My worst self

I am back from the Big Giant Pseudology Conference, slumped in my home office chair.  I'm worn out after so much conferencing.  This year's BGPC was relatively successful, I think, especially in terms of schmoozing with colleagues.  And, of course, it was tonic to see old friends.

At the same time, I feel dissatisfied, and I think I'm the one to blame, for the most part.  I've been developing an awareness of how stressed I feel for most of BGPC, especially as it comes across to my old friends and colleagues when they ask how I'm doing.  Put bluntly, I fear that attending BGPC invokes my worst self: the anxious, self-conscious, permanently unhappy and self-loathing person who perpetually gripes about having a book but no tenure-track job, having no family, and generally being a miserable little storm cloud.

I admit that readers of this blog who do not know me in the meat world may suspect that this is who I am, but I swear to you that I'm really not (quite) that insufferable anhedonic person.  When I roll into BGPC, though, I become acutely aware of the comparisons and judgments that potential colleagues could be making about me.  This year, I learned that many of my colleagues from DOU have landed tenure-track jobs.  People are having children, cranking out articles, producing books, getting fancy jobs — often two or three of these at the same time.  And here I am, all by my lonesome, happy to have my book but daunted by the prospect of producing articles at the same time while being weighed down by my teaching obligations, and increasingly fearful of what may come to pass next year.

I worry that I'm beginning to smell of flop sweat to my colleagues.

I would like to share in my friends' optimism that my book surely will land me a job.  Really, I would.  But I remember people saying basically the same thing to me years ago, when I was fresh out of Research Country with splashy cachet, but with no serious teaching experience.  Or last year, when I had just gotten the book contract.  And it's only when I'm at BGPC catching up with people that I hear second- or third-hand that Whatshisface or Whatshername got an interview at some school or other that I applied to, thus clueing me into my inability to get anywhere with jobs I hoped would at least grant me a prelim interview.  It's difficult not to look bitter and disappointed.  And afraid.

It's also hard not to wonder what I did or am doing wrong, in comparison to my erstwhile classmates at DOU.  Was it my lazy, uninterested supervisor?  My lack of sexy subfield?  My general nuts-and-bolts approach to pseudology, rather than the high-theory approach?

Or, despite my forthcoming book and my dogged attempts to remain employed, am I just not that good?

Honestly, how does one put a good face on this internal turmoil?

ETA: I sincerely hope none of my pseudology colleagues reads this blog, but if any of them does, then I feel bad enough about my attitude to apologize for being a dick this year.  I didn't want to be or mean to be, I promise.

The (underemployed) authority

I ended up having a decent time at Secondary Disciplinary Interest Conference. (Many meals shared with old friends helped considerably.). In fact, I even had some professional fun: I made sure that my panel chair introduced me as the author of Forthcoming Book, and damned if people didn't treat me like an expert in the field. They seemed to address me in slightly more measured tones, and a number of the grad students there - many of them older than I - were actually obsequious. People came up to me later asking my advice on how to get a book published. (!!!)  I was stunned.

More importantly (I think), I attended the business meeting for my designated interest section, which let me introduce myself to nearly every colleague there who works in SDI. A whole bunch of them showed up two days later to hear my talk. I know this because the heavy hitter on our panel was the first speaker: when zi finished, a number of people quickly departed for other panels, but the movers and shakers all stayed on for the entirety of the panel. I feel that I have made a proper debut at SDIC. :D

I've spent the last few days de-stressing and, to the extent that I can be bothered to think about it, my job. Now, however, I am on the road again, taking breakfast at one of the generic "family restaurants" by the highway before heading out to Great Big City for the Big Giant Pseudology Conference. Pseudologists are way harder to impress than my SDI colleagues, so I can't get a swelled head unless/until I pull off the same trick twice. Wish me luck!

Grumpy conference-goer

I haven't posted in the last few weeks because I've just been worn out.  My teaching schedule is hectic with evaluative assignments and planning right now, I had several conferences to prepare for, and I'm beginning to get that yearly anxiety about what may or may not happen with the job market.  All told, I've just been dog-tired at the end of every day, and not much into communicating.  Grump.

Now I'm at the first of my two conferences this season, Secondary Disciplinary Interest Conference.  SDIC is new to me, and I know very few people who will be in attendance.  I am currently huddling in fear relaxing in my hotel room right now, typing this post, rather than mingle half-heartedly with total strangers whose work does not interest me.  I already ran into a former classmate, and one actual friend, which was nice.  But beyond that, I'm kind of waiting for my pal who organized my panel to get to town so we can catch up.  Zi just moved to an expensive new address, and zi and hir spouse are still paying off moving debts, and I have travel funds from CBU, so I've promised to treat hir to a nice dinner so we can trade stories properly, with food and wine.

Also, the first talk I went to kind of sucked.  (No big shock, I know.)  What dampened my mood more was going to a second talk by one of my professor acquaintances from DOU and discovering that zi had to withdraw from the conference for some reason.  Sigh.

Writing this stuff down brings into focus for me just how much I cherish conferences as a way to catch up with old friends long separated by distance, and how little of a damn I give about any other aspect.  (Especially when, as is the case at SDIC, I'm only tangentially in the orbit of their job market.)  Guess I'll go get lunch.  By myself.  Grump.

