Once, Once I Knew How To Look For You

1. Fuck. Fuck if there is not a shitload of crap happening.

2. I'm constantly reading career-related shit now. Things that sound vaguely like concessions about choosing "alternative" careers from what I'm being groomed to do. To me, these things don't sound like concessions at all. I continually waffle on this topic-- what shall I do with myself?-- yet when we break it down into component pieces, I am not cut out for traditional career choices. I like JD. I like free time. I don't think the intrinsic joy of doing independent research offsets the costs of being so far up my own career's ass for such an extended amount of time still to come. And really, judging from the faculty I know who have recently been tenured, it doesn't let up once you cross that bridge. It's a fat fucking fiction that it's only this heavy for another 8 years (which sounds pretty gruesome anyway). I'm leaning. I'm leaning very decisively this time because I took a look around and it's been 4 years and it's time to get the fuck out of here. It will still take forever and there's a ton of work to do, but my fear and trembling about the next chunk of life has been replaced with steely resolve. Ish.

3. Some of this decisiveness is being prompted by JD's career trajectory. Which has recently become just that, a trajectory. It's shocking to both of us how quickly this happened, but in hindsight I am not totally surprised that he's become a rising star in his field, I think everyone who's ever met him has a strong reaction to him. Right now things are in this somewhat awful state of flux-- he has several offers on the table that we are discussing, the most heart-stopping being the idea that he's already at a point in his career at which he could viably choose to freelance himself out as a temporary consultant/contractor, traveling around the globe for chunks of time. This is totally enthralling, tinged both with selfish little whines like, "but then i would have to learn how to cook" and selfish little secret thoughts like, "oh god I could be so productive if he would go live on another continent for a few months."

Adding to the ambiguity of a career cobbled together with consulting opportunities is the abject terror I feel now that I am in my 5th year and even teaching funding isn't always guaranteed. At any moment (before each quarter, anyway), I can be informed that there isn't work for me. But when you work the uni pays your tuition/fees for you. Which are exhorbitant for people who aren't receiving a paycheck. And you have to pay your tuition/fees and be enrolled full time in order to live on campus. See how this snowballs? So I am contractually forbidden to find outside employment, yet I am no longer guaranteed anything from the school. And I am following a totally average time-to-degree course like everyone else in my program, and I am thus fighting bile about how screwed we will/would be if they yanked my funding and in-campus housing.

There are creative solutions, of course. I have friends, I can sleep on couches, especially if my husbie is traipsing around in the south pacific. But I don't want to deal with all this added uncertainty and shittiness now. Grad school bureaucracy is total bullshit. And some days I feel spiteful enough to think, secretly, "Oh yeah? No teaching funding? No on-campus apartment? Well, suck on this, bitches: ABD! That's right! I fucking said it."

What kind of manky fucking system trains people up this well and refuses to make it reasonable to finish a thesis? Honestly.

Anyway. I'm getting fed up, and that irritation is incredibly motivating, and I suppose that's what is important. I'm getting to a good, zen place from which I can crank out a proposal and finish the shit I'm working on, and assume that I'm not destined for a top-tier anything, and be totally content with my 85% effort comfort zone. Even my excellent advice-er has lately expressed intense misgivings about the "crapshoot" that is the trad'l job market. I love her for that. I love the profs who candidly say, "I got a job with 3 publications. you can't do that anymore. you guys are totally fucked." and no, I don't even have three publications. And I'm not holding my breath to have three before I leave here, either.

BOO HISS.

Something's Going to Steal Your Carbon

My meeting went really well. Like, now I am questioning my own sanity because of it well. Did I hallucinate all the shitty, unprofessional rage that I had detected in the last few weeks of gritted-teeth emails and second-hand accounts of how much shit was being talked about me?

Hmmm. No.

Ok, on one hand I am hugely relieved that things are back on track and the project has been salvaged and, apparently, no relationships have been destroyed and some little nuggets of praise and/or understanding were thrown my way ("oh, this IS complicated!" and "I had NO idea this was so complex, no wonder it has been progressing this way") that are kind of making it all better.

