Frogs and Ravens

Year of Unorganizing

Today's Facebook status:

I have finally decided what my theme for this year (or life stage) is: The Year of Unorganizing.

That is, I'm working towards becoming more productive and achieving more of my goals, but without freaking out about the process by which I accomplish them, or whether I am Doing It Right. If that means my projects get done at 4am instead of 9pm, and I'm still getting enough sleep, for example, who cares?

So far, what I've been finding is that when I take that pressure off to Be Responsible or to Do Things The Right Way, I actually get more done, and with less stress. And when I make changes, it's because I want to do something differently, and not because the way I'm doing things now is wrong. And I only need to use systems that work for me, easily and naturally (Yay, Google Calendar Tasks, yay, UFYH), instead of trying to conform to ones that don't.

And I'm also not worrying if I can keep this up, because not worrying about things like that is sort of the point.

Professorial Scapegoats, Or Why Little Jimmy Can't Write a Cover Letter

Having gotten overly involved in a debate at Ask A Manager regarding colleges' and professors' "failure" to prepare students for the corporate world, I'm posting my thoughts here, so I can stop spamming the comment thread there. (It's not just AAM where I've seen these arguments, by the way.  It's just that they happened to hit with particular force while I was reading that post and those comments.)

The gist: recent graduates are poorly equipped to enter today's job market and/or are lacking in specific job-related skills.  The claim: professors are to blame for not teaching them the skills they need to succeed and/or teaching them things that are harmful.  My response is below.

Personal Archaeology

So, we've moved.  And the new place is significantly smaller than the previous ones, and it's time to start weeding out the detritus.  My current project is going through old file boxes, tossing junk and preparing other things for scanning and shredding.  I just got through a box from 2002, and it was an odd experience.  In 2002, I still had student loan payments, I was getting a good monthly paycheck at an academic job I loved, I was a member of all kinds of organizations (mostly music and outdoors), I was traveling regularly (though primarily for job searching purposes), and I had a ton of catalogs from companies that had yet to go on the web.  Strange how my life has changed since.

Update in a Time of Uncertainty

Long time no post, I know.  (I've decided that one of my Health Month tasks is to write a blog post each week, so hopefully that will change.)

Life's been busy in a low-key way, meaning that most of the busy-ness has been of short duration and of only minor significance.  Now, however, it's teetering on the edge of a lot of changes, and I'm feeling quietly anxious about it.  (I'd be running around with my arms waving in the air from nervousness, if I wasn't coping through determined denial.)

Two things are clear: D has an upcoming part-time job in Midwestern City (not this one) with unclear long-term prospects.  And we will not be staying here past October. Beyond that, little is clear.

Recession Realities

In comments, Shaker CassieC writes:I was wondering if there could be a thread for shakers to share what this recession/depression/catastrophe is doing to them and their friends and loved ones. ... I've just been reading people's accounts here and there, on various threads, and I know how strong the pressure is not to tell these stories of personal difficulties in the US, because of our society's f-ed up code of personal success/failure, which makes it so difficult for the personal to be seen as a collective, legitimate phenomenon. Here it is.

via shakespearessister.blogspot.com

D and I are not in as desperate straits as some of the folks posting here, but we are both currently unemployed, with no work visible on the horizon. To say that we're worried is an understatement.  My own contribution to the thread is copied here below the fold.

Picking at Scabs

Staying Alive is a blog that sets out to offer academics a vision of a life that's larger than the confines of academia.  It is also a blog that, after looking through its archives, is clearly not one I should add to my blogroll.

Basically, it's a somewhat more thoughtful version of Chronicleland, in which success is possible if you only try hard enough and think creatively enough.  Now, I get that for some people, hopeful stories and positive role models are motivating.  Telling people that the world won't end for them if they don't end up with a tenure-track job isn't a bad thing. 

But telling people that failure is a gift that teaches one to embrace risk, that one can just shake off the emotional devastation of career catastrophe, and that enriching alternatives are there for the taking if one makes a focused enough effort?

All that is bullshit.  Or, at least, the effort to turn it into one-size-fits-all advice is bullshit.

Obssession

Ferreting around in the depths of the internet, tranced in a researcher's fugue, I gradually realize:  I need to pee.