Everything has changed — or has it?

I need to get my ass in gear for the upcoming Big Giant Pseudology Conference, and my abstract has become a stumbling block.  My (semi-)brilliant idea for a presentation that I concocted last winter is now out of date, in some ways.  Research Country's irritating habit of not freezing in historical time Brigadoon-style means that some of the assumptions that drove my abstract are no longer factually accurate.  (Although they were when I wrote it, I swear to you!) 

BUT...has everything truly changed?

(Ominous and portentous rumblings on soundtrack)

The key observation to draw out in my presentation should really be that my original analytical point is even truer now than it was then, even though some of the surrounding historical architecture has altered somewhat.  The cast of characters has changed a bit, and there's been a classic reversal of fortunes narrative in the works, but the way that people think about Important Research Stuff has not really changed at all.  I'm using this state of affairs to write a paper that offers the same analysis while cleverly swapping out a number of concrete examples, or shifting the emphasis from one bunch of stuff to another.  It isn't a bait-and-switch, folks, it's just cutting-edge research!

I kind of knew this before, but it actually didn't become crystal-clear to me until I sat down and thought it out here, writing this blog post.  I guess I should go and write that paper, now that my thinking is clear(er).  Thanks for serving as my sounding-board!

Scheduling conferences on syllabus

Every fall, I am confronted by the same problem when scheduling conference travel around class days on my syllabus, and I'm still not sure how best to handle this situation.  This year, if my luck holds, I'll be going to not one but two conferences in the fall that are practically on top of each other.  If I plan conservatively so as not to schedule a class day that must later be canceled when my travel plans solidify, this would mean wiping out seven class days in a row.  And, due to timing, that would mean that we would only have two more class days before the Thanksgiving break.  (We'll have two more full weeks of class after that, though.)  I will probably be in town for Thanksgiving and could go to class, although I know from experience that I am usually worn to a pulp from conferencing at that point, and neither my lecturing nor my discussion facilitation makes much sense under those conditions.  

Last fall, after I went through all of this in combination with some unbloggable drama back in Hometown that forced me to cancel a few other class days around the same time, I swore to myself that I would just write off the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving as days off with no classes scheduled in the first place.  Some months after that, though, it became clear that it would be in my best interest as a researcher to attend a second conference in addition to my usual Big Giant Pseudology Conference this year, which would almost certainly mean clearing my diary for a few more weekdays.  Naturally, I will also be teaching five days a week next semester, so some class sessions will inevitably be lost.  This hurts some courses more than others, since every course I have next term is on a different weekly schedule.

My understanding of CBU's academic culture is that people disapprove of canceling a class day that had been on the syllabus as usual, and that it is preferable to schedule days off as such, so that students know the score from day one.*  But I wonder if I'd be pushing my luck to say that we would basically forget about having class for half a month altogether.  CBU's academic culture – among faculty and admins, anyway – frowns upon declaring days off on weekdays immediately preceding scheduled breaks like Thanksgiving.  I understand and appreciate this policy for things like spring break, when students always try to skive their way out of taking tests and submitting papers with ski trips and the like.  But Thanksgiving?  Isn't it just a little unrealistic to say that everyone has only Wednesday to travel whitherto they require on the busiest travel day in the U.S. calendar?

Oh, right, almost all of our students are from Cornstate itself.**  They only need a few hours on the road to get home.  But I digress.

It sure won't be pretty, but I might be stuck having to travel home from a conference, turn around and teach for two days after a little more than a week of no class at all, and then go back to no class for another three days while I fight off whatever bug will surely attack me during my travels.

Am I missing some better solution?

*That is, if they ever read the fucking syllabus.
**That matter deserves a post of its own.

Verschiedene Themen ohne Kohärenz.

• Have you ever tried plugging a deeply idiomatic expression into Google Translate, just to see if you could make it work in other languages?  It's a pleasing thought exercise in precise language, since the program seems totally ignorant of even mildly idiomatic phrase.  You have to keep refining the phrase as you think out the exact nuance in minimally referential Standard English.  "Random bullets of crap" takes some real effort.  And, since I can't actually read German, I can only wonder how close to the mark I got here.
• Dude, the deadline for submitting abstracts to the Big Giant Pseudology Conference is mere weeks away now!  Where has my fool head been about this?  I need to get on the stick, and fast.  I had pretensions of organizing my own panel this year, but that collapsed pretty fast: I'm at a point in my writing and research in which there is no particularly salient concept around which to build a conference panel.  I'd better humble myself and just send in a regular abstract, and hope that it gets accepted.  I'll have to go one way or the other, if I get any nibbles in next year's job cycle, so it would be nice to add a line to the CV as I trudge back into battle.
• I'm getting faster at grading essays, but it still makes my head hurt.  
• It also makes my soul hurt to see smart kids with good ideas have to take a low grade because their writing is just that abysmal.  How the f is it possible for someone to be more than halfway through college at a pretty good school, and utterly incapable of putting together a coherent paragraph?  I really want to help them shape up in this regard, since I can already dimly glimpse the gemstones underneath all the dirt.
• Although my soul is unaffected by this, I'm also annoyed to see vacuous, thoughtless students avoid answering straightforward questions by trying to drown me in verbose bullshit.  Kid, do not flatter yourself that you can bamboozle me.  I read motherfucking pseudology for breakfast, punk.  You'd do better to write an under-length paper acknowledging that you don't yet understand the material and you're just going to give it your best shot than to give me a full-length paper full of awkward sentence constructions and bloviation.  
• It's also not encouraging to see that some of the worst offenders in this last regard are close to earning degrees in writing-oriented majors.  I'm trying to remember that we all have less-than-optimal students at times, lest I be tempted to march across campus to their advisors' offices and wave the incomprehensible writing in their faces.  Lord knows I wouldn't want to be held responsible for the mediocrity of some pseudology students, once I'd given my best efforts to teach them something.
• The more I consult with friends about this, the more I am convinced that hard-anodized aluminum non-stick pans and I simply do not get along.  (Traditionally, I'm a stainless steel guy, except for a trusty old glass baking pan.)  A number of people have recommended that I learn to work with cast iron, saying it's not as finicky to maintain as I fear, and that it does a really good job cooking all sorts of dishes.  I've never used cast iron in my life, but the evidence suggests that I cannot get aluminum non-stick to work for me.  Any readers out there care to comment on the relative merits of cast iron, enameled or plain?

