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Wednesday, August 06, 2003
Briefly Checking In
We survived the move with sanity and health intact -- barely. The trip itself went quite well despite occasional thunderstorms and the slowness that is U-Haul; moving into the storage place was an exercise in patience. Note to self -- do not attempt tricky spatial arrangements while tired and hungry in the presence of family. Crabbiness will ensue.
However, now that most of my possessions have been squeezed in successfully, I've had a day to rest and I won't have to think about housing-related things for a couple of weeks, I'm feeling more calm and sane. I've also been given a lead on some adjunct work on the local military base (interesting!) so I may return to employment -- a nice thought.
The laden U-Haul
Creaks slowly along the road
Moving adventure?
(When I get a chance I'll try again to respond to the comments you've left; enetation was not -- unsurprisingly -- working.)
Well, they say that human beings became bipeds in order to be able to carry things. If so, I and my parents have fulfilled our evolutionary destiny today. What a lot of boxes!
No blogging for a while -- we've got to get a U-Haul to California, unload it, visit the Pacific Northwest and return to California. Hence, blogging will be light at best, absent at worst. Have fun while I'm gone!
I swear, my possessions are breeding in the corners when I'm not looking. How else can I explain the fact that I've been packing fairly steadily the last few days, the boxes of neatly packed and labeled things are becoming more numerous, the number of to-dos checked off the list is growing -- and it still looks like I haven't done anything!
(Voice of reason: That is because now you're packing things that have been hidden away in cupboards and there is lots of trash strewn about. Voice of hyperbolic ranting: Shut up.)
Ahem. Back on topic.
If you ever wondered how much you value your possessions, packing is a good way to judge. When you have lovingly swaddled a fragile glass globe into a box (labeled FRAGILE! DON'T DROP! DON'T CRUSH!) and kept it intact through several moves, you can safely figure that it is worth something to you. (Indeed, the act of caring so protectively for it may well temporarily increase its value.) When you spend a lot of time hunting for the right box to hold That Possession and for bubble wrap to protect it (drawing from one's carefully horded stash of used bubble wrap and packing peanuts), again, you can figure that in some way it is important to you.
On the other hand, the things that you look at and say "Okay, I can't make it fit in this box. Oh, well, I'll just donate it to Goodwill" or "Yech! Pitch!" have been clearly deemed Not Worth My Time (or Space).
Packing through several moves also lets you track how your values change -- that treasured something later inspires "Why did I pack this last time?" or "Okay, I have two of these now. How many do I really need?"
And on the meta-level, one wonders whether possessions are important at all, and if so, which ones and why. (Filling out a renter's insurance form can produce this state, too -- "If my house was on fire, what would I grab?"
Stuff, stuff, stuff. Someone once said that life consists entirely of moving dust from one place to another. Sounds about right.
Let's see. The past week I've been distracted, anxious, fretful, angry and unfocused. I've felt hot, flitty and frustrated.
Why? Well, the most immediate and obvious answers are (1) I'm moving and (2) it's been hot and humid.
That's not the whole story, though. I've been reading a book called Yoga for Your Type which talks about suiting one's yoga practice to your ayurvedic type. I waffle between being Vata (air -- intellectual, nervous, skinny) and Pitta (fire -- energetic, emotional, average). In ayurveda, this means that I have tendencies toward disorders associated with an imbalance of either type -- such as panic attacks or breakouts. This knowledge has been shoved to the back of my brain the past few days because I've been, well, busy!
So I was reading through the book and got to the section that talks about how environmental factors can aggravate imbalances and a little light went on. (It's a measure of how wound up I've been that this came as a "realization" -- I'd actually read about such things before.) Between the restless, messy chaos of packing (Vata-provoking) and the emotional upset of leaving friends and home behind and the heat (Pitta-provoking), it's not surprising that the past few days have been a bit of an emotional and physical tornado.
So this morning I followed the book's suggestions for a Pitta-reducing practice (since I was anticipating heat and humidity again -- which has indeed re-appeared)and I've been SO much calmer today. Ah. Tomorrow I think I'll do a Vata-reducing practice and keep alternating the two until life settles down again.
Note to self: such effects are part of why you do yoga, right? So DO YOGA! Stop blowing it off!
It is meltingly hot today, even inside with the AC on. (I will admit that it is not on very strongly, but given that I am a cheapskate who prefers opening windows, the fact that it is on at all is indicative of the extremity of the weather.)
I am very glad that today is not the day of Moving Things Downstairs -- I am praying that the anticipated colder front comes through the day before -- but it is miserable nonetheless. I feel like I'm moving slower than usual; perhaps the extra humidity has resulted in more friction as I pass through the air?
