RBOC: Notes from the Bosstown job hunt

• Hi, guys!  I'm in Bosstown now!  (See photo of downtown Bosstown.)
• Bosstown seems to run on meetings.  Meetings in order to set up more meetings.  Which pave the way for even more meetings.  At some point in this seemingly endless feedback loop, a job materializes for the job seeker.  Everyone here swears to me that it is ultimately a matter of acquiring a sufficiently large circle of acquaintances who know me personally that one of them will realize that zi has a job I'd be perfect for.  The whole thing feels distinctly like the Underpants Gnomes business model:
  
• Fuck me, new wardrobes are expensive.  Here in Bosstown, people dress a lot more formally than in any university I've ever heard of, and that goes double for interview attire. 
• On the plus side, I've got some nice shirts now, and some killer ties to go with my new suits.  I also have a beautiful pair of business-dress shoes.
• On the down side, the stupid screen door where I'm staying has already scraped my left shoe a few times.  No doubt about it: I'm hard on footwear.
• We can put a man on the moon, but we can't develop truly tropical-weight wool for business suits?  WTF?  It's in the goddamn 90s already; it just isn't right.
• Still, the clothes are fun.  How do you like today's ensemble?  (I know, it's not quite my best angle.)

Say I can say words only simple

I feel the nervousness in my stomach and in my head, but I think it's the good kind.  I set up mail forwarding today, and started making appointments.  I booked a hotel room tonight, and printed out my driving itinerary.  Tomorrow, I have to go to campus for the last time ever, and get all the books moved out of the office and return my keys.  I need to eat or throw away the last of my perishable groceries by Tuesday.  Two days from now, I will drive out of Cornstate and begin the process of relocating myself (and eventually, my stuff) to Bosstown.  Eeep.

Stuff is beginning to happen, rather fast.  Not just stuff, you know, but Stuff.  I'm pretty scared, honestly, but I'm also hopeful.  I'm too excited and scared and nervous to say much more than that. But I'm hopeful that all the changes will bring good things.

Wish me luck, friends!

Everyone knows you're going to live

I have posted this song on this blog once before, when I was getting over some very silly heartbreak.  That's what the song is about, of course.  But I suddenly realized a few days ago that the song is now speaking to me in a new register, in regard to my career drama.  It's unsettlingly on point, given that I have had moments over the last month when I actually felt like I was dying.  And yes, I know that is completely batshit insane.  I don't deny that at all.  But it was a real emotion.

A number of people have likened the academic job market to an emotionally abusive relationship with a partner who refuses to affirm you.  If I'm in the process of (at least temporarily) breaking up with academia, then it's comforting all over again to listen to Spektor sing this song.

Reimagining classic songs

I give the hat tip to nicoleandmaggie for the spiffy New Orleans jazz arrangement of "Sweet Child o' Mine."  I can hardly think of any other pop song cover that so thoroughly reimagines the song from the ground up.  However, I know a few good ones that offer something new, instead of a band just covering a song they like: covers that add to our understanding of the song's possibilities, not just rehashing what has already been done.  In the spirit of old standards cleverly reimagined, here are a few more I'm fond of.

I never really loved "I want you back" in the original version; the Jackson 5 were Michael Jackson and four bozos, not a band.  But Lake Street Dive slows down the song to a seductively langorous tempo, and all four of them are actually talented.  Add in some jazz instrumentation and some tight vocal harmonies, and it goes from gimmick to showstopper.




I always liked this Leonard Cohen cover — one of the few I can say that about, really.  Tori Amos does such a beautiful job retrofitting Cohen's song (and, really, his basic arrangement too) with her own piano work that it feels to me like more of an artistic effort than merely paying homage.  I heard this cover before I knew the original, and if I hadn't encountered it on a Leonard Cohen tribute album, I'd never have known she didn't write it herself.



Another fabulous and inventive cover of a song by a distinctively voiced singer-songwriter.  I almost always feel let down by covers of Tom Waits songs, but Neko Case nails this one the way so few do.  The instrumentation is different from the original, but so is the tone: where Waits' narrator is boozily and jovially bullshitting the listener, Case's narrator is heartbreakingly wistful.  When she sings, "He gave me a ring," there's an aching hope in the line that Waits himself will never equal.

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!