Dragging

Dude.  The last few weeks have been so tiring for me.  Really, the entire month of November kicked my ass.  First I was preparing for the Big Giant Pseudology Conference.  Then I actually attended the BGPC.  Then I endured a week in Hometown.  (Virtually back to back!)  Then I had to get my ass back into gear for the following school week.

Inevitably, all that travel and stress has given me a cold to further enervate me.  Could be worse, though: it's not one of those colds that wallops you, but only saps some of your energy and desire to talk.  As you all know, it's hard not to talk when you're the professor.  Luckily, I have constant access to orange juice and the most potent panacæa* yet discovered: my grandmother's chicken soup recipe.  In an effort to ratchet up the sinus-clearing and throat-healing powers of this formidable soup, I added two tablespoons of cayenne pepper.  Perhaps the soup could have done just fine with only one tablespoon, but it sure cleared my sinuses. 

I'm down to a single remaining week of class, and then there'll be exam week and grading.  I feel like I may have to be carried to work on a stretcher for sheer exhaustion.  You know how sometimes you feel too weak to lift your limbs to do your class prep, even when you're perfectly healthy?  I'm reaching that point now, and my nose and throat are still misbehaving.

But on the plus side of things, part of my exhaustion comes from

• having enjoyed my best BGPC ever, replete with networking, good meals, and a renewed sense that my colleagues take me seriously as a scholar;
• having done some things that needed to be done in Hometown, unpleasant as they may have been;
• somehow keeping my classes running, although I admit this part has suffered as a result of the first two accomplishments.

I am amused to observe that, as personal as all this stuff is, it's structural at a larger level: every one of my colleagues at CBU agrees with me that our asses are dragging as we approach the end of semester.  We all have different stories, but they all have the same conclusion.  Perhaps I really have joined the club in some way.

*I love typing those fiddly letters and diacritics.  Don't you?

That time of year again

I am bleary-eyed and heavy-limbed right now, and can't go to sleep yet because I have clothes I need in the dryer.  I awoke on a little less than four hours' sleep this morning to give a test in Intro to Libel and Slander.  The insufficient hours of sleep were a product of my trying to finish (ha!) my conference paper last night.  Somehow, late this morning, I managed to hack out a full draft of the paper and email it to the discussant.  (This may be my all-time record: the furthest in advance I drafted a conference paper and sent it to the discussant.)  Then I put together a presentation for a colleague's class.  Then I dealt with some utterly insane unbloggable stuff. 

And now, after treating myself to dinner because the fridge is empty, I can start packing my suitcase as the laundry goes through the dryer cycle.  I have to rise at 5:00AM tomorrow, so it's gonna be an early night.  (If I know what's good for me.) 

Stay tuned for updates from the Big Giant Pseudology Conference!

Reading; and, refusing burdens

Moria has a great new post up at her place, observing that too much writing and not enough reading can lead to a discomfiting sense of distance and confusion about one's own material.  I'm feeling that hard right now, in fact.  I've been having one of those weeks in which I tried to re-work the journal article I'm revising now to serve as my conference paper at the Big Giant Pseudology Conference, and instead found that this is a futile endeavor: the one will not translate into the other.  Now that I've admitted that, I have about four and a half pages of talk drafted, with more soon to follow.  It's a good thing, too, because I am increasingly aware of how staggeringly ignorant I feel of my own subfield of pseudology – basically, I identify as a Damn Liar specializing in Research Country – at the moment.  A new Annual Review of Pseudology article came out covering the recent developments in my subfield, and it freaked me out to read through that and its bibliography and see all these pertinent, interesting-looking books and articles that I'd never fucking heard of.  I can honestly say that this didn't happen much to me three years ago, when I was writing my diss; there was little on either Damn Lies or Research Country that I hadn't read, and less that I hadn't heard of.  The volume of research published just in the last year blows my mind; how has this stuff not come to my attention before a freaking Annual Review article collated all of it?  And, of course, the thought immediately comes to me: I can't finish writing my book until I've read all this stuff!  Wrong, wrong, wrong, I know.  But it's kind of unsettling to me how quickly I can become ignorant of the latest work after just over a year of full-time teaching.  I may need to start typing reminders into my calendar to check the various journals for new articles.

