p.s. and a return to poetry friday

p.s. Maggie May asked, regarding the poll, if there was something she had missed. No, I know nothing of the tenure decision yet. Just planning escape routes in the meantime. Thanks to everyone who did the poll! Votes can still be tallied and results are in the pie chart on the sidebar. Bartender/poet/novelist and Alpaca farmer are closely tied, so I figure I can raise llamas, write poems and novels, AND tend bar. The trick is figuring out how to do all four in Manhattan, my city of choice, though going pastoral is always an option.

Speaking of which, the lack of poetry around here on Fridays is a pitiful thing that needs to be remedied right now. Some Kit Marlowe for you and the lovely lovely The Someone--


The Passionate Shepherd to his Love

Come live with mee, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Vallies, groves, hills and fieldes,
Woods, or steepie mountaine yeeldes.

And wee will sit upon the Rocks,
Seeing the Sheepheards feede theyr flocks,
By shallow Rivers, to whose falls,
Melodious byrds sing Madrigalls.
And I will make thee beds of Roses,

And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle,
Imbroydred all with leaves of Mirtle.
A gowne made of the finest wooll,
Which from our pretty Lambes we pull,

Fayre lined slippers for the cold:
With buckles of the purest gold.
A belt of straw, and Ivie buds,
With Corall clasps and Amber studs,
And if these pleasures may thee move,

Come live with mee, and be my love.
The Sheepheards Swaines shall daunce and sing,
For thy delight each May-morning.
If these delights thy minde may move;
Then live with mee, and be my love.

All she wrote

I do know how to write a dramatic subject line, don't I? No, it's not all over in terms of the tenure stuff, my career, etc. Or if it is I do not know and will not know for many moons. I do know a pathologically narcissistic sociopath is involved, so, you know, I am not feeling as secure as one might (as if one might even feel secure under any circumstances during this process, as ozma tragi-hilariously describes here).

Anyway . . ."all she wrote" as in I am, as of this morning, done done done DONE writing (and sending) job applications. I am done done done DONE writing about myself and what I've done and why I am good at what I do and why I do what I do and why I want to do what I do and why I deserve to keep doing what I am doing and what makes me an ideal candidate for blah blah blah blah blah blah fuckity blah. Umpteen job letters on top of the 500-page portfolio? Yeah. All she wrote. Really not so much up for representing myself in grand and great detail for a good long time after this. A little of this type of writing is okay, even affirming. Months and months and pages and pages of it? Not so much. Done, I say.

Of course, this will make it indeed awkward if I do get a job interview, because I swear to god I might say something like, "Yes, well, normally I really would like to say a little bit more about my teaching style and the connections between my research and teaching and where my research is going, but would ya'll mind if we talked about something other than me? For instance, that Badiou. Non-universal universals? Interesting stuff, right? Or True Blood, that new vampire show on HBO? OOOH! Or Mad Men?!? How broody is that Jon Hamm? Right? Hey, are you on Facebook?".

Which reminds me, it is about that time of year for many of us to watch the brilliance that is this.

Serious business

I have dropped off the edge of the earth in order to finish finish what feels like the biggest and most important project of my life, The Thing (i.e. the tenure and promotion binder). Wish me luck! See you in October or thereabouts.

Random Bullets of Chaos and Joy

• I hereby declare this the Summer of Chaos and Joy. I am also going to go ahead and admit to myself that this will probably be a summer of light blogging. Too much joy. Too much chaos. I should point out that both "too much" and "chaos" are as joyful as joy to me.
• I am hands down head over heels in love with The Someone. In. Love. Bigly.
• I have recently pissed off important people at work. Again.
• I have recently made friends with important people at work. Yay!
• I just spent an amazing few days with my favorite person in Favorite City. Bliss.
• I leave on Monday for two weeks in the Deep Red. Pretty much dreading this.
• Work projects languish. I would make a list here of everything I need to do before summer's end, but if I did the space-time continuum would spontaneously explode.
• The Someone is exquisite. You have no idea.
• I must work 2-3 hours a day while with family in the Deep Red. Please advise.
• If you drink many bottles of this wine, you will have a vicious vicious hangover. Trust me: it is The Brain Science (as explained by The Wine Guy at the local liquor store) that proves it. If you do it with a bunch of fun and fabulous people in New York, it will be worth it.
• This morning I realized that The Someone and I have been together in four states (states as in the United, not psychological, physical, spiritual--feel like we have been in many more than four of some of these together) in the past seven weeks. (By the way--Happy Anniversary, TS.) We are fabulous gypsies.