On the other hand I am frustrated at the extremely huge expenditure of energy this has demanded, from venting/bitching/kvetching about it to literally everyone I have ever met to the mountains of mental and material preparation I accumulated this weekend, to the psykologikul and biological stress response enactment. All for naught...or at least, all for naught much. haaaaaa.

In other news, JD and I ruined some poor woman's day yesterday at the deli counter of a grocery:

Deli guy (to me, because i am clearly next in line): Hi, what can I get you?
Me: Hi! We just need 2lbs. of this vegan chicken salad, plea--
Lady: EXCUSE ME. I was next. EXCUSE ME? I was waiting!
*a lady has magically appeared, behind us, while I began ordering*
JD: Fine, then. Go ahead.
Lady: Well it's just that I was next. I was waiting and it's MY turn and I
Me: FINE GO AHEAD, WE DIDN'T SEE YOU IT IS FINE JUST GO AHEAD.
Lady: I was waiting over on the other side of the deli counter and I asked them to get someone to help me, so it's MY TUR--
JD: YOU WIN. YOU WIN, WE GET IT, YOU WERE HERE FIRST AND IT IS YOUR TURN
Deli guy (to Lady, after shooting us apologetic look and rolling his eyes): Ok, sure, what can I get you, then?
Lady: Hmmmmmm. Hmmmm. I think I want a sample. Yes.
Me (agog): ---
JD (mouth hanging open in utter disbelief): ----!
Lady: What tofu do you have today?
*there are, literally, twenty dishes with tofu available at this deli*
Deli guy: Uhh, well, this (pointing) and this and this are made with tofu, and this, and this....lots of things, anything that says tofu on the sign will have it in there.
Me (not even bothering to hide my bitchface now, hissing): Is she serious?!?
JD (also hissing): She wants a SAMPLE?!
Lady: ooh, ooh. I want a sample of this BBQ tofu, please. Yes, I want a sample of that.
Deli guy: Here you go. *turns back to us and opens his mouth*
Lady: HMMMMMMMMM.
Me (opening and closing mouth): Harrumph
Lady: Can I also have a sample... (looks at me as though she's just realized I'm there) OH, you can go ahead, I don't even know what I want yet.
Me (dumbfounded): Oh, thanks a lot! If you're sure that's ok? OK, it is? Ok great.
Deli guy (to me again): So what can I get you?
Me: Just 2 lbs. of this
deli guy (smiling): oh yeah, right.
Me: thanks a lot! (to JD): WHAT THE FUCK!?!?!

I felt bad until Jd convinced me that if ever there's a time to put on a bitchface, it's when some crazy lady interrupts my extremely quick, half-syllable away from being completed order so that she can hee haw around asking for samples and not having any earthly idea of what she wants to order, only that she wants to be first. He also told me that after I turned my attention back to the deli guy, she smacked herself full in the forehead like a cartoon and said, "oh, I can't buy groceries today! What is wrong with me!" Which confirms my suspicions that she is a nutter. As did the deli guy's reactions to all of this. Oh and we then continued shopping and she was nowhere to be found in the store. I believe I reacted so bitchily that I scared a woman out of a grocery store.

I felt like my knee-jerking reaction might have been a touch oversensitive. A smidgen off-kilter. A tad overdone. I'll blame it on the stress of waiting for this meeting. but I'll still feel bad, because words can never fully describe the withering eyeball daggers I hurl at people when I get this way.

We Treat Mishaps Like Sinking Ships

1. I'm listening to Kid A for the first time in about three or four years. The other night JD and I heard Disarm (my favorite SP song ever) playing at a restaurant and came home and dug up Melancholie & the Infinite Sadness.

2. I've been getting into trouble with one project I'm working on. Like, major, bizarro-world trouble that only makes sense in the context of some other dimension where it is a reasonable thing to treat someone (me) like a baby who is too stupid to do the simplest possible thing involved in a project, and where it is also reasonable to send shitty emails to an entire work group lambasting my idiocy instead of asking me if indeed I have done some retarded thing that I stand accused of having done. Also, in this other dimesion, it's cool for several colleagues to talk shit about you in your absence in front of many other students, regardless of your not actually having fucked anything up the way they are assuming you have fucked it up. And, in this dimension there is no need to talk directly to me, instead communication should pass only through a well-meaning but Not Exactly Helpful person who has been working in a research capacity for, oh, exactly five weeks of his entire life now. It's also great to be in this magical dimension, because even if you are an established member of the fakultee you no longer feel the need to acknowledge or respond to anything that I say, my pleas for reason or a chance to defend myself, or attempts at appeasement. Oh! What fun to be unreasonable! What fun to toy with hapless little students and totally fuck their sense of competency.