*                *                  *                  *                  *                 *

Meanwhile, I'm having a moment of hesitation that would astonish Fie Upon This Quiet Life, given how vociferously I have argued in favor of being mercenary and self-interested as an early-career academic trying to climb the ranks.  A student of mine has asked if I would oversee hir independent study next semester, and I haven't actually said no yet.  Let me list the pros and cons:

Pro:

• Zi is whip-smart and fun to teach.
• I have some specialized knowledge in short supply at CBU that makes me a more obvious candidate for the job than most other professors zi knows.  If I say no, then zi may be unable to pursue the independent study.
• I feel unusually sympathetic toward this student, since zi has confided to me that zi has been having a difficult time due to some of the interpersonal politics of the university.

Con:

• My specialized knowledge is still not ideal for the job, and I am sure that zi is asking partly because the prof who would be a natural is never around, wrapped up in other business.
• While I am deeply sympathetic to the student's unhappiness, I also recognize that I cannot alter that situation, and if zi continues to rely on me as a confidante, I can do no more than be a friendly ear for hours at a time.  Seriously.  Zi could go on indefinitely, I fear.  Often when I have other work to do.
• This is flatly NOT MY JOB.  No one is going to give me a course release for this independent study.  No one is going to give me a salary bump to compensate for the lost time.  And certainly no one else will do the supplemental research for my book while I'm mired in extra grading and advising.
• For real, people, it's NOT MY JOB!  I'm a two-year hired gun here, albeit kindly treated and more or less a full voting member of the department.  I refuse to be burdened like a pack mule without either concomitant job security or financial compensation.
• And finally, as cruel as it sounds, it's just not my job.  The student isn't even a pseudology major; zi is just taking a course with me.  Someone from Stu's own department really needs to be stepping up to the plate to advise hir, instead of letting hir cast about like this.

Really, I suppose my mind is made up, and I'm just stalling on sending an email disappointing a favorite student.  Sigh.

Stress dream?

This is the dream I had just before waking up this morning:

I was checking into the hotel for the Big Giant Pseudology Conference this year, and since I'd never been there before, I quickly got lost trying to find my room.  (It was one of those floor plans with little mezzanines up and down, so it was hard to know what floor I was on, sometimes.)  I was wound up about looking competent and professional around my colleagues, so I was trying to hide the fact that I had no idea where I was in the hotel, and couldn't find my room.  Naturally, the more that I tried to find the room and avoid making a fool of myself, the more colleagues and friends of friends I ran into, until I seemed to be at the center of a knot of people.  We were having an animated conversation about language and pedagogy – one of them noticed that I spoke a particular language – and I tried to keep up my end of the conversation while sitting down on the floor of the confusing lobby and opening my laptop so I could try to figure out from a web page or something where the hell my room was.  And all the time, more people that I wished to impress favorably kept passing by and stopping to chat.

And throughout the entire experience, I was completely naked, and was constantly trying to hide this fact from everyone by sidling along walls to hide my rear and using my courier-style computer bag to strategically hide my front.  I had no clothes on at all, so I don't know whom I thought I was fooling,  But in any case, I felt pretty much trapped by the time I was sitting (naked) on the lobby floor, since I had taken the laptop out of the bag and had the laptop balanced on my lap.  (Strategically.)  I seem to recall rising anxiety that someone would suggest a restaurant for dinner or check the conference program and try to take the computer from me to get the logistical details.

Now that I'm awake, out and about, I can't tell which fact offers me more relief: the fact that I'm off for all of next week for CBU's fall break, or that I'm clearly wearing trousers right now.

Gonna get my travel on

I mean, I'm already traveling heavily this month, but you knew that already, right?  Ah, but I got word today that I'll also be doing a bit of air travel this fall: my paper was accepted – along with its entire invited paper session – to the Big Giant Pseudology Conference for this year!  Since I got in on this via an invitation from a kind and supportive senior colleague, I am mindful at this moment of how much academic careers can depend upon precisely these displays of professional and personal generosity. 

In honor of my thoughtful colleague's invitation, please allow the Muppets to serenade you with a Beatles tune.  I've always held a soft spot for this sketch: this was my first exposure to the song, even though my parents sometimes played Beatles records on the stereo in my early childhood.  (Sgt. Pepper wasn't as big with them as later albums were.)  Bonus points for the classic, if Orientalizing and anti-porcine pseudology-laced setting!

RBOC: First week pandemonium

I feel like it's bad form to just throw post after post of random bullets of crap on the blog, but there are times when you can't get it together to do more than note everything flying at your head.  (And then duck.)

• I kind of feel like I will never again hear good news from Hometown.  This past week's bad news was so out of left field that I hardly knew how to process it.  I'm used to two or three different kinds of bad news from home, but I discovered a new kind this week.  Fuck.
• I feel like I'm clicking into the brute survival mode that got me through my last semester of dissertation writing.  For months now, I've been laboring with the unhappy sensation that accomplishing everything that I have to do might kill me.  Somehow, I have transitioned into survival mode, which feels more like I am going to accomplish all this even if it kills me!  Once again, it is life during wartime.
• This means that I suddenly feel more capable (because I have to be so), and therefore a little less tragically depressed.  I can actually laugh to myself, rather than cry at the fact that one of my students emailed me in confusion, upon learning that zi could not buy books at the library.  Just when you think you've heard it all...

