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.

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.

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!

What's the point?

I'm feeling stymied.  More job rejections have come in, I'm back to scouring the internet for one-year positions, and I have to teach three courses this spring with a smile on my face while having no idea if I will have any living in six months' time.  I have an article to revise and resubmit, a book review to write, and new articles to prepare.  At some point this spring, I will have to have my book indexed, if the press ever gets around to sending me the galleys.

And I can't make myself do any of it.  I'm starting to feel like the butt of a cosmic joke.  If having years' worth of teaching experience at name-brand universities and a single-author monograph to my name can't even get me a campus interview, then what the hell is the point of any of this?  I feel like I'm being made to jump through hoops that don't even matter.  I have more expenses every year, including some family members who are increasingly dependent on us young'uns.  My savings would be obliterated in short order if I had to move to some other state just to look for work.  I can't afford not to work.  Why is the universe jerking me around like this?

It's too disheartening to think about for long.  Easier to think of Shakespeare and pretend that someone besides me gives a shit about my petty problems and my not-so-petty existential fears.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

Is there a more pleasant alternate universe that I could get transferred to?  This one is getting me down just now.
 

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.

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.

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.

My heart is never cold

It's been a rough week over here at chez Koshary.  Lots of emotional turmoil: not just my usual unbloggable misery – though that was certainly part of the mix – but also some unusual unbloggable misery stemming from the troubling events of late in Research Country.  It's miserable just to recount the general outline of events, so I'm going to skip that.  Suffice it to say that a lot of people I respect (and perhaps a few that I even fear as well) are acting in disrespectful and disrespectable ways toward each other, and I feel the need to keep my head down, lest I get sucked into some absurd argument on Facebook.

But yeah.  This week kind of sucked balls.  And with nearly all my friends out of town right now, I've felt rather alone as I dealt with all the bad shit.

Fuck it.  I need to cheer myself up somehow, so I'm sipping an Aperol spritz made with champagne – okay, fine, método de champaña – that I opened for myself because fuck it, I need a break.  And of course, some great music.  It starts off a little slow, but wait until the second verse begins.  That's when this recording comes into its own.

The hell with this

Fuck online dating.  I'm completely exhausted by feeling like we all have to examine each other like products on Amazon, and by having dates that feel like job interviews.  (Even the good ones.)

Either I'll meet someone in the real world, or I'll die single and childless, cold and alone.  I know which I'd bet on right now, but hopefully that will pass soon.

In the meantime, I'm going to curl up in a corner and sniffle drunkenly until this week is over.

Thanks

I'm currently gritting my teeth and getting through another tough period in Hometown.  I'm feeling rather vitriolic and ungracious toward a number of people and things right now.  But, since it's Thanksgiving, I thought it would be worth reminding myself of a few people and things I'm actually thankful for.

• I actually like my job.  
• I actually like most of my students.
• I really like my colleagues.
• I have a job.  (Attending the Big Giant Pseudology Conference and meeting some old friends reminded me that some of my colleagues have never held a full-time academic job with health benefits.)  
• My book contract.  'Nuff said.
• The few people in my family who actually make my life easier, rather than harder.
• My health.  Visiting Hometown reminds me of that pretty sharply.
• My sanity.  See above.
• My friends.

And so to bed.  Happy Thanksgiving, all.

It's being a week

Two more elderly relatives back in Hometown died in the past week.  These were not sudden tragedies, at least; they were elderly and infirm people.  And, in the case of one, it was something of a mercy anyway.  But the mood of the phone calls to and from Hometown this week is distinctly downbeat.

More unbloggable stuff.  So it goes.  Sometimes there's nothing left to do but hold on.

Torch songs and sympathy

It's actually embarrassing to me how crappy I have felt this week as a result of the flame-out of a really brief (and, inevitably, doomed) affair.  It would seem that several years spent in monk-like isolation can have a deleterious effect on one's self-possession when suddenly confronted with any level of romantic interest, no matter how transitory or ephemeral.

What I mean to say is that I need to re-learn how to handle my shit in dating.  Sigh.

Very fortunately, a friend recommended to me Regina Spektor's new album.  It's kind of spooky that Spektor has not one but two songs on this album that kind of wrecked me: one pure torch song, and one loving slap upside the head to a friend who has been listening to too many torch songs.  Many thanks to Ms. Spektor, should she be bored enough to read this blog.

A small dose of intense self-pity

Fuck.  There really is nothing I'll be leaving behind here in Ghosttown.

