It's Thursday

Today is officially "Don't take shit too seriously" day. It is for me at least. I was hoping to try this earlier in the week, but the hormonal storm that is my period on progesterone made it impossible to take anything at a level lower than very, very seriously.

My arms hurt, my job is ending, one of the few people I like at work has been told to stop talking to me (long story, I'll write later when I actually know more about it), the holidays are coming, I dislike christmas on a less bad year but this year I think I'm really going to want to drop kick some lawn ornament Santas. I can feel all this stress over things which are largely out of my control building in me. And so today I've resolved to try to let shit go, and what can't be let go, I'm going to try to laugh off. I don't have to take the job too seriously because now that I know there's no way in hell I'm going perm because they have a bias against temps, my work consists of not fucking things up too much. This is liberating if approached correctly. E.g., most if not all of my problems with K-cop result not simply from her being her but from me being me too. I want to assume that people have logical reasons for doing shit. When I discover evidence that they don't, it just blows my mind so completely. Moreover, when I believed that there was even an eensty chance of this job being permanent or longer term temp (or of these people being good connections to find another job), I cared more about not following K-cop's effed up reasoning.

The big problem with this kind of reaction is that I have the anti-poker face. I can't keep the look of what I imagine is shock tinged with outrage and/or disgust and/or contempt off it. This does not help matters because even idiots like K-cop can read that level and type of emotion when it's displayed right there at eye level.

So if K-cop is in my face with her moronic crap today, rather than start down this path to horror at the largely unexamined self serving idiocy, I'm just going to laugh at her.

To get me started on not taking shit too seriously day, I thought I'd share this video.

oh boy

Today I noticed an ad for a book called "The Trouble with Boys". That tired shit again? It's so January 2006. Oh wait, it turns out the author of the article (Peg Tyre) has written a same titled book which was just published.

I can sum up the arguments in the article as follows: boys' needs aren't being met because boys are made of snips and snails and puppy dogs tails, thus they like to get up and move around and girls like to sit quietly like little sugar and spice-full ladies. Therefore any educational context where students are not treated like monkeys in a zoo is an environment where boys will not thrive (and by "thrive" we mean dominate) and everyone knows boys just DESERVE to thrive even if it is at the expense of not only other students' learning but safety.

I'm going to assume Ms. Tyre expands on this general theme in her recent book devoted to the topic of the boys' entitlement movement.

Interestingly, within just 9 months of Tyre's Newsweek article alerting everyone to the crisis of boys not thriving in schools, prompting the claims that boys were "under attack", the US had two high profile mass assaults which provided what I'd consider clear evidence of girls being under actual attack. Platte Canyon High School - September 27, 2006 and West Nickel Mines school - October 2, 2006.

So my thoughts on this Wednesday morning are this. When our boys are similarly systematically hunted and assaulted, then I will respond to calls of boys being under attack. Until then, Ms. Tyre and the other boys' entitlement advocates can fuck right off.

sign of the times

Last summer, I was at a crucial point in my decision process about whether or not to go forward with my PhD or to "cut and run". With most of the faculty from my own academic concentration rating somewhere between "clueless" and "douchebag" on the functionally useless scale, I had all but stopped trying to find academics in my department to talk out my problems with. And then I ran across this guy, this one junior professor from another academic unit in my department, and we had a really nice chat.

Well I stopped by his office again yesterday when I was on campus to officially drop out (i.e. meet with the dean and say "dude, I'm out of here...now how do I do this in a way that will not tax me in terms of me money, time, or my precious little tolerance for faculty based chicanery?"). Turns out this fellow was just up for tenure review this past year and didn't get it.

Oh. My. God.

He is an EXCELLENT faculty member. He has grant money. He has an active research program. He has great data. He's doing high impact research. His students LOVE him. He goes the extra mile for graduate and undergraduate students and for the department - the list of how would just be crazy long and it would sound like I was describing mother fucking theresa. But he didn't have enough first author publications. Thus, the department's finding was that if they could vote on the two separately, they would (a) give him tenure but (b) not promote him. This is the same deal which was given to a junior faculty member in my own academic unit this past year. The professor in my own unit is an unctuous bastard who routinely scoops the graduate student slave labor he employs, who runs a research sweat shop staffed by a gaggle of uninformed and undertrained undergraduates, and whose motto could quite reasonably be "Cramer can cram it!"

For some reason, which I do not fully understand possibly because I didn't want to pry for more information than this (outside my unit) professor was volunteering, this professor did NOT get the tenure without raise deal.

And so I left his office yesterday feeling more shaken than I had about actually officially dropping out a few hours before. On the, uh, bright (?) side, this embittering news only strengthens my conviction that I have made the right decision in leaving my program.

OMG - my cell phone is cooking my brain!