Now, for the more positive bullet points:

• My Pseudology of Area Studies course seems to be off to a good start.  I scared away a few students who admitted to themselves that this class wasn't for them, which means the total registration now stands at fourteen: excellent size for seminar-style discussions!  I rather suspect that almost none of my students will do the reading for the next session, even though I went to some lengths to point out that this stuff is heavy-duty.  (That was one of the scare tactics.)  I've accepted that most students need to feel some heat under their asses to start studying for real, so they will likely find out this week what it feels like to sit in dead silence, waiting for someone who actually read the piece to say something.  Like I told 'em, I can outwait them.  And if that doesn't tell them to study, the quiz they'll have to take this week should drive home the message.
• I'm getting a little detached and less emotionally invested in the success of my students in Introduction to Pseudology.  This makes me happier.  Most students in that class take it to knock off a distribution requirement, and they don't really give a fuck.  I'm going to teach those classes, do them well, and not lose sleep about how they do.  I've made the syllabus easier than last time, and the tests are fucking jokes, so I rest easy in the knowledge that passing the course will be pretty easy.  Those who want to learn something for real will do so, and the rest should be able to slide by with little trouble.  I've made my peace with that.
• I was planning to forego conferences for this year, since I was so wrung out (and broke!) from last fall's double-header.  But this morning, I got an email from a senior colleague inviting me to join hir panel, which zi and another colleague are organizing.  Both of them are heavy-hitters who have written crackerjack books that I have not only read but studied closely.  And the theme of the panel is on one of the big theoretical topics I've set myself to develop from my field research!  After catching my breath at the thought of how much money I'll have to spend to go to this year's Big Giant Pseudology Conference, I admitted to myself that I'd be a damn fool to pass up this invitation.  I'm psyched at the thought that I might get to sit on an invited panel alongside scholars I admire, and pleased (albeit a little scared) that this means that I must attack this paper with a lot more theoretical rigor than I devoted to the one I gave last year.  
• Speaking of research as well as life during wartime, today is one year and a day after I began one of the strangest, scariest adventures of my life.  But an adventure it remained, for me, and led to some fondly remembered times with some old friends and some new friends — Shedding Khawatir and her husband foremost among the latter.  The whole business, as vexing as it can be to analyze professionally as a pseudologist, is going to shape my career for years to come.  Now that I listen to the song I keep name-checking, I'm a little stunned to recognize some lines as things that have actually happened to me.  The sound of gunfire off in the distance, I'm getting used to it now.  I've got some groceries, some peanut butter, should last a couple of days.  Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock, we blended in with the crowd.  I hope I make the best of all this.  I hope my friends back in Research Country do, too.  Al-sawra mustamirra, y'all.

This ain't no party; this ain't no disco; this ain't no foolin' around.  The war is on.

Post-conference exhaustion

I'm feeling a little knocked out right now, after going through finals week as a professor for the first time ever.  Please accept my apologies for saying so little online lately: I couldn't think much about the blog this week.  A week ago, I was just getting back to Ghosttown from the Major Area Studies Conference, where I got to see Shedding Khawatir again, and had the pleasure of meeting and hanging out with Ajnabieh.  (See my sidebar for their respective blogs.)  I had a fine time there, and enjoyed feeling a little bit more like a scholar on the loose than a kid at the grown-ups' table.  Much like I did at the Big Giant Pseudology Conference, I savored the chance to see my old friends again; the smaller number of such friends at MASC is tempered by the sweetness of seeing a number of people who live quite far overseas, including some countries that are prohibitively expensive to visit without a grant or an expense account. 

Right on the heels of the end of MASC, naturally, I came down with a cold, which I've been enduring all week while administering final exams to my classes and, when time permits, grading them with my TA.  It's lucky for me that I have so little pride — otherwise, I suppose, it would have been embarrassing to arrive at a grading session with a huge box of tissues in hand.  (My nose has been running all day.)  But tonight, I uploaded all my final grades to the university system, and they have been finalized.  I AM FREE!!!...for a few days, anyway. 

I guess that, after a day or two of seeing colleagues getting 'faced on cream-based cocktails at the local pre-Christmas parties, and grappling with the maddening conflict between Nyquil, Dayquil, and bourbon, and other post-Finals Week issues, I need to focus a little attention on my sorely neglected writing.  And then, of course, I need to plan out my syllabi for next semester for reals.  Lord help me, I'll be teaching my first-ever upper-division course, and I will use this blog as a way to vent the sad fact that

I have no fucking idea how to do this.

Please don't tell anyone.

I haven't been in an upper-division course targeted toward pseudology majors in, gulp, twelve years.  And that was back at Alma Mater College, which was quite a different place from Ghosttown U.  I've already planned out a pretty feasible reading list, I think/hope, with the assumption that I shouldn't slam my students the way we were slammed at AMC.  But I need to do the fiddly work of scheduling weekly assignments and so forth, and I guess I'll just have to learn through trial and error how to lead a discussion-based seminar course.  (Moan.) 