Pop culture moment: Ellen Page comes out

At least one genuinely beautiful thing happened on Valentine's Day:



Being the analytical killjoy that I am, I started critiquing this speech almost as soon as I had seen it.  Big deal, a wealthy and privileged actress comes out in front of a sympathetic audience.  She is accustomed to performing, and clearly waited for applause after making the big statement.  But, even if there is some truth in these critiques, the more I thought about it, the more I felt like there was something more significant and valuable here, and I felt bad that I was so cynical at first blush.

Ellen Page is a professional actress who earns her living – and yeah, sure, it's a good living – partly through her desirability: the pleasure that people take in watching her craft as well as in admiring her physical charms.  She's also young and young-looking: she's only twenty-six, and has some good years of ingenue parts left in her.  Those are exactly the kind of parts that, historically, have paid her bills, and they are exactly the kind of parts that she is most likely to lose in the wake of coming out.  Think about it: with all the actors who have come out, how many of them have continued to find work as romantic leads in heterosexual roles?  Coming out isn't career-ending the way it once was, but it certainly seems like it still threatens or diminishes an actor's marketability in Hollywood.  Page is taking a real risk with real potential consequences, and she clearly knows that.  Not a risk quite on the level of, say, Michael Sam aspiring to be the first openly gay NFL player, but significant nonetheless.

I'm a little mystified that a bunch of people immediately reacted with "No big shocker" or "No surprises here."  Are you people out of your minds?  Page has always styled herself as something of a tomboy, but that's a pretty far cry from telegraphing I am a lesbian to all and sundry.  Don't act like you knew, because you didn't.  That's bullshit.

And don't act like it's inevitable that a gay actor would come out, either: for a lot of gay actors, everyone around them either knows or suspects it, and they never breathe a public word about it in their lives.  Being something and talking about it are drastically different things.  If you want to know what made me a little sniffly when I thought about it, Page was scared and anxious and, poised professional actress or not, had to fight for self-control when she gave that speech. 

Page also indicates frank awareness of how shitty day-to-day life is for a lot of ordinary non-famous LGBT kids, and makes no attempt to aggrandize her own experience as ultimate victimhood.  For heaven's sake, she's there at Time To Thrive to support the work of people trying to change those kids' circumstances!  She's no clueless self-absorbed celebrity airily offering solidarity.  She recognizes her luck and privilege freely while offering empathy, which I think is perfectly fair.

Page's empathy sounded genuine to me because she obviously knows about feeling forced to hide her identity, and, by the sound of it, to sneak around to keep her relationships out of public sight.  (Just imagine what that's like when you don't have to worry only about friends and family, but also a troupe of tabloid photographers who want to catalog your every living moment.)  It's a privileged version of the horrors that lots of kids fear, but it's no less real anguish for that.  It certainly sounds like Page knows whereof she speaks when she mentions the toll it took on her mental health as well as her relationships.  When she said, "I am tired of lying by omission," she fucking meant it.

I'm glad for her, and I hope that she goes on to break the cliché of an actor coming out and promptly seeing her roles dry up.  And I hope that the young LGBT people that no one will ever see onscreen take heart from her talk.

Distraction III: Staying privileged in airports

I have always been deeply skeptical of the big scary machines in which we must all humiliate ourselves when traveling by air nowadays.  It didn't take long for people to start leaking the info that these things were bogus, and that most, if not quite all of the TSA security measures put into effect after September 11th, 2001 were nothing more than security pageantry rather than actual helpful measures.  Recently, an ex-TSA agent wrote an entertaining and disturbing piece on all of this.

Going through careful security screening is something I understand, but I also want it to be intelligent and effective, rather than some faux-CSI bullshit to impress morons unfamiliar with air travel more recent than the Wright brothers.  Since Research Country is one of those places that can set off enhanced security screening all by itself, I understand total ignoramuses thinking that I have to be strip-searched.  Real security professionals, though, ought to recognize that I am not a threat.  (Thanks for rummaging through my books so thoroughly, though, gang!)

My irritation with the pointlessness of most of these measures reached the point at which I was willing to pull bourgeois cultural capital rank as well as financial sacrifice, and basically pay for premium service.  You see, when you try to slip a $20 bill to a TSA agent to keep your shoes and belt on and undergo a more modest search, it's bribery; when you write an $85 check to the TSA, it's advance screening!