The title of this post, by the way, comes from one of my informal ways of determining or categorizing the weather here. (Weather awareness is really important in the Midwest, I've discovered.) Wind from the south is often scented with the odor of grain roasting from a nearby plant; winds that bring rain come from the west; on really cold days you can see crows' breath; on days that are meltingly hot the occasional unhappy sparrow or house finch can be found panting on my porch, trying to cool off. It is a most pathetic sight.
The humid air sticks
To skin and spirit, while birds
Pray, panting, for rain.
I think my posts of the last few days have been confounding whatever rubric Blogger uses to generate the ads in the banner above my blog. For a while it was running ones for boxes and packing materials. Today it's offering free publishing.
The most entertaining were the ones for the previous two days, during which time visitors were informed that "This blank space is brought to you by Google."
(My traffic monitor has not been tracking google-based references lately, so I don't know if something involving recent searches is a factor. And on that note, go see Invisible Adjunct's post today on that topic.)
Since I'm moving, I'll be leaving my current internet provider behind. Today I ran across a link to MacDialUp. Does anyone know anything about them? Good experiences? Bad? Links to reviews of them? Or is there another good alternative of which I should be aware?
My needs are pretty straightforward: email, access to the net, website space and (a new thing for me) national coverage (in anticipation of future moves). Good service and friendly folks on the other end of the line are nice, too.
The jury's out on this new article at the Chronicle in which the author talks about the nausea-inducing range of non-academic career possibilities open to him as holder of a PhD in English.
Part of me is amused by it, part wonders what exactly the point of it is, and part simply thinks, "Oh, this was less interesting and entertaining than I'd expected."
Well, after stewing over John Lemon's posts (and follow-up post, in which he presented me as akin to a student who has screwed up and needs to know that) I finally figured out just what exactly it is that bothered me about them. This is good, in that now I can hopefully stop picking at this scab and get on with my life (and back to packing).
It is this: he has no idea who I (or any of us) are. He doesn't know anything about how well we interview, how we've conducted our job searches, what we've published, how well we teach, who our references are -- anything about us, really, at all.
He may think that he knows his audience -- witness his confident assertions that we are smart, and cocky, and politically liberal, and scruffily dressed, and doing po-mo research on popular culture, etc. etc. -- but he clearly does not.
Yet he -- and many others like him -- assumes that, if we have not achieved success, it is because we screwed up somewhere along the way, and therefore might well benefit from some kindly advice. While I appreciate the later sentiment -- it's certainly better than "let 'em suffer!" -- it is that unspoken assumption of knowledge that rankles.
Well meant or no, such casual presumptions about the lives of others are simply arrogant.
Or should that be cranky enough to spit? Either way, I'm feeling cross this morning.
Packing no doubt has something to do with it, as with nearly missing a dentist appointment. (Whee. Actually, it wasn't bad, and because I'm moving they did the nifty thing of giving me copies of my x-rays -- very cool. My eye doctor also cheerfully gave me a copy of my records. This is wonderful -- and sadly surprising, since California doctors were never willing to give me my records directly; they always wanted to transfer them to the new doctor, unsullied by patient hands.)
Largely I think it is a return of my academic/career angst. Reading the recent posts at Invisible Adjunct were one factor, particularly those relating to John Lemon's Tough Love for Adjuncts, which made me feel both cross and a failure. I so looove advice that I'm no longer in a position to use, but which if I had, would have me smelling the roses now. And I've just read this article in the Chronicle about how a tenure-track assistant professor failed to find a(nother) job this year and is, well, okay with this. GRRR...
What's most irritating about all of these things is the corrosive effects they are having on my psyche. It is good to have a career plan and to do what it takes to carry it through. It is good to understand one's situation and do what you can to change it. It is good to be able to rejoice in your fortune and considerate to extend that to others in happy situations. On the surface, these articles and advice look benevolent and positive, and if I were secure I would no doubt be able to perceive them as such.
But I am not secure. As a result I sense underlying all of this a message that, because I haven't achieved success and because I cannot rejoice in the success of others, I am a failure. The two easy responses to that message are (1) to agree, which I think I may be finally moving past and (2) to become cynical and bitter.
I don't want either. I want to be happy and satisfied with my life and career path. I want to be a success at something. Even more so, I want to be secure enough that I could write pieces like these -- but grateful and humble enough that I don't.
Okay, this Chronicle article just rubs me the wrong way. I can tell that the author is hoping to eliminate some of the stigma borne by adjunct professors by telling us that they can and do commit as much time to their students as tenure-line faculty. This is not in itself a bad thing.
