Happy Returns

A pleasant thing to come home to = a request for Additional Materials from an institution where you would be very happy to work.

A pleasant thing to check email to = two more dossier requests.

* * * * * * * * * *

Less pleasant ways to start the week = breaking your coffee pot at 6:30 am. And a ladybug infestation that necessitates the use of Raid, which is currently really stinking up the joint.

We can't have everything.

Where Is My Luggage?

Yes, where is my luggage?

It was not in the airport.

It was supposed to be delivered to me at my house 22 minutes ago.

Perhaps I am holding the luggage delivery person to too high a standard of punctuality, but nonetheless I ask:

Where is my luggage?

*Fuller report on the conference that I attended with said luggage to appear shortly.

Update: Luggage has arrived! Two hours late, but still well before bed time. All is well.

A Weird Cat is Out of the Bag

Yeppers....

After my middle class today, a couple of students were sort of lingering in the room. Finally one of them sidled up to me (I was erasing the blackboard) and asked, "Do you have a tattoo?"

"Um, why?" I asked.

"Just wondering," he said.

I glanced around and noticed that one of the students conspicuously eavesdropping was a guy who's a lifeguard at the campus pool. Sigh. "Yeah," I said, "I do."

There was a predictable outpouring of excitement at this news, One of the students has a bunch of tattoos already, and another one is about to get some; I suppose that that's how the subject came up. The lifeguard-student, who was obviously the one who had got this whole thing started, asked me what my tattoo was of (it's on my back, in case you were wondering)--I was evasive on that score. (It's a symbol of my own youthful design; nothing embarrassing, but some boundaries must be maintained! And besides, it would've taken more explaining than I was up for.)

Anyway, it confirms my fear that the lifeguard-student has told other students (I don't think these are even his particular friends, honestly) about seeing me in the pool, in my bathing suit, and my tattoo, and so who knows what other...evaluations/opinions are circulating. The freshman class already knows all about my yoga prowess (the local teacher is the mother of one of my students), so I guess they're well on their way to knowing ALL about me.

This post should be read with wry humor, not irritation; I'm really just amused. But I'm also a little worried--so far, I think, the revelations have reflected well on me (tattoos might give me some cred with some of the kids; I'm not sure about the yoga), but the mind recoils from what more humiliating things might eventually come out!

Teaching through the Sweetness

Last night the English honor society was to meet at my house for an informal book club. Only two students showed up (not a huge surprise), but I think that it was kind of a success nonetheless.

I'm low on furniture here, so we sat on cushions on the floor eating grapes and drinking apple cider and talking about the book--and other books, and movies, and whatever else came up. These two students are so bright and idiosyncratic; the conversation ranged from Bergman to horror movies to Ivanhoe. What with the floor-sitting and the snacks the whole thing felt very collegiate, and I confess to being a little startled when, towards the end of the evening, one of the students addressed me as Dr. Mihi.

I'm having good feelings about teaching--and students--in general lately. Yesterday I bumped into one of my survey students as he was smoking a cigarette; I asked him how he was enjoying the reading. He told me that he'd been having a hard time with it but that the lecture had clarified things and he loved Satan's shape-shifting in the excerpt we'd read for that day; we talked a little bit about some of the more (and less) exciting things that he'd come across in the text. And last week I conferenced with all my comp students, which at least gave me a stronger sense of who most of them are as people (even if some of the conferences were more successful than others). One of the great things about Field students is that they tend to be pretty comfortable talking to professors. Of course, sometimes this isn't such a great thing, but in general it's nice.

The thing is, I really like most of my students--in some cases without good reason, since I know almost nothing about them and they seldom speak in class. But I look out and see them, day after day, all full of their own lives and their strivings and whatever else is going on, and when I'm in a good mood I feel a peculiar kind of tenderness for them. I want them to do well and I want my classes to push them along in their intellectual growth.

That's sappy as hell, I know. Oh well. I don't sleep much lately. Grant me my emotional outpourings, please!

A challenging meme

This is incredibly hard. Not the logistics--because I'm just following what Squadratomagico, my tagger, did--but the questions. Lord. What is "classic fiction," anyway? Okay, here's my best shot (preceded by the rules):
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There is a set of questions below, all of which are in this format:

"The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is . . . ."

Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

*You can leave them exactly as is.

*You can delete any one question.

*You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change"The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is . . . " to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is . . ." or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is . . ." or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is . . . ."

In addition, you can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...."

