If you're in graduate school and thinking about leaving, either part-time or temporarily, Phoenix Rising may be a good site for you to visit. Most appreciated is the author's Pledge, in which she refuses to take any stance that makes those who leave feel bad about their decision. For post-academics looking to make transitions out of academia, much of the site will feel like it's aiming at a different though clearly kindred audience -- BUT the links page includes several sites addressing that experience. The site as a whole seems to be a work in progress, but what's there is good -- let's hope that the Phoenix can keep rising.

{edit} Some of the links are outdated. "Escape Pod" has been retired, for example. Sellout has been recommended in my own comments and reviewed earlier by me (along with some other transition sites). Again, pre-post-academics (or whatever you want to call pre-degree departers) will probably find more here than post-degree career changers.

Carine's related site, PhinisheD, is "A discussion and support group for people who cannot seem to finish their dissertations or theses." Again, not terribly helpful for those of us who've been there, done that, but it looks promising for members of the target audience. More useful may be the "phorum" called Phinally Phinished, which is for people who have, obviously, finished. If I have time, I'll take a look and report back.

A small stylistic warning, by the way -- "ph" (as in Ph.D.) is used in place of "f" in a number of words (like "phorum," "phinally," "phinished," "phriends" and "pholk." I wearied of this cutesiness fairly quickly and found it hard to focus (and hard afterwards not to write "phound" and "phocus") on the actual information. Your mileage may vary.

Yami, over at green gabbro (wonderful name!), wonders if graduate school in the humanities and undergraduate science programs might have common ground in their effects on students. Given this wonderfully evocative description -- "for the past four years, I've struggled to maintain health and balance while watching bits of my intellectual self-confidence flake off like pieces of pastry that I'm not allowed to eat. Sometimes I've managed, and other times I've hidden under my pillow." -- I suspect that this may warrant further inquiry.

This cheered me up -- thanks, Aaron!

Like a tennis ball
Caught suddenly in a fence --
Bird on the screen door.

Yoga Journal has published an article on yoga sequencing for depression.

I think I will have to give this a try. It certainly couldn't hurt.

This wrenching post from Tim Burke reminds me to be happy for what I do have, and to appreciate that things could be much, much worse than being unemployed.

Today Dorothea over at Caveat Lector wrote "I strongly resist the idea that depressed or angry people are completely non-functioning. For Pete�s sake, I know better! In the grip of the same paralyzing depression that left me unable to read, I taught forty-odd people Spanish, and did so pretty damned well, thank you. So I don�t believe in telling people that they can�t get anything accomplished unless and until they fix their thoughts."

This sounds terribly familiar. Appearances of this blog to the contrary, most people don't know when I'm depressed. I have the lovely ability to suddenly look happy and cheerful when someone pokes their head into my office to say hi, then go back to the doom and gloom once they've gone. I know full well when I am depressed, why I am depressed, what I need to do to mask my depression and that -- often -- there is no good reason for my depression. My reason knows this, anyway; try telling this to whatever part of my psyche is responsible for being depressed in the first place. It doesn't like to listen to reason.

It's at times like this when I begin to understand why depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders seem to be related diseases; when I'm depressed, I know it on an intellectual level but I can't stop obsessively wallowing in it. Anxiety I seem to have a better handle on; I used to get panic attacks, not know what they were and panic some more. Now I think "Oh, it's another damn panic attack" and patiently wait it out. If only I could learn to do that with depression!

It belatedly occurs to me that it might be productive to throw open the door to suggestions for possible work environments, since that seems to be the bone my mind keeps digging up and gnawing on.

I like Western environments, particularly deserts. I enjoy observing the animals and plants that live in such environments, though I lack the scientific training to avoid reinventing the wheel. Photographing and sketching often accompany these observations, and my skills are not bad in these areas.

My research work has been interested in questions of adaptation (of self/culture to environment and vice versa) and the social and individual representations and understandings that govern the processes of adaptation. In other words -- how people come to know the place they inhabit, and how that knowing shapes and is shaped by the experience.

I'm somewhat interested in environmental ethics and its relation to effective political action, but I'm not that interested in politics per se (nor am I good at critiquing policy, as previous efforts to do so in this blog indicate!) I'd be happy to work with activists, but I don't believe that I have the passion for any given cause to be one myself.

I like solving problems and working with my hands -- I did once contemplate a major in mechanical engineering that foundered on the higher math involved -- though that would not be enough without associated intellectual challenges. (In other words, I'm good with machines, handicrafts and pottery, but I don't want to work only with people who are good with machines and little else.)

