Long live the internet

I will spare you the second-hand irritation of reading the travail that the Mac store put me through before I could actually get someone to examine my computer.  Suffice it for now to say that my computer's little software hiccup has been fixed, and my wi-fi access is restored.

Except, of course, that I don't have wi-fi in my apartment right now.  The router's kind of fucked.

After the day I had, I didn't have the strength left to go online (no phone support for me, since I'm exactly 95 days past date of purchase!) to see if Netgear's tech support could walk me through trying to re-establish my connection.  (The Mac tech support wiped my network preferences, so now I suspect my computer doesn't know how to log in to my home network.)  I'll deal with that tomorrow.  But, since I am only now figuring out that the underlying problem is that Netgear is kind of a piece of shit, I'm already planning a new router purchase, in case their tech support pisses me off. 

I'm mildly ashamed to admit that, despite my uneasiness about the Cult of the Mac and the resulting price differentials, I'm tempted to get an Airport Extreme.  A friend observed that I could just buy a used Linksys router or whatnot through Craigslist for much, much cheaper.  But what about the warranty?  What if something goes wrong?  Ah, he smiled, then you can just buy another cheap piece of crap on Craiglist!  I find this neither comforting nor, in the long run, reasonable.  I can cheap out on a lot of things -- you will never, ever hear the phrase "Prof. Koshary, the fashion plate" at a conference -- but increasingly I refuse to do so with the high-tech equipment that relates materially to my profession.  I need a smart, efficient computer to manipulate my multimedia research files and store a huge amount of big things.  I need an equally adept hard drive that can easily store and retrieve all that stuff upon request.  I need a relatively fast internet connection so that I can keep up with my email and a number of media web sites that bear upon my work, to say nothing of Skyping with friends and family far away.  (Dear Old University is a very long way away from where I grew up.)  And I need wireless capability both for travel and for home, since my apartment's absurd layout places the only cable jack near the front door, where it is physically impossible to arrange a work space.  My computer desk sits across the living room from the jack, and so wi-fi I must as a matter of course, if I want to be within arm's length (literally!) of any book, piece of paper, or whisky glass coffee mug while working at the computer.

Spiffy computer? Check.
Good hard drive? Check.
Fast internet?  Well, TimeWarner's all I can get in my apartment complex, but I suppose it will do.
And good wi-fi?  Uh, not so much, I'm afraid.

I sometimes wonder if this isn't the vanguard of middle-aged bourgeoisification, rationalized as professionalism.  I admit that sometimes I fantasize about buying the ultimate commuter bicycle or ideal cookware set, and browse stuff online and in stores that I couldn't possibly afford even if I had a real job.  But the difference is that I look at that stuff, then get a cheap frying pan or hoopty used bike that gets the job done.  Not so with my tech: these are fucking tools of the trade!  If my frying pan warps, I can get another; if the bike breaks down, I can get it fixed or, hell, just walk to campus.  But I know from scary personal experience that my computer and related devices matter a lot, and I've almost completely lost the will to sacrifice quality for price in the way that I can do for almost anything else.

Wow, see how neatly I just talked myself into getting the Airport?  Hmm, better e-chat with Netgear tech support before I rack up any more credit card charges...

Cut off from outside world!

Okay, I admit it's not as bad as all that yet, but few things strike terror in my heart like the thought of losing my internet access at home.  For reasons that are probably could possibly maybe kinda-sorta could be my fault, the wireless internet capacity on my beloved little MacBook Pro is not working.  I got tired of the wireless connection dropping randomly while I was in the middle of doing stuff that doesn't reload easily, so I unplugged the cable from the wireless router and plugged it directly into the computer.  I had to spend a few minutes reconfiguring stuff, although I can't say why -- shouldn't the computer automatically recognize its home network flowing through the cable? -- and then I was in business.  Hours later, when I finished up and wanted to restore the wireless connection so the computer could sit in a more convenient place than the middle of my living room on top of some portable file cabinets, I got nothing.  I mean, nothing: not only could I no longer connect to my router, but I couldn't even connect to any of the surrounding unsecured networks in the apartment complex. 

Hell's. Bells.

