Damn.

Already got a rejection letter this morning from one of my first apps. We are moving on to phone interviews and are sorry to inform you that you are not one of our continuing candidates. Damn.

Why am I even doing this?

The Great Drizzle of 2009

You'll never believe it, but it's raining! Enough to get the streets wet and actually require the windshield wipers on, which means of course that the accident rate in California has just gone through the roof. And I know, because I was just (stupidly) driving out in the rain shortly after dark (even more stupidly) and people are just not slowing down or paying any extra attention, despite the fact that driving in the rain is dangerous and all their fellow Californians on the road are stupid. Ah well. I survived. I became furious at least fifty different times and started immediately lecturing nonexistent passengers on general driver stupidity. As I have said before, it's a good thing I can't blog the various driving snafus I witness because this blog would be devoted to nothing but traffic bitching.

In other news, I am very tired, I have been working hard at sending out my job applications and yet it feels like I am not getting nearly enough done, I found a worse-than-typo in an already-sent letter ----- a sentence which appeared in one part of the letter reappeared in almost identical form as a transition on the second page ---- and I am refusing to check just how many letters I have sent out this way, and I don't have anything to do in the evenings these days because my eyes hurt and I don't want to think and I have almost no activities here that don't require looking at something and thinking about it. But if I just crash at 9 pm I'll wake up and be irritable around 3 once again. And there's nothing on even at 3 am.

I'm pretty burnt out on the whole job thing. Whereas I was obsessive and terrified the first year I applied for jobs, and panicky the second, and the third time kinda felt good and went smoothly, like I had finally learned the ropes (unfortunately with no success), this time I'm just unable to care. And that's a bad thing when it comes to quality control of the apps, or even just sending them out. Fuck tailoring. Fuck including any apt details about your programs that indicate I have exhaustively researched your institution and discovered in my heart the myriad ways my teaching and research approaches mesh with your mission statement. Fuck listing potential course titles and describing how the classes on your books match my teaching experience. Fuck even the "your job posted on the MLA Job Information List," fuck "cordially," fuck even spelling out my university's name for fanciness's sake; I need that fucking half line to cram another mote of teaching philosophy in there.

I vaguely remember blogging about how I almost didn't finish, refused to finish, my dissertation with less than a chapter and a month to go ---- how I've always had this incredible problem with finishing things. I'll be incredibly invested and anxious and freaking out about, say, a final, writing and working away at it furiously, and then something will just click and I'll feel myself go, I can't do this anymore, I'm done, and I'll get up and turn it in unfinished, right there in the middle of the sentence. I do this with deadlines all the time if I'm not careful. I have to make sure that a conference paper or seminar paper is in acceptable form long before the deadline and I'm just polishing it, or else I won't have anything to present when that little thing in my head goes click and I just walk. Well, now I'm feeling it pretty strongly with the whole job search thing, with academia, with everything. Fuck that shit. And so I'm fighting it but it has come awfully early in the process, considering I haven't even sent out most of the apps yet. I hope that I don't just send my stuff out but actually force myself to bother with doing a good job on it.

Ah, who am I fucking kidding? It won't make one whit of difference.

Cat in the bag

Not out of the bag. Not in a hat. I know, it's complicated. Sorry to confuse you.




The real question is, where is the food???

Why, hello there...

Hey, baby, what's happenin?

You want me. I know it.

You are powerless to resist my fuzziness.

It is true. I am too sexxxx-ay for my own good. But, I cannot help it, no?

Sigh. It is so hard being adorable me. Fetch me another treat and I just might let you pet my fuzzy belly.

You know what sucks?

When you have to go onto your grad campus for not one but two different noontime meetings for things you are involved with, and neither provides food. I assumed that the noon meeting time meant that some sort of sustenance would be provided?* Hello!?!?! Or you could rename the mandatory meeting a "brown-bag session" and we would have gotten the idea to bring our own consumables. Not only did I have to send a lot of apologetic emails planning how I would be in two places at once for today, and excuse my way early out of one meeting to be able to sneak in late to another, I had to be hungry and grumpy for the duration. Bah!


In other news, applying to postdocs still sucks, being interdisciplinary may mean you can apply to more jobs but it also involves a lot more tailoring, and I have depleted the paper-clip supplies of this and the surrounding three counties. Oh, and applying to postdocs sucks.


* Ok, so one meeting apparently had a small plate of stale cookies going around ---- but there were so many people present that the plate got nowhere near around the room. That hardly counts.

Postdoc-ery: Tailoring the Research Statement

So I have sortof something that resembles a project description for my future research project, henceforth to be pseudonymously known as Enlightenment Orifices: Transgressing the Boundaries of Body and Nation (chapter one: "A Nose is a Nose is a Nose: The French Revolution, Syphilis, and Early Plastic Surgery."). And, you know, I have a nifty title, I have some interesting ideas, and because I have already written a dissertation, I'm getting better at knowing how to frame and present this shit as if I already have an argument or know what I'm talking about. It's mostly smoke and mirrors, but, since it took me maybe six months to come up with a workable dissertation prospectus (to say nothing of the time I took after defending it reading tons of stuff and actually figuring out the contours of my argument), I'm hopeful that this improvement means I will actually be able to turn this into my actual book project one day.

But having a something does not mean I can just shoot it off to the various postdoc places, oh no! One place wants 500 words, another place wants 1000, some want bibliographies and some don't, some want you to situate the project in the rest of your scholarly trajectory or against your dissertation project, and others don't. So I am busy right now twisting and tying and trying to make this stupid something look like a research statement that matches what each place wants without it taking up too much of my time, since most of these thingys are due way before my tt job apps and I need to get those all ready as well, although if I really meant that I would not be blogging nor would I have a sparkling clean apartment with all the laundry done right now.

