My Plate is Full

(Picture taken from The Girl Who Ate Everything's blog. )

Yes, my plate is full --- I have been diligently working away at cleaning my plate and getting all the various projects off of it, and yet, there is much to do in the rest of the summer! I wanted to represent my to-do list with an enormous plate of different fried foods, but the pictures were a little too off-putting. This one looks both inspiringly tasty and sure to induce major indigestion afterwards, which sounds about right.

Just like a plate of 15 or so fried twinkies, my projects are very rich and overwhelming and I can only work at them for a short time before needing to take a breather. But! While recovering for a moment or two I will encourage myself with my progress to date:

- finished, one revise-and-resubmit.
- very close to done, one previously rejected article
- extensively brainstormed, one brand new article idea

Not bad. Not bad at all. I'm actually happy about my work, except for that first five minutes when I sit down at the computer and my brain automatically blurts out, "WTF? You can just climb back into bed, you know. No one is there to stop you."

I also have:

- several small article-idea sprouts,


which I have compiled some crap on and put into a folder on my desktop. I'm hoping that the ideas will germinate completely on their own in my subconscious while I work on the other projects and in a couple years I will just wake up and bust out the entire article in one sitting. I can hope, right?

So you can see, as long as you completely ignore that whole dissertation-into-book-manuscript business, I am working my way through that overloaded plate. I want to finish that damn article revision, proof it up, and send it out next week. That should give me some breathing time before I have to get back on the job-search treadmill.

Anybody wanna revise my dissertation for me? I have no clue how to start! Some people gave me advice (thank you! I owe you an email!) but that was mainly useful advice about some specific publishers who might like my stuff. And other people mentioned the Germano book, which I have. I'm just kinda feeling overwhelmed by ... starting. Like, literally: do I go reread my dissertation and make a list of all the stuff that needs to be changed? do I brainstorm an introduction? How do I even start to tackle this? I mean, I can't unhinge my jaw like a snake, so how do you bite into a humongous burger that is the size of my head like the picture up there?

As a caveat, I should note that none of these projects have anything to do with each other ... so while I have a "research agenda," it would seem, I do not have a coherent research agenda. I like to study everything. I'm just finding stuff that's interesting and working on it, regardless of topic or field. If that's really bad, you might want to let me know.

Oh, and I ordered the gold bottle.

I Want the Shiny!

The shiny what? you may be asking. Anything, as long as it's shiny. I'm not picky; I'm in the mood for buying something shiny and pretty and fun --- something that I can dangle in front of myself when my brain is fried, saying "ooooh, sparkly!"

I missed my first-of-the-month academic deadline (oops). I have revised half of the article instead of the whole thing. On the other hand, I think I need this much time to get it all fixed, so I'm not too upset. Obviously having it done already would be ideal, but then again, so would having a team of handsome models to feed me chocolate truffles while I cogitate. As always, I'll just have to make do with the limitations of reality. Sigh.

Anyway, I was searching for something properly Shiny! and Fun! and decided that I need one of these:
Perty, huh? I like it. And I've been very good about going to my exercise class lately, and feeling grumpy about my workout clothes, which are boring and I'm tired of them, so maybe it is time to get something cute to look at while spinning! (I guess the team of models with chocolate would also work...)

I think I like this orange/gold color best:


But then again I like the red a lot too (I love the color red anyways):

Which do I choose? Help me!

Ok, also ---- I could just buy this now to celebrate the fact that I seem to have made exercise a new habit for myself, or I could not buy it until I send out the article and reward myself with it then. Only problem is if I had to order it and then wait, even longer, after all the waiting to get my article revised! Hmmm. Pondering. If you weigh in on this you also must pick a color! There was also a beautiful green-and-gold flowery type design on their site when I looked a few months ago, but it seems to be gone now. Sad. I guess it makes it a little easier to choose though.

In other silly news, my niece is such a total overprepared weirdo that she shops for Christmas presents early. She just emailed me to say that, at July, this is her latest and most behind she has ever been on her Christmas shopping, so I better get her some suggestions damn quick. I must be getting a garlic press in December. Heh.