On a side note, I assume that a lot, if not most universities are going through the same finals-and-grading stampede right now, so I'm willing myself to be calm and detached about all those prelim interviews I had a few weeks back.  Nearly all of them told me they'd let me know the status of my application some time this month.  I'll probably start climbing walls and forging prescriptions for sedatives in another week if I don't get some good news about those jobs, but I'm okay.  For now.

Meanwhile, I'm going to swaddle myself in woolen clothing, because it's fucking cold here in Ghosttown, and try to get myself to the supermarket so I can buy some more generic cold medicine so I can try to fall asleep without feeling like my nose is revolting against my body's structural order.

Useless heap of conference-going flesh

Another night before I fly to a major academic conference, another night that I find myself helpless and paralyzed in the face of a presentation that refuses to write itself.  On the plus (?) side, I have no job interviews to prepare for at Major Area Studies Conference, so I can devote a little more of my intellect to making this shit make sense.  So it goes.

RBOC: post-T-Day, inter-conference edition

• It occurs to me to mention that, although I brought my suit with me to the Big Giant Pseudology Conference, I never wore it.  I actually put it on the morning that my interview onslaught began, but as soon as I saw myself in the hotel room mirror, I knew it wasn't right.  (It doesn't help that the cut of the suit somehow makes me look like an undertaker.)  I wanted to look professional and respectful at my interviews, but a suit would be going way too far.  I ended up substituting my sport coat for the suit coat, and wearing the suit pants as separates.  Felt much better.  
• For those of you who find yourselves in a similar position to mine, try bringing a suit and something just a little less formal (but business-appropriate) to your next conference.  Scope out the scene before you have to swing into action.  I think that I saw only five men at BGPC wearing suits, the entire time I was there.  Sometimes a suit just isn't what you need to look professional.
• Coming off the BGPC and getting ready for the Major Area Studies Conference coming up soon means that I was actually back in Ghosttown for Thanksgiving, which in turn meant that I spent Thanksgiving by myself.  I felt a trifle sorry for myself about this, even though Thanksgiving is one of those holidays where I feel like I'm supposed to be with other people because everyone tells me I should.  (Valentine's Day is the worst offender of these.)  In time-honored fashion, though, I stopped feeling sorry for myself after a ten-minute phone call to my family in Hometown.  As they passed around the phone so I could send greetings to everyone, I could clearly hear three of my close relatives yelling at each other in the kitchen about how to do the cooking prep — especially when someone put the phone down for a solid minute without anyone else picking it up.  I know exactly where all of that was going, and when the call ended, I gave thanks to whatever powers might exist that I was nowhere near Hometown that day.
• And really, I get a little more uneasy about celebrating Thanksgiving every year: all this stuff and nonsense about "what are we thankful for this year?" seems to me a band-aid for our consciences, given that the source of the holiday is really a celebration of successful colonialism and the establishment of a toe-hold of British imperialism in the New World by "some Mayflower-cruising Jesus freak corn rustlers." 
  
• Since I've been having trouble focusing on work after BGPC, it's only yesterday that I really began to write my talk for MASC.  Of course, I never make things easy on myself, so I've also begun to fiddle around for the first time with iMovie, so I can edit together bits and pieces of things for my presentation.  I'm not sure I can make this work, but I'm hoping to knit together some clips and some subtitles, and have it all come out looking good.  No doubt this will require many hours at my computer muttering under my breath as I learn on the job how to use iMovie.  But at least that's more productive than spending many hours at my computer surfing YouTube clips, repeatedly checking hobby forums, and generally skiving off work.
• The other thing gluing me to the internet for long stretches of time is the current wave of unrest in Research Country.  It's arguably worse than earlier this year, for a number of complex reasons.  And now, to be self-centered for a moment, it hurts me more, because it's beginning to hurt people I know.  (I knew people involved from the start, but they all caught lucky breaks at that time.)  I won't go into details here, for the sake of their privacy and mine, but it's giving me and a lot of my friends gray hair.  I'm supposed to share a hotel room with an old friend at MASC, and now we're not sure that zi will be able to travel out of RC.  Not that zi is likely to end up in a dungeon or anything, but the sense of instability, to say nothing of potential travel bans by the government, may make it seem more prudent for hir to stay in RC with hir family.  I certainly couldn't blame hir if that's what happens, but I'd be sorry to miss out on seeing an old friend — which, as I've been saying lately, is the best thing about academic conferences.  
• And, naturally, it raises everyone's anxiety to think about why people would have to make such choices.  The beauty of non-violent civil disobedience can also be its weakness: it doesn't push violent people from power.  We're, uh, coming to the end of the non-violent phase of RC's political transformation, I fear.  (Really, it ended quite some time ago, but here we would have to start parsing language about who is coordinating violence in premeditated fashion for political ends.)  There are many violent people still in power in RC, and they are willing to kill whomever they think they have to kill to maintain that power.  Getting rid of them may require RC to endure a proper civil war.  I don't know how any of this will pan out, but it seems a sure bet that there's going to be a lot more death and destruction before the dust settles.  
• The neighborhood that I lived in for several years, and where I spent untold amounts of time during my doctoral research, is turning into a genuine war zone.  A lot of my area studies colleagues and I have similar experiences there, due to the presence of a major academic institution in the area, and we're all heartsick to look at the videos on YouTube that show our former stomping ground transformed into a battleground, complete with front lines, field hospitals, and poorly observed ceasefire agreements.  It's hard to see such things, even when your professional judgment tells you that these sorts of events had to occur sooner or later to sort out long-standing political disputes.  It's...it's just hard. 