All I can say, though, is at least this person/group is not my advice-er, and at least the worst that can happen from this disastrous series of miscommunications is that I get kicked off a project, not that I get kicked out of school or asked to leave, etc. It still makes my stomach flop over when I think about it-- I have no idea how this happened and I am acutely aware that before the dust settles, I will have to endure at least one terrible meeting in which several people will scream at me and I am already trying to imagine how I will want to react to that: so far, I am unsure whether I will scream back (probably justified, as the more I think about what has gone wrong the more I am totally confused as to what their problem is) or sob like a bitch.

Awesomely, this project concerns emoshun and how one goes about managing it. My life has recently become very "meta" all the time- I know the things one should do in order to be happy, healthy, etc. I know which means of managing emoshun lead to which unseemly outcomes. yada. Anyway, this has been stressing me out for a couple weeks as I sit here, breath baited, waiting for the other shoe to drop, cringing every time I check my email. I suppose I am lucky to have gotten this far without having any Real issues with people I work with, but this is just sad and a waste. And who knows? Maybe it will still work out. But that would require my being allowed to explain myself first-hand, which does not seem likely. I feel very frustrated and like I am getting totally. fucking. screwed here.

3. I am also finding it necessary to read books about how one should motivate oneself to write, or write a big D, or go about navigating the shark-infested waters of akademic life (even just as a student) and none of it is cheery stuff. However, one particular book is proving useful in urging me out of writer's block (or motivational block, whatever) and I am trying to establish some better work habits than I have ever seriously considered doing before. I get the feeling a lot of things people have been trying to tell me for years, that I have dismissed roundly as not being effective for me, are things that I either need to learn or I will fail at this stupid big D process. For example, people always say that you should "write everyday for two hours and don't let yourself be interrupted by anything no matter what and it has to be your sacred time to write"

which I immediately snortled at. Only two hours? But so much writing has to get done, when will that be accomplished? Turns out that attempting to write all day sometimes results in impressive amounts of it, but I can only write all day once every so often. And the rest of the time I am being useless and unproductive, worrying about how I'm not writing. So I'll try this 2 hour thing. I did it yesterday and felt better about life. I'm not counting this blogging shit toward my 2 hours, but I'm going to go start it after I post this big steamer of a life update.

4. My hubsie is in AZ at a conference, networking and making himself totally obviously invaluable to a whole corporation. I have talked to him once since he's been there (he is too busy socializing! and enjoying it! I wish I could do that) and he'd had something like a trillion job offers from various exotic locales and people more or less offering to put me in touch with people they know who might study what I study but at private corporations. people telling him how cheap houses are in pittsburgh. Etc. Good for him. When I fail spectacularly at this, we can get by on what he makes. It'll make his grandmother happy, at least.

5. So along with this new writing routine I'm trying to develop, I am finding that, when left to my own devices, I would go to the gym most afternoons, write in the morning before I do anything else, and never turn the tv on. This is considerably different from married life routine. Sometimes I wish we had two cars so I could go to the gym in the afternoon, when I either want to eat a chocolate bar or take a nap, but I can't get there if JD drives to work. Man, what a dilemma.

6. Also, everything I've been reading about the "process" of the big D has emphasized how selfish on emust be during this important time, eschewing friends and family and husbands and pets and children, to focus on this all-consuming task. Hmmmm. I am sick of thinking and hearing about the "process" and how hard it is. This whole stupid thing could not be more nebulous and fraught with unclarity, and it is my suspicion that it is kind of the point of the whole dumb thing to make you feel like shit. Perhaps this is all a test. It's definitely a big flaming hoop of stupid they want us to jump through.

Argh. Raedy? Jen? Is this your experience(s)? I am starting to hate everything. I don't want to be a bitter heartless person on the other side of this. Cog in the machine and whatnot.