tgiw

I used to work the weekend evening shift on a (largely elective) inpatient surgical unit at a small community hospital. My shifts were much like work was this week. Very, very quiet. I was one of four employees in yesterday, the rest took it off. It's a school, classes aren't in session, etc. If the job is to primarily serve the students, then there isn't much to do. However, if the job is primarily to wrassle with payroll and think of creative ways to solve the "where DID that person's paycheck go?" problems and write brief yet informative memos about it, then there's ALWAYS something to do at big F.U.

Today, I will be one of three. I'm sure to get lots of memo writing done.

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.

classless

K-Cop and I were working on a request for facilities yesterday. She asked me to come in while she did it, I guess because she forgot the short but detailed email I sent about the request (the one that said I had tried to log in to do the order myself but the system denied my account...the joys of temping). I mentioned this and she responded "Oh that's right. Well, if you do it with me then you'll know how to do it next time". I didn't bother untangling that little logic knot she had thrown out. I said "Ok" and sat down in a chair in her office.

Since I was involved, when she stopped (and she did, often) while writing what turned out to be about two sentences worth of instructions (i.e. "please do X to Y in manner Z such that Q will result. Thank you."), I offered wording. Toward the end she was at a loss as to how to conclude. "Do you think they'll understand?" she asked. "Yeah. But we could write something like 'Please call if further details or more information is needed'." She typed "Please call if any questions", quipping to me as she wrote it "Ha, it's not like anyone THERE is going to really READ it anyhow!" And then she laughed really hard and loud, and she laughed alone, which gave her statement an extra creepy and awkward effect.

Now, you should know this comes on the heels of her telling me that these folks are very nice and very accommodating, complete with a little vignette about how one guy went out of his way to do this and that, etc. on this one order. So to me, these sound like people who would take the time to read something. To me, it also sounds like K-Cop believes they are the kind of people who take the time. Then this leaves the source of her mirth, or at least the basis of her jest, to be the likelihood of someone in facilities READING, or at least READING at the level where they'd distinguish between our phrasings. Maybe she thought it comically likely that the facilities staff member would get to the embedded clause and lose all of their minimal intellectual function.

I don't know for sure that this was what she thought, but it or something like it seemed most plausible to me based on the context, the office culture, and what I know about her (K-Cop has a thing about grammar and punctuation (which she has fused together in her mind to be the same, a practice which is a serious pet peeve of mine) and makes vocal judgments about the intellect of people who commit cardinal "grammar" sins like misusing commas and...and well, I could go on but the point is that I fucking hate when someone gets all high and mighty about that shit, especially someone who doesn't know the difference between grammar, diction, usage, and punctuation).

What pisses me off is that she assumes I share her classist attitude because I have degrees. No, I'm not reaching there. She's remarked on it.

cranky

The cat woke me up at 5:30 (a half hour before my alarm was set to go off) for food. He's been crying on and off throughout the night most nights these days. So up I got, and stumbled out to the kitchen. I bent down to get a can of cat food from a low shelf and smacked my head off the corner of the counter.

My day followed in a similar vein at work. No injuries, but it was not a good day. Lots of fuckery, some preventable and some not. The latter I can accept with some grace. The former however, tends to push my buttons, especially on a day that started out as unpleasantly as this one did.

Today was my last official day at work, and I don't have a job or even an interview.

My siblings, who were both just down for my sister's birthday, are both cranky right now too. And my fella's in some kind of semi-depressed or possibly sick state so he's sleeping a lot and feeling like shit.

On the plus side, I've never been a fan of July. Aside from my sister's birthday, the month generally is one of my less favorites. Too hot and lots of stagnation. So this July sucking already, well, it's not like it's wrecking a month I love and that's a little sliver of a bright side.

tgiao?

My job is not that hard. There are some organizational issues which end up making more work for everyone, but providing it gets shared fully among the people whose slack caused the extra work, it's not so bad. There have been I think two days that I've been annoyed by this, and on both days I was feeling shitty enough physically to have it impact my mood and general outlook.

Our boss is kind of hands off, assuming we'll all self organize into a more or less efficient system. What makes for problems is that the system which academics naturally self organize into when confronted with tasks like those at this job (e.g. filing, organizing paperwork, tracking down administrative details) is not a more or less efficient one. For that goal to be achieved, someone has to take on the job of herding, coaching, cajoling, or whatever. It's a largely thankless, rarely respected, and much maligned job and so I can't blame my boss for avoiding it somewhat. And perhaps it has worked out in the past, however I think a few factors conspired against a more efficient outcome this year. One is that we had a shitload of students accept admission this year. Another is that the office was down a program assistant. That would be one of the people who would at least peripherally herd. And a final factor is that the staff consists of a lot of new people who didn't come in with a good idea of what needed doing or the best way to do it.

Anyhow, aside from the extra work we sometimes make for ourselves due to our tendency to self organize into a mini-goat screw, it's a decent job. I like it ok and I thought my coworkers did too. It has nice hours aside from being up early but I thought lots of people were early risers. Several of my coworkers have told me they are up and out by 7 most days even when they are not working here. There are reasonably decent people to work with, e.g., there is not a single person who is chronically tweeking or zombified, who is angry all the time, or who is all up in your face with whatever ("let's have a birthday party!!!"). Everyone says "good morning" and usually talks to one another if they are in the same room.

