a wolf angel is not a good angel

I had a disturbing dream last night. My cat was outside, playing in the yard and in the very large balcony that was in my dream. And then suddenly there was a bear outside, chasing her. And I couldn’t go out and get her because the bear would have eaten me. And he was running after her, going up and down the stairs from the balcony to the yard and back. I was terrified. Every now and then she’d get ahead, only to have the bear catch up. Finally he got her tail, and I thought thank god, now he’ll be so distracted by that she’ll get away. But she didn’t.

I woke up so worried for her. She is, of course, just fine.

I had another, equally disturbing dream after. But it was weirder, I remember it less well, and it had too much R-rated content for me to want to share it.

I hope I sleep better tonight.

So today they did a little orientation for the new first year students. They didn’t have one before, and I suggested very strongly that this be changed. It was quite what I would have liked to have known or have told to me. It’s a little early — most leases haven’t started yet — and probably should have been Tuesday afternoon, but still, all (4 of) the new students came.

I’m trying not to be bitter that they didn’t do this for us, or feel that if I had to suffer, so should everyone else. Sometimes I am not a very nice person.

As usual here in Canada City, half of the roads in town are under repair this summer. (Weather conditions make it impossible to do construction in the winter.) This time, it’s the highway that goes NS through the city.[1]

So all the little orange detour signs have sprouted like flowers. Including — my favourite — the ones that say Detour Chalet BBQ (there are more of these signs than signs to the highway under construction). Yes, priorities are straight here.

[1] Which city I am referring to is probably abundantly clear to anyone from near here. But I still insist on the pretense that I can be marginally anonymous.

Note: I neither intend to have children nor intend not to. At this point, I do not want any. This may change, but it may not. I generally only like children who I am related to (siblings or cousins). What this means for the following I do not know.

I have commented on the childfree/childed (I think nonchildfree sounds silly and English zero morphology is productive, so childed it is) discussion elsewhere, but I am now thinking about my uncle.

My uncle has never ever wanted children. He made that clear to everyone he ever dated seriously. He dislikes children, and he does not want to give up his own interests for them. Fair enough. His first wife got pregnant on their honeymoon, figuring he’d change his mind. Now, some people do. My father never wanted children, and he now has three. But my mother only got pregnant *after* he changed his mind. My uncle never changed his mind. So he divorced his first wife, and though I believe he’s supported his son financially, I know he sees him regularly. This seems remarkably fair. Sometimes things happen, but to force someone who has made it quite clear they don’t want children into having them is wrong.

I *wouldn’t* want him as my father. And I daresay there are women — many of them — that I wouldn’t want as my mother. Many people who wouldn’t be good parents realise this (like my uncle) and don’t have children. Sadly, some don’t, and do.

But I don’t think saying that you wouldn’t want someone — say, Betsy Rollin — as your mother is vitriolic. Tone could make it so, but I don’t think it is.

I lied. More posts.

Tonight at dinner, my father shared his opinion. That if you were really raised an Orthodox Jew, you couldn’t help but feel that any other form of Judaism was fraudulent. Since I am really a Reform/Reconstructionist (atheist) Jew[1], it irritates me that my father (raised Orthodox) considers my entire family’s religion fake. (He claimed to be talking about my aunt’s sister-in-law, but he was clearly talking about himself.)

It *does* go both ways. You can be brought up conservative and truly honestly go to ultra-orthodox, or you can be brought up orthodox and truly honestly go somewhere more liberal, and not feel fake. But I’ll never convince him of that.

[1] Is this contradictory? In any case, it’s what I’d call myself.

In what I swear will be my last post for a while because I need to wake up early to drive back to Dullness (with my father, so he can drive while I sleep for a few hours, and then we can both sleep, and then I can drive while he sleeps. We both sleep a lot in cars) . . .

Reading Kate on her about-to-be-ex-roommate, I thought of my ex-roommate, S. At first we got along fine. I’m sure I did things that irritated her, but she never told me, so let’s move right on to the things she did that irritated me.

Her boyfriend (of 4 or 5 years) came up to visit law schools. So he needed his own keys to the place. So she GAVE HIM MINE. Just took them off my keyring without asking me, leaving me a note, or returning them to me. They “figured [I] wouldn’t mind”. Well, had she asked me, I wouldn’t have. But she didn’t, and I did.

She borrowed my towels. Which would have been okay, if she washed them after. But no. I had to root through her dirty laundry to find my towels. (When she moved out, she left one of hers. Although she left stuff in the basement to pick up, I kept the towel.) This really irritated me when I’d come back from a week away and ALL 3 of my towels which had been clean were dirty. And I kept them in my room, not the bathroom.

She took all my boxes when she packed, too. Again without asking. I needed those boxes for my stuff. So I unpacked her stuff and took the boxes left. Which is good, because I found some of the kitchen stuff which she’d stolen from me (though not all).

When she came to pick up her stuff, she forgot one bookcase (she said two, but one of the ones she was talking about was mine). She said she would drop by to pick it up (a month ago) but didn’t, and hasn’t gotten in touch with me since. I’m not putting myself out for her, so I’ll probably expropriate it. It’s worth almost as much as the stuff she took, in the sense of much less than.