Naturally, such screening has its limitations, but really, the whole point of this is to make my life easier when it makes sense to do so.  I'm not going to blow up an airplane anywhere under any circumstances, but it seems to me especially ridiculous to fear I might do so on the Thursday red-eye from Cornstate City to Hometown.  People, no one is gunning for that flight.  If I could gather all TSA managerial personnel in a room and explain to them reasonable suspicion, to say nothing of why you can't hire part-time help and then never give them proper training, I would.  Times being what they are, and I being an obscure academic instead of a rockstar governmental advisor, the best I can do is pay for premium and let the TSA confirm once and for all that I'm not a terrorist.

Now, perhaps they have some criteria to determine who qualifies or not that they don't acknowledge to the general public.  However, looking over all the criteria they list on the website, the basics are:

1. Don't be anyone already under suspicion of having committed treason or terrorism.
2. $85.

It's both amusing and worrisome to me that this is all.  This suggests that anyone planning in advance to do something terrible just has to keep his nose clean, pay the non-refundable application fee, and wait a week or two.  Really, I kind of hope that TSA is being all sneaky and skullduggerish and not admitting to the more complex criteria, just to see if someone dangerous will blithely give himself away at the interview.  Or, you know, maybe they just want to see if the applicant is white and of an appropriately high socioeconomic class.  (I wore my best business casual, just in case.)

Of course, it's possible that it's at the interview stage when they pull out their bag of tricks for sizing up a person and determining if he looks/acts like a threat, and assuming the answer is no, continue to process the application and deposit the check.  That would actually be a pretty good way to run the ordinary security screenings, if only they would invest in the (wo)manpower and the necessary training.  (FWIW, my interviewer seemed considerably more professional and thoughtful than the average TSA agent, most of whom remind me of students who earned Ds in my courses at Ghosttown U.)  But it says nothing positive about either our priorities or our common sense that we have reserved such examination for people willing and able to pay extra for the privilege. 

In short, I'm glad to have the Known Traveler Number, since it will simplify the boarding process when I visit family or go on vacation (ha!).  But I don't exactly feel good about the haunting suspicion that all I have really done is to reinscribe class and racial privilege with the blessing of the U.S. government.

Frivolous P.S.:
Many thanks for all the helpful suggestions for whipping/thickening heavy cream!  I'm getting much better at it, now that I prep the utensils in the freezer for a little while.

Distraction II: When good coffee goes boozy

Since it is going to be damn cold for the next two months, by the odds, I've been fiddling with drinks that suit the weather.  In addition to some experimentation with a variety of liqueurs that have thus far not really paid off, I've been making an occasional vice of coffee cocktails: that is, something like an Irish coffee.  I never learned to like Irish whiskey, though, so my poison of choice of late is a nice aged rum.  Rum goes so much better with coffee than does whiskey, anyway!

For the most part, the drink is hard to screw up.  The steps are blessedly simple, if you don't want to get too fancy.

Step 1: Brew some coffee.
Step 2: Get a mug – because who the hell actually keeps Irish coffee glasses on hand? or why? – and combine a spoonful of sugar/simple syrup/agave syrup and a healthy tot of rum.
Step 3: Pour the coffee into the mug and stir all ingredients briefly.
Step 4: Top with thickened cream and serve.

But hark! Step 4 is what has bedeviled me from the beginning.  If you're the kind of obsessive that wants to get the drink right, then it just isn't good enough to pour in a little heavy cream and call it a day.  The cream must be "thickened," according to traditional recipes; that means heavy whipping cream that has been thickened by beating, but not so much that it turns into whipped cream, per se. 

I still can't do it.  Not by hand whisk, not by hand-held mixer.  I cannot make the bloody cream thicken.  I can't even overdo it and make whipped cream.  I just don't have the patience to whip the cream long enough for any of this to occur, I think.  My best attempt was some very slightly thickened cream that kinda-sorta did what the recipe calls for: it slid on top of the surface of the coffee for a second or two, before melting into the drink.  In theory, the thickened cream should sit comfortably in a layer on top of the coffee, and should only melt into it as the drink is consumed.

So, if anyone has any good tips on exactly a) how long to beat the cream, b) how much cream I need to put in the bowl to start, if I'm making only one mug's worth, or c) how to fix whatever other complications I have created for myself, please shoot me an email or comment below.

My other fiddling with the drink comes in the brewing of the coffee.  I love to flavor coffee with a pinch of cinnamon mixed into the ground beans just before I add the water, so I sometimes try a spice mixture to bring out different notes in the rum.  I haven't hit on any magic combinations yet, but it'll happen sooner or later.  If I don't get totally sick of allspice and nutmeg, that is.