I just heard about the cell phone/popcorn thing this weekend. The person who told me about it was not telling it in a "funny" way. He was telling it in a "omg think about what it's doing to your brain!?" way. I have a strong streak of skepticism and so I googled it. Apparently it was a "stealth marketing" campaign which was supposed to be "funny". On the CNN video clip below, the announcer asks "and what about the idea that videos try to scare people who hold cell phones close to their heads?" The response to this or a similar question from the CEO of the headset company behind the hoax is "we really never meant to eh ehm insinuate any of that ehm...the truth is that it was funny..." The jerk goes on to chuckle about stealth marketing. The news guy obliges him with a giggle, which was to me entirely creepy.

back around

One of the faculty members in my department has Lyme. While this is not the faculty member I most wished a nasty case of Lyme on - yes, I admit that I have often harbored such wishes regarding at least three faculty members from the program I am leaving - this is the faculty member who most overtly and vocally supports hazing of grad students.

not-bot

In a comment on another post*, AM asked where a recent ad commentary I had posted went. It was up for a few days, and then I took it down. It's back up, but will be down again in the future. The reason for all this is that the post got a hit from a corporate data miner. Here's some info about the program that hit my blog:
"...through the monitoring of blogs and other online public forums, we have the most information about online consumer sentiment and behavior, allowing our clients to make more informed business decisions." Yes, one of those "business decisions" could be whether or not to sue someone who is commenting on how the business is conducted if that commentary includes examples of images or other proprietary elements. Think I'm paranoid? Consider the following, from the data mining program's website:
"Organizations are...realizing that monitoring and protecting brand and copyright usage has become....harder with the rise of the Internet. Phishing, spoofing sites, phony links, misleading photos – there are literally thousands of ways a brand or copyrighted images can be misused. The rise of blogging and recent amendments to fair-use laws in the United States that allow journalistic use of copyrighted material without permission, have made it even more challenging."

Thus, this commentary may move around.

*I deleted the comment since it included a word which would greatly enable future searches.

Dump day

As you can perhaps surmise from the title of this post, today was not a good day. The list is just sort of depressing crap, some trivial and some not trivial. While I'm a fan of venting, putting it all down here isn't going to help right now. I know because I just started to and realized it was only winding me up more. So here's the abridged version.

- A____'s parents can't afford their house and are moving under less than exhaustively planned circumstances next week. Everyone's sick, so A____'s doing a very large amount of the work. Just what he wanted, another move. He's so damned busy and stressed over this (understandably) that he probably can't go to the wedding this weekend with me, which makes for the not super pleasant prospect of going alone. I tried calling some pals, but no one is up for it, or more to the point, everyone's out of town, chronically unreliable, or sick.

- Along the everyone's sick theme, my cat Max is sick. The only thing that was odd in his bloodwork from last week was an elevated calcium level. The vet told me today that this can be a sign of a particular kind of cancer that attacks or affects the intestine, which his symptoms are consistent with. We were really hoping it was thyroid, not because that would be great but because it would be less bad.

-In about two weeks, I will be unemployed and nothing (zero) has come of all the applying I've been doing. Last night, between the cat and the prospect of joblessness, I couldn't get to sleep. This hasn't helped my mood. Not one bit.

So it's officially Dump Day here in Connecticant.
I'm hoping tomorrow is better.

Ah....

Sometimes in life, you just have to sit and wait for it to come around. I love the "back around" moments.
Yahoo/Google deal is anti-competitive: Microsoft
Seattle (Reuters)
Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday that any definitive agreement between Yahoo Inc and Google Inc would make the market for Web search less competitive.

Granted, it's not as deeply or personally satisfying as finding out this Fall about the marital strife and upcoming divorce of one of the professor's who had been using my IMMENSELY slow progress through my PhD program* as a lesson for junior grad students. It isn't as warm and fuzzy as how I expect I'll feel when I hear that my (former) department head's smoldering type two diabetes contributed to the first of many toe amputations two months after he's had his first heart attack (yeah, keep eating them skittles!). But Microsoft making a plea to "anti-competitive" does have a touch of satisfying irony, doesn't it?

* = I'd just finished 5 years, had 3 publications, and was collecting data for my dissertation proposal when I discovered he'd been using me as a cautionary tale of a (mal)lingering grad student

Lacking

I was looking over my site meter this morning and seeing that a rather large number of people end up here by typing funny shit into a google image search. Up until now, it took them to a post about Archie McPhee and christmas shopping in 2005. Other than cjblue commenting that she almost bought me some of the very items I had been admiring at Archie McPhee's, there wasn't much remarkable about this post. Oh how disappointed these people must be. I'd like to know what the logic is that governs this selection of search terms.

Last night one of my neighbors kept propping open the outside door. This meant the heat was on full blast, roasting at least A____, me, and two of our other neighbors I ran into while I was closing the door a second time. It did occur to me that they could have been lying, but there are good, non-altruism assuming reasons for that being very unlikely. So some dipshit is propping the door. So what? Aside from being worried that our landlord will raise the rent (an issue for me and A____ who are no longer on a year lease), it means we will run out of oil faster. We've run out between 11 PM and about 1 or 2 AM the last few times. This is no fun because it means (a) NO ONE gets heat. If these idiots think their underheated apartment is cold now, imagine how much colder it will be when the whole building is freezing. (b) the oil line to the furnace will clog because it sucks up sediment from the low end of the oil tank. This happened the last time and the filter had been changed within the past year. Clogged means it won't run or won't run well.