I like my new roommate much better, although now we have a 3rd, which makes me somewhat concerned.

Two posts at Dan Drezner and Kieran at Crooked Timber about conferences.

I am taking them to heart. This part in particular felt just like some of the conferences I’ve been to:

Attending an academic conference is like being a teenager again. This is why they can be so awful. You hang around trying to attach yourself to a group ? preferably the cool kids, but in the end any group will do ? and then these groups hang around waiting for something to happen.

Now the conferences I have attended have been mostly small ones. There are two or three groups. If there are two, they are faculty and graduate students, with some junior faculty (ie, got an academic position within the past 2 years) going with the graduate students. If there are three, there’s faculty, junior faculty, and graduate students. I’ve been lucky, mostly — one conference was huge but I went with a friend (just to listen), one was small and at Canada U while I was an undergrad there (also just to listen and go to the party). The ones I have been to since were somewhat different.

The first one I presented at, I was the *last talk*. This is bad. As my advisor warned me, no one except your friends will talk to you until after your talk. And they pretty much didn’t, except for some graduate students who were at the University of Canada.[1] But I spent the weekend being sick about my talk, and it was a dull place for a conference, so that was okay. And after the talk, I had one person first think I had just been finishing up my dissertation, then think he had offended me because I was really a faculty member, and then babble about how he could tell the difference between PhD student talks and MA student talks and mine was definitely PhD calibre how could I only be an undergrad . . . Some of this was bullshit, of course, but I was pleased. Then he insulted the city Dullness is in — indeed, the whole state — which my coauthor thought sort of rude, but after a year living there I understand.

The next one I presented at was the same conference, a year later. That worked out much better, because I was the second talk, and it was in a vacation destination. So nice. So wonderful. It was the only bright spot in this past year, and absolutely the reason I didn’t quit. It also helped that the crash space I was at had 3 people crashing. Sigh. I can’t express how happy I was for those 5 days, or how unhappy I was for months previous.

The last one I presented at — it was entirely factional. You spoke to only the people from your school (no one from Dullness was there, but a few people from Canada U were, most of whom left early). The talks weren’t brilliant, either (including mine) — I went there because it was a city I’d always wanted to see, and because if I ever want to work in Canada, it helps to go to Canadian conferences. But I was staying with “family” (4th cousins, his mother and my grandmother grew up together). And I had a wonderful time with them.

Which brings me, yet again, to no point. Except maybe:

Conferences can be fun, if you know people to start your schmoozing with, and especially if they’re less shy than you are. But don’t expect all that much, like for every conference to be as wonderful as that one conference where everything went right.

Nope. No real point. Oh well.

[1] I know, I’m super original.

Go read Matthew’s post about Hummer license plates and blogging lightbulb jokes. Try not to make any yourself. Then go and read the post that first sent me to his site (via a link-free friend). It’s terrible, but funny in that sort of way.

This Zits comic just sums up some of those days. Not, as it happens, today.

I read something a few days ago that stuck in my mind. I don’t remember where I read it (other than online), but it went something like this:

“Young feminists striking back at the patriarchy by keeping their father’s names . . . ”

Except it was snarkier.

It annoyed me. I refuse to get into the “am I a feminist?” debate, mostly because I feel the argument is too slippery, too lacking a definition of feminism. But if/when I get married, I will keep my father’s last name. I have always intended to, except for a brief period after my father decided to share with people a horrible nickname based on it and it was used. At that point, I had decided to change my name (legally) to my mother’s maiden name. But since I was 12, we can ignore it, except for the part that shows I didn’t ever expect to change my name when I got married.

And why should I? Yes, it’s my father’s name. It’s also mine. I’ve had it for my whole life. Now I even have the beginnings of a professional reputation under it — presentations, publications. Will this pose problems with children later? Perhaps — but probably not, given how many more people aren’t changing their names now.

I once dated someone who had thought it obvious that a woman would change her name. After all, you want to show you’re a family. And there is something to that, at least for me. But I want to keep my name — and, unsurprisingly, so did R.[1] I wouldn’t change my name, but I also wouldn’t ask my husband to change his.[2] It irritates me when people work it the other way: I won’t change my name, but I want to have the same name as my wife, so you change yours.[3],[4]

[1] After I asked him this, he changed his mind about the whole thing — he’d still prefer to have a family where they share a last name, but if his wife wasn’t interested in changing her name, he wouldn’t argue. Or so he said, and I believe him: he was always quite reasonable about things like that.

[2] I’m more compromising on the part where I get married, and Mr. Smith and Ms. Jones end up as Mr. & Ms. Jith. I would be very offended to receive an invitation to Mr. and Mrs. Smith (or even Jith), whatever [some but not all] etiquette mavens say.

[3] Since I’ve never seen it go the other way, I’ll put in the sexes here.

[4] Note that I’m not anti-people-changing-their-names. I’m anti-being-expected-to-change-my-name, and it’s just annoying when the reason people do it is misrepresented so offensively.