Apprenticeship and its discontents

It is hard, so hard to grapple with the reality that I may well never have a long-term job in academia, and that I must perforce look for other work that (also) knocks me down in status to journeyman, if not apprentice.  I don't know if this bothers anyone else in this situation, but it disturbs me.

One of the attractions of professional academia to me was that it maintained, or seemed to maintain, the professional model of apprenticeship in training for master status.  Somehow this model of job training always made more sense to me than the idea of going to a professional program for a few years, sitting in classes, and then boom, you're suddenly a professional who's supposed to know how to perform a job in the real world.  Somehow I managed to overlook the fact that, historically, apprenticeship was often indistinguishable from indentured servitude, but that's neither here nor there now for me.

What is relevant, though, is that I feel either trapped at the journeyman stage as a professor, or forced back into the apprentice stage in any other industry.  Maybe I'll get over this once some likely job openings cross my desk or, lord love a duck, I am offered a job, but my immediate impression on looking for work beyond the ivory tower is that most kinds of employment that a pseudologist can seek require the employee to start with an internship — often literally so.  My gorge rises at the thought of someone demanding that I serve as an unpaid intern* in preparation for a job that may or may not be there at the end of the internship.  I fucking did that for eight goddamn years, motherfuckers.  I'm not a college student living in my parents' house who will work for pure experience.  I can't work for pure experience.  I am an adult and have bills to pay.

I am aware that a lot of my current misery traces to the degree of identity investment I have sunk into academia.  I cannot say for sure how much of my indignation is due to that, and how much to the hard calculations of my ongoing expenses.  I really don't want to be that person who says that he's too good, or too expensive, or too qualified to start at the bottom.  But the reality is that I have bills that I have to pay whether I want to or not, and I need a roof over my head and food to eat.  And along with that, I feel deeply ashamed at the thought that some employers expect me to be grateful for the opportunity to learn something in exchange for unpaid labor.  It's a variety of condescension that I haven't experienced before.  And it hurts.

*Not all jobs require this, and some of them pay their interns reasonably well, but I have already seen some jobs and companies/think tanks/whatever that demand an actual unpaid internship as training, with no guarantee of a job subsequent to that.

On vacation

It was a hard week for me, as you, dear reader, probably guessed.  After being seriously depressed for a few days, I'm starting to re-focus my thoughts not on the jobs that seem unattainable, but on those that may be within my reach.  Many thanks to you all who have offered a bit of advice on that front — and on, you know, not hating myself.

But more about that later.  Right now, for the first time ever, I am on a proper Spring Break vacation.  (Wouldn't you agree that I needed one?)  Don't worry, I'll be careful not to drink too much; it's too hot and dry out here to booze it up without serious risk of dehydration.  That said, I might have had a bacon-garnished Bloody Mary with my brunch this morning.  Because when you're hypertensive and in a desert climate, what else would you drink at brunch than salted, grease-spiked alcohol?

But not to worry.  As they tell me, what happens here, stays here.  See you when I get back!

My inner monologue, courtesy of the job market

You are worthless and valueless.  You have slid by the skin of your teeth into a book contract, but even that is not saving you from failure.  You have a book coming out this year, and no one wants to hire you because you suck.  If you didn't suck, you wouldn't be facing the prospect of unemployment this summer.  Worthwhile academics who have written books get jobs.  Ergo, if you have written a book and do not already have a job, you are not worthwhile.  QED.

Everything you have done for the last twelve years of your life is meaningless.  You are meaningless.  Your own society accords you no value at all, and you have only yourself to blame for your mediocrity and imminent failure.  You dishonor everything you care about every time you show your face out of doors.  You deserve to fail.

 Your increasing economic marginality reflects your irrelevance to your own discipline.   To your profession.  To your society.  To your family, probably.  To the universe.  You are worthless.

You are a FAILURE who has FAILED because you have NO WORTH and NO VALUE and NO MEANING.  Your DISHONORABLE existence on this planet is POINTLESS.  You have FAILED as a person.  You are a FAILURE.

Brought to you by my psyche and the antidepressants that are holding worse things at bay.

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 self-loathing never ends

I got the verdict on the article I submitted this summer: revise and resubmit. This is good news, I know, and yet it has made me mope for days.  It's hard for me to remember, whilst staring at the entire list of suggested revisions by both reviewers, that I am not obligated to do all of them, nor any one in particular, but rather those which I think are good ideas and feasible within a reasonable amount of time.  Instead, I went to bed in a deep funk last night, excoriating myself for being a fraud of a pseudologist* who would never properly understand theory and would have to read for six months at a shot to grasp what everyone else already knew.

In short, my academic self-loathing returned the moment I read the critiques.

Really, I was in the same headspace today until I consulted a colleague about it, and zi assured me that R&R was definitely good news, and that it's just a matter of talking with my editor and figuring out what needs to be done and what needs to be politely refused, based on what I want the article to be.  It all feels astonishingly like grad school, which especially surprises me because the form of the correspondence of this R&R resembles the revision process for my book manuscript far more than any dissertation chapter I ever drafted.

Do other people feel like this when they receive an R&R on a journal article?  Am I actually responding in part to the thorny matter of my research statement for my job applications?  To my general anxiety that I won't land a job this year?

