No guarantees, but things are looking good for my fall job prospects. The Head Honcho is getting some clarifications from the dean, and once he has them he’ll know how he wants to go.
I should hear early next week. All’s well… and all that.
I wonder sometimes how much awareness the people I’m typing up have of the origins of their sometimes rather fanciful names.
Found an intentionally classicist family just now, though. Children Nereida, Cleopatra, Temidocle, Emerita, Elfrida, Anibar (Hannibal—Puerto Rico is known for liquid confusion), and Euripides.
They were doing right well until they hit on Elfrida…
I hope I am imagining a very weird dynamic going on among some of the women in my office.
It so happens that I have waist-length hair. Save for two moments of madness in which I had it all cut off, I’ve had long hair all my life.
My boss started growing her hair back not too long ago.
Earlier this week, I wore one of my new long dresses. Today she shows up in one.
Just little things like that—and my dress sense is odd enough that it is genuinely hard to look like me—happening with enough frequency to make me, well, wonder.
You have to understand, my boss has trophy-wife looks, while I am from a long line of Polish and Russian peasants and I look every bit of it. (The other side of my family is mongrel Western European, came to this country indentured servants. I come by peasant looks honorably, I do.)
So the thought that she is consciously imitating me is simply bizarre—her looks have all the social power, not mine—and if it’s unconscious, so much the weirder. And weirder still? My boss gets squealy compliments whenever she does something me-ish. I couldn’t get a compliment from these people if I paid them.
Maybe it’s not imitation, but an attempt to overbear? To discipline me into a more “proper” fat-woman presentation?
Aaaah, I gotta be making this up. Pure coincidence. I can’t get it to make any sense whatever. Never mind.
But, geez, if she wears a peasant blouse tomorrow I reserve the right to completely freak out.
I’m quietly trying to counsel a woman who wants to go to graduate school in (IA and Rana, hide your eyes) American history, her goal being the endangered tenure-track humanities professorship.
No, I’ve been good. Really I have. I have not screamed “RUN AWAY!” in my best tortured-animal howl, tempting though that admittedly is. I’ve just been asking the tough questions—her favorite prof was an ABD abjunct who got tossed out of the department for not finishing her dissertation, so she’s not completely clueless, just unreasonably optimistic—and suggesting some alternatives.
But there’s a bit of starry-eyed proto-grad-student folklore that irks the life out of me—again, because it used to be me—the whole “But I’ll never be happy except as a professor!” hyperbole.
It. Is. Garbage.
Except when it’s self-fulfilling prophecy, and then it’s worse than garbage—it’s knowing self-sabotage.
I have only ever heard this said by people with no concept whatever of the bewildering variety of work the world offers. You don’t know everything that’s out there. Neither do I. Let’s not predicate our lives on tunnel vision, hm?
I don’t believe in the One True Life Path thing anyway. I’ve gone and said so before. It’s a continuum; there are things you’d be miserable doing, and things that would make you die happily of overwork, and a vast array of stuff in the middle. I’m here to tell you that on the whole, somewhere in the middle is a pretty good place to be.
I’m also here to tell you that what you’re actually doing is only one part of being happy in your job. It may not even be the biggest one. I got routed out of a job whose actual job bits (if I’d been allowed to do them uninterfered-with) were wonderful. My boss, however, had taken against me, and he made my life pure unadulterated hell without half trying. I got out. The next job featured a Dragon Lady who wasn’t even my direct boss, but was so horribly unpleasant that I didn’t stay to work through some things that, honestly, could have been worked through.
This job, speaking in terms of the job itself, is frustrating when it isn’t banal. I’ve been happy in it for a year and a half, because my boss is freakin’ awesome and my coworkers are pleasant, and my conscience is completely at peace about what I’m doing.
So don’t give me that “I’ll never be happy unless…” line. I know better.
Seems worth mentioning also that predicating your entire life satisfaction on your job is horrendously narrow-minded. Talk about setting yourself up for unhappiness. Once again, the world is a big place, and satisfaction can be had in many, many parts of it.