The Month Ends

It is grey and rainy outside, and that seems to match my mood at the end of this month.  Thanksgiving is not really a great holiday for me, and I settle into this melancholic state after each one.  There's too much travel, too little sleep, too much food, too little time to reconnect with the people I like, too much time coping with the ones I find tiring. 

The worst part of it, I've come to realize, is that it's both a year milestone and an occasion that provokes various in-laws to want to catch up with the latest developments.  Somehow, mine never seem to be sufficient.  It's not so much that they are judging my insufficiency, as I am.  I don't do small talk well, and I've never been great at tooting my own horn or at feigning excitement about things in my life that are not exciting.  So people expect me to play my role in the small talk script, and I keep flubbing my lines - "How's married life?" is meant to be followed by some variation of "Great" or "It's so different" or something... but we've been together for ten years, and living together for five, so it's not like having rings on our fingers and a legal document has changed all that much, and D's job now requires him to be away four days out of the week, so while that's different, it's not really great, either. 

"How's your job/what are you doing these days?" isn't a question that expects "The same thing I was doing before that I'm not that excited by but can't find anything better."  (Especially since, in this crowd, most people are either excited by their jobs or experiencing interesting new developments, or both.)  I honestly don't know why people keep asking me this each year, because if I had good news, I'd tell them.  It is disheartening to have to keep saying, sorry, no, my career's stagnating and the only work I can get is work that I dislike doing, and the work I'm training for isn't all that interesting to other people.  So, how are you doing? 

I've tried the old maneuver of "It's fine, and what are you up to these days?" to re-direct them... but they actually want to know.  Any attempt to fob off further questions with an indication that you don't want to talk about it elicits further probing to figure out what you're hiding.  It's so intrusive that I'm even reluctant to mention good news, because then they want to dissect that, in much deeper detail than it warrants or I'm comfortable with.  (Like my essay that came out this fall; I enjoyed writing it, I'm glad it was published, the book looks great - and I wrote and thought about this many months ago and I've moved on.  I don't really want to dig deeply into motivations and insights that are a year old, and many of which I've forgotten.  Just buy the book, and enjoy it, and let's not turn it into another discussion of my psyche, okay?)

The other questions that are inevitable and which I loathe are "Where are you living now?" (Answer:  In a small city that's tolerable but which isn't great, and which we will be leaving in less than a year) and "So, are you trying?"  (I really hate this one, since I don't like to lie, and yet I don't want to answer it truthfully either - too personal either way.)

Add in their tendency to want to dissect the problems, whatever they may be, and to try to figure out a solution, which doesn't in fact exist,  and I end up both rather cross and disappointed in myself.  For example, my sister-in-law kept asking me what job I would like to do, and my answer was, basically, something that uses my skills but doesn't take up too much of my time.  This was not the answer she wanted, of course, but the plain, uncomfortable truth is that the job that I would like, the one I've trained for, does not exist.  (Or if it does, it's the only one in the country and already filled.) 

While I don't want to cast myself as a gloomy Gus who sees barriers to anything I'd try, I do think that her perception of what is or is not possible is colored by her age, her background, and where she lives.  What's possible for a 30-year-old at the start of her career, with lots of powerful people in her social and professional networks, and who lives in New York City, and who is in a profession that's in demand, is not possible for a 40-year-old whose career shriveled up and all but died almost a decade ago, whose networks consist pretty much of other academics, who lives in a small city in a stagnating state, who has to move every year or three but can't choose the location, and whose skills line up with jobs that are few, very competitive, and require years of in-field experience (and of these factors none of which is easy or likely to change).  So my reaction every year is, basically, "Easy for you to say," which then makes me feel sour and grumpy for having to revisit all the negatives on my slate again.

So.  End of another Thanksgiving, end of NaBloPoMo, and time to get back to my routine. 

October Fatigue

Sitting in the Starbucks late at night, I stare out the window at the windblown lights.  It was a day of thunderstorms and turbulent air.  I am tired, waiting out the demands of my classes.  It is hard to teach, when the rewards are few, and the demands many. 

I think I have grown more introverted over the years, or else I've allowed myself to acknowledge that side of myself.  I'm not quiet nor always tactful when I talk, and I like people, so I figured this must mean I'm extroverted.  Yet I very much need my time alone, where the only sounds are ambient ones - at such times, even music feels like an intrusion.  I don't get charged up merely by being in the presence of other people; I enjoy them, but they are also work, and that increases the more of them there are. 