I had occasion to wonder what kind of reasoning leads to the behavior of my neighbor last night. I decided that more than being purely self interested, it is childish. That is, self interest would say "I'm cold and I want to be warmer. I don't care if making myself warmer make others uncomfortable. My warmth is the most important thing." So then this person being warm should be a governing principle in the decision of how to act. While propping the door open on a cold night so the cold night air floods the hallway where the thermostat is will make the furnace run hard and might warm the colder apartments, it will also increase the chances of us running out of oil. No oil means NO heat, not simply insufficient heat. And that outcome would seem to be directly in opposition to the governing principle of maintaining warmth.

Ok so this is not supposed to be like some fucking greek philosopher style argument. My point is just that if you're trying to keep warm, wouldn't you think that you'd avoid doing thing which might make you warmer in the short run or for a limited set of times but which has the risk at ANY point of making you much, much colder?

That's the childish part. I don't mean childish like petulant, I mean childish like someone who hasn't mastered object permanence.

All of this is just a long way of me wondering What the Hell is Wrong with People?

not ok

At my apartment building, there are two parking spaces per unit. Unfortunately my two are next to the parking spaces belonging to guy who lives across the hall. This is unfortunate because the guy who lives across the hall is an idiot. Let's call him Bumble.

Earlier this afternoon, I had been coding data at home. From just outside my open window came the sound of a horn being leaned on. I looked out to see activity in Bumble's parking spaces. Two cars with hoods up, wires running between them. And each sitting in his own car was Bumble and some guy, buddy of Bumble. As the horn continued to blare, Bumble and buddy got out of the cars and stood near the front ends, both looking perplexed and a little embarrassed.

"How long do you think it'll take him to figure out he can stop it by disconnecting the horn?" I asked A____. We debated, given the degree of intelligence and capacity for creative, abstract thought Bumble has shown in the past, we predicted the horn might continue to go off for hours.

Since the "getting some research work done this afternoon" plan was shot until Bumble managed to kill the horn, A____ and I decided to run some errands, get iced coffees, go for a walk around the park downtown. We were out for a few hours. When we got home, the horn was silent. Bumble's car was still sitting there, unmoved, hood open and waiting for more idiocy. Bumble's other parking space was empty. Buddy of Bumble had been traded out for an old geezer with a capped pickup. The pickup's hood was open and now the pickup was wired to the Bumble-mobile. I didn't think to ponder what this meant at the time since I was mostly annoyed about finding a pickup in my parking space.

(Now that I think of it though, what was Bumble trying to accomplish? Did he think that the buddy-wagon wasn't the right TYPE for the Bumble-mobile? Was the electricity coming out of Geezer's car somehow more compatible, or higher grade or something?)

I came into the apartment building looking for Bumble.
"Oh yeah, they parked in your spot," he said in a low and strangely conspiratorial voice. Drawn out vowels, falsely high pitch with falling phrasal tones. It's hard to describe the tone - if you can't get it from this I suspect you'd just have to hear it to understand. It's a tone I associate with teenage girls who are trying to appear (sincerely or not) contrite to one another. I've noticed Bumble uses this voice a lot when he's being a douchebag.

However, I tend to listen to WHAT people say nearly as closely as how they say it.
In response to my repeatedly saying various versions of "I need you to not park in my space/tell your guests not to park in my space" he said:
"I didn't think you'd be home so soon."
"I wasn't outside when they parked."
"They aren't my 'friends'" (this in reply to my having said "Look, I just want you to be sure to tell your friends it's not ok to park in my spot in the future.")
"They're not, like, kids." (said after I restated above, this time amending 'friends' to 'associates')
"I didn't know they parked there."

And finally, "It won't happen again."

He could have saved me the irritation of having to insist on the point by just going straight to "It won't happen again." I didn't even need an apology. Just an assurance that he understood my parking space is not his spill over space. Instead, he kept up with his strangely whiney blather. The overdone reaction-tone but with a pile of nonstop and sometimes contradictory excuses are his hallmark response in this kind of situation. Did I mention the clicking noises? Those "tsk" type sounds. It's very primatey. Overall, the entire effect is one of utter insincerity when you match up the apparently conciliatory purpose this extra-lexical information conveys with the communicative intent provided by the words themselves.

When I encounter this sort of - oh what to call it, disembled argument? Obfuscated negation? - I find myself quite irritated. Practically speaking, it is a discourse practice which seems meant to elicit an acquiescence. Which I refuse to give. I refuse to respond with a femmy "Oh it's OK!" because I think this is ultimately something which can (and does) get interpreted as "Oh go ahead and ignore my boundaries!"

It is not ok. It's ok that someone made a mistake. Sure. But it's not ok for someone to park in my space.

Interactions like this are why some people consider me a mega-huge bitch. I suppose I could work on being less aggro in tone myself. I don't know. Should I make the extra effort of removing the sincere emotion from my voice when I am dealing with a person who is heaping on what is a totally duplicitous affect in an attempt to sugar coat the line of crap they are feeding me?

Nice chat

I had a nice chat with a faculty member from another group in my department today. It was unexpected and very cool. I just wanted to share this since usually I crab about how much grad school and my department suck. Sometimes you remember there are good people too. We connected on the "is everyone here on crazy pills?" feelings experienced by a nontraditional student who is struggling with the decision to keep going (or not) for a brass ring which she strongly suspects is less a ring and more a ringer. Conversations with people like this help me feel less totally misanthropic.

