what happened?

Monday was not so great. It was beautiful out. But it was not good. I woke up with my stomach fucked up, didn't want to eat. I don't think the cookie and coffee breakfast helped, but no appetite made the idea of taking the time to prepare real food seem like too much. The cookies were in fact an attempt to be somewhat responsible and eat something. And the coffee is just plain necessary under all but the direst of circumstances. Despite hurrying (and probably partly because of it) I got to campus late and had to stand up my friend for lunch (sorry!) .

Then it was on to my meeting with my advisor, who was all kinds of cranky. She had just come from the faculty meeting. They have only one meeting a year at the end of the year. They didn't meet to talk about prospective students, not all of them anyhow. They didn't meet before or after the strange job talk we had this spring (strange because we are not having an official job search). They didn't meet to talk about the new "milestones" the new division head is imposing on the new set of students, they didn't meet to talk about whether or not the rest of us should be grandfathered in under the policies we started with.

But they met to evaluate the grad students. This is the meeting where all the faculty, no matter how little contact they have with the grad students, decide if we are doing well or not. The first time they had ever done this was last year. That meeting resulted in some genuinely peculiar "informal" evaluation letters being sent to most of the grad students right before my division head left town for a few weeks. I say most of because my division head's wife, who just defended her dissertation this past January, didn't get a letter last year. Yes, my division head's wife is (was) a student in my PhD program.

Anyhow, back to the letters and what they said. In my lab mate Sharon's letter last year, she was evaluated not only on her academic progress, but also on her social skills. No one else was. While Sharon has some quirks, we all do and (further) Sharon's are hardly glaring. They look downright mild when you put them in the proper context, in comparison with some personalities in my division.

My letter last year said that I was making "satisfactory progress and that (I) should expect to write and defend both the proposal and dissertation within the year." I laughed when I read this. Then I asked my advisor if this was a reasonable expectation. She said no.

Although I am told the letters are "informal" it still sucks to know you are going to be evaluated by people who couldn't manage their way out of a paper bag with a map, a flashlight, both hands, and a sherpa. I've been worrying for weeks that the letter I'll receive from my division head will send me either into a towering rage or a deep depression. My money's on the former. I headed into my meeting with my advisor knowing she'd been at this meeting for hours and wondering if she had advocated or not. Turns out not since she came into the lab later and told my other lab mate that the division head wanted him to re-schedule his qualifying exam for next month instead of December. Why did the division head want this? Let's take the Cosmo quiz*:
(a) it is more convenient for him
(b) it fits his plan of promoting our program as a 5 year phd
(c) he's a sadist
(d) it's all part of an evil conspiracy to make people more miserable and the world more rotten

During my short discussion with my advisor, she told me she might be leaving our university.

WHAT???!!!!

I'm not sure of the exact story, her options, or the odds that she will be leaving. She explained it but at that point she was addressing both me and our lab manager (the former grad student, my division head's wife, whom I also dislike and who also is in the same paper bag as her husband). My division head's wife/lab manager processes information a little differently than I do (euphemism) and we were asking conflicting questions in rapid succession. The result? I know very little other than that this is all up in the air and I should try very very hard to be completely done with my dissertation a year from this Fall. I told my advisor this would be no problem since if I am not officially done by a year from this Fall, I will self destruct. "No seriously, I'll blow up," I added when she and the lab manager chuckled as if I were making one of those silly self deprecating hyperboles female grad students are prone to making when dealing with discussion of academic deadlines and milestones which they have every intention of wanting to reach if for no reason other than to show what a good little pony they are. My advisor is a nice person, but I believe a high functioning autistic. She often has no idea how to deal with me even when I'm not being sincerely sarcastic, so my "outburst" only confused her.

This all left me feeling like I got smacked in the head with something large, heavy, and wet. Her leaving could make things hard for me, but I am quite serious when I say that I will be done in a year whether I am done with the PhD or not. I can't stay here doing what I do much longer. I strongly dislike connecticut and many other things about where I am. I'm not even sure I want a career in academia, which puts the whole PhD with oodles of publications goal into the category of having more cons than pros. My advisor's leaving will probably destroy whatever is worthwhile about the division though, and that sucks. It's been going downhill since my lab manager's husband became division head about two years ago. He's a trolly bastard who mistakes displays of contrarianism for intellect. Oh wait, I think I have a picture of him that I drew. Yep, here it is.

He acts like he looks. Poorly drawn and constipated.

From a purely selfish perspective though, with the prospect of my advisor stepping out of the picture, the division is only going to get worse, which will only make finishing with degree and a continuing desire to look for an academic job more difficult. Smack.

I worked on my paper, listened to some music, tried to just work and get it out of my head. It doesn't change what I need to do now, I reasoned. A few hours later, I took a break. I checked my e-mail to see if I had gotten the troll's "love letter". I figured I may as well just get it all over with. Nope, no letter. But there was an e-mail in the "Unboyfriend" folder.
Let's see what Tom had to say.
Subject: Questions about cats
Hi (PFG), someone is giving away kitties and I was thinking about one. It is 12 weeks old but has not had shots. What are some of the "rules" of thumb about getting kitties-thanks-t

Smack.

This has placed me into a nasty dilemma. Do I respond or not? And if so, what do I say? A little back story. This is Tom's second e-mail in less than a week. The first one came soon after the whole bringing his new girlfriend to the dissertation defense party thing. That e-mail was about electronic voice phenomena of all things. In it, he asked me to write back and tell him what I heard in the attached wave he found on a website about EVP and what I thought of the acoustic qualities and such.

Initially, I contemplated writing back and saying "I think I hear a voice saying 'Tom, what would your flat assed humorless girlfriend think if she knew you were writing to me?'". For a couple of hours, I was very tempted to reply with a re-synthesized wave that included a distorted voice saying "Booooooo! Tom's new girlfriend has an ass like an oversized ibook - Boooooo!" I chose not to respond instead. This is my preferred option when I am considering doing something I know I will probably regret for one reason or another. Hey, being over 30 does have its perks. I've learned I do not always need to make understanding the reason for reservations a requirement of heeding them.

I want to treat this second e-mail the way I treated the EVP e-mail, no response, but I'm finding that difficult. I believe, in retrospect, that part of why I was able to squelch the "ass like an ibook" and similar impulses was that I knew they were childish and came from a desire to be hurtful, neither of which are behaviors I want to give free rein to. In this situation though, it's a much more noble desire, and one that is at least as deeply ingrained as the "fuck you" impulse is. I keep thinking this is a kitty who might end up neglected and unsocialized, one of those adorable cats brought into a shelter because the owner just can't be saddled with the huge responsibility of taking care of anyone or anything other than themselves.

Yes. I know, really I do. It's obvious that this is tripping off some of my unresolved anger at the way Tom acted in the relationship, you know, the whole reason I had to shoot it like it was a dying animal, blah blah blah. Which is why the e-mail is still sitting unanswered in my "unboyfriend" folder.

I give up. I'm going to bed. Time to reboot and hope tomorrow turns out better.


* = while the ultimate effect is (d), the reasons are (a) and (b). Like most evil shitwads on this world, my division head is motivated to act rotten by a combo of an unacknowledged selfish streak and an implicit belief that no one else is as real or human as he is. Someone like this in power can do a lot of harm. Also someone like this should stick with neutral tones in the brown/salmon range for lipsticks, rouges, and polish. Crimson and other "cool" tones do not work well with the shitwad in power pesonality type.