Karma police

The karma police have been busy in my department.

Remember my division head? You know, the one who recently sent out the "informal" evaluations to all the grad students, the one who decided immediately upon taking the role of division head that all the PhD requirements - including writing and defending the dissertation - could be completed in 5 years (and applied this retroactively to people who had entered the program under an entirely different set of requirements, faculty, and structure), the one who intervened to protect his new student from university action for calling a fellow first year a "fucking bitch" and saying she used her "feminine behavior" to get out of working or thinking for herself (the division head's student said this because the other first year was in his shared lab talking with one of his lab mates and he was in a bad mood), the one whose wife (my lab "manager") was granted numerous allowances and exceptions in her long, unremarkable trip through the program including but not limited to continuing to be funded well past the five year mark and being given a job which she has demonstrated she either cannot do or does not take seriously enough to do.

I just found out he has Lyme disease.

Normally, I feel very bad for people who get it. Even if it is not complicated either by antibiotic resistance or co-infection, it sucks a lot. My division head has one of the co-infections, so that means he's liable to have a rougher time of it than is considered normal. I feel it is probably wrong of me to derive a deeply pleasing satisfaction from knowing he is sick with the same thing I caught, but right now I am having a hard time reconciling that with how I feel.

This man has been evaluating me as seriously behind in my degree progress for two years in a row now. He's had no regard for the medical problems I've had since I got Lyme - the Lyme itself or the sequelae. Before he became division head, a couple of faculty members gave me shit in social contexts about when I would get better, what was wrong with me that I was still sick, etc. The criticisms were not formal or official mind you, and none of them were directly in charge of evaluating me back then. Still, I offered the then division head documentation about the medical shit. She said it was unnecessary, that they knew what had happened and would work with me to make sure I had the accomodations I needed. Problem is, I let them talk me into taking my prelims early (after two years) and now I'm still trying to catch up on work and research requirements that slid when I was super duper sick.

I guess my current division head sees all of that as not his problem because the start of it was before his time. That would be fine if he would not forget it slowed me down A WHOLE LOT right when I needed to be kicking ass in this program, or if he would remember I am only starting my fifth year in the program and so even by his standards, I've got a year before I move into the realm of lingering. The evaluations without consideration of what happened to me really grind down my spirit. It makes me wish I'd just left grad school back in 2001 rather than transfer into this department in 2002.

If you want to call all of this a chip on my shoulder, go ahead. I'd call it a perfectly justified mountain.

My sister put it well. Clearly he didn't understand how much this disease can affect your life, and it seems he is not going to come to that understanding through any normal social means. Therefore, it makes sense to feel some vindication/justification/satisfaction at the thought of his illness because maybe a personal experience with it will enlighten him a little.

But that's not all. He's not the only one. It turns out another of our faculty also has Lyme. It's Tim, who I'm not sure if I've mentioned before. He's our most junior faculty member. Been here for only a few years and so far every grad who has worked for or with him has switched to someone else in a semester or less. He has money and lots of neato tech stuff and he has only one grad student research assistant. This is extremely rare, as usually grads are so desperate for money or research experience that they will work with a wide variety of assholes. This speaks volumes about the man. An oversimplification would be to say that he treats grads who work for or with him like packmules and he has no clue at all about how to mentor and manage the people who work in his lab. He and his wife were part of a "hire one get one free" pair and he was the freebie. Aside from all the reasons I have to severely disrespect him as a colleague, he also sabotaged my dissertation data collection this past semester, which has earned him my animosity.

So when my former division head mentioned that both of these men have Lyme disease, I had a very, very hard time keeping myself from dancing a little jig in her office.