So now that I may have bollixed my computer's wireless capacity by a combination of reckless impatience and exhaustion with Mac's substandard wi-fi abilities, I'm doing penance: I have an 8:30AM appointment tomorrow at the Genius Bar.  I seriously hope they can figure out a solution, because it won't be much use to have a lightweight notebook computer with no internet capacity outside my living room.  I kicked out a postdoc application today under these less-than-optimal circumstances, but it's hardly practical to keep this up -- especially when I get through the latest round of application deadlines and can turn my attention to the diss again.

All of this is to say that I may be off-line for a bit, depending on what sort of mischief I have brought upon myself.  Meanwhile, I'm writing myself a note here: next time I can attend to the blog, I should write about the conversation I had tonight over wine and a disturbing amount of cheese with a friend and colleague.

Good book/boring book

I was having a fine time with my work until I finished reading a very fine ethnography and started on a second that has begun to bore me seriously.  I don't quite know what the problem is.  I find the topic interesting, the writing style readable, and the methodology...oh, that's it.  The methodology bores me shitless.  (Oh, snap!)  I appreciate ethnographies about music in which the writers participate in production as tag-along musicians, really I do, but enough!  There's more to musical flows than producing!  In the last book, the author did the same, but he struck a much smarter balance, in my opinion, between talking to musicians and talking to music fans.  (In fairness, I believe that he had access to his field site(s) for way longer than most ethnographers could ever manage; he had the cleverness to do his research half an hour's drive away from his university.)  This new one...sigh.  If only he weren't such an undercover groupie.

This impatience of mine might even turn into something for me to mention in my introductory chapter.  The fact of the matter is that it's easier to write about production than reception.  A lot of musicians in almost any genre anywhere are eager for publicity that might somehow increase their visibility, especially if that visibility is in the bottomless gold mine of the United States music-buying public.  This means that, once you have arranged proper contacts and introductions, musicians like to talk to ethnographers.  They like to have them come along to shows.  If the ethnographer is at least semi-competent in a local musical practice (knows how to sing in Tagalog, can play the rabab, whatever), then there's a good chance that he or she can even perform on stage with the musicians.  For the musicians, all of this represents a chance not only for greater potential market sales and concert revenues, but for enhanced prestige that may lead them to play more lucrative shows for richer folk, as well as an increase in social dignity that, in many societies, musicians chronically lack.  For the lucky ethnographer, it represents a trove of data that translates easily into good stories to tell and expansive chapters that demonstrate expertise in the technical details of musical performance.  It's also lots of fun, even if you're not a starfucking type.  (And frankly, anyone who takes music seriously is going to have a streak of that in them.)

Now compare that to reception.  Sometimes you meet music fans who can't shut up about how and why they love XYZ; other people get freaked out that you're questioning them about any aspect of their private lives, start to wonder if you're an intelligence agent for one agency or another, and won't come within ten feet of you.  Unless they take pleasure in talking about their ideas and opinions to people they don't necessarily know well, or have some other compelling reason to care about your research, they have no reason to talk to you at all.  You have to get them to warm up to you the old-fashioned ethnographic way: by hanging out and getting to know them.

Of course, part of the complexity of this is that neither I nor anyone else in my field cares only about the music in and of itself.  Culture is political; we want to know what else goes into cultural consumption besides the potentially idiosyncratic matter of "I like this sound; I dislike that sound."  And if one is careless, then one can end up simply discussing one's own tastes and perceptions; a few particularly solipsistic writers actually pass off this sort of thing as thoughtful ethnography, which nauseates me.  YOU are not THEM, I wish I could yell at these people.  In my experience, the cultural politics that the ethnographer subscribes to rarely maps well onto the cultural politics of the people he's talking to.  And, just as importantly, the masses don't always see musicians the way musicians see themselves; you can go badly wrong by hanging out with the band for a few months, then imposing your analysis on what they say and do.  Part of good ethnographic practice is learning to recognize and delineate where all these fields overlap, and where they diverge.  And that, in my experience, takes a lot of time, patience, and willingness to fail for a while before succeeding.

But it's much more facile, I know, to glom onto the band and treat production as the whole of the matter.  (Oh damn, did he just say that?  Yeah, I think he said that.)

Keeping my chin up

It's not easy, people.  Every day that goes by with no word from my department's administrative coordinator about an open TA position for me ages me a little.  It's hard not to feel abandoned by my department, even though I know, in their minds, there's probably no idea of the sort.  I'm sure they feel that they're trying their best.  But, um, their best is kind of pathetic.  But hey, last time they did this shit to me, I ended up getting something at the last minute, which I suppose kinda compensated for such frighteningly high stress levels that I actually became hypertensive and had to go on medication.  (Still on it.  Thanks for checking.)  By comparison, I'm way calmer this time around.