And through all of this I am hoping that the search committees will not recognize that this something is not a tailored research statement at all but some cheap-ass fabric tied together as part of a ploy to avoid incurring the labor costs of actually sewing anything:

I mean, no one's gonna know that the bandeau I sent one place became the maxi-dress or halter-top I sent somewhere else, right? But they very well might realize that it's just some cheap, hastily-thrown-together crap that makes me look like a total dork. That's why I'm hoping that the smoke and mirrors and some mood lighting, or at least some fancy jargon, will distract from the fact that this thing is both riding up and falling down right now, know what I mean?


Excuse me now while I deal with this wedgie.







*lest you think I resemble in any way that American Apparel ad, hahahahahahaahahaha! I haven't seen my collarbone or had just one chin for years! Though I should think, from long experience watching my students fidget in class, that even thin girls can't keep a tube top up in the right places. Ah fashion, why do you make us so stupid?

Ethos, Pathos, Logos, Crisis

Some of you may remember that I have a penchant for reading the blog of Isis the Scientist, mainly for her fabulous shoes, although snark and science are always appreciated as well.

It turns out that Isis and other scientists at the Seed Science blog are doing a fundraising contest with DonorsChoose, a nonprofit that helps teachers raise small amounts of money for their classrooms. So I clicked over to find out what the site was all about, and to see if her readers were actually donating. And I got lost over in that site for hours, clicking on project after project and getting more and more pissed.

It's partly because I am a softhearted sucker who can never refuse a plea for doing good, whether it be in money or time (seriously: I lost a lot of time-to-degree progress doing work with my union (UAW 2865), volunteering, turning out my department, organizing, running for office within it --- why is it that "if you don't do it, who will?" totally works on me, and yet so many other people are immune to that call?)

But my anger is directed at the fuckers who consistently defund and devalue k-12 public education, whether through No Child Left Behind or the nitwits who implemented massively unfair district funding levels based on local property taxes (fuckin' Prop 13), to say nothing of the asshole California legislators who think cutting back on education budgets that were never restored from their last slashing is a good idea. And add to that the perfect shitstorm that is California's budget crisis, which has involved such priceless moves as withholding Obama's education stumulus money to patch holes in the general budget, holding local cities' taxes hostage rather than letting them pay their own salaries, cops, infrastructure, etc., and bumping up the sizes of classes again, and you will see why I am almost pissed enough to run for office myself.

I mean, seriously ---- if you go look at the California teacher requests, you'll find people asking for paper because they no longer have anything in the school's copy budget. Or the elementary school which rations out only two pages a day of wide-rule paper to each child, so the teacher is looking to supplement. Or the teacher who doesn't have enough mutherfucking chairs in his/her classroom, for chrissake.

This is ridiculous. And shameful. I'm glad that this site exists --- it allows teachers who work in high-poverty districts to find wealthy and resource-rich parents, for one thing, who ordinarily would be giving time and money to districts that aren't nearly as strapped --- but This. Shit. Should. Be. Funded. This is not negotiable. It should be funded through our taxes just as a basic cost of doing business, like the idea of not having police or a fire station is unthinkable.

So I thought: hey, what if I gave some money to one of these projects, which one would I choose? And it wasn't long before I had the audacious thought: what if I set up a DonorsChoose page through my blog? Could I get people to contribute, even though I have way fewer readers than any of the Sciencebloggers?

And now we're back to my title. For compiling all these projects and funding needs from so many locations, all in one easy-access place, makes it into the ebay of fiscal need, or the wal-mart of underfunding (ooh wait, that's redundant, hah) or something. It becomes a space where all of these funding projects compete with each other for you, the "consumer," for your attention and money. And I was just clicking for hours, fascinated by all the strategies of persuasion, all the different ways these teachers try to move you with pictures and emotional appeals and explanations of returns on investment. I would love to teach this site in a comp class. I'm sure that people would be angry with that and see the act itself as a form of pressure on the students though.

And what would you choose, what sort of strategies are "savviest" for the consumer to employ with his or her charity dollar? Do you go for the poorest districts, or for a medium poverty district, knowing that those might attract fewer donations? Do you fund someone's technology request, since the teacher probably will never buy a digital camera or document projector out of his or her own money, or do you fund paper and school supplies because they are more cost-effective and are basic needs? Fund a book, or a segment of a bookcase?

I was especially interested in the number of teachers across the country who want a new carpet, either a section rug for a reading corner or just to pull up the whole mess and have new carpet put in. But that's something that is always lowest priority on the district's list (to replace or even to clean, believe me), is probably thirty years old, and is too expensive for a teacher to just dip into the wallet and get. (My sister in law teaches 2nd grade and let me tell you, she spends money in office stores and teacher supply stores the way you and I do in bookstores, or a kid in a candy store. Teachers always blow large amounts of their salary on classroom supplies and love to do it. I'm not sure you could get a teacher to not spend anything on books and shiny things for a year and purchase a carpet instead.)

I didn't pick any carpets. But I did make a giving page and stocked it with some reading/writing/literacy/literature projects, as this is a blog all about cats who read poststructuralist theory. Can I get you to cough up some dough? A twenty? A five? Want to fund a grammar project or thesaurus or paper or buy someone a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X because the school is making them share copies and not let them take books home? Or a chair? (Yes, I picked the chairs. I'm still pissed about the chairs.) Really, if you give up a couple beers or a week of coffee you'll be able to pitch in, no problem. The sciences are great, but microscopes and frog dissections aren't the only school activities that deserve to be funded.

Or perhaps you are not a resident of the late great state of California, or don't feel any obligation to help out its poor benighted residents who can't even pass a budget. That's fine, you YIMBY. Go back onto that site then and find your own city, county, state! I bet there's even a real-life school close to you that really needs your time and help. Go to it, people!