Just going to let Bobby Z say it for me

I know at some point I said that if I did a post about Buddhism or my new meditation practices, it would be code for "that asshat at work is up to more ass haberdashery." But I just don't have the zen in me, folks. No, no I do not.

So let's enjoy this repeat musical interlude with the Dylan and videophorically give the melodiphoric finger to those idiotic Idiot Winds in our lives.

There are conferences and then there are conferences

And that, my friends, was one hell of a conference. I am spent in all the best ways. My liver is no longer speaking to me but otherwise. . .

Giddy like a little professing child

What do I love more than almost anything? Off I go!

(Oh, and if you are reading this and you think you might know of the super secret location in which I might be super secretly heading and you think you too might be super secretly heading in my super secret direction, email me!! There might just be super secret meetings of super secret blogging folks at this super secret location.)

Brautigan Saturday, "The Return of the Rivers" (+ some ruby shoes)

The Return of the Rivers

All the rivers run into the sea;
yet the sea is not full;
unto the place from whence the rivers come,
thither they return again.

It is raining today
in the mountains.

It is a warm green rain
with love
in its pockets
for spring is here,
and does not dream
of death.

Birds happen music
like clocks ticking heavens
in a land
where children love spiders,
and let them sleep
in their hair.

A slow rain sizzles
on the river
like a pan
full of frying flowers,
and with each drop
of rain
the ocean
begins again.

Happy Spring, everyone. This last stanza is one my favorites in all of Brautigan's poems. The beautifully quirky and rich image of a pan of frying flowers followed by this impossibly romantic thought. Quintessential Brautigan.

It has been a frantic week, back from break and trying to get ready for what is going to be an insanely busy April. With regular teaching, directing a student thesis project to its completion and presentation, hosting a major campus event I have spent hours and hours and will spend hours and hours more organizing, making sure my umpteen senior advisees will indeed graduate, grading the final work of umpteen students, and oh leaving for five days to attend a conference and chair a panel and give a paper there, April will indeed be the cruelest month. I am anticipating back-to-back 70-hour weeks if I am lucky. Oddly, I am feeling okay about it. Energetic, at least. Perhaps I am in complete denial. Of course, getting all of this done requires that I completely avoid Idiot Wind (formerly called TDC here) and ignore all of her last-minute, time-sucking requests--three alone in the last week.

What's just happened here?? Away with thee, bitchy franticness! It's Spring! Sorry I did not have time to post my wardrobe inspirations for the week. By way of apology, behold:



Ruby shoes. Calvin Klein ruby shoes. Want them. Cannot afford them right now. Thank the Zappos gods that my size is out of stock.

Hooray! Happy Dance!*

Spring Break in Professor House was a productive and successful one. I wore many hilarious and freaky outfits, wrote a conference paper, and got through more of the rest of my to dos than I thought I would. Wooo hooo hoooo!!



*I have to confess something. Lately, when I blast music and dance wildly around the garret, which happens quite regularly, I have been doing this thing . . . I dance badly on purpose, imitating famous bad dances such as the Elaine dance, the old man in the Six Flags commercial dance, the Finnish YMCA dance, and the spastic Charlie Brown kid dance. It is great fun, but I am concerned. There is a good possibility, I fear, that soon I will forget how to dance any other way and this will just be the way I dance. And that I will do it in public. (Click on the links when you have a minute. You will not be sorry.)

