Funkified Scholarship

So I've taken Tot to daycare (Montessori is closed for two and a half weeks so he's back at his old daycare where they love him and they're much more flexible about hours, but it's rowdy and crazy -- when I feel badly about him going to Montessori when he's obviously so well loved at the daycare, which is not to say that the Montessori teacher is not charmed by him, and doing okay, I think that they may love him, but my duty is to do the best I can for him -- and I literally couldn't do better than a Montessori school, not if I were the perfect stay-at-home mom, which I am so so SO not). I've watered the plants, taken out some trash, unloaded the dishwasher (which makes me feel better because as the family cook I'm constantly waging a war against dirty dishes). Today's Wednesday, and it's my day to not be on campus. And I'm in a funk.

I'm just so disgusted with politics and government and big business. Our regulatory agencies are staffed by those with significant industry ties to those who profit most from keeping consumers in the dark, no matter which president we have in office. And yet they are in charge of protecting consumers and keeping them safe. Furthermore, corporations have unlimited anonymous power to sway candidate elections with their big bucks. (What does this mean for initiatives and referenda? I don't know.) And when I talk about these issues, I'm the one who sounds nuts. I'm engaged in a project right now to address some of these issues the best way I know how, but even though this is the most exciting thing going on in my life, the more I research, the more I know, the more I get depressed. And it's also a big timesuck, as I evidenced by yesterday when I ended up spending time I should've been working on scholarship talking with someone about related issues and researching and working on the project.

There's also a work-related report that I haven't done that's weighing on me. I definitely find that finishing up some projects and getting them out the door lifts my mood. As does working out, which I definitely want to do today. But what I really want to talk about here is a certain piece of scholarship.

(Can I just say that Absurdist Lover is the most wonderful man in the entire history of the known world? He just sent me a text message saying that I should go somewhere and do something for me. I have tons to do work-wise, but this is quite literally the only time I truly get to myself. When I'm at work, I'm at work and yes, I can close the door, but it's not relaxing. I can veg out, but it's not relaxing. I don't even know what I'd do since we have no money. But maybe he's right. Maybe I need to get out of the house.)

Okay, so there's this chapter I'm writing for an edited collection that now has a publisher (that I'm not at all impressed by, but that's not a particularly significant consideration in this case). I worked hard and pumped a draft of me on this thing last summer. (I taught through the entire summer, so that was no small feat.) I knew when I turned it in that it was not good. But it was a beginning. I didn't get comments for a long time and so focused my scholarly energies elsewhere. I finally got my first set of comments back a couple months ago. They were harsh yet non-directive. So I took it to my multidisciplinary writing group which has a number of people situated much more inside the field than I am. While a couple people really didn't like certain parts of it and everyone agreed that it was very very rough, some others saw what I was trying to do and gave me good comments and direction about what the piece really needed to do in order to be useful. Then I got much more directive comments from the editors that emphasized their interest in it (the earlier comments hadn't) but made suggestions about where to go.

While I had a little spurt of energy on the project and ILL'd books like mad, my interest in the project is at an all-time low. Here's what I think is going on, besides just being in a funk about United States, Inc. and the fact that we're all guinea pigs in a country where Big Business is the bottom line:

1. The Comments A-Swirling in My Head: The comments from my writing group suggested more focus on practice. Okay, that's not easy, but it should be doable. I understand why. This is the most important single aspect to work on to make the piece do what I want it to do. It takes a lot of time to put that stuff together, and I feel I have to rob some of my other work or do a lot of new stuff in order to do it. It's time-consuming and means really starting over, but I can do it, and I agree that it should be done. The comments from the editors concurred with this. But they also wanted more of a specific kind of analysis that I don't like to do very much, which means a lot of new work, and asked me to do one thing that I absolutely will not do because it means a whole lot more research. I completely respect that it's their collection, and they need my piece to fit in with other pieces. But I'm not sure whether it's that the piece doesn't feel like mine anymore -- the comments taking up more of my mental space than the engagement with the work -- or my lack of interest in doing the things they want me to do, which probably brings us back around to the issue that this piece is not in my field.
2. I haven't gotten a lot of work done on this lately. It needs to be done in 5 weeks (they'd have liked it at the end of this month, but I'm teaching this summer (boo) so I asked for an extension). Not getting work done on it and barely knowing where to start is enough to be in a funk about this.
3. The Big Picture, aka Tenure Requirements: As of now, I'm halfway to the university's official tenure-able publication requirements. But this piece is not situated in my field. Now it just so happens that at my institution, I have a lot of flexibility in defining my field the way I want to. While the major field of the collection is not my field, the focus of it certainly is, so much so, in fact, that this and related foci are what my university colleagues outside my field remember about my work (especially when it lines up with their interests, so I've gotten people in the social sciences asking me about my work, which is cool beans indeed). What's more, my particular angle on it is also very much a key research interest for me that anyone would see from looking at my work or even my CV. So within my university, this piece probably does count as a sincere full-fledged publication. But when I think of outside reviewers in my field, well, it's not in my field. A nice outside reviewer will easily see what I'm trying to do, but it doesn't help cement, or even contribute, to my work in my field. And because of that, I see this piece not as useless but as counting as a half publication to my tenure requirements. (I have another half publication that is extremely short and not published in a field journal, so it works out. This and that equal one whole publication.) But probably the prospect of needing to do so much additional work and not getting much out of it (and of course they can still reject it entirely) isn't very motivating.
   
4. The work I need to do on this piece -- rewriting the whole thing and doing some new research for it -- is keeping me from working on another big project that requires copious research but is very well situated in my field. (Okay, it's putting two fields together: mine and one is that I have a lot of familiarity with, though not enough at this point to write scholarship in. But it's on a topic that I know very well in my field, and my particular focus is on something that no one has done yet. So with the four or five months that I have for it, I feel much better about that one, though the research is daunting. Plus it counts as a complete publication. It also has a well-respected publisher already. And the editor is completely excited about it. Maybe that's more significant than I realize: I know the editor will help me hone it because Zie is a generous rockstar and very much in love with the topic. Not so with this piece where I know I'm already skating on thin ice.)

(I love blogging because it helps me figure myself out. In my journals, I'm too prone to whining, but here I have to explain it all to someone outside my head and not whine. So I actually get somewhere rather than dwelling in the emotion of it all.)

So the whole context around this piece I'm supposed to be working on is negative. With this revision, I have to prove that this piece is worth including, even while my methods are not the field's methods. I'm sure it's occurred to you that I'm thinking of just hanging it up completely. But I hate to do that. It wouldn't exactly hurt me because these people are not in my field, though, yes, the academic world is small. But giving up can be a hard habit to break. (Who am I quoting? I can't remember.) If you have managed to make it this far and have an opinion on this, please please please leave it in comments.

I do think it's difficult to write to a resistant audience. That's what this feels like to me. I need to imagine that I'm writing it to someone who is receptive to the ideas. I know this won't lead me to exquisite argumentation, but right now I need a strategy for getting words down on the page. (I do freewrite on the damn thing, but I've got zero usable pages right now.)

Part of me really wants to not deal with it at all today but take the day off for a little EE time. Though perhaps not working on it will lead me to feeling worse about it later. It's difficult to know. I have no idea what I'd do -- probably work out and. . .oh dear lord, I don't know. Cook? Repot my plants? I should do that report, but that's not relaxing. Take a nap? Get outside? Oy vey. What is it that makes me happy and hopeful again? Organic agriculture, lovely food, farmy stuff, being outside. Good books. (Oh yeah, I'm sad also that I haven't been writing -- not scholarship, but the real stuff. Of course, this is old news. Maybe I'm just in a funk, a physical funk, and looking for mental reasons for it. Maybe I just need to snap out of it, work out, take a shower, and find something lovely to do. Go EE! Get off your lazy butt!)

I'm Working!!! April Fools!!