My coworkers are not disgruntled or maltreated workers. Our work is not physically or emotionally draining. It is not terribly cognitively demanding and while there are challenges and some problems to be solved, we have at our disposal the tools to meet and solve them. Many of us leave quite early most days because we think that although we were hired to work until 4:00, if we are done by 2:30 with whatever routine work we were doing in the afternoon, then 2:30 or very shortly after is quitting time. Sometimes this is true. Either way, we are actually underworking and getting paid for lots of time we aren't even there. Generally, no one gets too uptight about that either. Sometimes something slips through the cracks and it sets of a flurry of catching up and running around later but it's not like anyone gets viciously chastised or ostracized for having ditched out.

And finally, the students we work with (who do tend to make up the larger topic of complaint when any specific complaint is made) rotate through so fast that if there are some not so great ones in the bunch, they are out of your hair quite soon after they start getting on your nerves.

Thus, by all accounts, I'd say this job is a pretty sweet gig. Therefore, it strikes me as odd that over the last week or so, a lot of people have been making statements like "Thank god it's almost over!" While I consistently question what the motivation for this attitude is, I have different overt responses to these statements. Sometimes I try to look and sound agreeable because I know they assume we all share this sense of relief and to indicate otherwise would mean touching on a disclosure moment I'm fairly certain is not considered terribly polite. I sometimes ask "why?" And sometimes, when I'm feeling a little tetchy, I can't stop myself from saying I'm having a hard time feeling psyched about being unemployed. Yeah, gotta work on that.

Anyhow, I've decided that this "thank god it's almost over" attitude is similar to the "you don't have to be crazy to work here... but it helps!" type of comment/attitude which is repeated without much thought about whether a job or place of work really is all that nutty/rough/busy/hard/etc. This line of thought naturally called to mind Maria Bamford's "Crazy Office" routine, which I present below for your viewing pleasure.

advise

So the job search continues. Yes, I am currently employed but this job ends in mid July, which means unless I want to go on unemployment I need to get my ass in gear and get me some job prospects. Bad market for someone looking to change career paths, right? Yeah, well that's me. A master of timing. There are two recent postings which look decent. One is an academic advising position and the other is an office coordinator position. Pros and cons? Of course, for both. My pros and cons even have pros and cons. I am Libra, hear me deliberate!

Advising is what I'm doing now and I like it, a lot. This is what I've always done. Whether or not it was warranted or desired, I give advice quite freely. On the up side, I've learned to avoid speculation when giving advice. Short of gagging myself in the presence of someone discussing a problem or challenge, this seems to be the best strategy to accommodate my need to let loose with a stream of "helpful" suggestions while (hopefully) avoiding the pitfall of spewing a load of crap. Speculating is what I call it when someone doesn't have any hard empirical evidence or explicit knowledge of a thing but continues speaking as if he or she does. To me, this is a cardinal sin, and really damned annoying. The speaker who finds him or herself in such a context should at least have the good grace to say "Well I don't know for sure but based on A (b, and c), I think X", where A (b, and c) are spelling out at least minimally. This allows the listener to know how to rank the particular advice being given. I've given this much thought. How much? Most of my late twenties in fact. I went through this big communication crisis in my late twenties, which I chalk up rather superstitiously to being part of my Saturn return, and which made me a very difficult person to talk to during the time. But I'm clear of it now and I do believe I've learned some useful lessons so in the final accounting, including how to temper my need to advise with some acknowledgment of the limits of my experience, so this is a good thing I suppose.

But back to the jobs and deliberating about which one I should pin my hopes and wishes to, at least until the next round of searching comes along. The one job is advising. It's full time and if it is not flexible time then I'm screwed. Moreover, it is at an institution with a religious affiliation. Not great. However, it's my sense that religiously affiliated institutions may have more respect for needs like caring for family (i.e. my brother) and an institutional understanding that, well, shit happens in life. I am hopeful that I'll be less likely to encounter that wretched secular Calvinism which marks so many professional cultures in the U.S. if I work for a catholic institution, but my distrust of organized religion is so strong that even typing that last phrase gives me a small internal shudder.

The other job is office coordinating. This one is a part time, 35 hour a week position. Pros? Less committed time for work, less responsibility (hopefully). Cons? Less money, less responsibility (yes, it's a pro and a con), and more of that low man on the totem pole shit. There's a tendency in academic culture to treat administrative support staff like crap, which can manifest as explicitly shitty behavior or as seemingly benevolent but ultimately condescending attitude, and god knows I don't deal gracefully with either.

The list of pro and con goes on, but I don't feel the need to put all two of my blog readers through the full, winding process - especially since with this job market it could end up I don't even get an interview for either position. I'll be sending resumes for both today, so wish me luck.

work

Yesterday at work my boss announced "Tomorrow afternoon we are having ice cream with mental health..."
I asked "Is ice cream with mental health like ice cream with sprinkles?"

When I got home, I told A____ about ice cream with mental health tomorrow. "Is that like sprinkles?" he said, beating me to the punchline.

Work is going well. The early mornings are dealable, not great but mostly ok. I can tell I need to find a more local job or a later start date before the year swings around into dark, snow, and ice. But it's a good thing to know, a learning experience in a relatively low risk environment.