What irritates me, however, is that the gist of the article is "Hey, administrators, parents and students! It's okay to hire people part-time and offer them bad pay and no benefits -- they'll still do the work! Heck, they'll even do a better job than those dead-weight tenure-track folks!"
So adjuncts do amazing things with little reward and little respect. While adjuncts are certainly praiseworthy for doing their best under poor conditions, this is NOT a situation to wax rhapsodic about!
{edit} Invisible Adjunct has also posted a response to this article and, as usual, her comments are astute and more developed than mine. Go, take a look! (Also note Amanda's comment to this post, here; even though enetation is claiming there's no comment there, there is.)
For a while I've had a quiet interest in the Australian academic job market; a few years ago I had the opportunity to attend a history conference in Sydney and it was an eye-opening experience. Briefly put, Australian historians were facing then what American historians are experiencing now -- an impoverished market, structural shifts in the university system and lack of opportunities for young scholars. (At one memorable panel on the difficulties of negotiating the difference between academic standards of truth and legal standards -- in regards to historians' testifying in native title cases -- one of the panelists actually handed out business cards for part-time researchers and got a sizeable number of takers.)
It's therefore interesting to read Gary's take on this at public opinion. He has some useful observations, particularly about how scholars themselves are participating in the de-valuing of their work.
Just a quick heads up -- the comment server is behaving oddly this week. Notably, it is giving wrong counts for the comments attached to each post; some are over-counted, some under-counted. In other words, don't assume that there are no comments if a number isn't provided, nor that if "x" comments are listed that they will actually number "x."
This doesn't seem to have affected the actual comments, thankfully.
Nothing very exciting to report today. I've been slowly working my way around the apartment tidying up unpacked things. I know this sounds somewhat counterintuitive -- why tidy something that's going to go in a box soon anyway? -- but there are two very good reasons to do this. First, the chaos is getting to the point where it is depressing me. Some order will make me happier. Second, if I do a good job at this, it will make subsequent packing (and unpacking, later) easier, as I will have sizable collections of like objects to pack (unlike now, when the similar things are strewn through three rooms).
I did have one set of odd thoughts about job related things, namely about clothing. As I was dividing my clothes into long-term, short-term and in-use clumps, I found myself wondering what to do about job-hunting clothing. This was less a packing matter and more a matter of further worries about transitioning from academia to Templand. Briefly put, if clothes make the woman, this woman is going to have fun trying to fit into corporate culture.
What I realized is that I do not think I have any clothes that meet the stereotypical "businesswoman's formal interview suit" standard. I do have two nice skirt-suits, but one is camel and the black one is a mini-skirt and funky jacket. I also have several dressy dresses and some decent pants, but nothing resembling a tailored outfit. Heck, even my button-down blouses (to go with the suits) are in funky colors and edgy or ethnic fabrics. I couldn't look conservative if I tried!
Amanda, at Household Opera, writes: "Sometimes when I'm less than willing to heed the call of the clock-radio and get up first thing in the morning, I start dreaming about whatever the NPR announcers are saying."
I have to laugh, because I've had this experience. It's particularly strange when the actual news is weird and I wake up thinking I've dreamed it until I see it in the paper.
She also writes about various forms of anxiety dreams involving meeting (or trying to contact) important people. I'm grateful that my psyche doesn't seem to produce these. More typical is the experience of discovering that I'm taking or teaching a class and being unable to find the classroom or remember when the class is scheduled.
Once, though, I had the same anxiety dream in the same imaginary school enough times that I learned my way around it and didn't get lost in subsequent dreams. I remain half-convinced, in fact, that this dream school truly exists somewhere in the real world.
Perhaps I've been having career anxiety dreams; if so, I'm not remembering them. This is probably a good thing.
I seem to have reached my first plateau of packing apathy, even though I did manage to pack some clothes, sort some papers (remind me again why I've been keeping multiple copies of my dissertation revisions?) and stuff a few more books in a box.
Partly it is because my knee continues to act up; I'm good for about 2-3 hours of packing before it starts to hurt too much to be ignored. It is now wrapped and feels sturdier; tomorrow I'll have to try wrapping it from the outset. What a dumb thing to have done to myself just before these two weeks of lifting!
(It's a very strange sort of injury, too; it's all in the back of the knee, as if it has been overstretched. Who knows, perhaps it has.)
Mental fatigue is more of an issue than physical, however. I'm getting to the point where I sit in the middle of a room of boxes (empty and full), piles of paper and random small objects and such, and just look despondently around at the increasing chaos.