Distraction I: The Desolation of a Perfectly Good Book

You, my good internet friends, have left me in a posting pickle.  Everyone who weighed in on my last post asked for something different in the way of fluffy posts, so I'm back to throwing darts blindfolded to decide.  For no good reason, here is my first distraction post.

[SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ ON IF YOU WISH TO REMAIN UNINFORMED ABOUT THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG!]

So first of all, I am not a hardcore Tolkien fan, nor am I a rigid purist about film adaptations of books.  I don't always agree with the choices that Peter Jackson made in his Lord of the Rings trilogy, but I mostly understand the artistic motivations behind those choices.  (One notable exception: this fucking ridiculous invention.)

I do, however, recognize naked greed when I see it.  The Hobbit is a one-film book — two at the very most, and even that is stretching it, if you ask me.  It's artistically unconscionable to bloat the thing into a trilogy.  The Hobbit is a neat little children's tale: my copy numbers 330 pages, and that's in comfortably large "read me a bedtime story" print.  Sure, there are occasional plot holes, and Tolkien didn't spend nearly so much time working out the inner lives of the characters as he did in his later works, but when was the last time you picked up a story written to entertain children that had airtight plot consistency and rich psychological portraits of the characters?  There's simply no need to spend more than six hours of screen time telling the story.

(And let's be fair here: The Hobbit is hardly artistically shallow.  I'd never have noticed it when I was a kid, but as an overeducated damned intellectual a grown man who knows a little history, I'm intrigued to see the moments in which Bilbo Baggins seems to speak Tolkien's personal feelings about warfare.  This is a subject for a post of its own, but for all his Nordic hero-worship and his racist, Orientalist mentality, Tolkien was also a veteran of WWI who knew first-hand how awful war really was, and how far from epic valor day-to-day soldier's life was.  Sam Gamgee fills the same sort of role in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.) 

But that's a general critique of the entire concept of a trilogy of Hobbit films.  The matter at hand is the currently screening travesty, The Desolation of Smaug.

First of all, I'll give them this much: Smaug looks more convincing than I expected, even though I can no longer be intimidated by CGI anything.  I kind of feel like they should have let Benedict Cumberbatch just work out the voice on his own instead of altering it digitally, but there's a lot of unfortunate historical precedent for using some goofy echo effect on a dragon's voice.  He's not a bad job, on the whole.


Just about everything else, though, was a fucking joke.  I mean, damn.  I can start with one complaint and let the chain spring thence naturally.

1. TAURIEL.  Okay, I get it, Tolkien wasn't much for female characters, and they want girls to go see this film, too.  I was willing to tolerate this thinking when they gave the literary Glorfindel's lines and plot functions to the cinematic Arwen; after all, in an epic story that size, there has to be some conglomeration and telescoping if you don't want a sixteen-hour piece of cinema.  And, you know, Arwen actually exists in the books.  But inventing a whole new character who has no function in the extant plot?  Tacky.
2. You know what else is tacky?  Inventing an utterly ridiculous romantic subplot between an elf and a dwarf in a story that depends on elves and dwarves distrusting each other and never really bridging the gap outside of battle scenarios.  (See my previous complaint.)  You wanna see elves and dwarves learn to trust and care for each other?  Read The Lord of the Rings!  (Or fuck, I dunno, watch Jackson's LotR trilogy.)  Yes, Evangeline Lilly and Aidan Turner are hot, but it's already cheating to let Turner run around in the films looking like his movie-star-handsome self.  Where's the huge dwarvish beard, dude?  Oh, right, that would get in the way of you looking all pouty and cute.  And since elves are apparently incapable of growing facial hair, one has to assume that Tauriel wouldn't be into anyone with more than a five-o'-clock shadow.
3. Speaking of which: what the fuck is the use of inventing a second romantic subplot with Tauriel?  Do elven kingdoms always have such lopsided sex statistics that there's only one female in sight among dozens of dudes?  
4. Oh wait, I forgot: that provides you with an excuse to throw in Legolas, since everyone liked him in the last trilogy, even though I'm pretty sure that Tolkien didn't even begin to create the character until The Hobbit was already in print.
5. And oh yeah, there's also the convenient heterosexuality that you can drape on Legolas that way.  Don't think I haven't noticed the way that the producers are styling and promoting the film in distinctly macho, heteronormative ways.  Perhaps they were disquieted by the slow-building friendship between Legolas and Gimli in the first trilogy, uninterrupted by any female character.  (Tolkien's assumptions of wartime camaraderie and general homosociality are no doubt puzzling to many younger readers and, especially, viewers.)
   
