Chronically underslept but highly recommended

The title says it all.  I've been operating on less sleep than I (apparently) need all week, even though I haven't been burning midnight oil.  The last two weeks, really, have been draining for me.  The benefit is that I feel like I've been productive, especially in regard to this year's job hunt.  I recently completed a soup-to-nuts revamp of all of my key job application materials, a process that took something like six weeks in total.  Now that my portfolio is thoroughly refurbished – and ooh, look, my writing sample is now a press-formatted book chapter! – I can throw myself into the irritating but necessary task of tailoring job letters for the relatively small crop of jobs so far that I could fit.

In combination with that, I successfully recruited three shiny new referees to write letters for me: one of my colleagues at CBU and two colleagues in my field who teach at universities I've never attended or worked at.  I feel an odd sense of satisfaction when I look at my list of references and see no mention of Dear Old University.  It makes me feel a little more like an academic grown-up to see that three people with no skin in the game are willing to write on my behalf, and even more so that two of them are highly respected pseudologists of Damn Lies in Research Country who teach at fancy-ass R1 institutions.  (Of course, I still have two referees from DOU up my sleeve as well, just in case some jumped-up school demands four or five references.) 

Of course, when you're working that hard on something, something else has to give a little.  I've been so discombobulated about my schedule this past week that I somehow convinced myself at frequent intervals that it was a day later than it really was.  My cooking schedule that allows me to make myself dinner and bring the leftovers for lunch the next day got totally fucked up, and I had to subsist on pistachios and some old doughnuts for lunch on Thursday.  Worse, I forgot to set my alarm for Wednesday morning, and it's only by sheer luck that I woke up soon enough that I could get myself to work mere minutes before I had to walk into class.  And on Thursday, because of the aforementioned crappy lunch, I compensated by drinking too much coffee: I was pretty tweaked out during my afternoon class, and after I came back to my office from that, a colleague remarked that I looked strangely wide-eyed.  Fortunately, zi knows me well, rather than suspect that I had a drug habit.

The cherry on top was that, much as Academic Cog has been dealing with lately, I cannot keep straight what the hell I teach from one day to the next in my double helping of Intro to Pseudology.  These different time banks are hell on wheels to manage, although I admit that it's a pretty speedy education in pedagogy: since one class runs half an hour longer than the other, I not only have to teach different materials at times but must also cook up different ways of engaging the material.  My brilliant achievement in fucking up my shit this week was – hi, Academic Cog!! – forgetting to check my syllabus and assuming I knew what I had said.  Consequently, we spent ninety minutes discussing a piece that I meant to discuss for perhaps thirty, because I forgot that I was supposed to show a film in class. 

The truly amazing part of this to me is that not a single one of my students even mentioned this.  Not in class, not in an email, nothing.  I'm relieved about that, too, because I would have looked like a goddamn fool in front of them.  I came perilously close, even so: when I showed the film (on schedule) to my other class, the stupid worn-out VHS tape (!) died on me, and I had to discard everything I was going to ask them about it on the test.  The silver lining to this problem was that I then got to email the first class and explain that I opted (ha!) to concentrate on our reading last time, but now the film that I "planned" to show them next week was ruined, and we would have to move on to other topics.

And yes, before you say it: I am painfully aware that the moral of this story is, "Read the fucking syllabus, Professor!"

Well, fist me in the a** and call me Foucault

I got an email today from one of my soon-to-be-colleagues at Cute-as-a-Button University, asking to confirm my teaching assignments.  I looked over it, and it all seemed good.  They even list old syllabi of the intro course written by other professors, which come in very handy for gauging what people expect, and what sorts of texts and assignments are favored.  In the process of reviewing these syllabi, I noticed and then slooowwly realized that I was being assigned not to teach my usual intro – call it Introduction to Pseudology – but the other intro course for the department.  I will have to teach one section each semester of Introduction to Libel and Slander.  This is a much more, well, sciencey kind of pseudology, one that is very far distant from the broad segment of the discipline that I usually think of as the whole.  And, uh, I'm not well schooled in it. 

Last time I took a course in Libel was 1997.  It was an undergrad course.  The intro course, in fact.

Last time I took a course in Slander was, oh, MOTHERFUCKING NEVER!!  FUCK ME WITH A CHAINSAW!!!!!!

I'm trained in Pseudology, for heaven's sake!  You know, the non-sciencey pseudology!  This is one of those situations in which one's CV can unintentionally raise a bid that one meant to stand pat on.  Technically, I have taught several semesters of Intro to Libel in grad school, but really, I was a TA in an excessively computerized course.  I was more of a computer lab monitor than a regular TA.  And sure, I had to read the textbook, but I really had to read it, not just review and skim.  And probably half the information that I learned (and forgot) has been made obsolete by later findings anyway.