I've been doing reasonably well so far, largely because I've left things like furniture and decorations alone and focused on things normally hidden away in cupboards and closets. Now, though, I either have to switch to those things that make the apartment feel like my apartment or begin rounding up the small and numerous Things-Without-A-Category and trying to come up with a way to describe them concisely on the box.
I suppose I could begin the "toss-in-a-box" stage early, but I know my future self will hate, hate, hate me if I do so. ("Where did I put the freakin' magnets? Why can't I find my favorite teacup? What the hell is in this rattling box anyway? Why on earth did I pack this?!")
It always takes longer than I think it will, but packing books is not the worst packing I could be doing. They are more-or-less the same shape (though not always the same size!) and it is a shape compatible with the squareness of boxes. They also tend to fall into neat categories (sci-fi A-B; desert books; urban history; social theory, etc.) which makes the labeling easy. They don't break if the box is dropped and tolerate some shifting if there's a 3"x6"x2" bit of dead air unfilled because I couldn't think of anything to stuff in it.
Clothes should also be fairly easy; take off closet bar (hangers attached), fold over, place in box. (Copier paper boxes work great!) If on shelves, take off shelf, place in box. Done!
It is things like glasses, knickknacks, food and bathroom stuff that will drive me insane!
I don't know whether this is good news or not; apparently it may now be possible to program your cell phone with animal calls instead of music or ringtones. Birds I can see (or hear) -- the appeal of hippo bellows and pig grunts is harder to fathom.
It's interesting to speculate where I fit on the continuum. If I do make the leap from academia successfully, I'm not sure whether I'd become a New Careerist or an Intentional Downshifter. I have definite tendencies toward the latter: witness my summer activities of sewing, travelling, spinning, yoga, etc. Am I working? Well, yes, but only in dribs and drabs -- a review here, a chapter revision there. (It reminds me of when I was an undergraduate and found myself avoiding my physics homework by doing hours and hours of Russian interspersed with recorder playing and computer games. Not much has changed, I suspect!)
I suppose one approach -- and it's the one espoused by all the follow-your-bliss genre of career books -- is to find a job that allows you to do those fun things and get paid for them. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that would necessarily work in my case. It's not so much the work; rather the idea that some activities are "work" and therefore obligatory rather than simply interesting sucks a good part of the pleasure out of doing them. I don't mind having goals, but I like to be the one setting them; if I screw up or miss a self-imposed deadline, no one suffers but me. (I do keep my deadlines -- I'm very obsessive about them if someone else's project or welfare depends on them -- but I worry about missing them, nonetheless. Residual grad school guilt?)
The other thing is that the activities that give me pleasure are not necessarily things I'm sufficiently good at to envision doing full time. Take knitting, for example. I like to knit. I can produce some pretty nice things doing it. Unfortunately, I am slow, slow, slow -- so producing enough goods to produce a living wage is pretty much impossible. (Sewing I might be able to manage.) Or writing things like I offer here in this blog. If I had a job where I could write fairly randomly on whatever pops to mind that day, it would work -- but to turn out directed copy day in and day out would require a lot more work. (Disclaimer: most of these posts are not mapped out ahead of time or edited except for spelling and small bits of style, which is only possible if I'm writing about what I know; if I had to write about things outside my immediate range of experience, I would not find it easy at all.)
What you see if you go there is two side-by-side blogs, one listing "brilliant" bits of urban design (and similar) and one listing the "stupid" ones. Great for cheering and venting!
Another good post at Household Opera, this time about whether the intangible joys of teaching and research do indeed outweigh other, often more material but not necessarily, rewards.
My half of the office now looks good. Everything is in a neatly labeled box or on a shelf waiting to be brought home and stored with others of its kind. Yay, me!
I'm going to the fabric store to celebrate.
I've also begun slowly exploring various non-profits for which I might like to work. The list (short so far) includes Working Assets, Heifer International and the Sierra Club. The only problem is that they seem to be advertising jobs that just don't appeal to me, like Associate Director of Finances. (Yes, I know that many jobs go unadvertised.) I guess I'll just have to stay alert!
There is good stuff over at Household Opera today. One post likens writing a dissertation to sailing on the open ocean.
The other suggests that one way to begin thinking about alternative careers is to look at things that bother you enough to make you consider being the person to fix them. She also speculates that thinking about what people come to you for help might be another avenue for this rethinking.
I've been packing today, so I've not had much interesting to write about. During a break, though, I came across this amusing post at Yet Another Damn Blog: a list of questions to determine whether you are a biblioholic.
There's no hope for me, even if I wanted to break this addiction!
And, feeding my habit, here are some nice haikus at Notes from a Life.