It was just in time too. I was feeling pretty hateful about my department today.

sexism

I have of late had several interactions with people, mostly male, about sexism.

In general they do not go so well. They do not degenerate into name calling, barely and only through immense patience and a damned good sense of humor on my part (no really, I AM laughing at them usually). However, they always leave me tired and somewhat repulsed. Oh I know what it feels like. There was this place in Michigan called Heath Beach I think. It was not much more than a slightly large, chlorinated farm pond. It was chlorinated mud full of people, mostly kids swimming and peeing and their attending adults standing knee deep in the muck - a long neck in one hand and a cigarette clenched between their lips which they removed with the free hand only long enough to yell something like "Krystal-Lynne, you stop holding your brother Kyle down under the water!"

After these interactions, I find that I often I feel like I went swimming at Heath Beach.

There are some, mostly female, who will think me silly for trying to have a decent if difficult interaction with people about sexism at all. If someone doesn't come with some sort of anti-sexism pedigree, I should say "fuck it, fuck them, and fuck that". This goes against a good slice of my core reasoning, core reasoning being part of what keeps me chugging. This chunk goes something like "If I'm going to be part of this, I will not be a passenger."

In short, I do try to drive the bus sometimes. It's that or let it do things like drive off the cliff, and since I'm ON the bus, I have a problem with it going off the cliff.

Party

It's sunday. Tomorrow I have to go into school and explain to my advisor why the sisyphean task of reconstructing a particular research project which should have been abandoned like a turd in a litter box will take more than "some" of my research hours. Rather than filling me with dread, which would be the reasonable response, the thought of this meeting fills me with a sense of wanting to hand out ass kickings.

I believe this is evidence I exist in a somewhat disturbed state. Fortunately, I have an appointment with my shrink scheduled for soon after the meeting. Lately, I have had more interest in my dissertation topic again. It's a nice feeling. Like rediscovering a hobby you once enjoyed. However, being on campus has been a sincere pain in my ass.

Friday was a talk by a guy who might get hired to head up the research facility I tend to get some funding through. He would also be a part time faculty member at my university, one of the shrinking pool of possible graduate advisors, and essentially a barricade to a full time faculty hire anytime soon.

Before the talk was a Q&A with grads. The guy came in 10 minutes late, apologized for being 5 minutes late, and then started lecturing us. I had dragged my ass in early to make it to this meeting for both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. I feel grads should be more involved in the big decisions - even if that involvement pragmatically translates into something barely better than token inclusion - so I would find unbearably hypocritical to not take advantage of a grad inclusive event when it is offered. My attendance was made extrinsically important by virtue of the "not involved" discussion I had with my advisor a short time ago*. (As a full professor in our field, my advisor really should understand that extrinsic motivation is arguably less stable than intrinsic. But I digress...)

The pre-packaged discussion about himself and about research at our research facility went on well past the point of a plausible introduction or innocuous preamble. Moreover, it had a sanctimonious, condescending "rah rah research!" tone and content which made it hard for me to to keep the contempt and supreme irritation from showing on my face. I tried like hell but I suspect at best I might have acheived an aspect of constipation rather than utter peevishness.

Finally, I couldn't take it. I am not so naïve as to think what I did at this point was a politically wise move. I plead the intrinsic/extrinsic conflict as well as the fact that I was up and in a good two hours earlier than my meds and intestines normally allow. I knew I would pay for my early departure for several days and I was supremely irritated at the idea of this fellow taking my and my peers' time for granted. Continuing to sit through this lecture would have meant I was complicit in reducing an opportunity for any genuine grad participation to a completely token gesture. If not attending would be hypocrisy, then this would be outright betrayal of my principles.

I don't know if I'll leave this program with a PhD. I don't know if, regardless of my degree status, I'll leave with any hope of getting the kind of job I can do or like let alone love enough to have made the sacrifices of attending grad school worth it. But I'll be damned if I leave having compromised my personal principles so much that they are reduced to a sheen of bitter, frustrated idealism. So I raised my hand and interrupted his lecture to ask "Is this meeting going to be just a lecture or will there be a chance for questions? Because I have some questions."

During one of his answers (to a question about career paths and academic employment), he actually had the nerve to say that one should go for a PhD only if one is a truth seeker. He went on, equating success in an academic career with commitment to the goal of "truth seeking". How do people say this shit with a straight face? These are the moments which make me sincerely question whether a career in academia is the right choice for me.

After the Q&A and the talk, there was dinner. Dinner was at my DH's house. It included a truly revolting looking version of the already rather disgusting "curried cauliflower" dish which I have seen now at three academic food based venues, and it was staged mostly outdoors in a yard chock full of children, ticks, chickens, and chicken poop.

I had deet to keep away the ticks, cigarettes and a bad attitude to keep away the kids, but I hadn't counted on the chickens. As I was getting out of the car and spraying myself with bug spray, the chickens came for me. Or rather they came at me. They swarmed up to the opened passenger door making curious fowl noises. I jumped back into the car, slammed the door shut with a very unseemly scream, and scrambled over to get out on the other chicken free side.

Throughout the evening, the children chased the chickens around the yard, yelling "chicken chicken chicken!". Upon capturing a slower and stupider chicken, one of these delightful children would hold the captive proudly and carry it around for a moment before dropping it and starting the entire process over again.