Here are some other things I've learned.
- I still have a visceral dislike of men. I knew this and experienced it very strongly in my early 20s but being a student masked it for a number of reasons which I invite you to ponder if you're inclined.
- Despite having some physical shortcomings, I am a good worker. E.g., I believe if something needs doing and those present and aware can do it, they should. I believe there is no point rushing through a job if the only goal is to finish fast (and leave earlier) and if rushing is likely to make far more work for you or someone else later on. My beliefs guide my actions.
- I can't take phone calls after 9:00 PM if I want to get to bed on time.
-I can't hit snooze more than once in the morning or I'll be late.
- I need more work clothes.
- I am good at counseling and training and should probably be looking for human resources jobs.
- I still have a hard time working through irritation or impatience (usually at blithering incompetency, likely coupled with an attitude which strikes me as indicating a lack of even minimal age appropriate social and identity awareness) without it showing. I'm planning on using the rest of this temp job to work on that. I'm sure I'll have plenty of opportunities.

"TAing doth murder sleep"

Let me tell ya, when sleep has come the last week, it does feel like "the death of each day's life". I feel this most each next morning when I wake, still hopeful at that moment of rising consciousness that it will not hurt. What am I doing each day which would account for such a descent each night and subsequent exhuming each morning? Why, I'm "wrapping up the semester". Sounds so cheery, doesn't it? Sounds like it should have yellow gingham curtains tied back with little light blue eyelet lace ribbons. Sounds neat and homey, like something I'd find in a jar with a hand drawn label promising the sweet reward for good honest hard work.

Instead, it's a pack a day, caffeine embalmed, tendon twisting grind which leaves me wanting to write things like 'Ok now I KNOW you're just filling up space" in the comment sections of certain student papers. It's the emergency brake left on. It's the smell of what you forgot you were cooking and were reminded of by the smoke alarm telling you and your neighbors that tonight's dinner is way past done.

On that note, I'm off to stumble into bed. Gute nacht, apparently.

This is not my beautiful life

While my fella and I were waiting for the car salesman to bring around what I was assured would soon be my frosty green 2004 Civic, the Talking Heads was playing at a volume just under loud over the speaker. They pipe the music throughout the dealership, even out into the lot near the door to the salesroom. Through the many hours I was there last night going over variously unaffordable car replacement options, I realized that the dealership playlist was meant to target my age group, possibly a few years older. I smiled, because I found myself perversely thinking of the soundtrack of the aged come the year 2045. I was imagining how strange it will be to hear Frankie Goes to Hollywood playing softly in the background while my roommate is being suctioned for a sputum sample or having her bedpan changed. Most likely, the many intervening years of car dealership soundtracks and other audio indignities will ameliorate the jarring scene that would otherwise be.

On a happier note, I think I'm getting a car. I say "think" because there could still be a hold up with the financing. But if that clears, I pick up my pretty green Civic on Friday. I have my Ford for two more days. I can't get rid of it soon enough. On the way home from this afternoon's meeting with the Honda financing fellow, I sat at the red light with my hand stuck out the driver's side window to compensate for the Ford's intermittently fucked left rear blinker. The smell of cooking coolant wafted in from the engine while the fan whirred away in a mostly futile attempt to bring the engine temperature down from just a hair under well done and I was reminded of exactly why I am willingly about to go very deep into debt and to bleed my combined savings and semester's living expenses of a hefty $6000 this week.

I am so damned happy I have good credit and about a thousand left over from my divorce settlement. But the savings will be gone after Friday, and the debt load will be at a frightening all time high.

This unavoidable situation has helped to underscore that I've been feeling much closer to quitting my PhD program since at least May. I'll leave the precious pauper act for those who have the health, some level of unshaken belief that life always turns out ok, and the family financial backing to support such silliness. Lacking these luxuries, it's nothing short of terrifying to know that I am literally pouring time, energy, and a huge amount of money into completing this degree.

The faculty attitude which sees any slow downs for my health problems as a smoke screen for lollygagging my way through the PhD program are quite wrong and clearly deserving of a battle. It's the kind of fight I don't easily walk away from. But it is looking less like a battle I can win with anything better than a pyrrhic victory. And the degree itself is seeming less and less likely to support me in what are the most probable and desirable careers for me given my physical constraints, my shaken belief that life will always turn out ok, my apparent allergy to academic culture, and what I know about the academic labor market.

An unbelievably petulant and exceptionally passive aggressive email in my inbox from the new grad in my lab this morning helped push that growing sense of "This is not my beautiful life" a little further into the range where bailing seems the best way to cut my losses. So far, I've lost many things including my self respect on more than one occasion. I've found myself needing to sacrifice personal principles I hold extremely dear in order to even try to play nicely with the other children. I spent the last few years of good health I think I will ever have in my life first attending one crappy PhD program and now another, which, after a change in leadership is rapidly transitioning into high grade crap itself. My debt load is increasing each semester I waste here with little chance of a sure way to pay it off at the end (i.e. few tenure track jobs available and those that are involve hideous teaching loads). I know I have more I can lose before I am left with nothing but I doubt my ability to pull up out of nothing. If I were healthier, I might not be so sure of that, but as it is I don't think I can afford to take the hit to my sanity, any chance of current or future peace of mind, and all of my patience that another year of this program seems to require.

One day to go!

I did four hours of lecture today - back to back - covering my fella's class which is right after mine. And I was still standing, or at least talking and presenting, by the end of it. I'm impressed. It helps that his students seem like a pretty good bunch, they actually thanked me today. How's that for a nice group?

My fella's going to be coming back to the U.S. tomorrow! Yay! Yippeee! And woo-hoo! It's been a long two weeks. His flight gets in late to NYC, so he might stay at his brother's place down there to catch some sleep before driving back to beautiful bucolic CT - but knowing I'll be seeing him soon makes me very, super, extremely happy.

yeah, it's monday

My alarm didn't go off. I know it is rare that this truly happens, but it did today.