Not that I'm taking this line, necessarily, but a friend of mine in a very similar position -- literally, she was two places above me on that list of students to fund -- is of the opinion that this situation represents a colossal failure on the department's part, at the level of planning.  As she views it, they never should have instituted that triage system I discussed in my last post, and thus de-privileged some of the more productive students (I know, that's a pretty relative term) while giving a boost to some colleagues of ours who lean dangerously close to being deadweight.  Knowing this friend, I can write off some of her fury as the way she is; she fires up the jeremiad pretty fast whenever her personal circumstances are less than optimal.  You know you have an angry feminist scholar on your hands when she begins to grumble about other people's reproductive choices as a burden she shouldn't have to bear.  I mean, jeez, I get what she's saying, but as I've said before, I might have done exactly the same had I had administrative responsibility to sort this out.

But her larger anger is reserved for the staff and chair, who, as she claims, have always been kind of half-assed about doing their jobs thoroughly.  She's especially steamed at the staffer in charge of grad student placement in available TA positions, and here I have to cede my colleague the point.  The coordinator, although a very nice person, has always been incompetent about confidentiality matters: as far as I can tell, she's too lazy to hide her email recipient lists when she ought to, and therefore a few of us knew that we -- all of us, by name -- were in this particularly unsavory position at the bottom of the list.  So that clues me in that she's verifiably doing part of her job wrong.  (I know of other confidentiality breaches, too, because colleagues have dished to me in private.)  As my friend argues, part of the coordinator's formal duties ought to be searching for every available position in every department in the university, whenever our own department comes up short.  And lord knows, I can see her point, especially at the moment!  But I wonder if we could really hold the coordinator to this -- which I suppose in this context would mean going to the chair to lodge a complaint against the coordinator for slacking at her job by leaving us in the lurch.  Honestly, would this stick?  As much as I would like to believe that the coordinator is supposed to search high and low for TAships outside her own department as an advocate for her grad students, it doesn't quite sound reasonable to expect this.  Especially when all of Dear Old University's administrative employees recently had to swallow pay freezes and back-end cuts to their health care benefits packages.  My gut instinct is that asking a staffer who herself feels dicked over by DOU to exert herself strenuously to find money for people who are

1. not, in any technical sense, her hierarchical superiors on the job, 
2. not even potentially hierarchical superiors in the way that faculty are, 
3. in her eyes, coddled and privileged in comparison to the admittedly shit-upon administrative staff, and 
4. despite items (1), (2) and (3), often high-handed and peremptory with her as though (1) and (2) were true and (3) were false

is simply not going to pan out well.  But of course, my friend's point pertains even if the budgetary situation were otherwise.  And so I wonder: am I giving our coordinator too much credit?  Am I just being foolishly easy on her by thinking that it's normal for me to have to search out potential TAships on my own when she might, perhaps, you know, know what the fuck I do after I've been here since before she even took the job?  Does this sound normal to everyone else?  Is this just a function of attending a state university with fewer economic resources than an Ivy League school?  Or are we just saddled with incompetent, lazy staffers that would make any other department's collective jaw drop?

Bottom of the heap

I am now the only graduate student in my entire, huge department who has no funding yet for Spring 2010.  I feel the love, guys.

I certainly can't say this out loud around there, because the last thing I want to do is validate any system that fucks me over, but I might have made exactly the same decisions as the department did for funding its grad students.  As I hear it from the staff, who are more inclined to dish than the faculty leadership, when the funding crunch hit last year, they decided to deal with it by arranging a triage system, i.e. who is most likely to die of starvation if we don't fund them?  The practical effect of this idea was that the first people to get TAship offers were the people with families to support, and foreign nationals who are forbidden from taking any kind of ordinary job in the US and often need departmental support to validate their residency status.  (I believe that the family people came first, followed by the foreign nationals, but I'm not sure.)  Then they worked their way down the list, beginning with students still within the time period of their guaranteed funding years the department promised them upon admission, and ending with more advanced students whose guaranteed years had elapsed.  And, as it appears, mine is the very last name on the list that they composed.  Right at the bottom of the heap: Prof. Koshary.