   (Sidebar 1: I like to think that the last three problems hint at the producers' fears that without the presence of Evangeline Lilly, Legolas and Kili would somehow end up having desperate, furtive sex in a corner of the Woodland Elves' realm, and they had to butch things up to please their audience.  Or the audience's parents, at any rate.
   Sidebar 2: Cue a new generation of gay slash/fic starring Legolas and Kili...NOW!)
6. All of which is pretty weird in light of the film's seeming insistence that every elf besides Legolas and Tauriel act campy enough to be an extra in The Birdcage.  The vocal tone and body language that Lee Pace uses as Thranduil makes me think of nothing so much as Andreas Voutsinas in History of the World, Part I.
7. I dislike Jackson's choice to make a bigger deal of the Arkenstone than Tolkien himself did, but I get it.  I acknowledge that Tolkien's plotting of the burglary and wealth-recovery operation was on the thin side, and that people might start to wonder what the hell a bunch of nitwit dwarves and one hobbit planned to do to get that stuff home.  (In the book, this exact concern becomes a plot device; I suspect Tolkien was banking on small children not thinking this far ahead.)  Obsessing about a single crucial McGuffin is definitely easier for Hollywood-trained viewers to understand.
8. But then what am I to make of Gandalf apparently losing his goddamn mind and telling Thorin, "take back your homeland," when he knows perfectly well that Thorin has only the aforementioned bunch of nitwit dwarves and one hobbit as the vanguard?  The movie only worsens a problem that Tolkien originated: that there is no sane reason to select Bilbo as the company burglar, except the mysterious charisma of the reluctant/cowardly hero.  If Gandalf is as smart as everyone says, then surely he could do something other than to send this pack of chuckleheads off to steal from a humongous dragon.
9. The revamp of the Master of Lake-Town as a despotic unelected tyrant, rather than a canny businessman elected by his fellows like he is in the book, is fucking stupid.  I feel insulted by this entire subplot.
10. The addition of Bard's little children worrying about being killed is even stupider.
11. It's totally bananas that a bunch of orcs are able to raid Lake-Town, get ambushed by elves, and have an entire guerrilla battle without any residents noticing.
12. WTF Kili gets shot!?  There shouldn't have been a battle at that point in the story anyway!!  Why oh why are you sidetracking yourself with this idiotic subplot?  Oh, that's right: it's an excuse to put Evangeline Lilly back in frame.  I get it now.
13. I reluctantly come to the conclusion that the only actor doing a better job than Benedict Cumberbatch in this film is Richard Armitage.  How he's managing this, I have no idea.
14. It kills me to admit it, but much of the original plot in the latter half of the book is so poorly thought out on its own terms that Peter Jackson may well have decided that he had to do something about it,  and if that's the case, then why not sex it up with battles and desperate political struggles and, um, sex?  Kills me, I tell you.

Please distract me!

I'm pretty much too depressed by the moribund state of my job hunt to blog about it.  I made it through my stupid little January term course, so now I have all of four days to enjoy before the Spring semester begins.  I want to write about something, anything other than my fear of professional failure and depression, but it's hard to get going.  I'm hoping that presenting a small poll to my readers will help to focus the next few posts, assuming nothing earth-shattering happens to intrude.  Give me a good fluffy topic to write about!

What should I write about?  What would you like to read about?

1. My recent experiments with coffee cocktails?
2. My developing critique of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug?
3. My formal attempt to stop having to disrobe in airports?
4. Preparation for polar vortex storms, out here in frigid Cornstate?
5. Something else?

Comment away!

When does the good part start?

Back from Hometown.  Applying for jobs.  Drinking coffee and rye.  2014 is on track to begin the way so many others have: another one of the worrisome years.  What the hell, I'll wish for a better year anyway.

See you all in 2014.

Walking far from home

This morning, I finally finished grading my terrifying stack of essay exams for the Intro to Pseudology sections.  Heartily cheered by this, I rewarded myself by listening to the album I just bought a few days ago, Iron & Wine's Kiss Each Other Clean.