The closest I've ever gotten to Slander is in having some good friends and drinking buddies in grad school who are trained Slanderers.  Couldn't tell you too much about their work, but I can state on good authority that they can hold their liquor.  Somehow, this seems inappropriate knowledge to impart to freshmen. 

And, because I a) put all that on my CV, b) I blithely agreed in my campus visit to teach this course because I'm a fucking idiot, and misunderstood the course as broad enough in scope to use an adjusted form of my current intro syllabus, and c) I've accepted the job and have no intention of backing out of that, I've gotta string together something.  My entire current intro syllabus, which I have crafted and smithed over the course of three years, is completely useless for this purpose.  Virtually all of my theory knowledge, never mind my methodological training, is irrelevant to this class.

I think I have a lot of reading to do this summer.

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.

Tornado?

I am sitting anxiously at my desk right now, during the first serious tornado watch of my life.  We had these things occasionally in DOU-Town, but they were kind of a joke: the landscape, as I was told, did not easily permit such things to form, and tornadoes were exceedingly rare. 

Apparently, that is not quite the case here in Ghosttown. 

I have vast experience in comporting myself appropriately in, say, heavy rainstorms, snowstorms, ice storms, sandstorms, hurricanes, cold snaps, and heat waves.  Been there, done all that.  I do not fear them very much.  (Even though ice storms are a godawful pain in the ass to cope with afterward.)  But I'm afraid of tornadoes.  *whimper*

We're only half an hour into the "peak severe timing" for this tornado watch, and the weather service, which I am now checking obsessively online while I am still blessed to have internet access, says there are already tornado warning sirens going off in half a dozen towns and cities not so very far away from Ghosttown.  There have been periods of intense rainfall tonight, and some high winds.  I've been through all of that many times before, and wouldn't really think much of it if I didn't know the larger forecast.  The peak severe timing – what does that mean, anyway, 'be even more afraid right now'? – isn't due to end for another four and a half hours.  Seriously, until 3AM!  How the fuck am I supposed to get a decent night's rest when I may have to somehow rouse myself to stand in my bathroom as Dorothy's express commuter service rips my house off its foundation?

Needless to say, this is not how I hoped to unwind on the evening before my first day of classes.  It's entirely possible that both professor and students will be frazzled and underslept tomorrow in my classrooms. 

I guess I'll have a shot of whiskey to calm my nerves, and then prepare for bed, where I will sleep with my iPhone by my ear, in case Ghosttown U.'s alert system sends out a "take shelter immediately" warning.

*whimper*

Can't stop won't stop

Know where I'm going next week?  Research City.  Know why I'm going?  Because I'm a motherfucking pseudologist, that's why.  And, to be fair, because I caught a lucky break with the workability of my postdoc's administrative office.  That the admins are on the scene again and have our back for getting back to our research helps a lot.

Now that I've bought my ticket and can count down the days, I can stop feeling so much like a displaced person here in Evacuation City, and enjoy this final week as more of a proper vacation.  I'm going on a sightseeing trip tomorrow, because why the hell not?  Why not go see a few things that I don't ordinarily get to see?

I'm just a tiny bit anxious about the political situation in Research Country, which isn't anywhere near as bad as it was when I left, but could certainly be better/quieter/stabler/more democratic/etc.  But of course, this is partly why I'm going back: a lot of pseudologists would give their right arms for the chance to spend some months chronicling a period of revolutionary change up close.  I'm actually really lucky, to put it cynically, that I can get paid to do this and acquire a huge amount of data that could only be gathered at this historical moment.  This excitement balances out the fear.  I'm not a front-line guy; I don't have the temperament of a war correspondent, as I seem to recall someone else saying recently.  But between the intense desire (to say nothing of financial necessity) to complete my fellowship, my sense of obligation to my RCian friends who have been busting their asses to enact real change, and perhaps even a dash of egotistical pleasure that I will be doing for months what other pseudologists are paying through the nose to do for a week, I feel like it's time for me to step up and do it.  (Assuming, of course, that all hell doesn't break loose, a la a certain unfortunate country close to RC.) 

This also brings up a hitherto unknown issue for me in my research: my political commitments and my sympathies with one group of RCians over another.  (Anyone who has read the last month's worth of blog posts here already has a fair idea of where those sympathies lie.)  Until this year, none of that mattered at all; everyone could – and did – paint themselves as oppressed by the state in one way or another, and everyone saw me as a welcome opportunity to air complaints that they couldn't just blurt out loud in public.  Now push has come to shove, and some people have belied their early complaints by, um, taking the wrong side of history. 