I'm Oooooooold!

• I must be old because my brother has just turned 45. (hi bro) Eeeeek!
• On the plus side, his favorite birthday food is angelfood cake ... which my mom hates because it is not chocolate. So for the past several years we have had a tradition of making a dark chocolate fondue and everybody dips the cake and strawberries and banana chunks and other fruit in the fondue. Yum! Sadly, while raspberries go so well with dark chocolate, they do not hold up well to being skewered and dipped in hot liquid. It was just a mess rather than making it to anybody's mouths.
• One neice was talking about something --- music, I think --- and kept talking about "the 90s" in the same tone of voice that I talk about "the 60s." When I commented on how weird it was for me to hear talk about the 90s in this tone of them being totally distant and past and closed down and irrelevant, she goes, "well yeah. That's cause they are --- that was a totally long time ago!" Oh, I am cut to the quick! At least she was born in the 80s and thus can remember the 90s, unlike my other neice and nephews. "Yeah dude, they are starting to talk about "the millenium" in that same way already," another tells me. Sigh.
• Likewise I rewatched 10 Things I Hate About You today while going through a pile of bills and stuff --- it's still a cute movie, one of my fave teen Shakespeare adaptations, although time has proven that Julia Stiles really is incapable of acting and I had been giving her too much benefit of the doubt in that film --- and since we were on the subject of the 90s I mentioned it. "Ohhh, god, that movie is sooooo mid-90s," said my niece with an eye-roll. "it's cute" I protest. "Soooo dated" was the reply. This whole exchange is funny because I was having warm fuzzies during that movie because the "shrew" character reminds me a lot of this neice, who is blond and sarcastic and individualistic and strong and I wish she read The Feminine Mystique and listened to Bikini Kill like that character. Still, she's good people.
• Likewise my neices are both talking seriously about getting married and having babies because now that they have graduated, what the hell else do you do with your life? This makes me feel not only baffled by their logic but reeeeeeeeeally old at the thought of them with babies.
• After dinner and the presents we're all still sitting around the table talking and my various nieces and nephews are telling stories about various cute and crazy squirrels they have seen at their schools and when visiting college campuses. One neice starts talking about a cute video someone shot at Santa Cruz of a big squirrel and a little squirrel and I break in: "Noo! That was UCLA because I have seen that one! Someone posted it on my facebook!" It's here. I explained the "plot" and how cute it was and they all laughed and my brother started talking about some photoshopped squirrel pictures his friend sent him, where the squirrels have been spliced into various Star Wars scenes. My dad shakes his head and drops his forehead into his palm. "My god." he says. "And this is why we're going to lose in productivity to the Japanese." "Yeah," I say, "but at least we'll be happy."

The Academic Life Cycle

Here's a little blast from the past, to show you that I was weird and wacky and fond of bizarre metaphors (and apt to get myself in trouble in the department) long before I got myself a blog:


I had a quasi-admin gig at one point and made sure to abuse my powers (and my access to photoshop and dreamweaver). They let me run some workshops as long as I did all the stuff they wanted first, and --- surprise! --- I wanted workshops that would help me learn about the profession as a systematic structure, and how to survive in it.

Funny thing is, I got in major trouble for this poster --- one of the other grad students was very angry about it and gave me such shit. (I remember getting shouted at, or at least her getting way up in my face about it, in the hallway --- I don't do well with loud confrontations. We didn't mesh, personality-wise.) Anyway, she was incensed by the notion that we were spawns --- I am not just a number! I am not a frog! I remember her shouting. I didn't get it. Of course we are; recognizing this is the first step to changing it, or even surviving it. But then again, I'm perfectly ok with saying I'm a little cog in a big machine ---- rather than assert I am somehow special or unique, that I transcend or am separate from the machine, I'd rather take some steps to change the machine itself if it needs fixing. But I'm also very aware of the limits of my power to change things, even if I were to work collectively or collaboratively.

Anyway, like the teeny little mortarboard on the ABD frog? I feel like the tenured frog needs some sort of accessory too, but can't figure out what it would be.

