a wolf angel is not a good angel

Congratulations to my friend (and occasional commenter here) Michelle on finishing up her MSc thesis!

A friend of mine chose a supervisor for her thesis, after being told that Dr. Unavailable would be around for the first half of the summer (by Dr. U). (It’s a summer-long project.) She just finds uot that Dr. U is not around at all in the summer, so mostly she’ll be working with Dr. TotalStranger. Dr. TS is supposed to be hard to work with, and they have never met. It may or may not be possible to change thesis advisors now. So, should my friend: try to change projects and advisors, go with Dr. TS, something else I cannot think of?

After on Profgrrrl’s story of rudeness in class, I will admit that in large lecture classes (where attendance was mandatory but not otherwise helpful), I would hide headphones under my hair (very easy to do!) and listen to music instead. Maybe the prof could see me, but it was a class of 200+ people. I’d say I’m sorry, but in retrospect, I’m really not.

At a large, colorful panel along a wall, Carter reads aloud from a passage describing the disappearance of dinosaurs from the earth about 65 million years ago. He and some of the older students exchange knowing smiles at the timeline, which contradicts their interpretation the Bible suggesting a 6,000-year-old planet.

[ . . . ]

He and the other guides counter secular interpretations of history, nature and the origin of life with their own literal reading of the Bible. And they do so right at the point where they feel they feel science indoctrinates young people — museums.

“Museums are the secular temples of our day,” founder Bill Jack says.

I guess maybe this is better than creating their own “museums”? It seems like you can’t accidentally wind up in nutty religious tour, not realising what it is: you have to plan to go there. And a few of the kids there might be convinced by the actual science.

via Canadian Cynic

I believe in evolution like I believe in, say, quantum theory: people who study it for a living say there’s good evidence for it, and some of it I can follow, and some of it I can’t, but I think it’s generally true. I enjoy posts on, say, the evolution of dinosaur fingers (which I thought of today as I looked at my sister’s lizard’s feet, which look like it has thumbs but on the outside: I like lizards), but my reading of biology rarely goes farther than blogs.

But for my father’s birthday last year, I bought him a book so he’d stop telling me that evolution made no sense (I did not have the arguments to respond to him) and that we were put here by aliens (he was never clear on whether the aliens evolved or not).

And you know, he read the book. And he finally agreed, evolution makes sense (more or less). And when, recently, my sister made some comment about how come, if dogs came from wolves, there are still wolves, he said — unprompted — “No, they share a common ancestor.”

My sister has graduated from elementary school, the same school my other sister and I both went to. I only went there for two years — it only (re)opened for my grade 5. I was in the first ever graduating class there. It’s changed totally: we were a class of 12, the class below us, 20-odd. My sister is in a class of 50-something. None of the same teachers are still there. It’s odd, somehow.

My sister is, of course, sad: it’s the end of a time, and even though it’s been a bad school for her, and even though she’s having trouble with the girls in the class, she’s still sad. And she asks if I understand and of course I do, but also: I can barely recall my graduations — university, high school, elementary. I’m not in touch at all with anyone from elementary school, and I’m mostly uninterested in seeing anyone from high school unless we’re currently friends. I wouldn’t mind an elementary school reunion, though I’m not sure if I would be willing to organise one. I almost regret not wishing I could see them more, I feel like it says something bad about me, though I think really it doesn’t.

I can’t recall being too sad about leaving; I think I was always more excited about starting something else. You could almost call me an optimist.

It’s not that all of this, the changes, the loss in leaving a place — even one you don’t want to be at anymore — doesn’t matter at the time: it does, of course — knowing that you are feeling sadness for some natural reason doesn’t really make it go away.

Yet another darling Chronicle article, this one saying that if you’re a local candidate who has any reasons (say, family) to stay local, you’re screwed, and you should just give up now.

For some readers, my observations may seem bleak and foreboding. I sympathize with the Ph.D. who cannot relocate because her mother has Alzheimer’s. I feel for the person whose spouse is locked into a location for career reasons. I realize that some who had hoped to find a teaching job near the place they consider home may feel cheated.

If you absolutely cannot relocate, and many people are in such a situation, then you need to reconsider your professional plans. I know several people who did just that and stumbled into rewarding careers that allowed them to remain where they needed to be.

One final observation, the twin realities of a completed Ph.D. and an ability to relocate are, in some ways, related. While I have no statistical evidence to support this, I have noticed anecdotally that “local” students in Ph.D. programs are among the least likely to complete the dissertation. Perhaps those students are more encumbered with responsibilities that obstruct degree completion, or when they learn of the narrowness of job opportunities they lose the “carrot” at the end of the degree.

We’re such a wonderful school! We have no one local, so we can talk about all sorts of different programs, except, you know, the nearby ones, and our own program (his school does not seem to have a grad program in his dept), because faculty know what it is to experience school just by teaching there. And we can understand the issues of local students by magic. (There were a number of faculty who were unimpressed by people at my undergrad school who were from Montreal because they were from Montreal — I’ll leave this one alone, other than to say that if you’re disdaining people who don’t move around when you’ve been at a school for 20+ years, you’re a hypocritical ass.)