Big Giant Catch-up

Please insert your prophylactic superstition of choice here, because I don't want to jinx the fact that I feel like I kicked ass, for the most part, at my interviews at the Big Giant Pseudology Conference.  I had prelims for four different tenure-track positions, and two contract jobs.  I feel that I acquitted myself very well at all the t-t interviews, as well as at one of the contract jobs.  There were little things here and there, but really, with the five interviews that went well, my only doubts are essentially about the level of my rapport with the interviewers.  There were moments at three of them when I worried that my "I am so awesome and cool" hypnosis was weakening, but the two others went just beautifully, and I'm really hopeful that I will hear encouraging news from those two soon. 

The sixth interview...well, it was the classic bad interview scenario in which the interviewer couldn't shut up about hirself.  I was astonished to see this: usually, it's the interviewee under scrutiny who screws things up by getting nervous and droning on and on.  But here, the interviewer, who basically has nothing at all to lose no matter what happens, seemed bent on ruining the possibility of determining my potential usefulness by talking about hirself constantly.  Zi went so far as to cut me off when I was beginning to answer hir question about being in Research Country earlier this year to tell me at ungodly length about the fun zi had as a tourist in RC ten years ago.  Srsly?  Why have an interview at all?

Anyway, that crappy interview was for, by a long shot, the worst position that seems interested in me thus far.  I have absolutely zero desire to lose a year of my life to the sinkhole in which the institution resides, and even less desire to take on a high teaching load for a one-year position that cannot under any circumstances be extended.  Now that I think about it, I also would be perfectly happy never to encounter that interviewer again, either.

But enough about the low note.  I did well (I think, I hope) at five interviews, four of them t-t positions!  And I gave the worst conference talk of my career thus far, I admit.  But hey, I told you all last week that I would — no surprise there.  I took it on the chin for that from a friend and colleague of mine during the Q&A, but that's what happens when you try to be hip and timely.  (And, to be generous to myself for a moment, that's what happens when you have to submit a conference abstract when you're living in evacuation from world-changing events in your own field site, and you can't really bring yourself to think about business as usual.) 

Plus, I had the chance to sit down and meet with my potential book editor.  I feel really good about where this book project is going, after feeling out what the editor would like to see.  In a sharp distinction from my admittedly crappy talk, my (potential) editor clearly wants to see well-theorized and carefully crafted work, even if it takes a little while.  I can gladly do that.  Now I need to channel that good will into a fresh burst of writing.

Finally, I had the chance to see some dear old friends again, whom I never get to see otherwise.  This is rapidly becoming my favorite part of the Big Giant Pseudology Conference, which had heretofore felt like an albatross around my scholarly neck.  Now that most of my closest friends from grad school and I have graduated and moved on to positions in far-flung locales, we really can't see each other except at BGPC.  It's just wonderful to see them again, and catch up on the personal news, and see how they mostly look just like I remember, except for the stray gray hair or post-pregnancy pound.  The best moments at BGPC are almost inevitably the ones that happen with old friends over dinner or drinks.

And, once my head clears tomorrow from the tequila I'm drinking now, I need to start preparing my talk for the next conference I'm going to, the Major Area Studies Conference.  MASC isn't nearly as crucial to my career in most ways as is BGPC, but in my recollection, it's more fun — when you don't have as much riding on your personal interactions at a conference, it gives you more room to relax and enjoy yourself.  The hotel bar at MASC, last time I attended, was a crazy place in the evening.  Guess I'd better script that talk, so I can earn my drunken bonhomie at MASC.

Big. Giant. Pseudology. Conference.

Just a short post, since my time isn't exactly my own this week.  I'm here in beautiful Conference City, and am enjoying the taste of urban and urbane sophistication.  Plus, I'm seeing all my old friends again!  And I'm giving a paper, naturally, although I can't pretend that I consider the research I'm presenting as quite ground-breaking.  (Haven't worked through enough of the implications to get that far yet.)  Most importantly for professional purposes, though, this is My Big Year of job interviews: I've lined up six prelim interviews at BGPC, which my more senior colleagues tell me is a really big number.  Coolness!  The next step, of course, is to do well at those interviews.  The blitz starts tomorrow, so now I need to put the finishing touches on my talk and then steel myself for a lot of interview scariness.  But hey, I already feel a little ego boost from my friends' reactions to my schedule!  I can do this, right?  I mean, I CAN DO THIS!

Off I go.

Pre-conference anxiety

I'm not usually the type to get tied up in knots prior to conferences.  I like to hobnob, and catch up with old friends, and generally feel professional and professorial.  But this year, I have a sense of dread, largely because I feel a distinct lack of confidence.  (Thanks a lot, Journal of Pretentious Self-Justification, for taking the wind out of my sails.)  I'm still struggling to put the subject of my impending talk into words that don't sound superficial and played out, since that journal rejection seems to think exactly that of me.  And that journal's home discipline is, ostensibly, less theory-centered than my home branch of pseudology.  Can I offer any analysis that will not yield a shower of rotten vegetables from an enraged audience?  My blood runs cold to wonder about this.