I like writing and I'm a good editor. I like reading.

I like playing with the graphical presentation of information; I am fascinated by maps and web design (though not necessarily the coding that underlies it) and graphic layout more generally.

Activities that consistently give me joy: Making things with my hands. Watching animals. Fixing machinery. Solving problems and learning how to make things work. Learning weird science facts. Knowing obscure information others don't. Writing or presenting something and hearing people's reactions to it. Playing with old documents and artifacts. Wrestling with theories and devising my own out of them. Yoga. Reading books. Photography. Playing with maps. Teaching people how to do something. Playing with new languages, but more in terms of solving grammar puzzles than learning to speak them. Organizing data and playing with it to discover the relationships between variables.

I also prefer informal over formal working environments, casual or arty clothes over suits, workspaces filled with plants and toys and cartoons over cubicles and formal offices. I like small companies more than large; I want to know my co-workers and work for people, not faceless boards of directors. I want colleagues who see their job as a place to play and explore and make a difference, not a place to maximize profits, garner status and live by the rule book.

So... what does this add up to? What career venues might prove a satisfying home for my interests?

Working in a museum has occurred to me, but the market there is even worse than in academia.
Should I look for an environmental non-profit? If so, any in particular?
Go to work for someplace like the USGS? Other options?
Apprentice to a periodical like the UTNE Reader? Other possibilities?

Other suggestions?

Throw 'em at me; I have no plans now, so I have nothing to lose by exploring a wide range of possibilities. In fact, I will be doing this with the temp agency; it would be nice to give them a few examples of the sorts of places I'd like to be placed, if the option is available.

Sometimes, when I re-read posts like the last three, I think that I should not be allowed near a computer while I am depressed or angry.

If I didn't, however, I'd be letting those thoughts fester in my head. Blogging, then, is rather like lancing a boil; it can be disgusting, but the alternative is worse.

This is also part of the reason why having comments enabled is so important to me. I figure things out by trial and error, including ideas and attitudes, so the comments help me figure out just what it is that I think and feel. Cheap therapy!

I am terribly grateful that my readers not only put up with these lancings, but offer graceful commentary and salve for the wound of the day. I can only hope that others are learning from my pain and benefiting from others' comfort; I don't know how to repay that support and sympathy otherwise.

In the previous post I tried to explain why explanations of why working outside of academe is not a waste of grad school time tend to rankle. Unfortunately, that is a small component of my overall reaction to the experience of being booted from the nest. Assertions like those strike me as annoying, or stupid, or well-meaning but not applicable to the real worries that are currently besetting me. If I get cranky about such assertions, it ultimately doesn't mean much, because whether or not those arguments prove true is a matter of opinion.

So, you may be asking, what are those "real worries"? This is a good question, because it sure isn't a worry that I can't handle a temp job that leads me to weep in the shower late at night. If I were feeling melodramatic, I would say it is because I am in fear of losing my soul.

In truth, though, I'm not that worried about my soul. I am worried about what my work does to my personality and sense of self. As I've suggested in earlier posts and comments, I have tendencies and experiences in my past that make me worry about losing myself in an effort to conform to group norms and the pain that this causes. Much of my childhood was spent being an outsider and I still carry the scars; not the big scars one gets from being a reject or an outcast, but the subtle scars that come from never quite fitting in and always having to hide or prune aspects of oneself in order to find some measure of acceptance. As a result, I'm very sensitive to social cues about acceptable behavior, beliefs, etc. and often unconsciously find myself adapting to the norms of the place I'm in and the people who surround me.

If the difference between me and the others is small, the distortion is minor and fits within the fluctuations of personality I experience on a regular basis anyway. If the difference is large, what I experience is the psychic equivalent of footbinding -- a cramming of myself into an ill-fitting space until I fit. So what, you say, everyone does this to some degree. You go home at the end of the day and stretch and return to yourself. Unfortunately, I've found, I don't. The echoes of the distortion persist, and the longer I am with a group of people the more like them I become and I begin to forget the parts of myself that don't fit into the group norm.

