapped to be an undergraduate adviser this year. I'm also going to tell myself that it's okay to not exercise like an amateur athlete when you're injured, ferthaluvagod.

How I will manage this without giving up on standards altogether remains to be seen.

I don’t recall

I have a confession to make. It’s something I share with my students, but only rarely with my colleagues: I have almost no recall.

What I mean by that is not that I have no memory – that would be an ironic problem for a historian, would it not?  No, it’s just the mechanism of recall that doesn’t seem to work well.  Imagine my brain like a big filing cabinet. Really big, like a wall full of drawers, and lots of files in each drawer. I read something, and into the file cabinet it goes. It’s there, and it’s not going anywhere.  The problem arises only when I want to get it back out again.  All the information is there, and once I find the drawer where I put it, out it comes, full and complete, and I even make tons of connections to other stuff that’s in that same drawer that I had forgotten I’d put in there, maybe years ago.  But the process of finding the right drawer in the first place?  That’s what seems to be missing.

This was particularly crippling in seminars in grad school.  I sat there, watching colleagues remember this and that other book that we’d discussed weeks ago, and all I could think was, “Was that the blue one”?  And also: “If I can’t remember the way these people do, does this mean that I’m not cut out for this?”  And of course: “How long until my professors figure it out?”

So, terrified, I began to compensate by becoming an obsessive note-taker.  I even rigged myself up a set of interlocking Filemaker Pro databases (the commercial software at the time was good for bibliographies, but you couldn’t use it to take detailed notes) for notes on every damn thing I read, complete with meticulously correct Chicago Style citations.  I’d come to seminar armed with my sheaf of notes. I’m not sure my participation was all that much better, but at least I wasn’t a total blank.

I’ve now switched from Filemaker Pro to Zotero, but I still do it.  ‘Cause otherwise, I’ll forget.

Anyway, that’s my… would you call it a “learning disability”? Or maybe a “processing disability”? I dislike pathologizing it, because I think that probably everyone has a little brain quirk like this. The question of why this came to me just now is the subject for the next post.

Midcareer Query: Is it actually getting harder, or are we doing this to ourselves?

SPOILER ALERT! The answer is: yes.


You'll notice that blogging has been light this semester.  Part of it is the post-book identity struggle.  Part of it is my aim to observe, rather than complain for the sake of venting.  But part of it is that I'm swamped.  And I've been wondering why.  Why don't things get easier after tenure?  Why, in fact, do they seem to get harder?

Part of it is that they actually are harder, at least from my vantage point. Budget cuts, starting a new research project, a bit more committee work (okay, so I'm mostly still hiding under my desk when it comes to that bit), a new prep, three independent studies with grad students... Yep.  Lots of work.

But here's the thing that I've been talking about with a few other local proffies around my vintage here at Grit City U.: Once you get tenure, and the pressure to publish that first book is off, you turn to your courses and start... tinkering.  You start, gods help you, trying to improve them.  A new assignment?  New readings?  Or, if you're like me, you go all individual conference-intensive, trying to get better results.  For the record, all this tinkering has produced better results, for the most part. And the former SLAC-er in me finds this a vindication of what I've always believed: individual attention is the way to go.

Some days, I think of the struggles my students are facing, and I think, "Okay, this might actually be a hill worth dying on." Other days, I feel like I'm being devoured by a monster of my own making.  And in the tug-of-war between wanting to be the best at what I do, and sanity, I'm honestly not sure what's going to win.

A Moment of Reflection on Where I'm At

Please note: the following is a personal musing. It implies no judgment on anyone's aspirations or choices but my own. Really and truly. If you quote any of this, please don't leave that part out.


Like many academics, I have dreamed of the Dream Job.

The Dream Job is different for everyone. Maybe it's at a big research university. Maybe it's a small liberal arts college. Maybe it's in a part of the country or the world that you want to live in, for whatever reason is important to you. Maybe it's just a case of Anywhere But Here.

These things can all be compelling. For people with family considerations, or who are in toxic departments, it can take on a real urgency that I will in no way deny. I will just say that, for me, the Dream Job had little to do with the actual job I have -- a very typical mid-tier public four-year school -- and more to do with where I thought I would be happier, because... well, I was just pretty sure, let's put it that way.

I struggled with this a while. I knew how fortunate I was to have landed a good job in my field, in a place I liked well enough, and with good colleagues. Yet still, there was always the shiny promise of Dream Job, where I would be truly happy and fulfilled.

But over the past few weeks, a switch has flipped, and in a big way. It's not even a matter of "acceptance"; I think I've actively embraced where I'm at, and I think that's ultimately going to be a very good thing.

Here's the deal: My school is ridiculously under-resourced, and it's not getting any better any time soon. My students are often less prepared than the mythical students that I have imagined teaching at Dream Job. They keep working to the best of their ability; I keep pushing them to dig for just a bit more. But over the past few weeks, I've focused more intently on the content of our conversations outside the classroom: the things they're learning about in class and in the readings that are exciting them, their struggles to pay for tuition, their frantic balancing act between work and school, their efforts to translate what they are doing here to family members who never went to college -- their struggle, in other words, to live in two worlds and try to figure out how those two identities are going to work together, or if they're going to have to make a painful choice.

And then I think about my own experience: One parent with a Bachelor's degree, the other with two years of college. Underfunded public high schools, and the academic hole I dug myself into there while I struggled to reinvent myself as a rebel who disdained all manifestations of authority, including things like "homework" and "attending class." A reasonably fancy undergraduate degree that was in no small part financed by outside jobs and lots of loans,[1] and that included a necessary year and a half at community college rehabilitating my GPA. The experience of seeing one of my undergraduate professors visibly wince when I mentioned the part of town I was from. But also an upbringing that featured a strong focus on learning and self-improvement, as well as regular visits to the public library, and my parents' unwavering belief in my potential (once I stopped screwing around) and unconditional support for what I was doing. Parents who wanted to know about my research.[2] A little brother (okay, he's 30 now) who asked for a copy of my book for Christmas.

And I realized that, even though I'll probably always still dream of research funds, or small classes of motivated students who write beautifully, or even unlimited printer paper, the fact is that right here, right now, I'm doing good work that I'm actually quite suited to, for a group of students who I understand fairly well,[3] maybe better than some others might. And maybe people at Dream Job, wherever that may be, are better suited to the kind of work they're doing than I would ever be.

In other words, I've started to believe that, for the moment at least, I'm right where I need to be. And that's a very nice feeling.

_____________________________
[1] For what it's worth: my family was able to cover my rent, plus a supplement every term to cover estimated costs of groceries and books; I worked out tuition and whatever else I felt I needed to make it through my days.

[2] And because I was going through my own prolonged identity crisis, I'm ashamed to say that my answers were occasionally high-handed. But that's a post for another day -- or, most likely, never. Let's just say that I probably owe some humble apologies.

[3] I will admit that many of my students have additional burdens that I can never hope to understand. But I do what I can.