Their parents must be so proud.

A____, Sharon, and I stood off to the side of the house and smoked. Sharon expressed concern that we needed to find a more secluded smoking area. "Why? We're out of the way" I said. "But DH already bitched someone out once for smoking in front of his kids. He said he 'didn't want to expose them to smokers' when someone lit up at a party here." For the love of god. The first thing DH said to every guest who arrived was "beer's out here, wine's inside the house". No "you can hang your jacket/put your bag there" or "there's appetizers in the dining room" or any of the other party greetings a host normally utters as the guests arrive. Later in the evening, DH came 'round pushing booze. First was the case of beer, which he offered to A___. A___ explained he was already on his second, and DH pressed for him to take another. DH came around again with a very large bottle of wine. And finally, he walked out with a pitcher of sangria, saying "kool aid?" and holding it up suggestively. I called him a pusher but he either didn't hear me or pretended not to.

Let's get this straight. My DH doesn't want to expose his children to smokers (not smoke, mind you, but smokers) but binge drinking is a-okay!

I fucking hate these people.


* I realize I haven't blogged about that specific conversation other than to express apprehension before hand. To catch up briefly and therefore possibly ungrammatically: although over the last year I have specifically told my advisor I am uncertain of my commitment to a career in academia, although we have had several difficult and candid conversations about the several significant "why"s for my misgivings, although during those conversations she had at least seemed not to dismiss my concerns (saying instead that she thought I could and should stay in the program and finish my degree), it seems she has forgotten them all. What remains for her is an implicit feeling that I am somewhat disengaged from the program right now. Having forgotten all the conversations means she had no source for why she suspected this in light of the fact that she sees me every week working my ass off, so she misattributed her reason for thinking this to my having only attended 1/3 of an interdepartmental talk series this semester. I clarified why she felt I wasn't as "engaged" as a good grad student should be (i.e. I said "For some reason you think I'm not engaged? Maybe you think that because I told you I wasn't last year?") After this, we talked about my health, as we often do when the issue of whether or not I can afford to have a series of temporary, underpaid, under health insured jobs post degree and she said "I'm not sure you're healthy enough to even have a job at a teaching college at this point."

I've had almost a while to think about this. I guess maybe I was supposed to counter her statement with a renewed sense of commitment to my research and to attending every department-relevant event she attends (it's ok to skip the ones she skips though, presumably). Maybe I was supposed to take it as a shock-statement meant to knock me out of my poor, malingering attitude which is needlessly impeding my progress and hindering my job options. Unfortunately, when the health problems are real, frustrating, and personally quite scary at times, the statement is simply cruel.

oh...

Sweet jumping Jesus in a bucket of catfish!

This is something which calls for lengthy and whimsical curses. I'm mad. Madder than hell right now. The scenario may not sound that bad but believe me, there is a whole long lot of back history to it. And it's bad back history.

This week, my advisor, who quite some time ago finally (mercifully) took me off a wretched paper from hell after I worked chasing down problem after problem for an embarrassingly long time, is now finally working on the paper herself. And guess what? It turns out I'm not fucking off the paper at all. Oh no. I'm off in name but not in deed. Now that she's running into all the problems I had, she's writing to me to ask about them. I can't shake this vague feeling like she thinks I owe her an explanation for someone else's fuck ups (who else's? The guy who did the study and who wrote the majority of the results/methods sections). Either that or she's just plain deluded.

In addition to asking me to continue cleaning up, sorting out, disentangling, explicating and otherwise lancing the massive festering fuck-messes which pock this paper, she has stated that she wants me to come up with a new way to resynthesize the stimuli for two of the experiments so they can be run "right". And then I am to help another grad student to do the work. Writing out all that these tasks entail would turn this into an epic rant and no one is up for that - certainly not me at quarter of 1 AM. The short version is that she's asking me to (a) work on something we both agreed we'd all be better off with me NOT working on (b) work on something which I have no time or inclination for and (c) oversee a multi-staged task involving interpersonal bullshit with the other grad student and which will take up about 2 to 3 times my paid time for her this summer.

The kicker, the thing that makes me madder than a hornet on PCP is that in asking me to do all this, she said I should use "some of my supported time" to do it. "Supported time" means the hour appointment I am paid for. My time is 5 hours a week. This job is at least a 10 hour one if she wants product anytime in the next month. And I should use SOME OF those five hours to do a 10 to 15 hour job. Oh and did I mention I don't get paid for a month starting next week?

Holy Mary mother of god on a hot pocket.

It kinda makes me kinda want to put a time clock in the lab so I can punch in and out. What part of "not my job anymore and you're not paying me enough to continue making it my job" isn't clear to faculty?

A diamond is disgusting

I think I just vomited in my mouth.

I was reading this article on a town in Massachusetts where a proposal has been made to double the excise tax on SUVs (which makes me chuckle) and I noticed an ad for a diamond seller/jeweler.

Around mother's day and valentine's day, all jewelers are diamond peddlers. One of these days I am going to make that diamond ad parody for the station, I swear.