"What she's done, you can't give it a name
You got to make it rain, make it rain" 

Post-visit ruminations

I'm back in Ghosttown, after a whirlwind visit to, er, Tinytown, home of Cute-as-a-Button University.  CBU brought me in for a campus visit, and it all felt so positive and collegial that I am left with some hard questions no matter what comes of the visit.  Let me see if I can organize my thoughts a little.

1. CBU faculty are happy people, and Ghosttown U. faculty are unhappy.  You know how you don't notice how miserable you are until you get to taste how happy people live?  That's what I experienced during my visit.  I didn't quite realize how much tension, distrust, and pettiness circulate in my department at Ghosttown U. until I got to hang out with CBU faculty.  Of course, I didn't realize it partly because I'm sort of beneath the notice of my department's politics, but that stuff seeps into everything after a while.  
2. CBU students care about learning, and Ghosttown U. students don't.  Plain fact, for the most part.  There are exceptions aplenty, but the general trend is as stated.  There is merit in forcing academically apathetic and mediocre students to try hard and to succeed, but I have to admit that it's getting to be a real grind.  CBU more closely resembles my own beloved Alma Mater College than a typical university: liberal arts focus, an expectation of academic intensity, and, for the faculty, a priority of teaching students well, rather than gritting one's teeth and getting through classes on the way to publishing some more.  Witness the fact that my tour guide at CBU talked about her academic opportunities and classes she enjoyed alongside the sports and extracurriculars of the school; at Ghosttown U., the tour guides hardly mention academics at all, and concentrate their pitches on how old the campus is, and the great party scene fueled by Greek letter organizations and the athletics teams.
3. CBU faculty derive a sense of meaning and self from their teaching, and Ghosttown U. faculty do not.  At least, that's the general trend.  Within my department, most of the faculty seem, from my perspective, awfully lackadaisical about their teaching, and regard it as something that just comes with the job.  The few of us who really care about making the students struggle, and about making students learn things they did not know before, are all a few steps away from burn-out — even the new hires like me.  
4. I might be happier at a liberal arts college than an R1 university.  I know, not exactly a stunner; lots of people have this realization.  At this point in time, I feel like I'd have to run myself ragged to rack up the number of publications that R1 schools demand for tenure.  My work comes a little slower, partly because of the nature of pseudology and partly because I'm not one of the hardcore theory geeks of my discipline.  I don't think I could pound out a major theory article each year, even with a gun to my head.  Somehow, I didn't quite put it together that a liberal arts school, which values (and valorizes!) good teaching, might rank that higher than publications in some ways.  Whatever happens with CBU, I may want to step up my game in some fashion for apps to liberal arts schools, to drive home the point that I get what these places are about.
5. I hate Ghosttown.  There's no getting around it.  Yes, there's a great bookstore in town, and yes, there are a few lovely places to eat and drink.  But that doesn't really compensate for the fact that this place makes me existentially unhappy.  I felt a sense of relief and even impatience to be on the plane to CBU, as a respite from Ghosttown.  And I felt dread as I drove back into town.  My therapist has already noticed my distaste for my current locale, and has suggested we talk about it.  And, generally speaking, this has been the unhappiest academic year I can remember, including that rough final year of dissertating.
   Now, mind you, Tinytown isn't exactly my utopic vision.  It's actually half – half!! – the size of Ghosttown, and has even less to recommend it in a general way than has Ghosttown.  But it's less isolated from the, uh, civilized world than Ghosttown, too: only about 45 minutes away from a really big metropolitan area with lots of stuff to do, lots of people around, and a nice straight shot down a highway from Tinytown.  (Ghosttown is about twice as far away as that from Major Regional City, and that is partly so because one needs to drive half an hour just to pick up the main highway that leads to MRC.)  Most faculty at CBU, as I understand, live in one of the suburban areas of the big city in order to take advantage of the city's offerings, although of course Tinytown is dirt cheap for real estate.

So the upshot of this is that I don't think that I'll be very happy, in the long term, if I remain at Ghosttown U. or go to another such large state university with relatively little investment in teaching or intellectual engagement.  Obviously, I can't just demand to go wherever I want, but it's worth remembering that some jobs are better for me than others, even as I spam applications each year.  I also would be happier, in the long term, in a living situation very unlike Ghosttown, but that is, to some degree, an epiphenomenon of where I work.  I went into academia partly because I wanted to do work that I loved and found satisfying; if all I cared about was living in a convenient location and making a lot of money, there are a lot of other things I could have done.  It's a scary and potentially embittering realization that being a professional academician could leave me in a sadder situation than if I had, lord help us all, gone to law school.  I need to make sure I don't become one of those sad, bitter characters one finds in some schools, who wish they had gone some other route.