Again, you may say that I'm being melodramatic, but I've watched myself in action too many times to not believe that this can and will happen again. Like the frog being slowly boiled alive, I don't realize how hot the water is -- how far I have strayed from the person I am most comfortable being -- until something tips me out. I spent a month once living in a house of a British translator; by the end of the month I had developed a slight British accent and could complete her sentences. More tellingly, there was the month-long trip with people who teased me for always using "big" words (my ordinary working vocabulary); by the end of it I was no longer using those words, and no longer even having to think about it. I literally became a simpler thinker as a result; it took a return to grad school to remind myself that I did still have the capacity for more complex thought.

I think you can see where I'm going with this.

It was only in college, then grad school, and now in the presence of either family or academic friends, that I feel entirely myself. No distortions, no adaptations to the group, no foreign habits slowly adopted until they become my own -- THIS is why I am so afraid about leaving.

I've been trying, over the last day, to figure out why I am having such difficulty "thinking positive" as Kevin Walzer suggests.

I think partly it is because I do, deep down, feel that any career outside academia does, indeed, represent a waste of the seven years I spent in graduate school. This is not because I did not come out of grad school with skills that an employer may or will value. It is because the quality of that appreciation is quite likely to be different from my own, and because what such an employer is likely to value are things I did not need to attend grad school to obtain. When I look at my new resume, I see a long list of practical skills, like "Used PowerPoint to enhance public presentations" or "Developed a database using Excel to track student performance" or even "Produced analytical summaries of others' performance and writing," that really have very little relation to grad school beyond context. I never took a class in PowerPoint while in grad school -- did you? I figured out how to make an Excel spreadsheet for tracking my students' assignment and participation grades on my own. I do not remember more than the most informal instruction in how to contact an archivist, arrange an interview and begin working through the documents; most of this I figured out on my own, albeit in response to the impetus created by classes and professors' assignments. I am presuming that these are the sorts of things that make me valuable to future employers -- my skill set and my ability to add to it on my own initiative -- but did I need to go to grad school to obtain them?

What I did learn in grad school -- as a matter of formal training -- covered the writing of historiographic essays, learning how to parse arguments quickly and accurately, how to identify a school of thought, and more specific information about trends in ideas. My minor field exams required knowledge of a general topic area and of scholars' arguments about it. So too for the orals, with the added ingredient of knowing where to situate myself and my work within that larger body of knowledge. These things, to me, were the real essence of grad school, the knowledge that I could not obtain working alone. Will a future employer find these abilities as valuable?

When I hear these arguments about the value of my degree to employers, the analogy that comes first to mind is that of a person wearing an antique pin that belonged to a much loved relative from the time she was a girl, and which was given to the person when she was thirteen and scared about entering high school. She meets someone in an elevator while wearing the pin, and that person says, "Hey, nice pin. How much is it worth?" Both would agree that the pin is valuable -- but do they share the same sense of value?




{edit} Kevin's post is actually helpful; I don't want to give the impression that I'm including it among the mindlessly chirpy optimists. (Indeed, Kevin takes care to distance himself from that kind of fluff.) I'm not in a space where I can fully appreciate it yet, but other folks might be.

Earlier, Invisible Adjunct posted about Mary Dillard Johnson's article "What Else Can I Do? And Other Frequent Questions." In it, Johnson talks about how an academic can begin thinking about moving out of academia into the wider world of work.

Some of what she has to say is useful in a vague way, and her suggestion (which IA quoted) that looking at the NY Times "commitment" pages might be a good place to explore career possibilities is delightfully humorous.

I must take a grain of salt when she suggests "Read Do What You Are, a helpful guide by Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger that uses personality as an additional factor to consider in making career choices. For a comprehensive and sensible view of the whole career-search process, I still recommend the classic and frequently updated What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles. I think it is also worth looking at the classified ads in major newspapers, not so much to find a job opening (although that is always a possibility), but to find out how employers think about their needs, how they describe the duties and requirements of different types of jobs."

I read the former, and it is not very helpful (the latter is the one that language hat threw from him). You start with one of those personality quizzes to chart you on intro/extroversion, feeling/thinking, sensing/judging, etc. then read about your "matches." This is all well and good, but it doesn't address the complaint I've been making over and over again:

This is not only about what you might like to do, it is about what your skills qualify you to do!

I am reminded yet again about the time in grad school when I went to the career center to tentatively explore alternatives (just in case). The tests I took advised me that I had the makings of a nuclear physicist -- 'nuf said.

And then there's this bit of happy-happy-joy-joy we've all heard before about transferable skills (and note, again, the assumption that leaving academia is a chosen course, not a forced one):

"Question: My adviser is urging me to apply for jobs this coming academic cycle, but I'm not sure whether I want an academic career or not. I feel that I should be sure and that I will have wasted the last six years if I don't become a professor. But I think I want to look into other options. What should I do?