Just, please, if you’re thinking about writing me to ask if you should go to grad school, find some real sources of life satisfaction before you lay the “I’ll only be happy as a professor!” line on me, okay? Or I’m just gonna hafta hurt you, and neither of us wants that.
Thanks to John Cowan for my laugh of the day. John kipples his markup most elegantly indeed.
I notice that I have a rather bizarre email phobia. It affects only work-related email accounts. Have to make myself check.
I know why. Email has been a point of contention in both my last two jobs. The first employer didn’t so much as let me clean out my desk before they raided the server to read my email, which contained some, um, unvarnished opinions of the boss I was leaving to avoid. (I got a friend called on the carpet for corresponding with me, too. That hurt worse than anything else about that job.)
Because I was two or three states away from the second job, email was the major communications channel between me and the office. Since I quickly learned to hate that office and almost everyone in it, it wasn’t long before any email at all from the office was a signal for a bad day.
I’ve never gotten an email in this job that’s been anything but innocuous. Even so. I hate checking my work email. Gotta get over it.
I am told that Possibilities are Being Looked Into for a fall assistantship, and that “obviously, we want to keep you.”
Well, that’s always nice to hear. I can’t help imagining, though, the various powers that be sitting together in a room when my boss walks in with a lugubrious face to say, “This Dorothea followed me to work. Can I keep her?”
From the excruciatingly tiny world department:
CavLec has been on this man’s blogroll for quite some time. Only now do I find out he used to work for SoftBook.
Y’all ’scuse me while I pick up little squishy bits of brain from where they’ve exploded all over the place… the world is simply too small. I can’t deal.
Many photons are being spilled on the so-called “backchannel,” the morass of instant-messaging, blogging, and miscellaneous surfing that is starting to grow up underneath lectures at conferences and in colleges. (See Liz’s excellent discussion if you haven’t already.)
I haven’t got an opinion about the “respectfulness” or overall value of this phenomenon. I am here to say, though, that if my teachers and professors thought they had my undivided attention, they were mostly wrong—and I’m too old to have been a laptop-totin’ undergrad.
I called it having a two-track mind when I was that age. I knew perfectly well that if I didn’t give the other track of my mind something to do, I wouldn’t be able to keep track of the lecture—I’d zone out completely.
Exactly what I did varied. For half my college years, it was writing love letters to David in the (indecipherable by ordinary eyes) script he invented and taught me. No one knew what I was up to—for all they knew I was taking notes—no one bothered me, I kept up with lecture, everyone was happy.
In other words, I don’t think it’s fair to assume that someone who isn’t giving their entire attention to a lecture is giving it no attention at all. It’s never worked that way for me, and I doubt I’m all that special.
I got a surprising number of nibbles on my book idea, mostly from people who liked it—but clearly envisioned a very different book from what I had in mind.
Which is, hey, great. If six wildly different but equally worthy books come out of a single silly idea, rocketh that not mightily?
I’ve also had the Discworld books, L. Sprague deCamp, and Delany’s Neveryon series recommended to me as being what I’m after. I haven’t read the Neveryon books, but I don’t have to be told twice to read Delany. (Except for Babel-17, which is a vile excrescence that should never have made it off the slushpile.) Pratchett I find scattershot. Funny, yes, and sometimes pointed, and sometimes quite touching—but often, rather blah. (Heresy, I know. Hang me later, ’k?) DeCamp is just plain lousy, sophomoric and heartlessly silly. I am not a fan.
But clearly I’m not going to get my book, the book I am wanting, unless I spec it out a bit more clearly.
I suspect this book would be called “urban fantasy” by someone who had never read Cervantes. I very much imagine my protagonist as a not-quite-young woman in a 2003 McJob, a little lost, maybe a little boho. Like the Don, she reads too damn much, and it turns her head a little, and she wanders…
Because despite all the grad-school bloodshed I still love Don Quixote, I would probably be tempted into too much homage if I wrote this book. Even so, I think some homage is only right. The debate between the Don and Sanson Carrasco (“How can you read this tripe, much less believe in it?”) definitely needs an update. And Barataria lives eternal… only with much worse names, I’m afraid.
That’s the book I want. Feel free not to write it.