Never mind what this implies about my personal relationships with some of these people; that can always get worked out somehow or other.  What comes to mind is that, depending on how certain events proceed, I may – in a very hypothetical and not-very-likely, don't-think-I'm-beating-my-breast-about-this way – find myself annoying some of the powers that be, owing to things that I have publicly said in easily traceable formats.  It would absolutely suck to blow this opportunity by being kicked out of RC by some irate functionary.  But, since I feel like the time has passed for staying officially neutral about all this, I don't see any way around the public statements.  All I can say is that I have no official voice as a foreign national, so it's not strictly my business, but I have personal loyalties to my friends who have taken great risks for their country in a way to which I, as an American, respond deeply. 

In any case, I rather doubt that I would be ejected for what amounts to posting a bunch of links and comments on Facebook.  But, since we all know now that Facebook played a more than casual role in these proceedings, it is technically possible that someone is monitoring such things, and may call me to account.  But seriously, even discussing this feels self-aggrandizing to me: I regret that I have but one Facebook account to give for Research Country!  I'm not some hipster douchebag trying to pick up chicks in a coffeehouse by broadcasting my personal sacrifices for a political cause; I'm a very junior academic researcher trying to build a career.  The point is that I am aware that my political statements now carry more weight than they used to; it's not just a theoretical exercise to run while killing time at a café.  I have a lot less to lose, and perhaps even something more to gain, from speaking my mind than have my colleagues who work full-time in RC, which is itself a curious state of affairs.  For pseudologists, who often* get very comfortable posing (unconvincingly, as a rule) as radical activists while maintaining the most conventional and conformist of professional and personal lives, it's actually kind of freaky to confront the possibility that their academic privileges and more could be rescinded for the most modest levels of political engagement.  And, maybe, a needed splash of cold water.

*Discounting, of course, the pseudologists who knowingly put themselves in serious harm's way out of their professional commitments.  People get killed doing this job sometimes.

Up and down

I have high blood pressure, damn it.  I don't know how much I can tolerate of the absurdly hot and cold news that I get from Research Country, day by day, hour by hour.  I mean, none of us can!  Everyone posting on Facebook, sending tweets, or – as in the case of one or two of my associates – chiming in as experts on news programs is completely worn out and stunned and angry.  I mean, ANGRY.  It's not good for our health.  But we have trouble staying calm when the figures we see on TV (or, in my case, on my laptop) seem to be sadistically and incomprehensibly playing with the emotions of everyone who cares about this situation.  I have the distinct feeling that all of this will get worse before it gets better.

I want to chant and shout and march.  But, as Ajnabieh has remarked, my American body is perhaps not really appropriate to this context, and possibly even inimical to the things I believe in.  And besides, I'm sitting here in a Starbucks in Evacuation City, so I can keep up wifi access and overpay for lunch.  I'd just look like an unmedicated, over-caffeinated crazy here.

I maintain the hope and cautiously optimistic conviction that this will end well in the long term, but this short term is scaring the pants off of all of us.  I really have no idea how things will look in another twelve hours from now.  All of which, if I must look for a silver lining, at least seems to vindicate my decision to evacuate.  (I heard on the news five minutes ago that the road to the airport from which I flew a week ago has now been blocked altogether.  Wheee!)  What a story it will all make, though.

Hopeful news, despite it all

Let's just say that I am not wholly pleased by recent steps taken in Research Country with what appears to be the blessing of the United States.  Srsly, doodz?  Y u no bring teh democracy frealz?  Sigh.  At least my RC-ian friends seem cautiously optimistic.  Things still seem to change day by day and hour by hour, so there's no guessing what will come of the latest moves.

I do, however, feel real hope that RC-ians have finally and permanently lost their sense of political hopelessness, that nothing they do or think or say can ever matter in the political sphere.  All it took was uniting, and focusing on a goal, and not allowing their other disagreements and divisions to overwhelm their unity.  They are still a little stunned, I think, to comprehend their own political power.  Seeing the YouTube videos of them working together and taking joy in the fact that they can do it so well is enough to make me sniffle.  And reading the thoughts they post, often from the sites of the protests and while attempting to avoid being murdered by state security, makes me just break down sobbing.

In much more solipsistic and less dramatic good news, I've been invited to another short-list interview, and this one is actually on campus!  Going to be a tricky business working that out, but they're paying for the ticket, so bring it on!  I should explain here that I'm not back in the US; I'm currently staying in Evacuation Country, which is in the same (very general) region as RC.  It's not the most convenient for international flight patterns, although it was (and is!) hella convenient as a safe haven.  Gotta do a little flight searching to find a route that won't leave me exhausted right when I have to be on point for the campus interview.