The fear is ratcheted up as well by the fact that a friend of mine is chairing the session, and zi is pretty well up to date on my work.  I feel personal pressure not to repeat too much of what zi has already heard, although zi is certainly more intimately familiar with my research than 99% of pseudologists.  And I'd die of shame if I left myself open to a serious criticism from my friend about my methodology or my analysis.  Avoiding shame would be nice.

Speaking of fear, shame, and colleagues, have I mentioned that I'm on the job market this year?  Lord love a duck, I've lined up three preliminary interviews at the Big Giant Pseudology Conference so far, as well as a face-to-face chat with the press editor I've been corresponding with about my manuscript.  My intellectual knowledge that I have acquired a sophisticated repertoire of questions and answers for job interviews is at war with the id-like fear that I will only continue to humiliate myself the way I did the last time I attended BGPC.  I've already had one prelim interview this year via video-conference, and it was a struggle for me to speak about my research, because the criticisms/dismissals in the article rejection were so fresh in my mind.  I was afraid to say what I was working on, because I was newly aware that people might all but say out loud that it was stupid.  That I'm stupid.

We all go through moments of this, right?  I just need to get my theory brain going again — I feel like I've been spending entirely too much time thinking about my classes, which is exactly what everyone and his mother warned me not to do.  And I need to get my game face on for impressing potential manuscript-buyers and hiring committees.  I need to spend a little time thinking of myself as a functioning scholar, instead of a contract teacher.  And maybe I also need to drop by the haberdashery, since I just realized that my dressier shoes and accessories are all black, but my only sport coat and my best non-suit trousers are both brown.  In my anxiety, I'm planning to pack both my (charcoal gray) suit and some more professorial clothing, and I find it easier on these business trips to pack a wardrobe that goes with a single overarching color to match or complement.

And yes, I am aware that this clothing-buying impulse is probably yet another way for me to avoid writing my conference talk.  FML.

Business cards for profs?

I've never had a strong feeling one way or another about business cards as a professional academic.  I've been getting them printed since my last year of grad school, when I was on the job market for the first time and [foolishly believed that I was] getting ready for a blitz of interviews everywhere.  Obviously, that was not how it worked out that year, and I felt kind of silly sitting at home, filling out online applications that never called me back, a big pile of business cards that announced my identity as an ABD.  They didn't cost too much, but naturally every cost was a burdensome expense at that time.  And of course, since I really had to finish up that year, I did so, which made those business cards obsolete.

Then I got a bunch of new ones made when I got to Research City for my postdoc.  Those, at least, made sense to have: business cards are a very common part of everyday life among professional and artisan classes in RC.  People were visibly pleased to take one from me, in contrast to the times when they asked for my card and I could only offer an email address.  I didn't use them much at all in my job hunt that year, but I certainly made good use of them in my research.

Those cards, of course, are also obsolete now, since they declare me as a fellow of a now-past postdoc, and give my former address in RC.  And, you know, half of them is printed in RC-ish, which almost no one involved in any aspect of my job hunt this year can read. 

So am I expected by hiring committees and conference attendees and/or poobahs to get another set of cards printed up, declaring me a VAP at Ghosttown U. in the pseudology department?  My very limited Stateside experience with such things suggests that they're just window-dressing.  People handed them out sometimes after chatting about common research interests, but I can't quite see the purpose, now that we have Academia.edu and Facebook and websites for every college department in the universe.  But I'd hate to come up short if someone were intrigued by my book manuscript or thought I should consider an open position somewhere, and asked me for a card to keep my name fresh in their heads.  On the other hand, I'd hate to spend whatever larcenous sum of money Ghosttown U. or its local competition might charge for a professional-looking business card, and then hand out about five of the 150 cards I had to order.

Those of you in the know, please share: are business cards useful among academics at conferences and on the job market?  Or are they a waste of money and paper?

RBOC - Busman's holiday

• I sincerely, deeply despise the website for the Worldwide Association of Registered Pseudologists (my primary professional organization).  It takes fifteen fucking minutes just to log in, because the website is that poorly designed.  For this I have to pay $150 dues each year?  I guess it's something to know that our annual fees support the very worst web programming money can buy.  
• Also, making us register and pre-pay the registration fee for the annual conference just to submit an abstract?  Tacky, WARP.  You are fucking tacky pieces of crap.  I bet the officers on the executive board insist on cash bars at their house parties, too.  WTFever.
• Part of my irritation with this stuff is that I had to hurry up and do it at the last minute take the opportunity to get it over with while I'm on vacation.  I decided to take a few days off to relax and enjoy myself in Vacation City, another locale in Research Country.  It's on the ocean, and there are tons of fresh seafood all around, and the weather is beautiful.  I find something tonic in being close to the sea.  It makes me happy just to walk down the street and see the blue-green expanse along one side.
• Know what else makes me happy?  Seeing total jerks getting what they deserve.  The former authoritarian leader of RC, recently relieved of his position, has now been 'detained' for questioning.  It's not possible to use such delicate language for his sons, though: they've both been imprisoned during the corresponding investigation into their dirty business.  How about a round from the Singin' Brakeman for them poor fellas locked up in the hoosegow??