pronoia

Still Not Cool

It's the story of my life: late to the party again. I spent the afternoon surfing around to find post-academic blogs, post-academic websites, post-academic anythings so I might get to read along, get some inadvertent advice, not feel so alone. And so far as I can tell, the conversation has mostly up and disappeared after Invisible Adjunct left. I've got Rana, and Dorothea, and Household Opera, and WolfAngel. There has to be more.

Was there some cool-kid memo where everyone left academia while I was still desperately trying to figure out how to have a job and a mortgage and now it's just passe?

Anyone want to point me in the right direction?

Affirmation

I just talked to my closest colleague, the one hired with me. She's between campus visits, hanging out at the airport and calling me to commiserate on our stupid jobs. She says it's the little things that are making her sit up and take notice: not micromanaging her downtime, a kind of casual professionalism that encourages collegiality, an office dedicated for her use when she's got space between scheduled events (complete with chocolate).

Of course, a GTA situation went supernova while she's been gone, so she's been fielding endless emails from the awful program director, who is not happy to find out she's got interviews. The director even called my colleague's partner and left a message demanding he call her back, which he outright deleted. He said he's now heard the note of frantic egotism we've been telling him about, and it's scary.

All of this is only affirming the decisions both of us are making.

I woke up this morning thinking about what it will be like when my colleague is gone, preplanning the retorts I'll make to the inevitable charges of irresponsibility and untenurability and bad decision-making our supervisor will lodge against her when she's gone. It will be worth my while to defend her, to make it clear that the supervisor is part of the problem. It will likely make my last year hell, but if my colleague leaves it will be that way anyway.

She also affirmed my decision not to go to 4C's this year. I'd been hemming and hawing and not buying my plane ticket and mooching off of other people's hotel rooms and not registering and generally not getting off my ass. I know I'm not a fan of events right now, but I was really not a fan of this one. All I'd really get out of it was time spent with grad school friends, and in turn I'd spend way more money than I'd likely be reimbursed for. I can do both much closer to home, without having to dress up or leave Ms. P behind. And it's not like I need it for career advancement. But if she and the best friend both tell me that's a good move, then it's a good move and I'm staying home.

It's good to have all of this affirmed, but I'm in something of a cranky mood today, despite yesterday's happy puttering. I keep starting activities and abandoning them, unable to summon the energy to think about them. So I think I'll bead and do the breath-counting exercise my 2nd degree mentor recommended to help engage the health and job stuff spiritually. If nothing else, sitting on the cushion will be good for me.

Adding Insult to Injury

Several months ago, now, I went to a GI surgeon for a colonoscopy consult. We had a terrible relationship, he didn't take seriously my own experience of illness and my body, and the staff was unhelpful.

Not long after that, I get a bill from them for $95. I'd paid my copay, of course, but my insurance company claimed my visit wasn't covered. I called the insurance company, who refused to tell me what the doctor's office claimed when they submitted it. I called the doctor's office, and they tell me the claim was for morbid obesity.

They'd mixed up my claim with the claim of someone there for gastric bypass surgery.

They check it against my charts, and oh goodness, they'd mixed things up! They promised to resubmit the claim, and when I got a subsequent bill from them and called to check, they said the resubmitted claim was still at the insurance company.

Today I open my mail to find a report from the insurance company saying they'd denied the claim because it was a repeated claim, that they'd already judged that one. I have no idea whether a) the insurance company didn't read the materials properly or b) the doctor's office resubmitted the same damn mistake.

Looks like I'm going to be on hold a lot on Monday.

I'm sure there was something I could have done...

this morning, work-wise, but I decided it was better to run some errands before Ms. P takes the car away for the weekend. She's going to visit her best friend, and while he and I adore each other, they need some girlfriend time and I need some time alone in the house to putter. So I bought TurboTax and Quicken, so I can do taxes this weekend and try to set up a functional accounting system. (I LOVE doing taxes. I'm such a geek.) I bought shampoo and conditioner. I vaccuumed the downstairs. I considered shaving all of the animals to prevent the kind of fur build-up we've got going on. I snuggled youngest cat and yelled at the dogs for chewing a box of beads. Soon I'm meeting a colleague for lunch, then meeting a student to talk about her MA thesis, and then I'll do a quick grocery shop and then I'll pick up Ms. P from work and then, my friends, I will settle into a really lovely weekend.

It couldn't get here fast enough.

Keeping Track

It's really easy right now for me to turn my dissatisfaction with my job against myself, to get a little weepy and feel like if I had been another kind of person, this would have been okay. While it's true that the horrors of this job don't mean that it would have made everyone leave the profession, I also need to remember the ways in which this particular deck was stacked against me from the beginning.

Context:

The year I was hired, my department hired four jobs: two in writing, one in British literature, and one in literary computing. My department has hired every year since I've been here, usually for two positions. (We're still low on faculty from an ill-advised retirement push 15 years ago.) Until that point, we had no writing program per se, although we had the usual complement of writing classes staffed by people who have never been trained in composition.