Brautigan Saturday on Poetry Friday

The Sidney Greenstreet Blues

I think something beautiful
and amusing is gained
by remembering Sidney Greenstreet,
but it is a fragile thing.

The hand picks up a glass.
The eye looks at the glass
and then hand, glass, and eye
fall away.


Indeed.

One more class and then it's a much-needed week off for me. I refuse to call it "Spring Break" as that conjures up images of tropical settings and drunken debauchery or at the very least implies something related to Spring (which doesn't really come for me until May) or at the very very least denotes an actual break.

I have a lot of writing to do. A lot. This is not unusual for Spring Breaks March Writing Marathons of years past. There will be much writing but there will also be sleeping in and movies and wine and maybe just maybe a night or two out.

Do they still have the MTV Spring Break beach house or party house or whatever? If MTV were to do a Spring Break professor house, there would be a lone dishevelled woman in strange outfits (which I, like many of my comrades, tend to wear when I write), books and papers everywhere, a bored chihuahua, maybe something like The Maltese Falcon on the television, and several bottles of red wine in various states of fullness--one on the desk, one by the bedside, one by the table. Every once in a while in the MTV Spring Break Garret, the dishevelled prof would rouse herself from the laptop, put some Led Zeppelin or Violent Femmes on the iPod and dance wildly. Then it would be back to the writing.

OK, now I am kind of looking forward to my lame non-Spring Break alone with my own bad self.

Nearly obscene levels of cuteness . . .

Seriously, how am I supposed to grade with this kind of thing happening beside me?

I know. I am becoming the crazy doggencat academic lady with no life, lost in a sea of cute.

I'll have sex with a bassist soon. Promise.

Contradictory note to self

An elegant reading is not necessarily a good reading. Oh how I love an elegant reading.

The re-entry

The busyness of the re-entry, combined with a visit from More Fun this week, has left me no time to blog. I am still here, feeling at turns shell-shocked, energized, annoyed, ecstatic. Here's some of what I have been doing during my absence:

1. Attending the heteronormative dinner. Married with Children Colleague Who Refuses to Bring Her Husband to Work Things or to Exist as Half of Coupled Unit attended sans husband. Yay MWCCWRTBHHTWTOTEAGHOCU! (Really going to have to work on a better pseudonym for MWCCWRTBHHTWTOTEAGHOCU.)

2. Dancing with a man with a peg leg and parasol

3. Being cornered in a tiny pub by and very briefly enduring the advances of a Muckity Muck Professor of Fancy Medicine at Terribly Prestigious University who tried to woo me with ridiculous babble about Lear, the "soul," and "human nature"

4. Attending a vast array of meetings, one of which devolved into weirdly heteronormative part-professional, part-personal individual reportage of summer activities, during which I wanted to say something like "Well, there was this one really intense week when the condom broke. Thank god I had some Plan B on hand! I just threw myself into work on the revisions for that article." I also have this impulse at holiday time when I get those family form letters. (Someday I will post a Year of Medusa fantasy version of the holiday family letter.)

5. Drinking a vast array of adult beverages

6. Hanging out with the rock-n-roll circus

7. With More Fun, deciding on names for our children: for a girl, Emmylou Harris Fun, and for a boy, Lionel Richie Fun

The busyness and the More Fun fun will continue into next week. Planning to join More Fun in Favorite City this weekend. Could NOT BE MORE EXCITED about this. Remember how I said September is going to be mine all mine? I am really trying to let myself let that happen.

Who I will be channelling this academic year

In order to deal with the s-h-i-t storms it will bring, I will need to be a s-t-a-u-n-c-h character indeed this year. I might even bust out a head wrap or two.