Time to focus

I just got back from another emotionally draining visit to Hometown.  It's a damn good thing that they make drugs for these situations.  (To say nothing of red wine.)

Brief update on my cousin that might disappear, depending on how dishy I feel it is: zi is recovering well from the stroke, although the aphasia is apparently known to be the most stubbornly lingering effect.  Zi literally cannot say very many words right now, but has full (and sophisticated) comprehension of what zi hears.  Zi is also relearning how to read and write.  It's a little daunting to see what the stroke did to hir, but it's also a huge relief to see that the mind and psyche remain fundamentally the same.

Now that I'm back, I have a few more days to get ready for my campus visit.  Perhaps I should draft that job talk.  Ahem.  Hey, don't look at me like that — if you had to spend the last few days the way I did, you'd be behind on work, too.  I'll get to work on that tomorrow morning.  Right now, all I can do is fold laundry, drink wine, and attempt to beat my own high scores in Angry Birds.

Music as emotional gloss

Yeah, it's another one of those unbloggable times.

On the plus side, I just discovered this guy, Bhi Bhiman, tonight.  Why isn't this dude a big star already?

The little moments

There aren't many things in my life right now that make me happy, but there are some bits worth mentioning.  They are few and far between, but that makes them stand out to me even more.

• While walking around Ghosttown, I bumped into a student from the last semester.  She smiled when she saw me, and told me that she and a friend of hers – another one of my former students – both still talk about what a great class it was, "even though you were hard on us."  She thanked me again for a great class, and then went on her way.
• A student I've never seen before came up to me in the dining hall during lunch and said admiringly, "You're always so well dressed, man!"  I thanked him, and said, "I have to impress my students."  He nodded and said, "Keep it up, man, keep it up!"  I suspect he took me for an over-dressed student, and didn't expect me to explain my tweedy appearance that way.  On the other hand, maybe he just appreciates a sharply dressed man.  Either way, I'll take the compliment.
• I got a phone call from a long-standing friend and colleague, in which we discussed hir career moves and mine.  Zi has a tenure-track job, but is interviewing for another.  And I...well, you who read this blog regularly know my situation.  My friend has served on several hiring committees in recent years, and repeatedly assured me that I am a strong candidate for a job, especially if I get this manuscript finished and under contract.  That sounds kind of like obligatory pep-talking for a friend, I know, but it was still good to hear.  Certainly better to hear than my family making the same claim on the basis of zero understanding of my career.
• I'm practically knocking on friends' and colleagues' doors nowadays to do dinner.  I've concluded that my sense of isolation here in Ghosttown is, to some degree, my own self-perpetuating creation, and I need to work harder at socializing with people who could just go home and spend time with their families.  As much as most (maybe too much?) of the conversation can be made up of my bitching about all the ways in which my life currently sucks, it's good to be able to trade off the bitching with colleagues.  It's also nice to get out of the house so I don't have to look at my own walls for a while.  Also nice to trade tips about pedagogy, grading schemes, etc.  Having dinner and drinks with colleagues = tonic.

I've been feeling pretty small and insignificant lately.  Maybe I can turn that to some musical advantage, and give myself a nudge at the same time.

I am gonna stand my ground

I seem to have so few psychological resources left nowadays.  Every day now feels to me like I'm hanging by a thread.  And yet every day, I somehow make it from my bed for another day in the trenches, and make it back home again.  I don't even know how.  But I do.

I guess I just have to keep on doing this every day.  Maybe it will get easier.  Maybe not.  But I don't see any other choice. 

At least music can still inspire me a little.

Can't speak

The good feelings were short-lived.  I got yet another kind of awful news from Hometown that I wasn't expecting.  One of my cousins, a generation older than I, has been felled by a stroke.  The right side of hir body is weakened, although not paralyzed, and zi cannot speak.  No telling yet what the long-term prospects are for recovery.

It's so hard to grieve these things by myself, in a town I wish I weren't in on a good day, let alone today, with almost no one around to whom I would even mention these matters.  I want to curl up in a fetal position and have someone I love hold my head while I sob.  But there is no one like that here.  I won't even have a therapy appointment until next week.

Zi is pretty much the last one in the family I'd expect this to happen to.  Zi is zealous about watching hir diet, getting regular exercise, and living with almost Buddhist-like moderation.  We've been close since I was a baby.  We've always shared the same sense of humor, and traded terribly corny jokes with each other.

And now zi cannot speak.  And neither can I.

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.