My day is full of running around. I'm hoping my car can stand it. When I got it back from the mechanic this last time, they made me promise I was either getting a new car or would bring it back in if I hadn't replaced it by October. Seems I don't have a lot of brake left in the rear.

Today I have an appointment with a naturopath, at the strong suggestion of my primary care's nurse practitioner. I'm a little less than enthusiastic, but I'll try it. I'm trying to keep an open mind because if it will help me feel better, then that's good.

After the nuts and berries hour, I'm meeting with an Irritator (who, true to name, simply could not meet any day last week), and promptly after that I'll be dashing off to go sit in a room with about 8 other bored to hostile teachingassistants, listening to a fluffy childish woman-girl (whom I've nicknamed "poopapotamus") tell us how to do the job she's only done once - and not well. She was rather recently bragging to me that she failed two students for turning in their final papers 6 hours late. With some context, this might not be as shitty as it sounds. But without is how she presented it, and she was really, truly proud of this. I voiced disapproval, which doesn't matter too much because my guess is that she's more interested in male approval than female.

I'll give some backstory, not lots but some, later. It involves poopapotamus taking two weeks off mid semester to get married but refusing to accommodate me for a conflict between her meeting (it's a weekly thing!) and a medical test which has already been rescheduled three times...long story. I'll tell it later because I have to run to get to the beads and rattles appointment by 1:00.

Oh my...

You know what's embarrassing? When your advisor emails you a week after you have surgery and says "I'm trying to find those files, the stimuli from 5 years ago...When you get a chance," and you don't get in for 1 and 1/2 weeks later and it turns out she still hasn't been able to find them anywhere. You talk, catch up, do all the coordinating that needs doing, and she leaves.

One cigarette break later, you get to work looking everywhere. You look on all four work station computers, on every cd you can get your hands on - even the ones which are labeled for something else. You coax the various computers to open the various zips and you find nothing.

You look in all the drawers and cabinets to see if you missed a cd or a zip but you just can't find them. After about 40 minutes has passed in frantic, fruitless searching, when you're sitting there pondering a pile of floppies and Jaz disks you found in a dusty cardboard box on the floor, you know you're in trouble.

Then a thought strikes you. You enter your advisor's office. You turn on her computer, feeling a little guilty for going on there when she's gone and feeling quite furtive about logging onto her personal computer. You tell yourself she wants the files and you don't want to come back empty handed without having turned every damned stone and you just seriously don't want to bust out the floppies. You search for probable names of the folder the files would be in, starting with the most obvious.

And you find it, on the first search. The folder, the files, the meticulous notes you made on the creation of the files, detailed documentation of "to do" and "done" tasks relative to the files when they were last your responsibility. You find all of it just how you left it five years ago - wrapped up nice and neat.

Now that is embarrassing.

Not for me. For me it was kind of validating. And I can honestly say, after being made to feel like a useless husk of a PhD student for the last two years by my department head, it felt kind of good to call my advisor from her office and leave this "You'll never guess where I found those files..." message on her answering machine.

Interview!

I just got a call on an application I submitted. Yay! It's a totally non-academic job, less than a mile from my house, part time weekend evenings. Sounds perfect for making some money while collecting dissertation data during the week.

I hope it doesn't suck and I hope I get it.

Now I just have to go out and buy some "interview pants". Been a while since I had to look proper.

cheating

Duke: 34 MBA students punished for cheating
By Bloomberg News
May 1, 2007

Duke University's Fuqua School of Business disciplined 34 first-year master of business administration students who were caught in the school's largest cheating scandal.

Nine students face expulsion, and 15 face a one-year suspension and a failing grade in the course. Ten others were found guilty of lesser offenses, nine of whom received a failing grade and one who flunked the assignment, [marketing professor Gavan J.] Fitzsimmons said in the e-mail.

The problem came to light when a professor noticed similarities in answers by students on a take-home test.

So what do you do about cheating? I've had students do exactly this kind of work - the "overly similar". I've also had students who turn in work which is clearly plagiarized from a published source - my god sometimes from the ONLY source they used in the assignment. Did they think I wouldn't notice? It's one article! And they copied and pasted out of it!

This year I had a student go kinda kooky on me for even suggesting that he had sampled too freely from the source text in his writing. Two other students had also done similarly non-original work. All three had a common kind of reaction, (although the level and tone varied by student - one got petulant, one got creepy, and one seemed just plain old perplexed).

When I explained to each student that s/he had used too much text straight from or closely paraphrased from the source, each of them individually told me that the words they had used (i.e. the text from the articles) were the best way to state what they meant. The perplexed one said "So you want us to write more?" when I told him that his answer was only three sentences long and two of those sentences were nearly identical to text from the article. I tried very hard to explain what "summarize" means in a way that doesn't suggest one should copy and paste. "I want you to read it and then think about what you read, what it meant, and what the author was saying. Then I want you to share YOUR THOUGHTS with me by writing them down."

This was apparently a novel concept. And I say that with only a hint of sarcasm. Seriously.

A friend of mine in another department recently (and vaguely) described having to ask a grad student to leave the PhD program for repeated cheating behavior. That person's excuse was that "in my country students work together all the time". This was perhaps not the most artfully conceived defense since most of the faculty in this program are not American (one of the two who are was raised in several other countries), and the international PhD students outnumber the domestic by about 5:1 in any given year.