September

I have been in writing prison since early July. At some point I think I said I was going to do a long post about summer work strategies, with all the tips and tricks I have found useful as I work on the birthday "work better/faster/harder" resolution. Well, the post hasn't happened but the work has. I have basically been writing** on a 9-5, 10-6, or 11-7 schedule. I have had luck with the schedule, because it allows me to tell myself that it's ok to relax and to do no work at all in the evenings. I have also found it helpful to limit email and internet. For a while there, I was not accessing the internet for personal stuff (blogs, personal email) at all until 5 p.m. No personal email or internet during work hours became the better rule. This improved my focus. I realized two of my major problems with self-scheduling and working at home are focus and motivation. I am also working on improving focus through meditation and limited television, which is hard in the attic o' televisions but which truly helps. Finding motivation? It's hard. The tenure carrot is not enough and is more likely to invoke a paralyzing freak-out than a spurt of productivity. The promise of little rewards (glass of wine, dinner out, a movie) is more effective.

I have to say no one strategy works perfectly. Ultimately doing all that I have to do to do my job well and to get tenure is bloody difficult. It's too much. On paper, it doesn't seem possible. In reality, it somehow always is. In the end, it's about keeping your head down and plowing through the work. Some artful dodging, bobbing, and weaving as well as some rolling with the punches (usually in the form of extra work) when they come is required. Manipulating the space-time continuum proves, at times, necessary.

Dr. Crazy (whom you should go wish a very happy birthday) has an excellent post detailing the workload of an assistant professor on the tenure track, but even she cannot provide an exact account of all of the work that she does on a daily basis, especially during the school year. The post was prompted by the comments to an earlier post about protecting one's time--comments that in my opinion revealed all manner of misconceptions about the job. As a graduate student, you think you know. You do not. I did not, you do not, and you will not until you are in the thick of it. I do not mean to mystify what is neither mysterious nor extraordinary. Do any of us really know how we accomplish a challenging task? We lay our plans, we dedicate our time and our energy to carrying them out, we improvise when necessary, and at some point we are in the work and no longer thinking about it and just doing it. Do I know how I did what I did as a graduate student? No. I know it was exhausting and exhilarating and frustrating and rewarding and demoralizing and life-changing. Teaching in itself is a challenging job. Teaching on the tenure track is three (at least) challenging jobs rolled into one. How do we do it? We are able to do it because we are intelligent and clever and dedicated and talented and ambitious and hard-working and persistent and resilient. We are able to do it because we care--about our students, about our fields of study, about our profession. We are able to do it because we are kick-ass at what we do.*** Why do we have to apologize for it? Why do we have to explain that we are not spoiled entitled brats? I am not interested in being a martyr or a victim or a superhero. I have a challenging job. I do not do it perfectly but I do it very well. Period.

Now back to the (also totally necessary and perfectly valid) bitching component of my job. The last thing I want to do is tear through the pile of work that still must be done before the semester begins. That is, however, exactly what I have to do. Here's how I have decided to motivate myself. September! September is mine! I am promising myself that if I work furiously to get through all of this work in the next two weeks, I will take my summer vacation in September. How will I do this when school will be starting and in session? Well, I will be teaching and advising and getting started on the year's service work. I also have some minor revisions on one article due by the end of September. But but BUT! I can and will accomplish all of this during the weeks, and I will take every weekend (and maybe one or two long weekends) completely off in September.

I love autumn! Love love love! For all of the most cliched reasons. I am promising myself weekend trips to county fairs and to the off-season shore and to fields of antiques and maybe even to Favorite City. (I realize my September might spill into October. All the better!) I have more energy in the Fall than in any other season. I want to apply some of it to some seriously energized relaxation.

That's the plan and it's providing motivation for the moment. I may skimp on the blogging during the next two weeks or I may post spastically multiple times a day. It could go either way. If I disappear, do a little "Go Medusa Go!" chant for me. Hopefully my disappearance will mean that I am deep into the work. Or it may mean I have run off with the circus. Can you still do that? If so, it could go either way. Wish me luck!



**When I say writing, I mean the actual writing but also the various related tasks (including research, contacting people, etc.) of the several writing projects I am working on right now.
***And sometimes, even with all of this, because of chance and circumstance, we are not able to do "it," whether it is getting a job, getting published, or getting promoted.