"Answer: Your uncertainty and conflict are common to many graduate students in their final years of study. When you decided to go to graduate school, you may well have thought you wanted to become a professor. Then for the first few years of graduate school you concentrated on your academic work and thought no more of careers. There is no reason to feel guilty if you don't want an academic career now. People change; circumstances change. And there's no reason to feel that you have wasted years of your life if you don't stay in academe."

Oh really?

She continues,

"During the course of getting your Ph.D. you have developed not only a specific area of expertise but also an array of skills that are transferable to many types of careers. And in completing all the requirements of the degree, you have demonstrated your ability to do something hard and to accomplish something significant. That is experience that many employers will value."

Surely the Chronicle can do better than this.

I think I have figured out the lesson that is embedded in my not gaining an academic job this season. It is learning how to ask for help.

I've always tended to be someone who does things on her own. Partly it is that it is difficult to work with other people successfully, and I'm a nit-picker when it comes to my own work. More so, I think, is that somewhere along the line I developed this belief that one should not need to ask for help and that it is vaguely improper to do so. The impropriety is important; I suffer from a mild form of what D. and I have called "vampire disease" -- I'm reluctant to do things that I'm uncertain I've been invited or permitted to do (hence the name, like the vampire who can't enter a house without an invitation).

In some ways, that sense of vampire propriety is a good thing, but I've learned that I have a lousy sense of what other people judge "proper" and so tend to err on the side of caution. This includes asking people for help; not only does it run against that belief in self-sufficiency (which, oddly, only runs one way -- I'm always delighted to help), but I'm also afraid that I'll offend someone by asking. Stupid, I know, but there it is.

Anyway, being unemployed begins to change that equation. So does blogging, where I can feel that I'm not imposing on people, but rather inviting them in to offer advice (or not) as they wish. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit, therefore, that when I did finally act on the advice of some of my visitors and emailed my non-blog friends and family about my situation, I was surprised at the response. Everyone was sympathetic and helpful, and that is why I feel ashamed -- I should not be surprised that people who care about me would respond that way. But I was, and I believe that these might be the lessons I need to learn:

To be willing to ask for help from those who are willing to offer it, and to gracefully accept it when it is given.

And to not so badly misjudge my friends.

Working again, thanks to the expertise and hard work of Phil Ringnalda. THANK YOU!

Well, Blogger has upgraded its input screen. At present, I can see this is not going to make me happy. First, it's not letting me code in my special font classes. Second, it refuses to type a capital "w"! They show up in the preview, but not in the original screen.

Feh.

Here's what the virtual fortune-telling parrot has told me: "CYBER KILI SAYS ... You have picked Lord Murugan! You are likely to be caught in a tangle with too many thoughts. Never mind, whatever decision you make, Lord Murugan is with you. Do everything with sincerity and devotion. Success is always yours!

Hmm...

Its tail wet from rain
The squirrel ransacks the feeder
Shells and water fall

Waiting

On the advice of D. and some of the people who have posted here, I have returned all my job search books to the library. I was tempted to do what Language Hat did, and fling them from me, but they are library books and thus not mine to fling.

I've been trying to think of what my next step should be in this transition, but there really isn't one. That is, there isn't one that can be done to any effect right now. What I should be doing at this point is all those things I will (hopefully?) not have time for once I am working the ol' 9 to 5. I should be revising chapters, working on my book review, crunching through my ARCDesktop GIS tutorial, and -- shudder -- packing. What I want to be doing is running around looking at new apartments and learning how to work at places that require me to wear nylons and suits. (Well, maybe "want" is a little strong in that last case.) I do have general plans, such as emailing all my friends to let them know of my move and to ask them to keep an eye out for work for me. But, like packing, that is not something to do a month in advance of the move. In a week or two, yes. But I'm not there yet, and it's bugging me.

In other words, I want to be in motion towards something, not from something. Nor do I want to sit brooding about things to do that I can't yet do.

So much these days is about waiting, and it's hard to persuade myself that waiting is okay, and not "wasting time."

A Matter of Perspective

It is hot -- and damp
So am I -- gently sweating
Wind is not so bad.

Lethargy

I don't know what is up with me these past few days -- I've been staying up much too late and sleeping in much too late and getting very little done in between. I really need to snap myself out of it!