Several hours later, while attending to sundry job application matters, I made myself look at the pseudology job wiki.  Established that I have been rejected by some twenty-five of the fifty or so jobs I've applied for — probably more, in fact, but not all of them are listed on the wiki.  Made myself coffee spiked with rye.  Swallowed my pride and began adding one-year VAP positions to my spreadsheets (one for me, and one for my referees). 

And in moments of both triumphant pleasure and defeated sorrow, I took solace in this song.



Wish me luck making it through this winter.  It looks like I have to keep walking far from home for another year.

Chili

The downside of a chili party being cancelled because of a fast-spreading stomach bug: I don't get to show off my chili-cooking prowess to my friends until some unspecified date in the future.

The upside, however, is that I got to reacquaint myself with my chili-cooking techniques, as well as experiment with a few small changes to my basic recipe.  All in all, it turned out well, and I anticipate much carnivorous celebration when everyone involved has a settled stomach.

Extension of previous observation: the one real flaw in my technique here is the "one for you, one for me" philosophy of adding a can of beer to the pot of stew.  As I learned to my chagrin tonight, when I pour myself a pint of beer to sip while stirring the chili on the stove, I have a distinct tendency to let my attention drift to the fucking awesome music showcased on another blog, become obsessed with memorizing the lyrics and parsing the harmonies, and then suddenly become aware of a burning smell coming from the kitchen.

RBOC: Liveblogging the final exam

I'm proctoring.  I'm bored.  So.

• There is a noticeable scent of Axe body spray in the air this morning as CBU students begin their exam week.  I wouldn't be surprised if a few of the boys are putting it on as a talismanic gesture in preparation for an exam, but the smart money is that they stopped showering days ago and believe that a rampant chemical stench will cleverly disguise their poor finals-time hygiene.
• It fascinates me to observe the varieties of boots that students wear for winter weather.  This can be broken down in several ways:
• Men very rarely wear boots.  It is sneakers, loafers, or bust around here.  How they avoid pneumonia is more than I can say.  (Of course, I write this with some decidedly non-boot oxfords on my feet, so maybe I should shut up.)
• Women are all about the boots here.  Sure, there are the usual Uggs and Bean boots, but there's an impressive array of alternative styles on display — most of them, to my eye, fashion boots rather than actual heavy-weather gear.  (I sure hope you waterproofed those nice leather boots, sweetheart.)  
• Speaking of the Bean boots, I am amused to see how many of those look absolutely, flawlessly new.  And expensive.  You don't get hot pink or fur-lined duck boots cheap.  (To say nothing of hot pink and fur-lined.)  I wonder if the owners ever actually walk in such fancy footwear any further than the distance to the dining hall.  I mean, yes, the shoes are cute, but wear the damn things!  Buying something with a lifetime guarantee motivates me to test its endurance, not baby it.

• Given how lazy time-inefficient some of the students have proved at semester's end, and how much I've heard colleagues grumbling about catching plagiarists of late, I'm really glad that the heavily weighted final assignment in my intro classes is an in-class exam.  It's simply not possible to plagiarize such things without flat-out cheating like a first grader.  In my grading rubric, even a disastrously failing exam earns a positive integer of some kind, which makes even flaming idiocy earn a higher grade than dishonesty.
• My, it's warm in this classroom.  My stylish professorial four layers are perhaps a bit of overkill in here.
• Including the awesome red lambswool sweater I'm wearing.  Have I mentioned that I've been stocking up on nice grown-up clothes ever since Black Friday?  I'm aiming especially to vary my color palette, since the dark greys and browns are starting to depress me.
• Oh man, I have to go to the bathroom.  It's just unavoidable after my morning coffee, you know?  But can I trust all of these students not to whip out notes the moment I step out?  Probably not.  Oh dear.
• A miracle! Out of bladder desperation, I ran to the men's room for a few minutes, and when I returned, no one was cheating!  They didn't even look like they had frantically dug out their notes and then thrown them back in the bag as I walked in.  SO relieved, for multiple reasons.
• I'm a little surprised to see how long this exam is taking my students.  I had estimated one and a half to two hours to complete it, but most of them look on track to take the full three hours.  Good student and poor student alike seem to need more time than I expected to write the whole thing.  Unprecedented.
• This probably has something to do with the fact that this is the first exam I've ever written without any multiple choice questions at all, and heavy emphasis on essays.  They really get to show their stuff on this exam, and with no softball questions, they have nowhere to hide. 
• Somehow I find it distasteful to see students chewing gum as they write exams.  It always reminds me of the scene in The Bird Cage when Nathan Lane disparages a gum-snapping dumb bunny of a dancer.  But it's just not appropriate to say to a student, "Sweetie, you're wasting your gum."
  