So today was supposed to be a day when I could relax, grading last quarter's portfolios and projects and starting my new syllabi from bed. I don't know why the image of this "relaxing" day always had me in bed, except in years past, I used to love working in bed with all my papers and books strewn about me. But, of course, there's no rolling out of bed and into coffee and work. There's taking Tot to daycare and then there was the leak under the sink.

So Tot, who deserves a better moniker, is moving up into the next room with the big kids. I think this is a great move for him, because being with the babies had him asking for a bottle. He's done a lot of new things lately: he's talking up a storm (often too fast for us to understand); he asks for milk, which is completely new; he responds to our calls that it's time to go to bed, somewhat. Which is a great foundation for the future. So I met the lead teacher, and we talked about organic and non-GMO food preferences and all the things they do in that room. It's more structured than the toddler room. On the one hand, I think this is great. On the other hand, I'm pretty convinced by the Montessori method of having children be self-directed in a carefully-constructed environment where they can work together and teach each other, as I went to a Montessori myself (though too late for it to be pivotal) and I am also highly critical of the general educational method with the hidden curriculum that says: sit and be quiet; the teacher will tell you the answer because you can't figure it out yourself; all answers are in books rather than in direct observation and experimentation; the way to success and approbation is through docility and following orders. Though I went to a nearby Montessori's open house day pretty recently and saw Tot focus on moving beans from bowl to bowl with a spoon, AL and I have been so busy and wanting to do our own thing in the odd hours that we haven't been able to have sustained conversations about this -- or anything. (We're totally talking past each other in our discussions of whether to move, sign another lease at this place, or what.)

Anyway, Tot moving up to the new room is good in any case.

So I've got ten portfolios staring at me (out of 19 I need to do and, I think, odd projects for about 8 students in my other class), but that doesn't mean I've done a darn thing. Instead I've been on the Timesuck, a.k.a. Facebook, which I had ignored for a few months. Two important discoveries: one person who I'm not friends with anymore but who I'm still curious about (I did Zie wrong, though I didn't do it on purpose and so Zie ended the friendship, which, I admit, was too much for me and had grown into something where I felt I couldn't be myself) has finally un-privatized hir FB info. So I'm weirdly glad to see that Zie looks so happy. Part of me wants to send a message to hir just saying that for all my thoughtlessness when we were friends, I think of hir still and wish Zie the best, but on the other hand I don't want to intrude. Much worse, it looks like my favorite couple in the world may be splitting up. Since I moved to the other side of the country, I've been out of touch with a lot of people -- and this split is just terrible. I hope I'm wrong.

There's been a lot of stuff going on at work -- lots of stuff I'm not very happy about. Lots of situations that really need to be addressed, but can I address them? Should I address them? And how do I explain to a certain Dickhead that rushing to a solution for a complex problem really disappoints me, angers me, and shows me that if Zie thinks that hir students don't take open-minded inquiry seriously, then I can bloody well see why. I realize lots of people don't agree with this, but to me service is a place where I'm called upon to walk the talk -- where I'm supposed to put my thoughtful and reflective scholarly self to work on shared problems. In fact, I've been raging pissed about this recently, but my therapist helped me with all this.

Therapy is going well. I'm also putting Tot into another day of daycare so I'll get more done. I'm determined to get that article to Fave Journal for a variety of reasons. Just determined. Since I got back from that conference I've felt so isolated -- both from friends and from the exciting conversations in my field. (Hence back on FB.) I've decided that I'm going to read more scholarship and do an article swap with a great friend-colleague of mine from grad school. Truth be told, I don't want to work on these student papers or my syllabi because I really want to be working on scholarship, but obviously I'm not doing that either.

So. . .I need to get to work. Even thinking of what I should do first and everything just takes the wind out of my sails. I guess I should get to work on a syllabus or two. Actually read the teaching journal I wrote. Blech. It doesn't sound like fun at all.