I am very glad, therefore, that Invisible Adjunct is exploring the mysteries of resumés and career searching this week. One, I am too tired this week to rant and whine about these things in my usual way. Two, she has a larger readership, so I am looking forward to reading the comments and advice she gets. (I'm very appreciative about the suggestions people have made to me here, so I'm hoping that they might post similar comments at IA's and get wider coverage!)

Cranky -- Blame It on the Heat

Somehow, I just can't work up much sympathy for the author of How to Handle 12 Interviews in 45 Days even though I can appreciate how grueling an experience that might have been.

It Ain't the Heat...

Before I moved out here to the Midwest, I'd always thought that the weather phenonmenon I disliked most was wind. It still leads the list, but is now joined by humidity as Weather That Will Make Rana Cranky.

Wind irritates me by blowing my hair around (wavy, fine, static-prone hair -- need I say more?), making me chase loose bits of paper, shoving my car around on the road, stirring up dust... shall I go on? A light breeze I don't mind, but wind!

Humidity bothers me by making me spend the whole day feeling warm and lethargic in that "I just got up from a nap that was too long" sort of way. It makes me feel sticky -- 'nuf said. It also annoys me because, growing up, I developed a vast array of ways to deal with arid-lands heat that simply do not work here. (I found this out the first time I tried wrapping a wet bandana on my head to cool off. Yech!)

Ayurveda would say that this is because I am a combination of vata (nervous air energy) and pitta (intense heat energy), which are aggravated by wind and moist heat. I say it's because wind and humidity suck.

Sell-By Dates

I just saw some writing on my wall: a fellowship for "junior scholars" that sets the earliest date for getting one's degree in 2001. I received mine in 1999. What, aren't I "junior" enough for you?

Beaming and Blushing (but Not a Bride)

I got the Invisible Adjunct Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence (No Cash, Just Glory) for this week! Whoo hoo!

I'm amazed, given that the competition is quite stiff; IA has wonderful comment-writers who are very insightful. I look forward to seeing who'll be next!

Template Tricks

Well, here goes. Be warned that all of this was gleaned by trial and error, so you're getting a crash course in how I went about it. There is no doubt a better, more elegant way than this, but it worked for me.

WARNING: BEFORE YOU MAKE ANY CHANGES, SELECT ALL OF THE TEMPLATE AND CAREFULLY COPY IT INTO A TEXT PROGRAM! I also recommend doing this before each change so that you can undo it if necessary. If you are like me, you will probably be doing a lot of testing following by undoes and redoes. I therefore recommend doing this through a fast connection; dial-up was hideously slow.

The simplest change is color. Pop open your template in Blogger's "edit your blog" page. You should see, after the font descriptions, something that looks like {table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%"}
{tr}
{td width="100%" bgcolor="#666666"}{img src="bloggertemplate59_cleardot.gif" width="1" height="13"}{/td}
{/tr}

only with arrow brackets instead of the {s. This basically is setting that top color bar, just below the blogspot ad (if I remember correctly -- a lot of this will require testing and checking -- I won't guarantee the exact results, just the process). The key variable is bgcolor. The number will be different for your site; 666666 is the code for that medium teal I use.

There may be a list or key of the color codes somewhere; I figured it out by opening Netscape composer (6), typing some text, selecting it, then double-clicking on the color to see the options. You can do something similar with MSWord, though I've forgotten the exact mechanism -- you want to open the window that allows you to manipulate text colors. (This was all found out by messing around -- no doubt someone out there can offer a more elegant method.) If you are a clever person, you can also go to a page with a color you like and peek at its code and see what # corresponds to that color -- the trick is finding the relevant piece of code!

When you've found a color you can live with, replace the old code # with the one you prefer, and click on "save changes." Then click "publish" and hit "view web page" (if you've already done this, then reload it) and see if you like the change.

You can do this with any place in the code that says "color=#..." -- you can do it with the tables (at the top, at the bottom, with the fonts). Darker colors work better with the fonts, obviously. Watch out for #fffffff and #000000 -- these are white and black (or is it the other way around?), and probably shouldn't be messed with too much in the sake of visual clarity.

The other two changes you can make easily -- and, again, SAVE BEFORE EACH CHANGE and, preferably, MAKE ONE CHANGE AT A TIME -- are to change the fonts and the table widths.