When I see cheating in the undergrads I teach, I can't help feeling a little annoyed that this wasn't addressed in high school or earlier. Sometimes you just have this overwhelming sense that what you are seeing is part of a long standing pattern of behavior. I suppose when one encounters similar behavior in graduate students, one might feel similarly about the undergraduate instructors.

I can attest that my personal and indirect experiences are that the undergraduate faculty and instructors do NOT come down like they should on cheating and that the universities are doing a rather bad job of educating students in anything like academic or professional ethics (awareness of which might in some part inform the former).

ass kicking

We have a unicorn in my lab. And as everyone knows, unicorns kick ass. Wait, apparently not everyone knows that.

A and I got the unicorn a while ago from a toy store in a strip mall near campus. It's a unicorn on a stick, like the old fashioned, perplexing child's toy "horse on a stick" (seems it's called a "stick horse" because "horse stick" could sound bad).

Our unicorn stick has sound effects. This is what made A and I buy it. I mean, we were playing with it anyhow, giggling like idiots in the store. When we realized that pressing the unicorn's ear results in a few moments of galloping noises which end in a series of whinnies, we had to get it.

And so now we have a unicorn. We brought it to school because it is often a toxic place and having a unicorn to look at and play with sometimes is helpful. We have many nice happy memories of people on the unicorn either in celebration or for cheering up. Today, it was for cheering up. I've been trying to fight off a first class bad mood all week.

I went over to the box where the unicorn stands. Justin, named after the unicorn in the Scrubs episode since it seems that the makers of that show understand the usefulness of having a comfort unicorn one can go to when one needs to. I went over and took Justin for a short spin. The other grads cheered us on, happy for the unicorn moment. The undergrad, however, was not impressed.

This is the undergrad who sits at the desk my officemates and I had set aside for a fellow grad student. The fellow grad student had transfered to our advisor but doesn't personally use the space we went out of our way (way out of) to make for him in our advisor's lab because he doesn't want to offend his former advisor by leaving the one remaining student his former advisor has in a lab by herself. It's politics and it's about sparing the professor's "feelings" (this professor has the range of feelings of a very small child - "cranky" and "full") at the cost of the feelings of us, the grads who moved all this shit around because we were told "hey guys, ____ is coming to the lab so let's make some space for him!"

This is the undergrad who works for the politically absent fellow grad student, collecting his data for him, and so this is the undergrad who sits at the desk we set up for our fellow grad in our office, who ignores her subjects when they show up, ignores them in that sort of bored receptionist ignoring way. This is the undergrad who, when she finally does recognize their presence, advises the subjects she is running for our politically absent fellow grad student to throw their shit "where ever" in our office without regard for doorways, walkways, or other people's space in this small area. This is the undergrad who quite often seems to be very put upon by things like us wanting to use our lab space for data collection on a day when she usually runs for our politically absent fellow grad student, by our coming and going through our office, by our eating lunch in our office, and by our sometimes talking with each other or meeting with our students in our office.

In my book, everyone can be put upon for no apparent reason at all. It's life, it's hard, you feel like huffing and puffing sometimes. I understand, truly. But the frequency of this undergrad's put uponness over things being done by people who are much more graciously putting up with the not terribly convenient circumstance of her working from our office (at best an irksome reminder of her boss's choice to be absent) is far too high, even for me.

This is the undergrad who was annoyed that I was playing with my unicorn, in my office.

"Ummmm, why do you have a unicorn in your office?" she asked in those tones which say "I'm saying 'why do you have a unicorn' but really, what I mean is 'that is like so stupid, it's totally gay. My gohhd, if I were getting my PhD, I wouldn't waste my time riding a unicorn around an office that has rainbow cut outs on the walls (gay!). I'd wear glasses and put my hair in a bun and I'd look very smart while I squinted at computer screens and pressed a pencil to my lip nearly chewing it but not quite. My office key and flash drive would be on a color coordinated cord around my neck, and I might also carry a clipboard, at least when I am running subjects...which is so totally beneath me' Now please stop fooling around for 5 minutes. I know it's your office and you're sharing your space with me simply out of misguided respect and concern for your peer who I am doing data collection for, but I simply must get back to squinting over and highlighting every second line of my reading for my Dysfunctional Personalities Types class."

I haven't touched the unicorn all semester, hell, I think not since I finished my first time teaching as an instructor last semester. It's not like we're always fucking off in there. Usually it's largely headphones and laptops. But now, I'm thinking of riding that unicorn every day she's in there. It's my office. I can ride a unicorn in it if I want to.

Got unicorns?

hippie import clothing store (I)

The hippie import clothing store was located not far from the state street theater, quite close to what I came to think of the multidimensional used book store (it had more rooms than it seemed it should or, I believe, could have had). The hippie import clothing store was right next door to to the dance club which according to my brother's recollection is alternately either named "The Mango" or "Tangerine".

One afternoon, my co-workers at the hippie import clothing store told me Leaf would be working with us that week.

"I hate it when Leaf is here," Sam said. "She sits on her ass. She doesn't DO anything."
"Wait, her name is [leef]? Is that 'L-e-i-f' like viking?" I asked.
"No, no...'" said Eva who was standing under the extremely large mermaid, picking through the cherry vanilla incense. Eva said "It's Leaf like tree," and held out her aromatic hands, fingers stretched into branches which she wiggled stiffly for emphasis.
"They named their kid 'Leaf' like tree? That's fucking horrible."