Strikes:

• While candidates for the the lit job and the humanities computing job were both asked to give job talks on their research (as every other candidate has done), candidates for the writing jobs were asked to give talks on the kinds of writing programs they would design.
• Candidates for the lit job and the humanities computing job were given receptions to meet the faculty and the graduate students, as is always done. Candidates for the writing jobs weren't.
• Candidates for the lit job and the humanities computing job gave talks at the student union, in rooms with proper chairs and atmosphere. Candidates for the writing jobs gave talks in dank annex rooms off the gym that were often invaded by students in AFROTC.
• The scholar hired to the literary computing job receives two course releases for the work he does (and no one is exactly sure what that is or why it matters to the department). Those of us hired into the writing programs get one course release each to manage two programs (me) and 160 sections of undergraduate writing a semester (her).
• We are the only untenured people running programs.
• The massive amounts of adminstrative work we do aren't counted as service, because we're granted release time. The release time works out to 5 hours/wk.
• Our attempts to fit our scholarly lives (i.e., articles instead of books, administration) into the standard departmental cubbyholes while acknowledging their specificities have been routinely squashed and ignored.
• Our attempts to address our unusual situation with regards to tenure (i.e., asking for a mid-track review so we could figure things out ahead of tenure) have been met with "just trust us."

Reality:

Although much of academia exploits people with lovely myths about the importance of education and how we should all get paid poorly for all of that ability to be flexible with our days (and therefore justify working 65 or 80 hour weeks), it's also true that from the beginning, we were marginalized and hung out to dry.

I'm so glad my colleague is at this very moment at a campus interview far, far away.

Escape Artist

We lost our cat last week. It was dreadfully cold, and several times a day we'd stand outside calling his name. Usually if he doesn't hear us one time, he hears us the next and comes running, tail up, paws frantic, to come inside where it's warm and cozy. For three days we called, even at 6am when the neighbors most certainly swore at us from their pillows, even at 11pm. Then we finally get a phone call from our next-door neighbor, an elderly artist who had feared for him in the cold and let him inside. She hadn't seen our car to let him out again.

Now, I appreciate her concern. It was misplaced with eldest cat, who once stored a half-eaten squirrel in a snowbank and tried to bring it along when Ms. P moved. But her concern for cats is admirable.

However. Eldest cat doesn't so much like having to live with dogs, although they've got a dutiful peace going on. He's an opportunist, and he got to live for three days with an old lady with other old cats in a quiet house without dogs. So when I thanked the neighbor profusely and asked her not to let him in anymore, she put him out the back door. I called him. I shook the Pounce treats. I made little cat noises. Nothing. He just sat on her back porch and cried to be let back in. I had to climb railless wooden stairs covered with snow to scoop him up (all 17 pounds of him) and carry him home again.

He wasn't impressed. We decided to keep him inside for a while, to reset him, so to speak. Ms. P wanted to give him a treat, so she gave him mahimahi. He got tuna. He slept on my pillow every night. He repeatedly pawed at the door and meowed to go out, but we ignored him. Our goal was two weeks.

Well, first thing this morning, while I'm switching the dogs on their lead, he sneaks out. Ms. P assures me he'll come home, that he knows where his home is, that he got mahimahi for fuck's sake! And I know he will. He came home when I first let him out after having to move in with a dog. So long as the neighbor doesn't let him in again (and I doubt she will), he'll come home. But oh, it makes me nervous.

Displaced Anger

I dislike the person I am becoming in this job.

I am angry all of the time. I even need to be angry all of the time to combat the indignities of this job: the ever-increasing workload, our inability to serve the actual needs of our actual students, the dissociation of the administration from what the rest of us do all day, the pervasive cynicism about student intelligence and drive, the lack of parking, unhealthy physical working conditions (including ice-covered stairs, today), the exploitation of hanging our promotions on work we aren't paid to do.

I watch myself participate in these things, watch myself bond with colleagues over the strange things students don't know. (Although I will always hold on, with fascinated bemusement, to the student who, in the middle of a conversation about early Christian sects, asked if that's where Protestants came from.) I watch myself shrug and let go of the fact that there are probably 60 students who can't graduate this year as planned because they were unable to get courses to fill their writing requirement, because departments won't offer their own and we don't have the staff to serve everyone. I watch this university struggle to find a way to survive in legislative budget cuts and simultaneously spend money on athletics and cut library budgets. I watch my supervisor regularly belittle us and undermine our decisions and load us with more and more jobs while claiming she's "protecting" us. I watch the politics of evaluation committee meetings, the fighting and backstabbing over piddly bits of merit money that may or may not ever appear again.

I get angry again. Over and over and over I get angry again because the only other option I see is to accept it, accept this whole situation, mine and everyone else's, and let it be okay. My friend and favorite colleague is on the job market this year and has three campus visits because she sees the same problems I do, she's just banking that they're better someplace else. I think this institution is closer to the edge, that the problems are that much clearer here, but I don't think we're unique.