I've had uneven luck changing the main font, but all of the font.blank descriptions can be changed. You can even create a new one and use it in the template (my link descriptions are all coded like this: {font class="linktext"}descriptions{/font} for example) or in your blog entries (I regularly use "font class="title"; the code for font.title is "font.title {font-family: palatino; font-size: 12px; color: #339999; font-weight:bold; line-height: 17px}" -- in this case the {} should stay as they are, and not be replaced by <>. Note that I changed the font from verdana to palatino, a serif font, and the color to dark teal (339999) and the weight to bold.

To change the table widths, look for code like this: "{td valign="top" width="575" class="body"}" and replace "575" (or whatever -- yours is probably a smaller number) with another. Again, save, publish, reload.

These are my meager bag of tricks, but they seem to work. Other suggestions from others would be great!



{edit} These instructions presume that you're working with the same template I used (it looks more or less like mine, but with a tan scheme and narrower columns than this), though the basic principles should be useful regardless of which one you start with.

Hulk Reviews Hulk -- and Grad School Economics

I came across this funny line in a review of the Hulk movie written as if Hulk had gone to go see it with the author of the blog:

Girl wants to know why Movie Betty have such big house on grad student salary. Hulk not know. What student? Girl also want to know how Movie Banner (puny Banner! Hulk hate Banner!) have such great house, too. Hulk not know that either, tell girl to shut up.

Hee hee.

Blogger Templates

I have discovered that, among the circle of blogs I frequent that are hosted by Blogspot, a certain template is very popular. I have to admit that I find this somewhat disconcerting, in that I tend to be a visually oriented person and so easily learn to associate certain words and personalities with certain appearances. (I was unsettled when Invisible Adjunct had to re-do her site -- I still miss the typewriter!)

Heck, I should probably include myself in the list, because it was that very template that I used to develop this one. It makes me wonder if those of us who use it share a similar aesthetic, and that is why we are all part of a set of overlapping blogs?

By the way, it's very easy to customize the template simply by altering the colors. If anyone's curious, I'd be happy to explain the code.

What an incoherent post. Clearly, I need to go eat something.

{edit} I don't mean to say that anyone is wrong to use the template as is. It's an attractive template! I'm mostly just fascinated by its popularity among the blogs I frequent, and amused at my own reactions to this.

Search Engine Referrals - A Poem

Harry Potter, PhD, can't find a job
Affluence and academia escape him
Although he wears a tweedy sweater of the proper pattern.

So he writes complaints in his head,
Standing in long grocery lines
Buying dairy products and molds

His iritis flares
While ravens croak,
Knitting.

The actual search phrases:

ravens molds
affluence and academia
PhD can't find a job*
Harry Potter knitting sweater pattern
grocery complaints long lines
autoimmune dairy iritis


*When I followed this up with Google, it turned out that this blog was the only entry in which that exact phrase appeared. Go figure!

Rain

The rain is slanting down
Heavy drops falling
A low rumble of thunder
A windbell ringing in the wind.

Restraint?

I now have Harry Potter right where I want him! (Or is it the other way around?) Choice number 2: scarf the book down in a great orgy of reading, then go back to life bereft, or dole it out bit by bit and go mad with the delays but have it around to entertain me longer?

Of course, I could also scarf it, then re-read slowly.

One complication: strictly speaking, this is D's birthday present, so it would be cruel to hold onto it longer than I ought, even though his birthday is not until August. It'd be cruel for me as well; I hate spoilers, so I will be about ready to burst with things to share with him until he has a chance to read the book too.



This is a much more pleasant set of dilemmas than others I have posted about of late!

Harry Potter Tonight!

The dilemma: attend the midnight book party or get up early tomorrow and pick it up then? One brings the possibility of velvet and hair glitter; the other cool fresh air and the opportunity to do yoga. What to do...

I guess it will depend on how sleepy I am around midnight!

The Yoga of Change

With all that's been going on in my life, I've found myself increasingly comforted by yoga. Some of this is due to the asanas -- the postures -- but not as much as it ought, perhaps; I've not been practicing regularly. Rather, it is the philosophy of learning to see things as they are, not as you would wish them to be or assume that they are. The self is a central locus for this perceptual growth, with the postures intended to quiet and strengthen the body so that it can be receptive to the insight that such examination will hopefully bring. Richard Rosen's The Yoga of Breath has been particularly interesting to me this past week.