While we spoke of Leaf's arrival, I contemplated the girl's situation. Sure, she might suck to work with as much as the other employees seemed to think she did. And she might even be a rotten person. But how much of this could really be laid only at her feet? I mean, if ever there was a situation of mom and dad setting the kid up for shit, this was it. By this point, I'd been working at Leaf's parents' store for over a month. I'd heard and personally witnessed not good things about our employers, store owners N____ and B____. But finding out they had burdened their child with the name Leaf was up there for worst things I knew about them yet.

Maybe it's because I had grown up where I did - which very much wasn't here - that I thought giving your child a name like Leaf was a signal at least to the sensitive adults of the world that you were selfish to the point of cruelty. But maybe here it was ok, or at least less bad, to name your child something like that.

Here was Ann Arbor MI in 1996. We were downtown but away from the extremely undergraddy part. "The City" as people from the pokey towns around it called it. And why not? If they didn't come in for the congested football game days, they came during other super packed times like the annual art fair or hashbash. To them, I'm sure it looked like a city.

Here was where you were more likely to get hit by a spandex and hemp wearing bicyclist whizzing down the sidewalk than actual motor vehicle traffic since most of the time, the cars were caught in a web of perversely arranged oneway streets and power-pedestrians.

Here, there was a working class but it wasn't much like the working class culture where I grew up. Here there seemed to be a very large number of 18-25 year old refugees from the boring MI suburbs who were pissing off their parents simply by not being in college, simply by working a working class job for a working class wage, growing pot in the basement of a house shared with 4 to 7 other young people, and spending most evenings smoking happily on porches throughout town. Here you had some folks born into the working classes, raised in less suburban suburbs, people who were older and younger, but who collectively showed signs of having a larger degree of tolerance and wider range of social attitudes than what I was accustomed to from my rather parochial Irish/Italian south of Boston former ship building town.

Here, the working class households were the primary motivators for all the cool shit in town, like a 24 hour diner, bars without TVs, native plant nurseries, neighborhood/community art and writing projects, cooperative gardens, and those corner bakeries where if you volunteer to help out a couple of hours a week, you can get free bread. It had pockets of anarchists, open atheists, and self-proclaimed artists. Maybe, I thought, in a place like this, they could abide names like "Leaf". Where I grew up, if you'd named your kid that and sent her to public school, the kid was gonna get hit, physically or emotionally at least every week if not every day for no reason other than the residents' intolerant xenophobic inferiority complex attitude which caused them to necessarily hear names like "Leaf" as "My parents think they are better than you and yours (so please feel free to fuck with and/or smack me)."

I'd been living in Ann Arbor long enough to know that the exact context for judging the cruelty of her parents, my bosses, N____ and B_____ might need some adjustment. I hadn't thought I'd get culture shock moving from south of Boston to Ann Arbor. I knew the "r" thing would be a problem, but I had assumed it would be one way. I wasn't prepared for things like completely failing to understand a nurse's declaration to me that "mrrstrrr strrjrrs in room threethrrrrtifrrrr wants a vrrrrnrrrrs"

"So you go to school with Leaf?" I asked Eva. Eva filled me in on how Leaf was tormented by people at school and how Leaf herself was in fact quite mean to the few people who tried to be friends with her (like Eva). I couldn't help wondering if Leaf would've been less mean and less tormented had she been named something else. Spoiled, being raised by people who never matured past 17, and named as she was, it seemed to me Leaf was pretty much fucked from the word go.

I looked around the store, noting the nearly life-sized llama ("it's an alpaca!" N_____ had corrected), the half strung balinese instruments, the grateful dead batik-like printed wall hangings ("tapestries"), and the many mermaids, mercats, merdogs, and frogs holding mirrors hanging from fishing line from eyes N_____'s husband and store co-owner B_____ had screwed into the ceiling.

When they swung, I wondered how much coke B____ had done the day he installed them. I hardly ever stood under the large mermaid. Seeing others under it as its cracked and puttied body swung lazily over them made me feel a little funny, like the way you get when you're too close to the edge of a building.

Who the fuck would name their kid "Leaf", like a tree? These people would.

* = "Mister Sturgers in room three thirty four wants a Vernor's**"
** = Vernor's is a kind of ginger ale.

Busy

The semester has started and the usual swamping has occurred. This time it's extra heavy for me because I'm teaching. Which is fun, but which is a whole lot of work. Usually when a grad student teaches a class as the instructor, the faculty who have taught it provide that student with material, resources, notes, slides, syllabus, and a variety of things they themselves have generated in the past while teaching that course. You hope they give you stuff that is sort of "tried and true", although that is not always the case. This material does not absolve you of construct your own course, but it at least provides even some temporary or intermittent structure here and there.

I do not have this material. The two guys who have taught this course over the last 5 or more years are, well, not content oriented. One is "chalk and talk" and the other lectures straight from the book. This makes my job monumentally more, um, challenging. It is in fact possibly worse than challenging, although that sort of depends on whether my advisor and division head understand the nature of what I need to do in the absence of real mentoring in this course.

So not a lot of posts lately. I'm not officially taking a break from blogging. I intend to blog when I can. But today and until I get a little more momentum in this course, I can't.

Soup and other goodness

I made the stock for the soup earlier this week and A___ finished the soup today, just in time for the damp, chilly end of January. I used to make the broth with a whole chicken but realized that this results in far more meat and hassle than I need (cjblue will attest to having called me once while I was "boning a chicken"). I recently switched to using chicken breast, 2 split breasts, bone in. This makes enough stock for a large pot of soup, and a little extra meat that can be used for chicken salad. Making soup is great because you get to clean out your old veggies and create something that is exceptionally yummy and good for you with enough left over to freeze. This is all very exciting for a low income grad student with some nutrition problems.