*You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions. Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

Here's my genealogy:

My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent is Primate Diaries.
My great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent is Thus Spake Zuska.
My great-great-great-great-great grandparent is k8, a cat, a mission.
My great-great-great-great grandparent is Monkeygirl.
My great-great-great-grandparent is DancingFish.
My great-great-grandparent is Brazen Hussy.
My great-grandparent is Bad Ass Turtle.
My grandparent is Belle.
My parent is Squadratomagico.

Here are my mutated statements.

The best TV in SF/Fantasy is: Firefly, followed closely by Buffy. (Joss is, apparently, the man.)

The best classic hardboiled detective movie in film noir is: The Thin Man.

The best cult religion in classic fiction is: I delete this question! It is too hard.

The best high-fat food in Mexican cooking my house is: a carton of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

The best publication writing-related words I ever received from a scholar are: "Your dissertation was a pleasure to read."

The best everyday lie in academic life is: Good question--I'll cover that in our next class.

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(I think you're only actually supposed to change up to 2 questions--the rule has become a little hazy. But since I can't answer any of the three questions I've changed without changing them, I'm just not going to follow that rule too closely. Oh, I guess I could leave the Mexican cooking question intact, but it's kind of boring.)
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And I tag...if you're interested and haven't been tagged...Sisyphus! Dance! Belle! And Flavia!

Keep the line alive.... No pressure, though!

In which I contribute my own outraged vitriol to an ongoing debate

So I came late to the whole "debate" re. the purported "selfishness" of junior faculty who apply to other jobs, and I've made a decision not to blog about it at length--in part because so many other people have already made such strong arguments on their blogs (see Dance for links to the relevant posts), but also because I find the whole argument so shocking that I'm not sure I can respond rationally. The amount of vitriol spewed against people who feel that it's acceptable to change jobs at some point in their careers is appalling. I'm also just flabbergasted that anyone could sincerely believe that there's a moral requirement for Ph.D.s to stay, forever, in the first jobs that they get. It's so nonsensical that I don't even know how to respond to it. I mean, obviously we'd all prefer to get jobs near family/partners/friends, in places where we don't feel culturally marginalized and alone, with ideal teaching-to-research ratios and decent salaries/benefits, our first time out on the market. We'd love it. Of course. But I know exactly zero people (of my academic generation) to whom that's happened, and I know a lot of young Ph.D.s.

Everyone I know has moved. Most did the wandering VAP/adjunct thing for a while before settling down. Several went from a one-year to a tenure-track job that they didn't like to a tenure-track job that they like and plan to stay in. Oh wait--no, I can think of one person who has come out of my (pretty highly ranked) graduate program who got a tenure-track job her first time out and hasn't moved yet. But it was the only job she applied for (!!), she had personal connections in the department, and she didn't even have to move apartments. This is not typical.

I'd like to highlight the wandering VAP phenomenon. This profession, at least in my field, expects and demands that we move frequently before even getting a tenure-track job. This is financially and emotionally draining and unstable; from personal experience, I can say that moving to a strange town far from everyone you love for a one-year position with mediocre pay and no job security, where the culture is rather different from what you're used to and you can't get the foods you like in the grocery store, kind of sucks. So yes, I'm looking forward to settling in someplace and committing to my job. I want to commit to a job. But given the sacrifices that we are already expected to make just to secure a tenure-track job to begin with, it is the height of unreasonableness to then demand that we accept wholeheartedly, like, forever, whatever position the Job Market Gods finally deign to hand down to us. As much as I know that this is the career that I want, as committed as I am to the profession, I am not, ultimately, identical to my job. Our selves do not end where our jobs end. We are, in fact, full human beings, and those who would call our commitments to living full human lives "selfish" can bite me.

See? I said that I couldn't approach the subject rationally. So I'll just leave it at that.

Already?

Late this morning I emailed a cover letter and a CV to a school that was accepting electronic applications.

Early this afternoon I received a rejection letter.

I can't help but admire the efficiency of a search committee that gathers on Saturdays at lunchtime to breathlessly await the arrival of each new electronic applications--nearly a week before the application deadline, no less! Clearly, this is a marvel of dedication.



But seriously.

My application must have very obviously not fit with something that they were looking for, despite the fact that there was nothing in the job ad to indicate that. Well, fair enough; they're looking for something and I'm not it. But still, I can't help but be a little taken aback. And marginally worried that my CV is somehow tainted with an appalling, un-hire-able trait.

My only real regret is that this was one of only two schools in my optimal location that's hiring this year. Oh well. The other one looks like a better fit anyway.