Cryptic and desperate plea for advice

How do (or would) ya'll handle unfair treatment by a superior especially when his or her actions could seriously jeopardize your career? How do you keep it from sucking all of your energy, energy you need to spend on your work? How do you do what you can to fight it then draw the line and redirect your energy toward the major, time-intensive projects you need to complete? How do you put a limit on how much mental space you are going to allow the fuckwit to have? How do you handle the anger and frustration of someone putting you in a deeply unfair situation?

I am thinking voodoo doll, but I welcome any and all suggestions. Help!

Done and not done

Progress?

Last week's list:

1. Plan summer class
2. Work on Major Project due to publisher tentatively in June:
   
1. Email several people I want to be involved to ask them to be involved, including AB, AE, LE, and KC.
2. Look over some guidelines and sample thingies
   
3. Decide on several important details regarding format and content
   
4. Email some other people
5. Compile
6. Write proposal
   
7. Cross fingers
8. Send
3. Clean out study by: filing this year's course materials, move boxes to basement, moving big photo project somewhere, setting up sewing machine, cleaning out files, and getting S. to come over for an estimate on finishing shelves.
4. Meet with TDC
   
5. Scary medical test Not such a big deal at all, turns out
6. Insane Workout Plan 19/20 days; 5 lbs. lost

Things done instead:

1. Wrote last-minute proposal for grant (Very good money. Keep your fingers crossed for me.)
2. Partially cleaned out second closet and gathered shoes to take to Salvation Army
3. Corresponded with directed-study student about project
3. Watched Grey Gardens three times. It is a little distressing how much I find myself identifying with Little Edie.
4. Watched Tape twice. I can't believe Linky didn't write this movie, as he is the master of what I call the "what?-what?!-what! conversation"--those conversations you find yourself in that are contradictory and confusing in terms of what is being said but that keep you talking because you ARE certain you do not like the weird power dynamics of the conversation. The dialogue of such a conversation intermittently lapses into this:

Person A: What?
Person B: What do you mean, what?
Person A: What are you talking about?
Person B: What?!
Person A: What!

Nearly the whole of Tape is a brilliant example of the what?-what?!-what! conversation. It's dead realistic in terms of how conversations go (a Linklater hallmark, to my mind).
5. Upgraded my sad, old, dying cell phone to this one. It was cheap with my free upgrade, but I am not sure I like it. I am, however, apparently a sucker for a promotion involving the seven deadly sins.
6. Sent flowers to my awesome niece for her 7th grade graduation
7. Talked to my eight-year-old nephew about the potential scariness vs. the potential coolness of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (It's very important to him that the potential coolness outweigh the potential scariness, and he will often send me to a movie ahead of him so that I may determine the scariness-coolness ratio.)
8. Read Falling Man
9. Fretted

Must get to work

The last thing I want to do is hold myself accountable on the blog, but I think I must. I am pretty sure I have lost an entire week of planned work time. Two whole weeks at the end of the semester to take care of personal, medical, and household projects?? Positively scandalous. Oh, I am forgetting that last week I actually did do the major department project TDC was riding me about. I even submitted it a full week earlier than she had originally asked for it. (She moved up the deadline 10 days at the last minute. Typical.) So my first week off, I went to the dentist, to the eye doctor, started on insane workout plan, and emailed various folks about various research projects. Second week, I did major department project. But, I still have not:

1. Planned summer class. It is a class I have taught before, but I have never taught it summer-style. This will take some tweaking but will not be terribly too much work. I just want to make sure assignments and readings are perfecto so that it's pretty laid-back for me. I need to do two other research projects while I am teaching it.
2. Worked on Major Project due to publisher tentatively in June. Work on Major Project involves:
1. Emailing several people I want to be involved to ask them to be involved, including AB, AE, LE, and KC.
2. Looking over some guidelines and sample thingies
   
3. Deciding on several important details regarding format and content
   
4. Emailing some other people
5. Compiling
6. Writing
7. Crossing fingers
8. Sending
3. Cleaned out study by: filing this year's course materials, move boxes to basement, move big photo project somewhere, set up sewing machine, cleaning out files, and getting S. to come over for an estimate on finishing shelves.