Some of the other grads and I have been joking for a while now about how we should make a grad cookbook. "How to Cook and Eat Healthy on an Apprentice Model Budget" or something like that. Chapters would include things like "Avoiding scurvy", "101 things to do with peanut butter", and "Pasta is a TA's best friend" We could sell it (at a large mark up) and put the proceeds into a graduate conference travel fund, a fund which has consistently been cut by my university over the past few years.

While the soup simmers, I am reading two papers on auditory cues for induced self motion and writing up an outline for an experiment I am about to record stimuli for over the weekend. Yes, I am kind of blowing off my dissertation research, although that is somewhat justified by soundbooth noise related delays. And I am most certainly and unjustifiably neglecting the evil manuscript from hell I've been working on for (gulp) way too long and should just finish no matter how much thinking about the horribly designed experiments makes me want to puke. But who can do that when there's a brand spankin' new research project with an extremely efficient faculty member whose enthusiasm for it is infectious. And there is kick ass soup and a movie with my loving neighbor A___ to look forward to when I'm done reading and writing tonight. Who could ask for anything more? Ok, maybe a loaf of fresh baked bread from Kate.

Too far?

How far is "too far"? This is a question that is on the table in my department. If you read this blog regularly (all two of you), you might have seen some references to a student I call Dookie. Dookie is a problem just waiting to happen. He's a malignantly arrogant first year student with antisocial tendencies.

It began almost immediately with lab space issues. Dookie took over a very large chunk of the lab he was to share with three other grads. The other grads are a mid-40s white American woman, a mid-20s Asian man, and a 30ish white American man. Dookie and the woman are both first years. The mid 20s male student is in his second year, and the 30ish male student is an upper year. Before classes had even started, the others from Dookie's lab were complaining bitterly about his space use. Not only had he staked out a large and prime bit of lab real estate as "his desk", he had also moved several pieces of large equipment onto the small work areas left for the female and Asian grad student to share. I identify them this way intentionally, because I believe it was why Dookie chose to shove the shit onto their desks and not onto the white American man's desk.

The students complained to one another and to other grads. But they didn't complain to the faculty member whose lab it was, their advisor, or our department head. Eventually the complaints got back to Dookie. Dookie responded to the person who brought the issue to his attention by saying that I (yes, me, PFG, your beloved blogger) must have been relating untrue rumors about him, rousing the rabble, etc. When I heard this, I immediately went to Dookie to set him straight, to let him know that he had pissed off so many people it would be impossible to tell who had said what to whom at this point. We had a chat that left me feeling like I had to take a shower. His position was that if people didn't voice an objection even to what is generally considered poor and antisocial behavior (even in kindergarten), then they deserved to be used. I finally ended the conversation, abruptly because there is no other way to end a conversation like this. As I was leaving, Dookie said "I can see you and I will not be best friends, but it's good to know we can speak civilly to one another." I made a noncommital sound like agreement so I would not reinforce his mistaken notion that I wanted to continue a conversation with him as I proceded out of the building.

He then asked me out to dinner.

Fast forward....
Dookie stories kept coming.
The older female grad no longer feels comfortable working in the lab. A female international student mentioned that he had been hitting on her and had said something about women having the best place to keep a man's sperm. Dookie fell behind in his research and when he was called to task about it, he blamed his Asian lab mate for not being available to help him. My lab mate recounted Dookie's attempts to talk about his lecture to his lab on "the significance of the female orgasm". "It was disgusting!" my lab mate shouted, They shouldn't have to hear that!". A cross campus teaching assistant e-mail list practically shut down over Dookie's callous, personal attacks on other students who had used the list to discuss their distaste for a racist campus paper cartoon about international teaching assistants.

And now it has happened. He finally went "too far". Last week, Dookie lost his shit on another first year, a rather young white, middle class, suburb raised female. She happened into Dookie's lab looking for the Asian grad student so they could talk about class. The older white male grad was there alone when she arrived, and he said the Asian grad student would be back in a minute. She sat down at the Asian grad's desk to wait. Dookie returned and asked her to get out of his chair. When the female grad student said "But I thought this was ___'s chair..." Dookie told her he wanted to use the computer on the desk the chair was at (the desk Dookie had effectivly designated the Asian student's desk months ago). The young female grad moved to the chair next to it and said "Ok, I'll sit over here then," or something similar. And that's when Dookie called her a bitch. He addressed several statements about her to the older white male grad student, calling her a "little bitch" and "fucking bitch" repeatedly, saying she had "given him lip" in a class while he was proctoring the end of the semester evaluations. He accused her of flirting and using her feminine wiles to get other people to do her work for her, and said she couldn't think for herself.

She is bringing harassment charges against him. She sent an e-mail to several students in our department who have been so vocal with their complaints to ask if they would be willing to sign on to a group complaint with the dean of students' office. Among other things, this is what she got back:
I don't feel that I have one specific event that warrants some sort of "prosecution." I have had several...encounters...in which he has acted completely unprofessionally and has been a total jackass, but he has not said anything derogatory that would warrant a specific complaint.
Another response was similar. While these women will admit to having had problems with him, will refuse to work with him, will avoid him even if that means avoiding their common areas, they seem to feel his behavior is not reportable. In short, the responses were "I support your stand but refuse to stand with you because what happened with me and him was bad but not officially bad".