• Fifteen minutes to go, and half of the class is still writing.
• OMFG why haven't they finished yet?  Why can't I go to my office already?  I think time itself may be bending around some kind of black hole created by the energy of my students' brains working on overdrive.  What if they reach critical mass and we're all crushed to death by the pressure of the implosion?
• It would really suck to be crushed to death in a black hole before I've had my lunch.
• Oh, students, I see you turning in exams with questions left blank. *facepalm*  Don't you understand that you're sacrificing at least the possibility of points that way?  Nothing comes from nothing.  It frustrates me to see good students screw themselves that way.  Is it a point of honor for them that they don't try to bullshit?  I supposed I understand that way of thinking, but surely they can see for themselves that this is mathematically damaging to them.
• Then again, considering all the boneheaded questions I endure every semester about GPAs and maximal final grades, maybe they're even worse at math than they are at pseudology.
• DONE!!
• Now I have a full ninety minutes to enjoy before I have to do the whole fucking thing again for the other section of Intro to Pseudology.  Sigh.

Office hours in opera form

The vast majority of my open office hours through the semester run pretty much like this:



But this week, mere days before the final exam for both of my Intro to Pseudology classes, my office hours suddenly turn into — well, kinda-sorta* turn into this:



Uno alla volta!

Naturally, after the exams, I have to go into hiding, lest my office hours devolve into this:



* I mean, minus the gratuitous skeeziness, misogyny, and the crazy pantaloons.  I actually dislike this version, but the only staged version on YouTube that I like so far is an old filmed version with Tito Gobbi, and he performs it without anyone else on stage, so you sort of lose my point about being in high demand, and...I've explained too much, haven't I?

RBOC: Mired in the semester

• This semester may never actually end.  CBU actually lists the due date for grades as December 26.  Fucking seriously, CBU?
• I just finished grading the papers for my little topics course.  On to the two intro courses' worth.  Oy.
• Two more weeks of classes before the exam period even starts.  Seriously, FML.
• On the plus side, I'm still wringing the occasional tenure-track job posting to apply to out of this semester's listings.  This seems more exciting than it really is only because I've already begun to steel myself to give up on the tenure track and apply to more contract jobs.
• Three weeks away, and I'm already dreading going to visit the folks in Hometown.  At least I'm only going for a single week.
• This should be the place in the post in which I complain about having to teach a truly pointless January term course, thus rendering my winter break almost non-existent.  But, since that will at least occupy some of my mind and make me wake up at normal hours so I can work, it may well be a blessing in disguise.
• The wretched Christmas shopping season is upon us, complete with that goddamn music in every place of retail business, including my local bar.  I grit my teeth.
• Which reminds me: when people here in Cornstate ask you this or that about "the holidays" coming up, and you explain that you don't actually celebrate that holiday, they think you're setting them up for a punchline.
• Then, when you explain that you're a Jew, they think you're using some kind of profanity in a sick self-deprecation bit gone wrong.  It terrifies me to see South Park come to life in any degree.
  

I wrote a book!!

It is written! It is shipped! I FEEL AWESOME.

Pity that I can't enjoy any real vacation after that, since classes start tomorrow. But you know, you roll with the punches. And honestly, it doesn't bring me down that classes start tomorrow. I have written a book. I have seen its voluminous pages neatly tucked into a Priority Shipping box and sent off to my editor. I have formally updated my CV to list the book as 'in press'. (This is the right term once it goes to copy editing, right?) I feel good, the rest of the world be damned.

So for a change, let's just have a little fun on this blog, shall we? :)

Flavia jokingly included a link to a recent post of mine as defensive citation, which just tickled me. Even if she and I worked in the same field, which we do not, she is quickly attaining the status of what my grandmother would call "a big macher," whilst I am...well, not nobody, but not much above that. The idea of someone of her status citing someone of mine defensively is frankly hilarious to me.