For now I'll suffer with choking down the bile when I see something like this ad, which has text which starts with "This mother's day..." under a picture of a man being kissed on the lips by a woman. The man's head is the main focus of the frame with the woman who is planting one on him barely making it into the shot. We can see all of his big head but only the important part of hers (her face) as she holds the man's face in her manicured hands (no pigment in that polish though). That was enough to get the stomach churning. What launched it was the trademarked logo under the company name: "Every kiss begins with _____"
(where ______ is the name of the jewelry/diamond company)

Every on the closed lips oedipal kiss might indeed begin with them, however my completely non-oedipal smooches are non of their fucking business and began with a desire for human intimacy. Not feminine decoration bestowed on me by a man.

Douchebag du jour (V)

Today's douchebag is Mark Rowan, editor for the CCSU student newspaper (The Recorder).

Back in February, CCSU Recorder opinion editor John Petroski wrote a column called "Rape only hurts if you fight it" (text is here). After intense and wide spread protests of the paper's decision to run the column, apologies were issued.

One of those "apologies" came from Mark Rowan. It was a "We're sorry if..." apology, the kind which should be like a razor blade to the tongue of the sincerely contrite person but which literally slithers out of the mouths of remorseless douchebags.

Today, Rowan was in the paper again. The context was an article about the findings of a committee formed at CCSU which was meant to identify ways to ensure "...greater journalistic responsibility on the part of the newspaper". My summary of the findings as presented in today's news is that they don't even count as a slap on the wrist. In short, the committe decided that those who write for the paper are accountable only to what passes for personal conscience to guide a set of sophomoric, shock-jock informed standards of misogynist journal-tainment.

Here's what Mr. Rowan said in repsonse to the findings of the committee.

Recorder editor Mark Rowan...said the task force's recommendations would help the newspaper become more accountable to the student body. But he added that he felt the newspaper was already moving in that direction before the furor over the rape article.

Rowan added that he felt that some segments of the campus population would never be satisfied, no matter what steps the newspaper took.

"There's been a witch hunt from the day the article appeared," he said. "This should be about improving the paper, not punishment."

And here's some of the text of the column which kicked off this "witch hunt". I'm missing it. What part of this reflects the trend of moving in a direction of being more accountable to the student body?
In actuality, rape’s advantages can very much be seen today. Take ugly women, for example. If it weren’t for rape, how would they ever know the joy of intercourse with a man who isn’t drunk? In a society as plastic-conscious as our own, are we really to believe that some man would ever sleep with a girl resembling a wildebeest if he didn’t have a few schnapps in him? Of course he wouldn’t—at least no self-respecting man would—but there in lies the beauty of rape. No self-respecting man would rape in the first place, so ugly women are guaranteed a romp with not only a sober man, but a bad boy too; and we all know how much ladies like the bad boy.

Thank god for free speech. Because of that I can say Mr. Rowan is a douchebag. I can go on to explain he's a douchebag because he has fulfilled numerous douchebag requirements such as being a man who, in response to valid, shared community perceptions of his committing/defending injurious sexism, cries "WITCH HUNT!!!"

Why do I find it so irksome when men use the term "witch hunt" in a situation like this one? Aside from the illogical and utterly contradictory inversion of victim and perpetrator which it necessarily entails in such cases, I am overwhelmed by the irony of a man claiming alleigance with the victims - predominantly female - of exactly the same kind of callous, violent sexism he himself is being censured for advocating and advancing.

Unlike today's douchebag, as a reasonable and thinking person, I take comfort in the idea that there is a significant portion of the campus population which will not be placated by soft pedaled slithery platitudes like Mr. Rowan's.

DWNW

Excerpted from The Washington Post

Black, Hispanic, and white drivers are equally likely to be pulled over by police, but blacks and Hispanics are much more likely to be searched and arrested, a Justice Department study found. Police also were much more likely to threaten or use force against blacks and Hispanics than against whites in any encounter.

The study, released yesterday by the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, covered police contacts with the public during 2005 and was based on interviews by the Census Bureau with nearly 64,000 people age 16 or over.
...
- African Americans (9.5 percent) and Hispanics (8.8 percent) were much more likely to be searched than whites (3.6 percent).

- African Americans (4.5 percent) were more than twice as likely as whites (2.1 percent) to be arrested. Hispanic drivers were arrested 3.1 percent of the time.

Among all police-public contacts, force was used 1.6 percent of the time. But officers were more likely to use force against or to threaten to use force against African Americans (4.4 percent) and Hispanics (2.3 percent) than against whites (1.2 percent).

I know this is probably preaching to the choir (all two of you) but I couldn't let this one go uncommented. This is a good non-gender/sex based example of continuing "subtle" bias in our culture. Sometimes I get the sense that americans in general believe bigotry is a myth so when there is evidence of it I personally think it is important to discuss it.

I've noticed there is a large number of people who are apparently "reasonable", who hold a set of unexamined principles which conform to late 20th century cultural ideals, and many of whom I think have lived lives which are in general socially, emotionally, and spiritually relatively undemanding. Let's call them "the masses" for convenience.

Members of "the masses" act as if they believe they and their ilk are not sexist, racist, anti-gay, fearful they will catch cripple cooties, or hateful of old people. Most of us like to think such attitudes do not exist in our worlds and when we do acknowledge them we ascribe them to others, to caricatures of people (who may well be people themselves but who are so extreme as to count as something other in the mass mind - e.g. "those white supremacists like the ones we saw on Jerry Springer/Jeraldo/etc."), places ("red state", rural), and times (anything before nineteen sixty something, right?).

