Luxuries

I'm feeling a bit off-kilter at the moment, maybe because I had such a strange day today. After two seconds of conversation with J-ka early in the morning as I folded up her guest bed (never enough time at the J-ka residence!), I headed on out to have breakfast with a prominent member of my field -- I had planned on buying this woman a drink on Tuesday afternoon, in part as an expression of gratitude for some nice stuff she did for me recently, and also to listen whatever lore and mentorly words she was willing to share, but when talking on the phone to make plans she said, "maybe tomorrow morning is better -- why don't you come over for breakfast and I can make you oatmeal?" There was no way to say no, and really, why would I? But how odd, and oddly delightful, to have someone you cite the hell out of and respect tremendously and really don't know all that well make you delicious oatmeal in her bohemian NYC pad as her cat sits next to you, biting your hair. One major academic-gossip session later, I was off to midtown, where I got on a bus back to Spookytown, a bus that I sat in for 6 solid hours, with traffic every step of the way from beginning to end (on Christmas Day, largely traffic-free, the journey up to New York had taken all of 3 1/2 hours). Plus, as a bonus, Mission Impossible III was yammering at me from the speakers above my head as I tried to read a highly theoretical book about social interactions -- this even though only two of the teeny-tiny televisions on the bus were working, and these were way up front ("Why so angry, villainous Philip Seymour Hoffman?" I would think while gazing out the window at the endless traffic on the NJ Turnpike, "you're getting very well paid to star in this shlock.")

Anyway, after getting home several hours later than I'd expected, my plan was to simply collapse on the couch, but instead GG called and talked me into going to see The Good German. It's dark and cynical and kind of experimental (and convoluted as hell, plot-wise) and I really quite liked it, although poking around the intertron now that I'm back home, I see that most reviewers seem to have not liked it very much at all. In lieu of giving away any of the plot, I'll just say that it's set in immediately post-war Berlin and that it's a time full of darkness and manipulation and bitterness and double-crossing. Which got me to thinking about how there are times and places when things like kindness to strangers, or really, kindness to anyone outside the most inner circle, seems to be a luxury more than a consistently viable option. When I lived in that provincial post-Soviet city for my year of research, one of the things I noticed is that there really seemed to be not enough pie for everyone (especially with the "privatization", a.k.a. "stealing", of the state and state resources by the new socioeconomic elite). Once you were in, were "us", people would make a real effort to look out for you, do what they could for you, watch your back -- all with a tacit understanding that you'd do the same for them given the opportunity. But if you weren't in, were "them", your problems and issues were simply no concern of theirs. And who can blame people trying to grapple with such circumstances and survive? Meanwhile, for the last week I've been spending at least an hour a day reviewing fellowship applications from young college students in a different post-Soviet state, one also controlled by a repressive dictator (although not as bad as some recently deceased ones). Sure, a few of the applications are egregiously terrible, but if I could, I would give all of the remaining applicants that yearlong fellowship here in the States (I'm finding the "who do you look up to as a leader?" essays that invoke Gandhi and MLK and the hope that non-violence can triumph in even the most adverse circumstances particularly heartbreaking). How they all deserve a break from the many unkindnesses and difficulties of their lives! To top it off, almost all of them live and go to school in the country's capital, the city from which my mother's grandmother fled about a hundred years ago. And with every fellowship score that I tally and every application that I place in the potentially life-changing (or life-not-changing) 'yes' or 'no' pile, I find myself mentally thanking my great-grandmother for getting herself the hell out of there and giving me the luxury of not having to be unkind, hard-hearted, or cynical just to ensure my survival, or the well-being of the people that I love.