Like I said, this system makes a certain amount of sense.  I get it.  Somehow, though, that doesn't really make me feel any better about being identified as the weakest link. 

I guess that, since DOU is a public university, I should be thrilled that things aren't worse.  (The low point of comparison is, of course, the University of California system, which is so fragile and unstable right now that we look rock-solid next to them.)  I was one of three students still unfunded when the department office closed for the holidays, and now that they've re-opened, the other two have jobs for the semester.  I even understand why I rated below those other two: one came back from research a semester after I did, so she needs at least a modicum of support to get her dissertation prepared to defend it in May, and the other guy is a foreign national.  He's also a dreadful pain in the ass to administration, since he's a wannabe revolutionary permanently on the look-out for causes to champion against the way the department and university are run, and they probably figured that he'd be more irritating than I to deal with, if he were the last one to hear about funding.  (They're probably right.)

I've put out calls to all the other departments at DOU for whom I would make a reasonable TA; only one of them hasn't already told me no.  Meanwhile, I have nothing else to cling to but the hope that, if I'm the only one left now, something will materialize in the next few weeks and come my way.  Wish me luck.

My feet are cold...

...And so I sit here in bed, with my laptop, surfing the internet, because I feel mentally exhausted from yesterday's whirlwind job application.  I invented what I like to think is a clever idea that could potentially qualify me for a postdoc for which I am otherwise completely and utterly unqualified.  The state of the job market is forcing me to think as creatively, and to stretch ideas as violently as possible, which means that I'm applying for positions that refer to areas of the world that I do not study, fields of inquiry in which I do not specialize, and once in a while even entire professional disciplines with which I am unacquainted.  I fully acknowledge that this is all ridiculous, and that I probably deserve to be rejected from all the reaches, but Christ on a cracker, what else am I supposed to do?  The sheer odds of landing any particular job means that I need to apply (effectively) to as many as I can cram in.  Sooner or later, one is bound to run out of job opportunities within one's usual disciplinary parameters, and one has to start trespassing onto other people's turf.

Alas, I can't sit here in bed all day.  My feet are only mildly warmed under the covers, and it's impossible to reach the kitchen -- let alone go out for a coffee -- from here.  And I'm going to need both food and coffee because I have another postdoc app and another job app to crank out today.  (Ah, working against rapidly approaching deadlines!)  At least both of those actually make sense for my areas of expertise, so I won't have to repeat yesterday's stunt of brainstorming "Hmm, how could I possibly mount a reasonable argument for them to hire me?"

Welcome to the new year

I feel like New Year's Eve always inspires a false sense of negativity toward the ending calendar year in me.  I always manage to focus on major grievances I had with one thing or another, and look forward to a year in which none of that will happen.  And later on, after the champagne bottles have been recycled and my head clears, I realize that the past year was rarely as bad as this odd little mandatory holiday made me feel momentarily.

Come to think of it, in professional terms, at least, 2009 was a pretty good year for me.  It couldn't top 2006, when I had a bunch of grants come in, but that's a hard act to top.  So I can't bring myself to spit on the corpse of 2009 as 2010 begins.  I just hope that my professional life continues apace this year.

In terms of my family and dating life, 2009 definitely could have used some improvement.  But, since this is a career-related blog, I'm not going to burden you (or re-depress myself) by dwelling on such matters.  And even in those areas, things have been worse.  Wow, honestly, the more I think about it, the more 2009 seems to have been a good year for me, at least on the personal level.

Now I find myself hoping merely that 2010 doesn't turn out to suck.  (And if it turns out to be okay, then I'll enjoy the pessimist's pleasant surprise.)  To get psyched up for the new year, here are the perennially apropos thoughts of Loudon Wainwright III:

This Year
Another year has gone, here comes a new one
What's gonna happen this year
We're gonna make it, not gonna take it
Make no mistake-its this year

Last year was a fiasco, a real disaster, so full of sorrow
This year will be a great year, I just can't wait, dear, until tomorrow

Forget the old pain, sing a new refrain
Uncork the champagne this year
No, it's not too late, we've got a clean slate
The future's our fate this year

 It's after midnight and I'm just a bit tight
Hey, but I'll be all right this year
The year is brand-new, the old one's all through
It's time to kiss you this year