We are so fucking wrong. Sexism, racism, hatred of homosexuals, old people, sick and disabled people all exist in vibrant diverse attitudes of our neighbors, friends, coworkers, and other community members. Yes they do. When we hear or see things in those arenas which bear the hallmarks of bigotry, we will jump through hoops to explain them away: Bigots are not from NY/NJ/DC/CA (insert state here), are not young, and smell like Strom Thurmond, therefore my friend having said "that's so ghetto" is not racist and the fact that I can't finish a full sentence without using the word "gay" to mean something disparaging or otherwise negative is not anti-gay. Can't be. I'm not a bigot.

I'm not sure why this line and style thought is so alluring. It seems like it would involve so much energy to contrive and believe such a huge lie. I'd love to think it's because people want to believe good things about themselves, others, and humanity in general but I am about 99% that isn't true.

I think it's because people don't want to acknowledge that others might not be having a great time, or that there is no "great time" to be had (you know, the one we all can get if we just try hard enough...someday you might even be president! (some restriction apply, see all white male founding fathers for details)).

As a woman, abuse survivor, and semi-professional thorn in the side, I've found members of "the masses" sincerely and deeply do not like to be told or in any way discover that some people's lives are significantly not ok. In general, I've found people of all walks show a very strong preference for refusing to see or acknowledge that many of the systems and circles they exist in rely on principles of inequity - i.e., principles which serve to exclude or limit the full participation of some set(s) of individuals who have a priori been designated as "other".

My more strictly feminist experience suggests the reason for this blindness (and anger) is that to see clearly would mean to see that what one has is not necessarily what one deserves and that threatens some part of the sense of self worth. However, it seems sometimes to be baser than that even.

And it is with this cheery attitude that I greet my Monday.

Shameless

A website I visit frequenly has an annoying ad on it. It's for a drink being promoted by a chain coffee shop. The tag line is "Snack Shamelessly" and it features the drink being held up close to the viewer by a rather young and wholesome looking young woman who is smiling around her finger, which is stuck in her mouth.

It's the pinky finger.
Because she's dainty and wholesome.

What's amusing, ok well one thing that is amusing, is that when I first read the logo, I read it as "Smack shamelessly". Which to me made somewhat more sense with the young lady presumably having made such a mess that she has to suck it off her fingers, you know, noisily, because it's so yummy and you want to get all of it, even that bit that dripped down the side. Turns out it's just another annoying reference to weight and food guilt. Complete with a sexualized image.

Here's this wholesome young lady who has finally found a guilt free way to enjoy herself. She's snacking so shamelessly on her topical fruit smoothie that she's thrown all decorum to the wind and is sucking her own fingers. Has the smoothie aroused some hidden lust demon in her?

I suppose we should be thankful this shameless hussy still has the decency to suck on a doughnut shop straw and her own finger rather than channel her shameless decadence into other sucking activities.

Update: It now also has text that says "I feel so good. Do you?" This is so close to "was it good for you" that I want to punch the monitor. What's super odd is that the food guilt supposition seems so very female targeted yet this written message is very stereotypically heterosexually male focused. Oh wait! I think I have it. Maybe it's the smoothie who is stating that it feels good and asking the woman if it was good for her too. Silly me attributing animism and agenthood to the female in an ad. Shoulda known the smoothie was doing the talking. I mean, of course that chick can't talk - what with her finger stuck in her mouth and all.

No Pain...

No pain.

I'm taking a break from my mountain of grading. It's amazing how much faster you go through them when you've decided to accept that this is just grade generation. This is a nice change of attitude as it means I do not need to bother commenting my grades. I can simply assign them.

And this is why I say I need to get out of grad school before I become a complete asshole.

A___ and I were talking today about the term "No pain, no gain" as it is applied and realized in graduate education. I was asking for a term describing the philosophy of glamorizing the "hoop jumping", self eroding work-a-holic aspects of our program. Possibly most or at least many programs in fact. This is not merely my own jaundiced view (a commenter in fact refered to my writing as "jaundiced" not long ago - hence I feel justafied in calling myself "jaundiced". And coincidentally, my liver enzymes reflected that I was in fact jaundiced for a prolonged period in 2005. So there you go.)

No, this is not just me. One student, an older person who returned to school although she had a rewarding career already well underway because she couldn't live without the title "Dr." and needed the frequent cookies and pats on the head which are part and parcle of being a student, told me she didn't mind "the hoops". "I'm good at jumping!" she said as if this were an asset.

To me, hoops as in the term "jumping through hoops" implies a somewhat useless or extra-relevant but costly and/or difficult task. Why someone would feel such strong, expressive pride in their ability to do this is beyond me. Seriously. However, the older cookie and head patting student expressed an attitude which I see promoted by the faculty who do interact with grads and reflected back by the grads.

I overheard two younger grads from another related program talking about time. "Oh my god, I only worked like 30 hours this week...I am so lazy! I'm just like I know some weeks I work 60, but right now I did 30 and I feel like I worked so much. I used to do more. I'm getting lazy!" I piped up with the advice that some weeks you do 30, some you do 60 or more, and that in the end it all evens out. If you're getting your work done at 30, use that extra time to stay positive.