And of course, to pose the question is to provide the answer.  Of course my reaction is influenced by all of those scary existential questions of what I will do for a living a year from now.  I'm genuinely curious, though, whether or not other people temporarily despair when they receive an R&R, rather than celebrate not being rejected.

*How's that for meta?

RBOC: Spring 2012 semester edition

• It's been an emotional rollercoaster for me this week, just like the rest of January.  I'm increasingly convinced that Ghosttown, for a variety of reasons, is actually bad for my mental health.  It is therefore uncomfortable to speculate on the possibility that my only hope of employment for next year may be begging to have my current contract renewed for another year.  Sick irony, anyone?
• My therapist seems to have zeroed in on my emotional distress as rooted in guilt, shame, and self-loathing.  I find myself agreeing with this and, at the same time, wondering, Are there survivors of graduate school who don't fit this profile?
•  The semester kicking off doesn't do much good for my emotional stability, since there's the inescapable fear that I will somehow screw everything up and scar my students.  I'm calming down from that one, as the classes start to knock themselves into shape.  The add/drop period makes everything so chaotic that I have totally abandoned teaching actual material for the first week, since so many people register late.  I feel good about this choice, now that I've tried playing it both ways.  This is definitely the more efficient way to go.  The students may be bored the first few days, just going over the syllabus, policies, study skills, etc.  But hell, it's not like students won't be bored anyway.
• Even faster than last semester, students are dropping my courses (or the idea of them) after getting a look at the requisite work.  Effort appears to frighten them intensely.  I feel I chose wisely this time around by forcing the students to go through the entire syllabus with me so I can explain to them what college professors mean when we say things like "read" or "take notes."  No one seems to arrive at Ghosttown U. with any study skills worth a goddamn, and I figured that out too late to really address it properly last semester.  Now that I'm walking them through the processes en masse, and am forcing them to confront the reality that they will have to read for nearly every single class session, a few more of them seem to be jumping ship during the first week.  
• My favorite example of this so far: a senior came by my office today after class, apologetically explained that zi had just registered a few minutes before, and wanted to know what zi might have missed the first few days.  Zi seemed on the ball, well aware of how college operates, and I was fine letting hir know where we'd be picking up.  I printed out a syllabus and the little sheet I concocted this morning about reading and note-taking skills and gave them to the student, who seemed almost insulted by the thought that zi would have to read such elementary instructions.  I practically apologized as I gently urged Stu to read them through to understand my policies, even though I was sure zi knew all of this stuff already, and explained that these things were intended primarily for my first-year students.  Before the work day ended, Stu had already dropped the course.  I believe zi was on my roster for approximately two hours.
• Not that this is brag-worthy, but I have managed to write bits of my book manuscript more days than not, so far this week.  This evening, I was puzzling over which chapters to focus on preparing for my potential book editor's review, and I suddenly realized, while fiddling the wording of a footnote, that Microsoft Word doesn't include footnotes in the word count.  (Is this a Mac thing?)  I can't for the life of me find whatever widget in Word would change this scenario.  But anyway, I created a separate document and copied all of my footnotes from all my chapters into the body text, so I could see the count.  It expanded my manuscript word count by nearly 3,000 words!  Celebrate!

Post-partum depression (of a sort)

I'm surprised and embarrassed that I have already reverted from post-defense joy to grad-student-style self-loathing and shame.  I know this is ultimately my own responsibility, and that I need to just get a grip.  But I would like to blame a little of this on a lovely colleague, Supersmart.

I've known Supersmart since the very first day I set foot in DOU-Town, and zi has always impressed me.  Or, to be precise, zi has impressed me ever since I first read an article zi had written.  Supersmart is, well, look at the pseudonym!  Gorgeous prose, fantastic elucidation of ideas, amazing grasp of theory: zi has it all. 

In a questionable move for my emotional well-being, I attended Supersmart's dissertation defense on Friday.  This set up a comparison that, in hindsight, perhaps I didn't want.  Dr. Awesome is on both of our committees, and the difference was stunning.  Awesome gave me some valid and strong critiques of my thinking, and offered a few small compliments on my methodology.  Four days later, Awesome said to Supersmart, "I learn something new every time I read your work.  You really have to publish this book!"

*cue sound of Koshary committing seppuku with a butter knife*

My friends have told me that I simply can't compare myself to Supersmart, that zi is just one of those prodigies who make others feel bad about themselves for not being geniuses.  They're probably right, but it hurts me all the same that I now feel like my committee passed me partly out of pity, while Supersmart's committee glowed about hir work, and begged hir to put the work out there for public consumption.  It's hard to tell in these situations if I'm good and Supersmart is great, or if Supersmart is actually good and I'm actually crap.

All the tendencies of self-doubt and self-hatred that grad school (and my entire life prior to that) has taught me are feeding on this now.  Am I really going to make a go of it in academia?  Is all of my hard work received as a superficial appetizer for meatier work?  Is this primarily the result of bad advising -- which, everyone in the department knows, is my cross to bear -- that I can/will overcome in the future, or am I just not that bright as academics go?  And for heaven's sake, how many encounters like this will I have, where I feel like I've turned into Salieri encountering Mozart?

Somebody slap me and tell me it will be okay.  I think I need both interventions right now.