Reflections on the Job, Religion, and My Family of Origin

Hi everyone! First, let me just apologize. I know. . .reading a white font sucks, but I just loved this template and color theme. We'll see how it goes. (I kinda wanted something snowier -- to go with the outrageous snowy outside and my new snowy Firefox theme, but this assemblage of greens, well, I likes it!)

Here's something I want to remember: when I feel hurt or upset about something and just want to withdraw, sometimes the best thing I can do is go engage it! Here's why I say so: not only did I talk to my chair about the lack of electives I get to teach this year and get a good result, but I also held an event on campus that I really believed in. It started small, and I had to fight to keep it high-touch and deep rather than let it get industrialized (which might have made more "product," but would not have been a deep experience for participants), but it went better than I expected. A couple students thanked me for having it as they were exiting. Knowing that I brought something to campus that even a few people think is valuable and interesting makes much of the swimming against the tide worthwhile. Lesson learned: doing something I think is valuable makes me feel good. It boosts my morale.

I want to tell you about these realizations I've been having about my family of origin, but in order for all that to make sense, I have to back up and tell you about church. I'm Jewish and naturally skeptical about God. My father is proud of describing himself as someone who actively disbelieves in God. My mother is a seeker, one of those people who has explored religion after religion, converting to Judaism, but then exploring other things after that. I have also explored religious and spiritual traditions, feeling that Taoism makes the most sense, not that I'm good at all at going with the flow, which is pretty literally what Taoism is about. Judaism is also really important to me. I love Jewish culture and traditions. I felt bad this year until I bought a menorah for Chanukah, though I didn't light it each night. I'm proud of my Jewish background and think that there are some things that are fundamentally Jewish. But do I *believe* in the Old Testament G-d as the truth? Nope. Do I even want to *try* to believe in the Old Testament G-d as truth? Not really. I wish I had faith, have always sort of envied people of faith, am fascinated by nuns and monks and Haredi who reject our materialistic and competitive world for better values. But faith in an organized religion doesn't come naturally to me.

On the other hand, I've immersed myself in academic skepticism and found it wanting. Being a critical thinker all the time doesn't make me happy. Believing in only the material world doesn't explain or make room for the sense of awe and wonder which genuinely seems part of our world, at least the more natural parts of it. I believe that humans don't know all there is to know about this world, that just as there's light that we can't see (ultraviolet) and sounds we can't hear (dog whistle), there are energies that are just as real that our hubristic and materialist explanation of things just doesn't include or make room for. I *believe* in this, even while I also think that there are good reasons to believe it. (The history of science, which I was lucky to take as an undergrad, shows a long history of people knowing one thing to be true, then having that knowledge overturned by a new discovery. What this means to me is that while science may ultimately be progressing, we could very well be sitting right in the middle of some big scientific errors that people will laugh about generations hence.)

Since logocentrism doesn't work for me, I've been trying something else. While I grew up with the notion that those "crazy Christians" aren't very smart, many of the Christian students I've met over the years are, and what's more, they're good people with good values who do worthwhile things. Not all of them, of course. I remember some Christian students who tormented themselves and their loved ones with scriptural dogma rather than love and acceptance. Some things, like being anti-masturbation, seem to go against human nature in a way that can be seriously detrimental to all, I think.

But for a variety of reasons -- including my own curiosity and need for community -- Absurdist Family has been exploring a church. And in general it's been good. I love this pastor's sermons. Maybe I'm susceptible to a message that says that even though I'm a total fuck-up, God loves me and thinks I'm okay. Maybe I'm susceptible to such a message because of my fucked-up childhood, where even though unconditional love and acceptance was occasionally said, it was contradicted by action as well as words on a regular basis. But get Christ into the mix with all that dying for my sins and my needing to accept Christ as my lord and savior in order to get into heaven, and I check out. Out the door. But, this pastor doesn't focus on that. He says: if God is with you now, why wouldn't he want to be with you after you're dead. And the truth is, the pastor says, God is with you, with every one of us no matter what our religion. I don't know if I *believe* it, but I can see the use in believing it, in trying to believe that someone who loves me is with me in the dark times, of which there are many because, as we all know, parenting, living, working, trying to live in partnership with others, trying to do the right thing and waiting long enough to figure out what that is without self-destructing, etc. are really fucking hard.