It was as if I were lecturing herring on the current choices for US presidential candidates. Honest. Not a negative response, just a blank one. Just bubbles and fins.

This attitude is promoted and rewarded by the faculty. A set of them have a habit of using the following terms to refer to ideal grad students: "zombies", "slaves", "miserable bastards", "miserable blighters", "sacks", "poor fools", "unhappy sods". These terms are said in contexts which convey some kind of appropriateness of the meaning, as if we all should be this way. As if the traits associated with these terms were good positive ones we should aspire to. We live at the poverty line, have substandard housing, and some of us have family or other extra-curricular commitments and demands on our time, money, and resources. When these things add up and a grad ends up hospitalized, ill, called away for a sick or dead relative, or simply seen dragging his or her carcass through the halls, those terms are applied. And strangely, well to me at least, many of the grads respond as if they have been comforted or reassured. I see nothing at all reassuring in knowing my faculty consider their students' misfortunes cute.

So A___ and I were talking about this today. My point was that we don't all have the luxury of circumstances, past or present, to do the hoops. Those of us in that position are trudging along doing what we can when we can. Insisting we use our "spare" resources for graceful hoop jumping is in effect insisting on pain. That glamorized pain is something which is seen as not real pain or suffering, just good character-building fun. The "poor blighter" faculty member once told me this shit "built character". I told him I had plenty of character already, thanks.

No pain, no gain has been misapplied to this endeavor and has come to be seen as meaning pain = gain, in a very real sense. The amount of pain you are willing to publicly subject yourself to (e.g. multiple all nighters, over-loads in teaching, on demand research product with no research/writing mentoring) is a measure of how well you are doing. It's small wonder I am finding the culture of academia problematic. If it is built on the assumption of chronic personal over-extention for the degree, how does someone whose emotional and physical resources are already largely spoken for manage to get by?

Nearly all of the people I've known in grad school with who have left or are leaving are all assault/abuse survivors. I wonder if that correlates with a low threshold and tolerance for seemingly gratiutous self inflicted pain?

Jobs

Ever apply for a job you know you would be perfect for and you don't get it? I have. It sucks.

So now I'm back to the drawing board for funding next year. It's not just about funding (i.e. having barely enough money to live on while in grad school and having at least a half time appointment so I get a tuition waiver and medical benefits). It's about my career. Some time ago, I realized a couple of things about academia. Most notably, I realized I don't want to be an instructor in a system like the one we currently have. I don't want to deal with a grueling job search where I will compete with hundreds of other highly qualified candidates for the honor of being an exploited lecturer. I don't want to have to pad my CV with publications (which means putting more energy into getting published than doing anything else, including good research) just to have a chance to get a job where I will most likely have no time or resources to actually DO research. And I don't want to work for and with people who not only lack any managerial skills but who seem to find the entire concept of management and planning distasteful and base.
I thought I could salvage the time I've spent pursuing a PhD without abandoning that goal by shifting my focus to academic administration. There is a woman at my university who has a job I think I would be great at and which I am pretty sure I would like if not love. She's in charge of the program which orients, trains, and provides professional and ESL support for the international teaching assistants. It's part instruction and part administrative and it is right up my alley.

So I started moving out into administrative roles. I joined the graduate student government, a university committee overseeing sexual harassment policy, and made formal my role as graduate student liaison for my department. And I applied for this most recent job working as a graduate assistant in an academic support department (not saying which....shhhhh). Suffice it to say it is a program which I have strong competency in and which is looking to expand focus into an area I have theoretical knowledge, experience, and inclination.

But I found out today I didn't get it. Which leaves me with funding options of about shit, shit, and fuckall. I am so very disappointed.

I was pretty upset for a short time. After crabbing about it and making the usual "screw them" type proclamations to A___, I emailed my advisor to let her know I didn't get this extra-departmental job. Both my advisor and I had been hoping for it. I was hoping for it because it involved humane hours, it seemed like a good move in terms of my career goals, and because it would get me at least a little out from under the oppressive thumb of my division head who has been evaluating me as moving "too slow" since my third semester in the program. My advisor had been hoping for it because the grants most of the RA money came off of have dried up, the teaching loads are too high for the funding level they come with (a "ten hour" position is easily anywhere from 20 to 40 hours a week) which means not much dissertation work gets done, and they overadmitted grads for next year with little funding and a shrinking graduate faculty.

She wrote back promptly and not reassuringly, although honestly I hadn't dared to hope for reassurance. She said she'd prefer to talk about this stuff face to face (why? She doesn't pick up on social cues...) so we set up a meeting for tomorrow. I am fully expecting that she will tell me she thinks I should leave the program. I am expecting this because about 80% of me thinks I should leave the program. Without the other employment/funding option, I'm left trying for funding in my department which is exploitative, demeaning (to grads and undergrads), and exhausting and offered under a false guise of one size fits all academic training and career development.

I spent the rest of my morning redoing my resume and applying for clerical jobs at the local hospital. It's a paycheck, it's local, and it's at least people who would consider my work a job and not an honor or favor they were doing me. I sort of think I need that right now.

Wish me luck, in all this.