Plus, you know, if you’re local then you’ll have family obligations or whatever, and we’ll “feel” for you, but you’re not going to have no life but academia, so sorry. Look, you suck as students, not finishing the PhDs even though you know that (a) they’re a disservice in a lot of the job market and (b) you can’t get an academic job locally with them.

I’m afraid that sometimes we academicians are so used to trafficking in pristine ideas that we forget about the harshness of the real world. And in the real world of academe, you need to be mobile.

. . . because we’re unable to do anything to work on changing the system: it’s like this because of divine fiat, and there is no way academia could ever work otherwise.

(Maybe this time I’ll promise to keep posting about the topic to ensure I’ll move on.)

I was listening to the CBC in the morning, as I have taken to doing, and they were discussing depersonalisation, which I thought was interesting, since there is, in fact, a link with self-injury (though this wasn’t mentioned). There will also be a link with the whole academia thing coming, which is reason to continue on or to ignore this, depending on your interests. (Look! I can bring in craziness in academia to my just plain insane posts!)

The point, basically, is that you feel not part of your body, or part of the world, something which I’d always taken to be part of depression for me, but was perhaps not quite the same. The world is a dream; you are a dream in it. It apparently hits educated people more highly, and they suggest links with existentialism (including the famous French author “Sot” — could you just pretend you can pronounce things marginally correctly?).

And — yes, yes, I’m totally nuts, I know this, but wasn’t it already clear from this blog? — this was also an issue, once, and, yes, hurting myself made things a bit better that way: I was really there, even if I couldn’t feel it. But, you know, it wasn’t all bad; things didn’t hurt as much, cause I was at a remove, and I could set myself a task (a difficult one, even) and do it while I was sort of checked out.

It’s like I’m *nostalgic* for my craziest periods. But, you know, in ways I felt I was more interesting then. (You’re not; not really. I mean, what’s fun about someone who’s not really there? The rest can be imagined. And yet, I can’t get rid of that stupid thought: now I am boring. Maybe that’s why I keep posting about this.)

Depersonalisation, though. I could observe things in a way I can’t know I’m involved. I could get boring stuff done without really being bored. I could be brilliant and hard, a diamond (not *that* brilliant, but not a good thing: cold and cutting edges). And I think: this made me a better academic. I know I say that you’re better when you have a life outside of research, and I believe that, but I also apparently fall into the idea that to be a good academic, you must be a sort of monk, where the rest of the world falls away/doesn’t matter. And how much more could it go away than being part of another reality altogether?

When I was crazy[1], I was good at this sort of thing. I didn’t entirely mind a lot of the crazy things, because I had other things that were in ways results of being crazy, a creativity I think I no longer have, an ability to devote myself to doing something (by checking out), a way of looking at the world that I can’t get back, not even briefly. Of course I was sad and not really part of anything, I was causing myself all sorts of physical pain to remind myself I existed and to feel *something* other than an oddly distant misery or self-hatred, I couldn’t remember things half the time — what the hell am I nostalgic for?

And yet, and yet. I knew what was wrong, in a way, then. I knew this was weird, but in a way I didn’t mind, because it wasn’t real; I wasn’t real; I wasn’t there. And I could be all sorts of productive, far better than I was when I got better and had other things on my mind. Had I been not myself, I would have managed grad school much better, because it wouldn’t have mattered, because I could have said “okay, work!” and out would have come work, and everything else would have been trapped and hiding and — I am angry that I had to choose between sanity and academia, that to be good at what I did I had to be crazy and not entirely human — it wasn’t enough that I gave up any kind of security and liking where I live and my family and everything for it (though obviously I didn’t; I made a choice to give it up instead), I would have had to give up this hard-earned sanity, I would have had to give *myself* up. You cannot be yourself and be that kind of monk. (You can, of course, be an academic and not a monk. I can’t, apparently, but other people can.)

So sometimes I wish I could go back and get these choices back.

And sometimes I just miss the distance I had from the anxiety and unhappiness.

[1] -er.

The other side of the conversation I had last night with my grandmother was about leaving grad school. How long would it take me to get a PhD now, my grandfather asked. Oh, 3 or 4 years (at least), but the problem is jobs; the problem is that I don’t want to move around from adjunct position to adjunct position; the problem is that I don’t want to live in lots of places, and that I am unwilling to make that sacrifice.

And then we got to how and why I disliked living in the US, and I suppose my regret about leaving was clear. It was the right choice, yes, but I still regret it: it was a hard choice, and it required me to give up on dreams (both reasonable and un).

“It’s just as well you left. You’ve only got one life, you shouldn’t waste it being unhappy.”

What with people talking about students making unreasonable requests around exams, I will talk about one of mine.

A few years ago it was my cousin’s bar mitzvah, and I didn’t have a dress. (Oh yes, you know where this is going.) And my father was heading down to NYC for a day to do a trade show, and I could go with him and shop! And just hang around NYC for the day, which is always fun. The show was Fri/Sat/Sun, but he wanted to be there Friday (he was willing to switch to Saturday, but). And I had a midterm on that Friday.

So I went, somewhat abashed, and told the professor this, with the comment that of course I could take the exam on Friday, but if other people were already taking it at some other date, could I maybe write the exam then, with those other people?

I had a wonderful time (though I had a slight flu), found a dress and got a free makeover in Macy’s that Friday.