Here are some of the things I've read this week that caught my attention:

"Practice has two poles -- an active pole that entails intense and persistent exertion (abhyasa)and a passive one that encourages what yoga tradition calls samatva, an attitude of evenness or equanimity toward the world. Yoga practice is a balancing act between doing and not-doing: we must somehow exhibit all the prowess of the charioteer in mastering his horses and yet remain the same whether in success or in failure." --Richard Rosen, p. 15.

While formal training is the most common way we learn about yoga... it's definitely not the only way. Yoga also has an unrecognized element of play... We like to think of ourselves as serious students and regard play as something childish, just playing the fool. But James Carse, in his book Finite and Infinite Games, reminds us that to be playful is not to be "trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself."" -- Richard Rosen, p. 17

In the final stages, meditators in both traditions [yoga and Buddhism] see that the world of ordinary experience and the Self are actually constructions, compounds in nature rather than "real things" in and of themselves." -- Stephen Cope, "Seeing Eye to Eye," Yoga Journal175: 123-26, p. 126.

The first two seem to speak to my current situation very well, and to the comments AKMA and language hat and others have made about being open to luck. Part of what makes things currently difficult for me is that I feel like I'm not in place for luck physically; I won't be in California for another month and a half, and there is not much I can do from here to help set things up. I have some friends I can -- and should -- explain my situation to there, but otherwise this is a time of waiting, of suspension. I should take advantage of the lull, no doubt, to go through the mental equivalent of my asanas so that I am ready to move and be flexible when the time comes.

The third one has less to do with me directly and more to a general body of ideas I've been chasing through my research and other work: the question of how and why boundaries are formed, the how and why of our ordering complex and dynamic reality into relatively simple and fixed concepts and categories. When I began my thinking in these areas -- which have profound implications on the level of environmental ethics, among other things -- I did not yet see how deeply personal these questions were for me. I thought I was pursuing an interesting line of intellectual activity. I have since come to realize that many of my questions about crossing boundaries and adapting to new places (or new places to my existing expectations) stem from my own experiences growing up. My move to my current location really brought them home to me, as I came to discover that while I understood the cultural terrain for the most part, the physical environment was (and still largely is) profoundly strange to me. Things other people learned on a gut level I don't know; my own gut senses prove me false. Now I am finding that even my very self is open to question -- the old questions of Who am I? What is my purpose in life? have been revealed to have multiple possible answers -- an unsettling and profoundly troubling realization.

This is why reading the yoga books is so comforting, I believe. They accept the inevitability of change -- indeed, they embrace it -- while recognizing that change -- especially changes of perception and self -- is distressing to experience. I am not a "religious" person (unless you count being a Unitarian Universalist -- an open question) but I am a quester after larger understandings. My life, it seems, has become a "teachable moment," and I -- along with all of those who offer me sympathy and advice -- am both teacher and student.

Cool Stuff

I'm too tired to provide a coherent summary, let alone analysis, of Alex's posts this week on the history of word spacing and silent reading and on rethinking the meaning of "cyborg," but they are worth reading.

An Observation

I just noticed that many of these job search books are written by people who were/are in sales. Perhaps this is why they rub me the wrong way. I had no trouble with the temp ladies or the Gen X dude.

Small Graces

At least I managed to finish my general resumé. It covers far too much ground for a specific job (that recurrent theme, again) but it should serve to introduce a temp agency to my qualifications.

Yay?

Daunted

I've been reading more find-and-win-a-job books, and I'm feeling increasingly intimidated by the whole process. One even said that you were not doing a proper job search if you weren't seeking out and establishing at minimum 250 contacts a week -- about 50 a day, in other words. While I am doing this, I'm also supposed to be researching companies, sending out hundreds of carefully crafted individually-targeted letters, resum�s and "Executive Briefings" -- each to be followed by a call to the addressee. Should any of these result in an interview, I am then expected to create and maintain a very carefully crafted professional persona and do battle (graciously, with a smile) with stress interviews, drug tests and tests of my IQ and personality. *sigh*

I feel increasingly not up to this task, especially since I am continuing to fail at step one: identify companies for which you might want to work. For everything I have read, I still cannot figure this out. I like Ben & Jerry's ice cream -- but does this mean that I'd want to work there? Does it mean that they need people with my skills? I enjoy reading Yoga Journal but do I want to work for a similar periodical? I don't even know what sort of position would interest me -- though I suppose that's the point of temping and making all those innumerable contacts. "Hi, I'm clueless, and I want to learn about your profession" doesn't seem like a good way to begin, however.