Where the fuck do they get this from? It's not from the harassment policies, I am sure of that. In both the workplace and education federal antidiscrimination laws, the terms are "severe, persistent, or pervasive". Meaning a pattern of what might appear as "isolated" encounters across several individuals can be argued to be pervasive. Further, sexual behavior is not a requisit. The guidelines on Title IX protection state: "It is also important to recognize that gender-based harassment, which may include acts of verbal, nonverbal, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostility based on sex, but not involving conduct of a sexual nature, may be a form of sex discrimination that violates Title IX if it is sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive and directed at individuals because of their sex."

What is driving these expressions of what counts as "too far"? I looked up "sexual harassment" and "reluctance" on google. I found this paper by a college undergrad. Yes, an undergrad. I wish she would come and lecture to my graduate peers. I can't fact check all of it, but her exposition calls attention to one factor that has been proposed to account for the reporting reluctance of the type my peers are displaying:

Brooks and Perot (1991) and Fitzgerald et al. (1988) agree that another contributing factor is that women need to view the behavior as offensive and serious before she [sic] will report sexual harassment. Jensen & Gutek (1982) suggest...that...women who believe that it is their fault that things "went too far" may not report incidents of sexual harassment unless they believe that the acts were very offensive and serious.

While this segment of the paper is couched in terms that suggest sexualized harassment as opposed to sexist mistreatment, it seems the underlying point is quite relevant here. How far is "too far" for an exchange that has progressed into incivility? If it goes there, if it goes too far, who is to blame? And what is the blame that is to be had?

If you have a sense of self worth, if there is nothing in your core that suggests you deserve shame, ridicule, derision, scorn, objectification, beratement, then when you are subjected to this in an exchange that has all the conventional assumptions of being a professional or polite social encounter, you are SHOCKED and horrified. If you do not believe you deserve this or that someone has an unspoken right to casual displays of this sort of behavior, when someone who makes a habit of shitting on people casually chooses to shit on you, the questions you might ask yourself shouldn't start with "well does this really count as shit?" For christ's sake, of course it's shit! And it's on you! And he put it there! Now make a fuss! Get angry! It's ok to not want to be shit on!

Why would graduate student aged women not understand this? Let's ask the undergrad.

Fitzgerald et al. (1995) reviewed research on behavioral responses to sexual harassment… Internally-focused responses included: ignoring the harassment and doing nothing to arrest it (endurance); pretending that the situation was not happening or had no effect (denial); reinterpreting the situation or interpreting the intentions of the harasser as non-negative (reattribution); and perceiving the harassment as self-induced (self-blame)...

Internal responses are victims' attempts to handle the situation on their own due to fears of retaliation, not being believed, hurting one's career, or reluctance to cause problems for the harasser. The study concluded that victims most often practice avoidance, emphasize the positives, and endure, hoping that the situation will disappear without the embarrassment or retaliation that often accompanies a formal complaint....Women will continue to use these mechanisms inadvertently perpetuating the problem of sexual harassment as long as real organizational protection from stigma and retaliation fails to exist (Fitzgerald et al., 1995).

One thing I must add to this (really comprehensive) discussion of motivation for the responses to harassment is that the "internal" responses may arise not just from a sense of helplessness. They could be interpretted as a dysfunctional attempt to establish control while denying the reality of the harm that the behavior has done. I see this kind of response as a logical outcome of the post-second wave feminist backlash of the late 70s and 80s. Popular strategies of invalidating feminist social complaint and critique entailed a variety of tactics, mostly involving ad femme attacks which portrayed the dissenter as pathologically disposed to chronic discontent, as a miserable, malicious, individual who whips up hysterical responses to even the "teensiest" behavior she finds personally nonadvantageous. These stereotypes made their way into our mainstream culture, as new terms like "feminazi" can attest to. A whole generation's acceptance of such portrayals and a concomitant desire to want to avoid not simply being labeled as but actually becoming such a hideously unacceptable (and unlovable!) monster is wrapped up in the bigger lie that the members of our society are equal. This is the monsterous gold leaf letter Lie that encompasses notions like institutionalized racism ended in the 60s; homocidal bigotry is not condoned or encouraged by our current social values; sexualized aggression is not sold side by side with all our favorite name brands; people from underdeveloped nations will benefit from "investment" by foreign (US) owned industry; and there is no gender or sex role war being waged on the battle fields of women's bodies and consenting adults' desires to openly love and be loved by each other.

If we unquestioningly accept key pieces of The Big Fat Lie, which so many of us do, we have a hard time extracting ourselves from it even when it threatens us quite directly. If we are threatened but refuse or can't let go of this lie, we have two clear paths.
a) We can acknowledge the afront, which brings the very real social threat of becoming (through being labled as) an unsympathetic perpetual victim or a troublemaking feminazi.
b) We can refuse to acknowledge the level, scope, or degree of the offense. We can put on a good face, be a team player, go on with the show. We can be feminine about this. We can acknowledge that there are real problems, real instances of harassment, but that our encounters do not even come close to those indisputably overt ones, like when a guy who shoves his hands up co-workers' skirts is elected governor of California. We might express sympathy for the women in those obviously clear cut circumstances of legally valid or at least highly publicized sexual harassment, cluck our tongues disapprovingly. We each can keep pushing how far "too far" is in our own lives until we wake up someday and there is nothing more than empty open space where there used to be a person.

Myself? I choose to reject the lie. I know that I will be called a troublemaker (been there, done that), a feminazi, and a perpetual victim. But those will be labels that others apply, and I will be me.

So how far is "too far"?
It's here.