I simply don't have the stamina to play the extrovert any more, and I'm growing increasingly reluctant to hide my impatience with the drop-in-the-ocean quality of teaching survey courses.  I don't see the positive results until years later - if at all - but the negatives are visible and in my face on a daily basis.  There is too much ignorance to fix with one class, too much material to cover in 3 hours a week, too many standards chopped down to fit the Procrustean bed of institutional limitations.  The things I need to do as a teacher to inspire myself require skills that these students simply do not have, and which cannot be taught them in this setting.  (I'm sure the students are as frustrated with this as I am, and that adds to my own sense of futility.  I doubt that I would enjoy my own class, if I were a student in it.)

My thoughts whirl with the wind, chasing the leaves up into the sky, rising high into the dark massing clouds.  In that way I can escape, getting enough energy to rise in the dark again, to hold my tiny candle up, hoping that it will not burn out in the heavy atmosphere of my own failing energy.

Damaged

Whenever I think I've moved past the trauma of academic failure, something happens to make it bubble up from the depths again.  When I coined the phrase "post-academic stress syndrome," I had little idea how accurate a parallel with PTSS it would have.

I will go for weeks, even months, feeling like I've finally found my footing again.  I can talk calmly at dinner parties about my uninspiring teaching job - and honestly mean it when I say that it's just a job and that's okay - and I spend most of my days feeling fairly content.  My dissatisfactions seem small and manageable - not getting enough exercise, spending too much time playing games online, the house being less tidy than I'd like, having too many old clothes to get rid of - that sort of thing.

And then something will rise up to drag me back down again.

I think sometimes that the two largest shaping forces of my personality are the loss of my academic career and a childhood spent being the new kid repeatedly.  Living twelve years in one place, or going seven after the initial job failure, weren't enough to undo the effects of the periods when instability was dominant.

I like people, but I worry a lot about not really fitting in.  What seems instinctual to other people - the give and take of conversation, timing one's activities to match those of the group, feeling relaxed in the company of friends - seems fraught to me most of the time, even when I'm enjoying myself.  It's not that I feel like I'm a fake or don't know how to behave; my particular torment is alternating between moments when I can't tell what the group dynamic is and feel out of sync, and those when I can see that I'm screwing up but don't know how to not do that.  I don't feel in control of my own interactions, and yet my instincts can't be trusted, either.  It's a bit like following a conversation in a foreign language and hoping to not look too stupid or accidentally offend someone.  And yet I have trouble sitting still and just listening, too - and it frustrates me that this seems to be the only safe course, sometimes.  Why can't I just enjoy my friends in a relaxed manner, like they seem to do?  Why do I have to perform my sociability, wondering if I'm screwing up even as I try not to?  And why is it so hard to sustain that performance? 

When I was in academia, I did have at least one coping tool in my kit.  I could be An Expert, which meant that I could use my knowledge of something to guide conversations.  By limiting the discussion to the topic on which I was An Expert, I knew that I was on solid ground, and wouldn't get caught on the hop saying something stupid by accident.  I also liked the feeling of being in control of the conversation for once.  It wasn't really a matter of being An Expert among non-experts, but rather being An Expert among other Experts.  We were all on the same ground, all able to understand our shared assumptions, all able to garner respect.  We spoke the same language, with equal fluency.

But now.  I am not an expert in anything.  Everything that I know is second-rate, or second-hand, or outdated and stale.  Or it is in an area that no one else is interested in, that does not matter or lead to interesting conversations.  So I find myself being the new kid again and again, even among groups of people I consider to be friends.  They speak with confidence and from firm ground.  I... do not.  Sometimes I forget, and behave as though I am still An Expert in something - anything - and in the process offend those who are indeed Experts.  Sometimes I perceive this.  Most times I do not, and wonder why the conversation went stiff around me, until hours later I figure it out, or someone takes me to task for my inadvertent arrogance.  And even now, as I write this, I am aware of those among my circle whose pain and scars are greater than mine, and I question whether I even have the right to speak of my own, smaller traumas.

I am damaged.  I will never not be. 

Most days I am okay.  But some days, like this week, I can feel my scars pulling, and it hurts. 

Is this part of a healing process, or just lingering trauma?  I do not know. 

Maybe I will never know.