Did I mention I also have a meeting with TDC (grrrr...), an appointment for a scary medical test (it's nothing, just a c.y.a. thing my doc is making me do), an appointment for a haircut and highlights (ok, this I count as pampering and fun), and a shrink appointment this week? Then there's Insane Workout Plan to work into the schedule every day. Did I also mention that in less than two weeks I may be joining More Fun for a few days here and then a few days with the rock-n-roll circus? Did I mention that three weeks from yesterday I am going to the Deep Red (where work does not happen) for a 16-day visit to my family?

Yes, I conduct my life like an idiot. But how can I not when my life is so idiotic? I am soooo tired of all the pressure, all of the crazy blinding-to-all-else amount of teaching during the year, all of the Summers of Deadlines, all of the family obligations that require me to come to them in the Deep Red for increasingly extended (and irrational, considering my work load) periods of time, and all of the department ridiculousness. I cannot tell you the last time I began a summer not mildly to utterly panicked about the amount of work I have to do. It's not normal. It's no way to live a life. I am in the ninth circle of burnout. I am this close to packing it up and doing something totally different. I feel like I would jump at the first opportunity to do so.

On poofing posts (and the 48 Laws of Power)

Just poofed away a rant about TDC that I wrote this morning. It didn't reveal all that much and it was not all that scandalous, just another petty frustration really. I am not sure why I feel uncomfortable writing about TDC, uncomfortable enough to want to erase the occasional post. I know I need to vent, but I also think I may be giving this too much power. She's an asshole, yes. Most of what she does is total bullshit, yes. But so what? I cannot keep feeding the negative energy. I have to find a way to let it roll off my back--to know she is going to be a jerk about most things, to know I will have to continue to fight battles over the most basic things to do what I need to do, and to stop allowing myself to react emotionally. I have to stop letting myself get caught up in the pettiness and stupidity. If she does have an agenda to screw me over, unless I let myself get totally crazy, I can certainly outwit her, right?

Hey, maybe I should re-read that diabolical bestseller among corporate generica, the 48 Laws of Power. Do you know this book? I discovered it in grad school, when I found it on my then boyfriend's bedside table. I immediately had to buy a copy and study it with a mad intensity to see what kind of mind power he might be trying to wield over me. (I should point out that this was a completely ridiculous relationship that began in an arcade and only got more ludicrous from there.) Around the same time, my Uncle, the fundamentalist Christian with whom I have a long-standing long-distance book club, mentioned it as something I should read. I was shocked that a) two such wildly different people were reading the same book, and b) Uncle J. did not recognize the tome as the work of The Devil that it is. I also got Dr. Crazy involved in my study of the 48 laws, as she was also involved with the bassist of one of the crazy boyfriend's bands. (Was he the bassist, Dr. Crazy? Why am I remembering him as a bassist, other than the fact that I was drunk that year?) Anyway, Crazy and I began to assign one of the 48 laws to each person we knew as "signature laws." The signature law represented a person's standard operating procedure, their normal modus operandi in life, relationships, etc.--kind of like an astrological sign. The authors of 48 Laws, by the way, never mention such a thing or suggest this as one of the uses of these laws. We, being students terrorized daily by a harrowing graduate program, were just heavily into methods of divination, even those we totally made up. My signature law, for example, was Law 44: Disarm and Infuriate with The Mirror Effect. I believe Dr. Crazy's was Law 17: Keep Others in Suspended Terror by Cultivating an Air of Unpredictability.

Hee. Can you see me next year covertly trying out a new law of power on TDC each and every week? This week, in our meeting regarding assessment, I will whip out Law 37 and "Create Compelling Spectacles" in order to generate an aura of power that dazzles all. That might actually make for a very amusing academic satire, I think. What I should probably do instead is re-read Straight Man, drink some martinis, and stop taking everything so fucking seriously.

Grrrrr. . . . .

I am so frustrated with TDC and . . .*poof*