Two other ways of looking at it

from daniel coleman's in bed with the word:

hard-hearted, cynical audiences are usually smart. you can't tell them anything they haven't thought about before. critique, clever interventions, intriguing arguments, and brilliant analyses are the bread and butter hard-hearted people chew up and spit out without stopping to breathe. the chink in the armour of cynics, however, is sorrow. (p. 101)

from frank donoghue's the last professors:

... professions do not prepare their members to deal with layoffs, chronic unemployment, or underemployment. ... when professors get fired, they cry. moreover, no profession more fervently believes in the myth of meritocracy than academics. the conviction that somehow one's talent alone ultimately determines one's place in the hierarchy of academic labor gives rise to a constellation of fantasties: my charisma as a teacher will be properly valued; my completed dissertation or published book will confirm my rare intelligence. in short, someone will discover me and celebrate my intellectual powers. since these epiphanies almost never happen, meritocracies have the effect of making everyone feel insufficiently appreciated. (p. 63)

What not to do (part 4)

from up here on the plateau, a partial list of things to avoid if you hope to be promoted in the university:

• good teaching. in particular, do not attempt pedagogical experiments. do not move into a new area. do not team-teach. do not teach extra-to-load. do not pick up teaching from colleagues who fall ill. do not assist colleagues' teaching. do not use new technologies. do not concern yourself with the relevance of your material to the students in your class. do not co-publish. do not teach graduate students to teach.
  
• responsible supervision. every time you are about to answer an email from a graduate student, ask yourself, "will this get me promoted?" you already know the answer. do what most people do, and leave that chapter sitting on your desk. eventually even the most talented doctoral students give up and drop out.
  
• mentoring. it's supposed to be hard for other people.
  
• publishing where people might actually read you. obviously, this makes your colleagues look bad.
• arts and culture festivals, extra-academic boards, or other demonstrations that you take seriously the concept of community engagement. "sweetheart, we didn't mean it!"
  

above all, if you imagine change and work for it, you might as well pull the trigger yourself.

Not bitter part 3

the OED defines bitter as "one of the elementary sensations of taste proper: obnoxious, irritating, or unfavourably stimulating to the gustatory nerve; disagreeable to the palate; having the characteristic taste of wormwood, gentian, quinine, bitter aloes, soot: the opposite of sweet; causing ‘the proper pain of taste’ (Bain)."

so maybe i'm a little bitter. but also:

• morose: "sullen, gloomy, sour-tempered, unsocial."
  
• humiliated: i have thought a lot about humiliation this month, not just my own, you'll be glad to hear, but the routine humiliations of everyday life. i think about GB and what it must have been like to struggle with recalcitrant despondency, particularly in a world that takes chipper as a prerequisite for lovable. i look around and wonder how humiliating it feels to be chronically obese in the new 21st-century moral order: those hungers must mortify you. i think about the endless humiliations of poverty, being 50-something years old and standing in line after line after line. humiliation, it seems to me, accretes and compounds until the night you find yourself texting from the west side of the high level bridge.
  
• angry: the chinese say anger is a function of liver imbalance, as are resentment, frustration, irritability and bitterness. the job of the liver meridian is to keep energy flowing smoothly throughout the body. when it doesn't: migraine. (huh.) in this case, though, it's hard to say exactly what i'm angry at. an anonymous reviewer? a poor chair? a corrupt process? "the system"? this is me, punching fog.
  
• dismayed, disgraced, discouraged, disconcerted, disheartened and, perhaps most of all, and most inarticulately, disappointed.

taste of soot.

New knife

i need a new knife. my old knives have been sharpened too often to hold an edge for long. they tire, dull.

i know who could advise me on a knife. and if she were sitting here now, i would ask: do you feel your knife's well balanced? are you familiar with its edge? did it feel heavy at first? unbecoming? what about the action, the hard thrust upward: did you have to get used to that? did your palms sweat or did the knife's handle warm with your caress?

i said, "less obedience, more boldness. less talking, more listening."
she said, "pass me my whetstone."

I'm not bitter part 1

98% of all publications (articles and monographs) in the arts and humanities are never cited.* professors don't even check each other's precious monographs out of the library.

i'm just saying.

* Deborah C. Rohde, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Scholars, Status, and Academic Culture. Stanford UP, 2006.

Miss joyce regrets to say

mo and i head over after work to change the sheets and swap clean-for-dirty laundry and check in on the food situation, make sure she has her pills and so on....

... but when we arrive, jo's on her way to the bank, so says: "i'm terribly sorry, but i just can't accommodate you today."

Going without

i'm going public because i can't believe i'm the only one in my predicament. which is, in a word, underpants.

here i am, a fully realized adult woman about to start a new job, and i haven't got a decent pair of gaunch. i'm not asking for the moon here, just a reliable brand: cotton, comfortable, and sold by the half dozen. i don't want to think about my panties, at least not most weekday mornings; i want them to fit. and by "fit," i mean that they should cover my ass -- ideally, my entire ass -- while staying below the waistline of whatever i'm wearing on top. i want them not to ride up (or, at the risk of being indelicate, "in"). i'd like something a little more up-to-date than my jockey french cut standbys (oh, 80s, i miss your pleat-front pants) yet not quite as trendy as little boy shorts (which, unless you have the thighs of a little boy...). i don't want control top, shape-enhancing, butt-lifting technology, just label-free, soft-elastic, no-polyester everyday undies. why am i forced to choose between gaunch that sit low on my hips yet strangle my legs and something seamless that goes to the rib cage? i know it's a global recession, hanes, but did you lay off all your good ideas? and i'm sorry, but bamboo?

like i say, i can't believe i'm the only one making do with four-year-old rags. so if you have suggestions, gentle reader, bring 'em. until them, i'm going commando.