I believe they call it "irony"

Yeah, so for like the last two weeks (since just before I was given the news that my services would not be wanted at Jesuit U.) I've actually been straightforwardly enjoying life in Spookytown. Can you believe it? For example, last Saturday I went to a nice party at Lieberman's house, where I got to see people who are usually just so busy that we don't hang out as frequently as I'd like (I suppose I may in part be to blame for this, what with the "never actually being in town" thing I had going on for most of the fall.) And there were a couple of last-minute, casual, you-live-in-my-neighborhood social events, one of which took place when I realized I was wasting a good hair day on cats and grading and so texted a hypersocial (and usually adorably flirty in a rather youthful way) local acquaintance -- within half an hour I was ensconced in a slightly hipster bar, getting discount drinks due to my companion's connections. Other highlights include an early evening walk to the nation's cathedral while getting lots of academic gossip (all ostensibly done in the name of exercise and taking advantage of the latest globally warmed heat wave in Spookytown - highs have been hovering above 50, sometimes above 60, for over a week), and a klezmer punk (or punk klezmer) show at a historic synagogue with my new friend Blackie, who I'm so delighted to be hanging out with -- finally, a local companion who likes Ethiopian vegetarian platters followed by Yiddish beat box rap as much as I do. Oh, and to top it all of, a delightful date with a handsome, well-educated, debonair charmer who not only was teasing me within 15 minutes as if he were, well, any of you reading this right now, but also had Gang of Four and the Pogues on his ipod -- even if it ends up going nowhere, an afternoon of swooniness does a lot to boost the morale.

Finally, yesterday I went an a little urban hike (the doctor has maybe figured out what my hiking-induced butt injury is, to wit, serious Vitamin D deficiency leading to possible early stages of osteoarthritis, but until we're sure I'm not doing any high-impact exercise beyond walking) and saw some decidedly aesthetically pleasing non-urban type things, all within just a few miles of the Postage Stamp:






Ok, I'm headed to New York in literally five minutes so I'd better shut down. Hope everyone is having a lovely holiday season!

E-mail milestones

People, it has taken weeks and weeks of dedication, hard work, and a strict maintenance regime. But my e-mail inbox (personal, not work, which is another story for another day) (not really) (as in, I'm not going to tell any stories about my work inbox) has been down to, or even under, 50 messages for one whole week now. That's as many messages as fit on a single page for Gmail. Just one page! Just 50 messages! After like a year of not being able to get it under 100! It's like losing half your weight in an intensive starvation diet, but without any blood in your urine or unpleasant aroma of ketosis.

Sure each and every one of the remaining messages represents an actual letter-type-thing with an actual author who needs to actually be addressed. And sure some of them are the kinds of messages you can't just dash off responses to, for example, a message from an old friend who many years ago (at a really inappropriate time) suggested a threesome with his then-current girlfriend, also a friend, because we were "all going to be sharing a hotel room anyway" (nb that I was two weeks into a devastating breakup and still living with the devastator in question, barely ambulatory, and sharing the hotel room in a desperate effort to get away from both one man in particular and men in general). It turns out that this old friend is now married but based on his e-mail I'm thinking maybe not so "married" and I wonder just what he had in mind when he suggested that we meet up the next time he's in Spookytown. Of course by this point the, let's see, 10 months between his e-mail and my still-to-be-sent response might have suggested to him a certain reluctance to engage in anything other than dining activities. (And you'd think he'd remember that "No married men" is my Rule #1, although this was surely less of an issue when I was in my early and mid-twenties.) Also not so easy to respond to will be several college friends looking for updates, an ex-boyfriend in a faraway land who is I guess expecting an e-mail in a language I can't really write grammatically anymore, and four former students all looking for academicky advice of some kind. Now that I'm so skinny e-mail wise, I wonder how much more e-mail weight loss I should go for. Is a nicely plump 50 messages a good maintenance weight? Should I try to lighten the load even more and then try to stay that way? Should I start putting more food directly in the garbage without trying to digest it? Or throw things right back at people without giving said things time to absorb? Maybe I'll think about all these options as I head back and aim for 45 by the night's end. If I look pale and drawn the next time you see me, it'll probably be due to these drastic measures...