Having written this, I find I think I'm a little crazy. I was greatly confused for a long time when I realized there were religious people in the academy. I thought those people must be a little crazy. And now here I am, a little crazy. But that's okay, I think. I can deal with a contemplative tradition (which I often can't find in the Jewish world, except in places with a high saturation of Jews).

So, jumping into the deep end of the pool, AL and I joined a small group at this church. And the group's focus was (it's over now) on the intersection between emotional and spiritual issues. One week was focused on messages we got from our family of origin. And now we catch up with what I really wanted to say, though I've long wanted to post all this church stuff, since I know many of you are much smarter about religion and church stuff than I am.

Here's something I realized was very true even though it was originally a throw-away comment to AL: I spend too much time and energy on my family of origin and not enough time and energy on the people who love me. I don't mean AL and Tot, who are my life now. But when we were back in Urban City, folks from Grad City sent me two boxes worth of gifts for Tot, even though I'm notoriously bad at remembering other people's showers and birthdays. These people care about me anyway, despite some really seriously faults at showing them how much I care. (Let's not even talk about the fact that I still haven't sent thank you notes, of which I'm deeply ashamed. Though even after two years, I still mean to.)

Instead of making sure to keep in touch with these people, who've obviously forgiven my faults time and time again, I spend a lot of mental energy being disappointed in my family of origin. It's as if they have to take up a certain mental space in my life even though they're not really in my life. I don't want to be disappointed in them. I realize that it's just who they are, but still, the way they are is just no way to be, at least for me. I managed to get very tense right around Tot's birthday, because I was paying attention to who remembered and who didn't. That is my problem. But my father texted me for Tot's birthday. Texted. Nice to know he didn't forget, and of course he sent a present, but he's not interested in seeing what Tot looks like or checking in or anything -- and for his lack of interest in Tot, I just cannot forgive him. I know my father is who he is -- one of those people controlled and overwhelmed by what is in front of him. And we're not. But my son is a treasure and has never borrowed money and not paid it back. He needs a grandpa. And my father is just not it. My father doesn't answer my emails in general and did not respond when I recently sent him a picture of Tot. At least I'm doing what I think is right. My mom is also a piece of work, frankly. Right now, I think she's giving me the silent treatment for reasons I can guess but have not been told. Not only is the behavior just totally ridiculous and infantile, but it's not deserved, if the reason I'm thinking of is the right reason. I know everyone complains about their parents (at least everyone in places like Urban City), but AL affirms that I'm not insane -- these people really are pretty awful. At the small group, we could see very clearly how most other participants really had no basis for comparison (not that I talked about it much, but most talked about their wonderful relationships with their families).

Now I'm staring down my own birthday. I should make sure my phone has plenty of money on it to accept their texts! Okay, that was bitter. But if I want love and acceptance (which is obviously a hole that no person can fill up), my family ain't it. Don't get me wrong -- my family has been good to me at times when I really needed it. But I'm still paying for that time, for those decisions. But there are these people who care about me even from a distance. Surely, I should be spending more time showing them how much I care and less on thinking about how my family of origin sucks. Instead of thinking about how much my family of origin sucks, I should thank God, heaven, or my lucky stars that I'm out from under my family enough to be able to see that they, probably through no meanness, are not good for me. And I need to have the mental discipline enough to turn my focus to things I like and can do something significant about, rather than just getting whatever it is I get out of (playing the victim, which is way too simple) opening myself up to being disappointed by them. That said, I know also that this is something significant I need to mourn -- and I'm going to feel bad about it until I stop feeling bad about it. But I think I need an outlet to explore how deep the rabbit hole goes instead of thinking about it now, when I should be working on an article with a deadline!

By the way, I never got to therapy or yoga. These are goals for January now.