I'm planning on working up some posts that link all my blatherings about certain topics, like grad school and the job search, in one central page list, but it's taking a lot longer than I had thought and so it will be a while before they go up. And someday, I may even write some new posts for the blog! Don't hold your collective amphibious breaths though --- I need to do my actual work too.

Coffeeshop Eavesdropping on Something Totally Different

So this Latino guy diagonally across from me is talking. He's wearing dark blue jeans with a narrow cut, so saturated with color they almost seem black, and a similarly vivid striped button-down shirt in blues and purples. He's very dark skinned, middle-aged, starting a bit of a paunch, with a long face and the prominent arched nose I associate with Mayan paintings. The guy across from him, over my shoulder and mostly out of sight, keeps saying that he must be so proud.

When Not Visible Guy asks, "so what was her dissertation about?" I perk up my ears.

"It's Edu-edu-edu -CA-shun, something, they've got these learning communities, and they track them across schools, but she's pulling them out and tracking things by kids and not by school, hell, I don't know. I keep asking her why she doesn't have something lined up next yet."

Now they are off on a conversation about money. It seems like there are two ways to give money, one is all about the show, it's a way of demonstrating your pride and showing both of you off to everyone; that kind you don't expect the other person to take the help, in fact you make a big show of offering money and they make a big show of not taking it and demonstrating their independence and that's totally cool. But then there is the other kind, where you want to give money because you are genuinely worried and want to help out, and how do you actually get the money to the daughter in scenario two when she's already made a show of refusing it like in scenario one? They're brainstorming methods; it kinda reminds me of when my dad and my brother fight over who gets to pay the check. :-)

* * *

She may be the first person in the family to get a degree but she's not the only one; he got a BS last spring (Not Visible Guy is ribbing him that now he has to go back to school and get more degrees than his girl. The guy groans. "Education is important," says the dad with a wry smile, "but not that important.") I'm assuming he did some sort of engineering thing? He seems to be in construction. These guys are making me cry the happy tears.


* * *

Ok I had thought the other guy was white but he's telling a story about somebody --- a relative? a friend? I missed that --- who is Hopi and Navajo on his mother's side and Cherokee and something else on his father's side. "They were big in The Movement," he says. "The Long Walk, total activist stuff. Totally messed him up because he was pushing all that and overloaded and nearly flunked out."

This is fascinating; I'm having a hard time concentrating on my own work stuff. Ok I missed part of that story ---- did the other guy manage to go back to school and graduate? ---- but the moral is all about the Importance of an Education. I totally love these guys. They are warming the cockles of my heart. Heh.

Coffeeshop Eavesdropping

There are these two weird old hippies sitting next to me on the patio. Either that, or medieval religious history/religious studies profs. At one point someone mentioned someone being kicked out of a class, and they keep namedropping medieval theologians. No, wait --- batshit crazy is what they are:


"And then I sent him to the place of eternal torment. I had him struck with the ninth curse, the [missed this phrase]. Which, on the mundane plane of reality, manifested as the development of [______] leukemia ---- which, on the earthly plane revels itself as a whitening of the skin, as pinpoints of whiteness," here he leans forward, jabbing his finger with incredible emphasis, as if he has just clinched his argument. "As a sign of the dematerialization of the skin, of the ... loosening, see, of carnality and a transcendence to a more spiritualized place." He nods.

Here the other fellow leans forward to speak. I notice he has some port wine stains scattered on his head and nose; his head is mostly shaved to hide the balding spots; what's left is gray.

He speaks as if replying to the first man's statement.

"But I, am afflicted right now with women who demand too little of me. And I am freighted with a consuming melancholy, not at the moment of initiating sex, but after..."

-------------

Ok, this conversation is wierding me out. I really have to work now. And I lost their conversation in the process of trying to transcribe what I first heard. Funny thing is, they don't look like homeless people --- they're dressed just like any other preppy software engineers in the area.