So tacky! (Warning: PG13)

Yesterday I finally finished grading the final papers for my class (as any of you who have ever graded anything know, it is a giant pain in the ass, even when papers are good, as these ones were). Now that I live in the postage stamp, I no longer have dedicated office space, and I don't love my kitchen table as a place to work, mostly because it means sitting and facing a wall just three feet away. So the grading I didn't manage to do on the plane ride home and back last week (Dad's medical procedure ended up going very well, btw) I ended up doing this weekend on the couch, which has a niceish view of my balcony and of northwest Spookytown. Of course, this meant that I needed something to lean on, so yesterday while reading the opening lines of Paper Three I absentmindedly grabbed a book from the oversized book section, bottom shelf of Bookcase One, and proceeded to sit on the couch with the boys and read all about my student's mini-fieldwork project and data analysis. I was pretty immersed in the reading and reviewing, so imagine my surprise when I finished the paper, gave it a grade, and put it on the coffee table, revealing that my book support during grading had been this:
Yes, even those of you who don't read Russki can probably figure out that this is an Illustrated Kama Sutra with 250 photographs, and (as written in red), a "textbook of love." This was a New Year's present given to me almost exactly 6 years ago in a foreign land (6 years already! No wonder my language skills are kind of rusty). It is, without a doubt, the tackiest book I own -- and the pictures inside are even worse, looking like stills from a low budget porn film (oh, I guess as opposed to those super-high-budget looking ones) and with the most pained and depressed-looking expressions on the woman's face. In fact, I have many critiques I could make of the book and the exoticizing Orientalism and anti-feminism found at my old fieldwork site and its environs, but all I'll say is that I hope none of the book contents rubbed off in any way on the ascetic, pristine, and highly intellectual content of the papers that were resting on it for most of yesterday. Yipes!

Bye-bye Spookytown?

So it turns out that the two unknown phone numbers yesterday were both in fact job-related. The person who left the voicemail was the one with the good news: that I had been selected for their short-list and will come out and visit next month. The person who didn't leave the voice mail was the one with the bad news, which she wanted to deliver "voice-to-voice", as she said: that they had decided to make the offer to someone else.

Now in some ways, this really isn't that bad. I was ambivalent about the job, but ambivalent in a kind of more leaning negatively way (details can be given in a more private channel), especially as it would mean living in Spookytown in perpetuity, which just didn't seem like the most appealing of options. In some other ways, though, I am really not pleased. I had hoped to be able to mentally just quit my current job and have the security of knowing I had something tenure track in front of me, instead of months and months of more uncertainty and waiting and being endlessly evaluated in public ways that are even so still behind your back. And I'm also totally over not being chosen for jobs, especially when I have kind of recently reached the conclusion that my work is actually ok, perhaps even "good." I mean, for this job I had good letters and good evaluations and the talk went well and I just had an article in a top journal come out last month and and and important people were calling and writing e-mails and whispering in ears on my behalf and also my current students had put glowing letters in my file saying how much they loved me. What the fuck more do you need to get a job in this field? I'm starting to think that this spring I may have to make good on my threat to give up on academia and find something else if I don't get a job in this round, because although top people say things like "perseverance!" and "don't give up!" and "how many times do I have to tell you that you're great and you'll get a job!", at what point of hitting your head against the brick wall do you decide that it might not be in your best interests anymore?

Meanwhile, I'm heading up to New York in a few hours to help out with some medical stuff for Dad tomorrow, and need to start packing right now. But in the spirit of obstructionism that seems to characterize the day, Wethead is perched directly above the pajamas I want. I'm giving him half an hour...

Good news and less-good news

So the less-good news is that neither of the two phone calls from unknown numbers this afternoon were from the chair of the local search committee calling to inform me that I was being offered the job. (Even though one was from the area code associated with the committee chair's home. Damn!)

The straightforwardly good news, though, is that the other one of those calls was in fact from the chair of a different, less-local search committee inviting me out for a campus visit. The grapevine had informed me that I'd probably be getting this phone call, but I didn't think I'd hear for another few weeks. Whee!

Of course, just to complicate matters, they'd like me to come between 1/17 and 1/26 because of hotel constraints in their city. And, because this is the way the world works, my family and I, all the little Pangeans, recently bought non-refundable tickets to Puerto Rico for a big family vacation to celebrate the 40th anniversary of my parents' honeymoon there, and I will be away until the 21st. For whatever reason, at Non-Local U they arrange for an extensive campus visit -- a day for travel, two days on campus (two days? really?) involving both a job talk and a sample class to be taught (and how do I get to be the professor who doesn't have to worry about lecture preps for a week because job candidates are coming in and teaching my class?), and another day for travel. So I'm thinking: 1) I'd better start preparing my job talk right now (can't use the one I just gave because the committee chair has already seen me give an earlier version of it) and 2) my kitties are going to be filled with pathetic longing and sorrow by the time I'm finally back.