But her post reminded me that I have pulled off some mildly ridiculous citations in my book* that, if I'm honest, are there for one of three reasons.  These are, to wit:

1. Another scholar is more famous and powerful than I, and I don't want to make an enemy out of that person — even if hir work is all but irrelevant to mine. (This is more or less what Flavia characterized as 'defensive citation'.
2. Another scholar is a friend of mine, and I want to give them a tip o' the hat. This reason goes double if said scholar has been a friend of mine since our grad school days, or if zi directed me to some information that I found useful for the book.
3. I thought it would be fucking hilarious to get away with citing it, whether or not it truly required a formal citation.

So for more entertainment, let's play a little game of Dr. Koshary's Ludicrous Book Citations.

1. How many old friends did Dr. Koshary cite just give them a shout-out, even though their work is relatively small-scale and largely irrelevant to his topic?
a. 1
b. 2
c. 3
d. 4
e. He stopped counting at 15.

2. How many of Dr. Koshary's citations qualify as 'defensive', as per Flavia's description, and/or sucking up to more powerful colleagues likely to read the book?
a. 5
b. 10
c. 15
d. He should have stopped counting at 20, before his face turned that red.

3. Which humorous music video did Dr. Koshary manage to cite?

a. 3-Way ("You guys are still here?")
b. Iran So Far ("...But you're in New York now, baby!")
c. Jack Sparrow ("Now back to the good part!")
d. Motherlover ("Every Mother's Day needs a Mother's Night!")

4. Despite proof-reading everything repeatedly, how many mistakes did Dr. Koshary find in the bibliography after mailing the package to the Press — in fact, while he was looking at it to find material for this post?
a. 1
b. 2
c. 3
d. 4

5. After discovering the answer to Question 4, what colorful language did Dr. Koshary just bellow to himself in his apartment?
a. "Fuck me and all of creation!"
b. "Son of a bitch!"
c. "Klatu verada nikto!"
d. "Goddamnsonofabitchbastardfuck!"
 

*Unless the Press' copyeditors force me to discard any of these citations as needless clutter, I suppose.

CYA citations and memes

I may well have worked the last of my citations into the manuscript this evening. To be perfectly frank, I was motivated to look into a few sources as a CYA maneuver to head off criticism that I never thought about XYZ analytical approaches.  Several pseudology colleagues of mine, who I know are going to read this book when it sees print, are more interested in XYZ than I am, and I live in possibly-maybe-just-a-little-bit unreasonable dread that they will be disappointed with my analysis and pillory me in the book reviews. (One in particular terrifies me, since zi has actually been awfully kind to me so far, and I am quietly aware that I owe hir big time.)

I've already had the realization several times over that I cannot and will not, despite all best efforts, completely thrill everyone, and that it's a bad idea to try.  And yet it's hard to let go of that grad-student-y desire to cite everything that moves!

 
But I at least feel like looking up these last few sources did me some good. I'm certainly not going to develop a new analysis for the book based on them, but I like the ideas they dropped on me, and I may follow up on them in the future.  And, more to the point, I feel – reasonably or not – like referring to them in a few well-chosen places throughout the manuscript is the equivalent of reinforcing a chink in my armor.  That's probably a really unhelpful way to view this whole process, but since I'm re-reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy again this summer, that's the first image that comes to mind. (Are you starting to think that I need to read something new?  I'm starting to think that.)

What the hell, if it works, it works.

Storm coming

The news of late from Research Country is fucking horrible. Never mind my chickenshit whining about how this complicates my writing, or changes my theorizations. People are being slaughtered and terrorized up and down RC by multiple oppressive forces, and it's just godawful to read the news updates and see all the photographic slideshows labeled "Warning: Graphic content that may disturb viewers." I am almost unspeakably angry at all of those forces who think that death and destruction are the way forward.  As one of my go-to historians lamented, "May God extirpate them all."

Times like this, there's not much besides music that comforts me.  This song was my jam of the day while writing, and it seems as good as anything right now.  I like how it starts out sounding ominous and scary, and turns beautiful and hopeful through each verse. Please God, may RC see a similar progression, and soon.

One month

I'm down to one month before a) classes begin, and b) THE BOOK IS DUE.  I am currently attempting to power through syllabus creation so that I can put in my book orders and then restore my attention to the manuscript, which is coming along, but needs — well, just look at the progress meter and you'll see what it needs.  Can someone please arrange for a metric ton of coffee – unground, if you don't mind – to be delivered to my door?  I don't know if I'll have the strength for this otherwise.

But of course, I must, so I suppose I must.

Meanwhile, I can't think of any appropriate song for the phrase "one month," so I'll be a cheapskate and just give you "Two weeks."