Be sure to use bullet points to highlight your absolute lack of marketable skills

The problem with being in the same room as my dad is that the power of his nagging is amplified by his clever use of nonverbal body tics, sighs, and grunts. When dad gripes "ya still haven't got a goddamn job yet?" on the phone, I am relatively unaffected, and manage to roll my eyes and distract him by asking if any annoying kids have been on his lawn lately.

In person, however, I am witness to the pathos of his response, which involves him clutching at his heart and looking off into the distance, contemplating, surely, my impending death by starvation followed by being eaten by my cats, which he of course is going to have to clean up dammit why does he have to do all the work around here? He sighs. Then his face sags a little bit and the lines around his mouth come out in greater depth and he looks really old. The piteousness of that last bit is only slightly diminished when he darts an eye over in my direction to see whether I am being affected.

Nothing I say or do serves to dissuade him ---- not assurances that I am teaching/have a fellowship/have money to cover the summer/just won the lottery, all of which, except the last, have been true at various times ---- and indeed I know this is a game I cannot win, for even if I were to get a job he would immediately move down the list for the next point of nagging: filling my retirement accounts, presumably, or getting the next job, raise, or additional job (you can never be too careful!).

But this time, or maybe it is that a lifetime of nagging has worn down my defenses and made me susceptible, this time the constant complaints have raised some worry and I have been looking for "something to pick up" over the summer, even though I could just spend the entire summer writing away at my publishing stuff due to my cushion. (Dad's pay-cash-for-everything, buy- nothing, re-use-tinfoil, you-can-never-have-enough-money-for-emergencies, don't-you-know-I -was-born-in-the-Depression-and-had-to-walk-uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow philosophy of miserliness is another trait of his I've unwillingly picked up.)

But this town is not an easy place to "pick something up in." Or I have become spoiled and formed ridiculously high standards of compensation and effort. Or I should have moved into the entry-level grunt jobs back when I was 22 and it hardly would have bothered me and then I would have moved up to actual money and interestingness by now. You know, there really is something to that, so please tell your students. Anyway, reading local job listings has been an exercise in depressingness. I can see now why so many people on that "applying to grad school" livejournal site talk about their jobs as soul-sucking.

However! Something popped out at me on the list one day as something that might be sorta fun. I might like to try that! And if I test it out I will be checking out a possible plan B if the job market this fall does not work. All to the good.

You need a resume and cover letter to apply, though. Turns out I write those much the same way as I write academic paragraphs: slowly and with lots of breaks. And by stealing about a dozen models off the web and reverse-engineering them. Whoo boy --- have you looked at sample letters over on Monster? They read exactly like the spam that gets left on blog comments. I hadn't realized that spam is actually a paragon of good business writing. This depresses me even further. The one upside is that business cover letters and resumes are, probably because the prose is so soul-suckingly godawful, mercifully brief. And bulleted. Even the letter is bulleted, although ---- and I'm giving you a solid-gold job tip here by telling you this ---- you do not actually use bullet points in your address, greeting, or signature.

The bright side of spending time looking at sample resumes and job ads and advice columns and salary scales is that I get to realize: holy shit, I am smarter and more qualified than most of the job seekers out there, if all these articles about applicants not being able to follow the format of a business letter by cutting and pasting sample key phrases and relevant information into a formatted template are to be believed. Or that being able to use Word and Outlook actually moves me up the pay scale. And that the academic job search is way fuckin' harder than any of the application processes out on the job boards. Truth be told, I've never said that getting a nonacademic job seemed impossible, just that, like Bartleby, I prefer not to.

Ok, I was going to do some funny riffs here on a bulleted list of marketable cog skills, as opposed to marketable grad student skills, as well as some sample cover letter poetry, but I just hit tiredness and promise to have part 2 of this post tomorrow. Except: and this is very important! You need to make me promise that the "side job search," spoofs of the side job search, and the side job itself cannot get in the way of the really important activity of this summer, which is to get out my damn publications and prep for the real job search this fall. I do not need to get some job and then be trapped someplace where "a strong ability to alphabetize and file neatly" is a cutting-edge skill.