So there you have it!

No news

is just no news sometimes, it turns out. For some reason, just naiveté I suppose, I thought that if I was the "winning candidate," as it were, I would learn within hours of the conclusion of today's faculty meeting. Such that I had told people I would know the outcome by today, and have received several e-mails and phone calls. But apparently job offers need to be run through administrative channels before candidates are called, so things like, oh, salary level, can be ironed out. So in fact I have no idea whatsoever when I will actually learn what's going on. Which is good in some way, because now there isn't a focal point for nervous tension and I can just let it subside to a general feeling of malaise and unsettledness.

However, I did have a lovely job-related thing happen today, in that my students bought me a present. A joke present, but a meaningful one, and seriously, since when do my students (graduate or no) buy me presents? (Answer: never.) I had left the room so they could fill out course evaluations in privacy, and came back in so I could sign the sealed envelope. Upon my re-entry they gave me a small brown tote bag with purple tissue paper coming out the top, and inside was a big mallet, with a black rubber head and a wooden handle that someone had written "[PANGEA], Ph.D." on with a Sharpie. "

"Um, it's lovely," I said. "A mallet?" One of them explained. "You know how throughout the semester you've told us again and again that it's only painful now because you're hammering the cognitive hooks of [tongueology] into our heads, but that later we'll have those hooks in place to hang information on and it won't be so bad? This is the mallet/hammer that's hammering those cognitive hooks in our head. We thought you'd like a keepsake of the process."

So sweet! And with a thank you card to go with it (????) in which each student wrote about how much they'd liked being in the class. I've been deluged with self-doubt for the last few weeks -- self-doubt about the validity of my research and research agenda, abilities, chosen career, interactional skills, and much, much more. But this made me feel great. Now I just have to figure out how to display a personalized tongueology mallet in the postage stamp.

They say

that stress affects short term memory (I think I may have read an article on this recently), and once again, I think it turns out that they are right. Unfortunately it's been a while since I've done yoga (moving, travelling, and apparent butt-region hamstring injury to top it all off) so I don't have that as a destressing agent. And it's hard to not dwell on the fact that tomorrow, at the precise moment that I will be teaching my final class of the semester on the 2nd floor of a Jesuitish building (which, unlike many other buildings on campus, is refreshingly crucifix-free) there will be a faculty meeting on the 4th floor of the very same building in which it will be decided if I will or will not be offered a job in the department. Overall I've been much calmer this job-search season than in the past, but please, this makes for a kind of in-your-face reminder -- as I'm in my office getting the course evaluations and some other stuff, faculty will be streaming by en route to the meeting. So awful! The funny thing is that all this but in fact I'm highly ambivalent about the job, and if I was offered it, it's not immediately clear that I would take it over some other potential jobs that I might possibly be offered.

Anyway, the whole point of the memory thing is that this morning I made it all the way to the entrance of the metro station, that's like a 14-minute walk, before I realized that I didn't have my wallet. I stood there, and stood there some more, and then laughed (a little bit like a crazy person) and then realized I had no choice but to walk home. Now one of the things I like the least in this world is retracing my steps. I mean, it's not quite a pathology. But close. Like, I don't love stoner humor, but in Harold and Kumar when they've progressed maybe five feet from the front door of the apartment and realize that they've forgotten something inside and Kumar looks and looks and looks and finally says, "No, too far," I know exactly how he feels. Minus the pot. After I had walked back home and picked up the wallet, I realized that there was no way I could return to the same metro station and start all over again, so I went to the other metro station in walking distance (I'm basically equidistant between the two) and tried to reconceptualize my morning journey as extra (and much-needed) exercise and not punishment for having no brain. At least it wasn't raining...

The universe is based on sullen entropy

(I'm quoting, of course.)

Now that I've been back from my nearly endless travels for a whole week (how in the world do people who travel for a living stay sane? Or maybe they just don't), it's time to hunker down and get my physical existence in as perfectly ordered shape as possible. Not in the sense of a new exercise regime, although God knows I need one of those, especially after the two NY Thanksgiving feasts -- driving back Saturday night in my newly CD-player-not-working car, my mantra was essentially "I'm never eating again." No, I just mean finally getting things in the Spookytown Postage Stamp in real and lasting order.