I am discovering that I lack all but the most basic understanding of what it means to work -- and THINK -- in a non-academic setting; my experiences are over 10 years old, and involved putting clothes on hangers, filing papers, typing letters and stuffing envelopes. That may produce a paycheck, but it's not a career. I know how to present and explain my credentials to an academic audience (at least I believe I do) but I feel woefully equipped to do this elsewhere. I'm not used to thinking of literally selling myself, nor of talking about profits and expenses and the bottom line -- it feels so forced and so fake when it comes out of my mouth -- those are honestly not things that interest me. I suppose I can fake interest -- if I can successfully pretend to know everything in front of a room of sceptical 18 year olds, I can probably manage it -- but I feel almost nauseated at entering a field of endeavor so alien to my basic beliefs. Money is fine as a tool, but it is not an appropriate locus for ethics and values -- at least for me. I hate, hate, hate the idea that I am a "product" to be "marketed."

There was a reason why I never went into sales -- every experience I've ever had where I had to tout something in order to get someone else to fork over money for it made me feel awkward, rejected and crass. I suppose academic interviews do entail this, but at least it is clothed in the rhetoric of colleagiality and in finding a new member of the community. Nor is it likely that your chair might later haul you into the office to complain that you are not contributing enough to departmental income. The interactions these books describe seem so nakedly mercenary by contrast.

Perhaps I am worrying too much about this. I know that I am intelligent and friendly enough to do well in pretty much any job that doesn't require specialized training, and that such training can eventually be amassed. I just thoroughly dislike the process by which one gets into a position to demonstrate this.

Another problem is that, having done such a miserable job identifying a satisfying career goal, and wasted years and years trying to achieve it, I have trouble trusting my ability to correctly identify a replacement. I don't want a job; I want a vocation -- but how does one go about manufacturing a calling out of thin air, let alone one that doesn't demand going back to square one? How do I find something to do with my life that is satisfying and lessens the odds of my waking up at age 43 thinking, "Well, there's another 10 years wasted."?

I realize that all of this sounds whiny, and that I appear to want a job to magically appear on a silver platter before me. (Who doesn't?) But I am trying to come to grips with something that is a job, requiring its own specialized training, in itself: identifying a chosen career and finding employment in it.

I lack that training.

And I hate feeling ignorant and stupid.

If You've Ever Owned a Cat...

...this post on cat barf will have you laughing and laughing.

Ah. I rather needed that.

Puzzlement

I can't tell whether this warrants another Clueless Award. From Martin Yate, Knock 'em Dead 2002 (more bedtime reading, whoo-hoo):

"On a radio talk show earlier this year I listened to a problem from a listener. She said, "I'm in the academic field and I've been unemployed for two years, and I don't know what to do." I asked her how many organizations she had contacted, and she said 250. I asked her how many possible employers there were, and she said about 3,000. I said, "Next caller please." The world owes no one a living. You have to go out and find a job."

I'm puzzled because I can't figure out what exactly caused him to make that comment. Did she look at too few jobs? Did she do something else wrong? Or is he clueless about the fact that a large number of organizations and employers does not necessarily translate into a large number of positions? (And what the heck does "in the academic field" mean, anyway?)

I want to figure this out, because I'd been appreciative of his approach up to this point.

Tired

It's been one of those days. I'd say I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, but I sleep on a futon on the floor. Oversleep, today.

I'm feeling moody and quiet -- lassidic? is there an adjective form of lassitude? -- and I can't pin down the precise reason why. There are certainly enough things -- or lack of things -- in my life to make me feel depressed (which I think of at this point as connoting not the mental condition per se, but the feeling of being slowly pressed beneath a heavy weight). Yet there is nothing in particular this week or today to make me feel this way, no obvious trigger for my mood. I know, too, that this will pass -- it always does -- but what governs the coming and the going?

I feel very calm, but it's the calm of suspension, not contentment. I have the feeling of being poised on the edge of something and not wanting to move. It's not paralysis, nor apathy, but a kindred emotion. Fatigue, perhaps, but a fatigue of the spirit, not of the body.

What changed? What ripple in the worldsoul found its way to me?

A Visitation

A toy car's honking,
Rustling of seeds, a whirr of wings --
A morning nuthatch!

Moods

I sold my old desk
For seventy-five dollars.
A dream is changing.


Shiny and so red
A bowl of ripened cherries
Is slowly rotting.


Warm melancholy,
Humid in the darkness.
Awaiting cold rain.


Pellucid morning
I assume Tadasana
Cool air and bird song