I don't like being angry. I don't like approaching every day antagonistically. I don't want to grow up into one of the perpetually-underpaid, cynical, self-sacrificing bitter women who treat everyone badly because they themselves choose to put up with shit.

Yesterday I was reading old posts of Rana's from her own leaving, reading her stories of figuring out what to do next. Her struggles to figure out how to think about work and life outside of academia sound so familiar right now; I know what I want and have very little concrete idea how to go about getting it. (If anyone has any great--or even mediocre--insights in how to get into freelance writing and editing, drop me a line.) How have I ended up in high school again?

I will leave because I don't want to be angry for the rest of my life, because I want a job that I experience as contributing to the kind of world I want to live in, which, despite all of the facile and knee-jerk arguments about the importance of education to the contrary, I don't now have.

I keep thinking there are more things to say. I am angry. I am leaving. That is all.

Alone

There are lots of things that keep our relationship afloat: Pigtails. A shared affinity for fantasy literature. Spiritual communion. Dog-love. Making up silly songs. Color. Love of ritual. Naked bed time. Not to mention things like trust and shared goals and life plans and all of that. But one of the really important ones, one of the non-negotiable ones, is Time Alone.

If we don't have Time Alone, we each get a little nutty. And lately, Ms. P hasn't been having very much Time Alone, but she has been having lots and lots of demands on her time and energy. The result was that she felt exhausted and despairing, and I felt like she wasn't really around. Of course, as we began talking about this, it felt to her like I needed her around more. While I'd love to have her around more, it's really that I can't abide those horrible in-between times when we're physically together but emotionally isolated, which is entirely different from having Alone next to one another. I need her to go off and have Time Alone so when we're together I feel like we're together.

She's having a hard time feeling justified in such things right now, so I sent her off upstairs with her book to snuggle into bed and perhaps nap. I tried to bead, but the cats are feeling demanding and I'm not very focused, so I'm going to wander around the web for a while and clean the kitchen and maybe sweep the floors and keep doing laundry. It doesn't have to be luxurious. It just has to be Time Alone.

Disappointments

We were promised a blinding snowstorm, a veritable blizzard of frozen water that led us to cancel weekend plans and hole up with books and blankets and beading projects. Because I am more inclined toward home as it is, and because Ms. P was more attached to our weekend plans, I am much more content with what we've gotten: a whole bunch of rain and time to hang out and do nothing much productive. I think she's enjoyed her day with her book; she just worries someone will be mad that we cancelled plans for weather that did not materialize.

But I cleaned out the right side of the garage from the Worst Garage Sale Ever, so even if nothing else productive happens, the car once again has its very own roof. That counts, right?

My own current disappointment has much more to do with my health than with any weather we're getting. My ultrasound on Tuesday was more than a little painful, so I went off to choir teary and feeling disengaged from the world (so far, 3 Tuesdays this year, 3 emotionally fraught Tuesdays; I can live without this pattern, okay world?). My doctor called on Wednesday to talk though results. Apparently, I have a cyst on my right ovary measuring 5.3cm, and one on my left ovary measuring 1.8cm. At work I have only inch measuring tools, so it sounded small and almost negligible, but measure it yourself: I have a cyst the size of a fucking lime on my right ovary. It's not like the abdomen has extra rental space; it's probably pushing against all kinds of things and causing all of those other fun symptoms I have.

I do love my doctor, however. She said there's only two situations anyone has to have surgery, and they're cancer or bleeding to death. She wants to continue hormone therapy to see if we can cut down on any of the symptoms I'm having, even though it won't minimize the cysts at all, because the symptoms are our main concern right now. Hormones vs. the knife. I'll pop pills for a while.

No one is talking about the fact that there is very little chance I'll ever be able to get pregnant with these enormous globs of endometrial tissue attached to my ovaries.

So I'm quiet and moody and apt to get upset that I'm incapable of cooking sausage the right way (i.e., done) instead of just being upset that something is actually wrong with me, that I'm not making it up, that it's not vague and unexplained anymore.

Naptime Thoughts

Somewhere between the beginning of the conversation with Ms. P and the visiting V about what we all want and expect and when I gently extracted myself so they could each nap, it started to snow. Apart from the occasional dogbark because youngest dog can't decide if she wants to be in or out, it's the kind of quiet that only comes in snow. The flakes are small, the prediction equally so, but the dusk fell while the branches got a nice lining, and I got a few hours to think about my own life.

I want that life I keep seeing: my days bounded by the routine of sleeping and eating and letting the dogs out while I work away in my sunlit office, Ms. P down the road at the retreat center we run with friends. I want to have a back porch and no near neighbors and quiet and peace and space.

In the middle of all of this, my father called to chat while he walked the dog, and he asked how my editing was going and said that I'd had a big dream that I'd achieved (the doctorate) and now I needed a new one to work on and although it would take time it was great to do something I loved. Inadvertantly, he punctured one big fear I have: what will people think if I quit? My father, at least, will think I'm trying out something new with a much greater potential for a living wage. It's nice to know.

The dreamers stir.