On the one hand, I usually really like my near-weekly Saturday clean-up and tidy days, where you put in a little bit of energy and undo some of the creeping chaos that will take over everything if you let it. On the other hand, lately I'm finding entropy really annoying, and I've been realizing that I'm apparently the kind of person who expects things to remain static (something fixed just stays fixed, yes?) -- while I engage in maintenance of all kinds, it's really kind of sporadic, and with an underlying sullen resentment. If I just cut my fingernails last week, why do I have to do it again? Ditto with the tweezing, and let's not even talk about the subtle calculations of leg shaving, with equations balancing the probability of tights-free skirt wearing or yoga shorts or maybe even completely unexpected random hookups (sure, not so much in my life, but apparently it's happening all the time with the young and randy political workers in Spookytown) with the annoyance of actually doing said shaving, especially when my poor vision is exacerbated by clouds of steam. Back in my HippyDippyville apartment, I had everything in pretty good working order by the end there, but of course the move undid almost all of that, especially since I lost my dedicated office/guest room. Yesterday I went to the big Swedish furnishings place and bought a second green bookshelf, on the recommendation of J-ka, who after approximately 5 minutes in the apartment had solved one of my biggest problems (where to put all my books) and made suggestions in re the solution of a second (where to have a semi-dedicated workspace, which is especially problematic as I a) will never ever ever work in my bedroom again, given the terrible effect it had on my sleep issues during the writing of the dissertation, and b) can't figure out how to get my stupid wireless router to work so am currently stuck with a 5-foot umbilical cord linking my laptop to the source of all nutrition and safety, to wit, my cable outlet). I'm just waiting now for it to be late enough on a weekend day that I can put my bookcase together (it involves hammering) without causing severe resentment on the part of my downstairs neighbor. I wonder how late is late enough.

Another thing I have finally realized is that I need to actually put some thought, effort, and god forbid even money into is satisfying lounge clothes for winter home time. You'd think I'd have figured this out by now. But the epiphany was relatively recent -- when I walk around the house looking like absolute and total crap, it doesn't make me feel all that wonderful. I'm not looking for J. Lo-esque velour hoodie matching outfits, just something cozy that you can still wear in the stairwell going to and from your laundry without blushing with horror in case you run into someone else in the building. I decided that the first step was a plush bathrobe, which will also help with winter heating issues, so when Mom and I went shopping over T-day weekend (I refused to go on Friday, on principle, but had succumbed by Saturday), she treated me to one of those new super-soft fluffy robes that are everywhere now. (Seriously, if you haven't been in a robe section lately, head on over sometime and give them a feel -- they're lovely to touch, especially if you're a texture whore the way I am.) Unfortunately, this robe is also a lint-tastrophe -- it had so thoroughly coated the shirt I was wearing when I tried it on that I had to change when I got home -- even the lint brush barely made a dent. It clearly needs its own laundry load, but I've been procrastinating on the laundry front, so hung it over the back of the bedroom door. Some enterprising cat, because they don't have enough surfaces to sleep on, pulled it off the doorknob and so it's been puddled on the floor for the last few days, and everyone has been taking turns using it as a new resting place. I have both eyewitness and forensic evidence to back up this claim --the most obvious thing is that I have seen each one of them lying on the new cat bed, I mean, bathrobe. But even if I don't see a particular moment of rest, I can always tell when someone's been using the new cat bed (formerly known as my winter loungewear treat) because his fur will be covered with tiny bits of red lint and red fluff, which show up even on an orange coat. This causes me to immediately turn into that mother with the napkin with a little bit of my spit on it so I can deschmutzify them, chasing them around the house shrieking, "Hold on just a second!" as I wave the napkin about. (My own mother, btw, has apparently rewritten history such that she now believes that she never, ever did this. Right.)

Luckily I just put on new sheets and changed the duvet cover, which is always a siren call for everyone to lie on the bed extensively, leaving as little room for humans as they can, and shed as much as possible -- this is what it looked like this morning, while I slaved away cleaning elsewhere in the apartment...