A rainstorm is passing through right now -- huge sheets of rain and a sky the color of a blonde nearly gone to grey. It is an unsettling color; I much prefer threatening dark gray clouds that loom to this sickly sallow sky.
There is something enticing about a thunderstorm -- you want to run into it and be blown by the wind as the rain washes over you, then run back giddily as the chill shudders through you.
This yellowing sky, of a color like the teeth of an old person, worries me. It's not a sort of rainstorm I understand.
I don't feel like I've accomplished much today. I've been feeling tired and I don't know if it's from lack of sleep or brain fatigue or that I'm getting sick. I may just be sick of the idea that I have to pack up all this Stuff with which I live.
I did send off my review and an essay and typed in revisions to one of my chapters, but all the work on those projects had been done before. Today was mostly tying up the loose ends.
I also drew up a tentative plan for my moving/packing project over the next two weeks. The tricky thing is that I can't just toss it all in boxes and call it a day. (Well, I could, but my future self would curse my present self every time she tried to find something.)
There are things to go in "long term storage" -- that is, in the back of the storage space and in the bottom tiers. If I do this right, I will not have to open them or dig for them at all while I am in California. These will be things like my class lectures and portfolios and journals and cold weather clothing.
Next are things for intermediate storage. These are things I expect to use or need while in Southern California, but they will need to be stored while I am looking for an apartment. I'll be staying with D. initially, but his apartment is too small for two households' worth of stuff and it has narrow stairs. It'll be easier to just put these in storage, especially since I'll be renting a space anyway.
Then there are the things I'll need during that first month, like job-hunting clothes and billing records, that I won't need while moving or travelling.
Next are the things for the move and trip to my parents' afterward, and things to keep me from going insane with boredom while I'm packing -- current projects, comfy clothes, camping gear, toothpaste, kitchenware...
Last are the things that will be needed after the U-Haul is packed and later before the unloading -- tools, cleaning supplies -- and which can't be packed until the last moment, like plants.
Plus there's the "What isthis crap!?!" category -- stuff I've been dragging from household to household for years and always wondering why. I think it's time to finally sell it or even -- gasp -- toss it.
Now I just need to get off my butt and actually bring up some boxes.
Dorothea, in a discussion of a book on exploring work paths (Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity), wrote:
A week or so ago, on some blog or other (if I happen upon it again I�ll add a link), I found an insightful criticism of academics as careerists: they fully expect a linear path through their professional life, almost the last people in this country to do so. Given that mindset, the only thing (they think) that can force them to deviate from a linear path is�failure.
Talk about hitting a nail on the head. I definitely have this sense that my career is supposed to progress neatly toward an end goal, with each step on the ladder leading directly to the next. Thinking about a career path as a ladder, unfortunately, suggests that stepping to the side of that path is going to result in a startling plummet to the ground!
I'm a bit more comfortable with the notion of my life overall consisting of multiple ladders (or jungle gyms? that would make sliding or swinging in place more fun!) than my career doing so-- perhaps because I've already had enough shifts to be sceptical of neat life paths. Maybe that's why the notion of a steady career trajectory is so appealing -- life is messy.
The SCA event was a blast -- it was good to have some time to spend with my friend, first of all, and nice to escape my packing responsibilities.
However, I have emerged with a whole new set of potential obsessions. I had forgotten (how, I don't know) how dangerous SCA life is for Jills-of-all-trades like myself. Want to wear funky nifty clothes and stare at other people doing the same? Check. Like lots of artsy-craftsy obsessive-compulsive hobbies like knitting, spinning, embroidery, applique, sewing, weaving, dyeing, etc.? Check. Like camping outdoors? Check, if we're talking events like the one I went to.
Add in the fact that sizeable portion of the community is actively interested in history (some for just general interest, others because they are crafting their personas' backstories and virtually all for the practical skills) and loves to talk about it -- I learned an awful lot about various handicrafts, the cultures who made them, the history of those cultures, etc. just by talking with random merchants.
I'd wonder what caused me to leave this enticing place, except that I know why -- the actual people were rather geeky and weird the last time I was at all involved in this. This time, I didn't notice so much of this. Partly this was because my friend's circle are steady, no-nonsense types. Largely, though, I think it is because I'm older and also more likely to talk with older people now. There are a few cool college-age folks in the SCA, but a fair percentage are nerds who are not yet comfortable with that idea and lack a certain social grace that comes with self-acceptance. The older Scadians, on the other hand, generally know who they are and are happy to interact with someone who shares their interests and sense of fun.
Or it might just be that the Northshield region is full of friendly, no-nonsense Midwesterners. We'll see how it goes when I get back to California.
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