Huge Luck

Here's a shout out there to all those adjuncts on the quarter system facing uncertain times. It's that part of the year when enrollments dwindle, and the trickle of cash you hoped might last till June dries up in the blink of an eye. You know you shouldn't depend on it. You try to keep yourself from hoping, but you can't imagine why, with students requesting you for the no-brainer (I mean this. You literally take your brain out like a supplementary drive and check it until class is over) Comp II class they have to take next quarter, there won't be something for you. You let yourself believe that maybe you'll make it through a good part of the summer. In a fit of luxurious hopefulness, you buy three paperback novels discounted to half the price by independent sellers on Amazon. You think maybe you really can finally replace those two expensive plastic hubcaps stolen from one side of your car by the kids up the street when you had that flat tire for two weeks. It's not a big break you're hoping for, really--just a little piece of something to sustain you as you wait for the upswing to happen. A tiny bit of luck in the first optimistic days of spring.

Thursday was the last day of class at Culinary College so I made sure I was there in time for my Last Free Meal. It was a doozy, as usual, with five different stations--hand-cooked and assembled cajun pasta, three different fish entrees, a salad bar filled with oysters on the half shell, a peppery roasted lamb, a pizza station, a salad bar. Desserts galore. I always try not to eat too much, but I took as many oysters as I could reasonably fit on my tray. I collected papers in two classes, then checked in with the coordinator to find out about final grades and possible spring courses. I found him at his desk eating salad out of a "to go" plastic clamshell, looking glum. We spent twenty minutes talking about final grade submissions before I asked him point-blank about courses, and he told me there was nothing. He could have told me up front. He knew from my flurry of emails that I was desperate. But he held back, hoping I wouldn't ask. Why?

He explained thet Spring enrollment was slack. Fewer courses were being offered, and most of these had to go to full-time people whose contracts required three or more courses per quarter. He didn't have anything for anybody, and by anybody, he meant adjuncts. The coordinator showed me the schedule, and pointed out the different classes and who would get them. But I could see over his shoulder that actually, one of us HAD gotten a class, out of the four of us that had started that quarter. I recognized the initials of one of the adjuncts penciled in. I didn't say anything. I know the adjunct, and I remembered that while a couple of us had gotten two courses to teach this past quarter, he had only gotten one. It seemed fair to give him a second course. The weird thing was, the coordinator was lying about it when he said nobody was getting anything. He didn't have to lie, but he did it anyway, hesitating when he came to the initials I recognized. I felt bad for him. His life was about holding back information and lying to people. He felt bad, too. He looked miserable. I think it must kill your soul a little every day to know that your job is to treat people like they are expendable. He promised to keep us in mind for summer, for next fall, trying to convince himself that he actually could reward loyalty and good work. But his hands are tied. Culinary College is run by a for-profit educational company. No programs will be built there, ever. As he gave his little speech, I laughed somewhere in my own head. See you next fall? Fat chance, sucka.

I drove out of the parking lot for what now seemed like the last time, but I didn't feel sentimental. Better to get out before my facade of taking it seriously cracked. When I swung by the apartment after class to pick up gf for a much-needed trip to Costco, though, I burst into tears. I was a failure. I couldn't even keep a stupid comp job at a sham college. Gf cheered me up with an exhortation to remember everything I had to look forward to later in the year, how far I'd come, how everything would work out. She offered to drive, and we switched places for the short journey into the land of suburban bulk-buying. At Costco, as usual, toilet paper is cheap and plentiful, and strangers offer us exotic reheated foods in little paper cups. Everything is giant-sized. Cereal boxes and Starbucks bags of coffee have huge, Mesezoic dimensions. That which was once big will be big again. Think big! Buy big! Dream big!

When we get home a letter in the mail tells me I have gotten a merit scholarship to Neighboring Big State University law school, putting it in the running with my in-state University law school. Cheered, I go to the back room to check my email, and find a solicitation from Elite University in town to teach an intro to gender studies course for them this quarter. One course at Elite pays a little more than I would make teaching two courses at Culinary. Whoa. Now I have to put my brain back in and make a syllabus. The hilarity of moving in two weeks from teaching composition to cooking students who don't want to be there to teaching gender to some of the best students in the country at a better school than any place I have ever taught strikes me. As an adjunct I can go places I never could as a professor; once long ago I thought teaching at Elite University was the most amazing and impossible thing. I knew I could do it, but I also knew it would forever remain out of my reach, reserved for much grander people than me. Under the radar, below the regulatory mechanisms of hiring and tenure, they are happy to have me. "Welcome aboard!" the email says. It doesn't mean status or validation. It means rent money for the next three months. I look at it. I feel lucky.

Saved!

Almost Legal

It's time to make the trip downstate to visit the big law school. I really want gf to come to the open house, to feel like it is our decision and our adventure. She cancels class for the day. She is very busy and very stressed. I assure her that she can bail at the last minute if she needs to, that I will go myself and be Completely Understanding, that I won't sulk or be passive aggressive or store it up as a Wrong in the Emotional Arsenal. But I really, really want her to come.

I make a reservation at the Holiday Inn Express. I arrive home from teaching to find a tiny pile of her clothing on the bed, ready to pack. She prides herself on packing light, which I can't seem to manage, ever. She takes one turtleneck cotton sweater, one pair of underwear, and one pair of socks for an overnight trip. I imagine blizzards requiring layers of socks, colonic disasters necessitating twelve pairs of underwear, and sudden climate changes requiring t-shirts, sweaters, maybe a fez. I am happy when I see her tiny pile, because it means she is coming with me.

It threatens to snow. Far away, rush hour traffic is piling up. We manage to pat the cats and dash to the car. The drive is long and boring. The highway is really, really boring. The blonde, bland fields go from straw to gray, and gray to black, and darkness falls with its raw red heaviness, and we are still driving, driving down the country, through all the towns tired of winter.

We find the Holiday Inn Express, finally, off one exit that looks like all the others. The Holiday Inn looks like all the others. But it is brand new, the room smells like new carpet, and the bed--lo! the bed!--is free of the usual scratchy germ-ridden polyester bedspread. Instead, it has a white cotton duvet cover encasing the puffy goodness of a real duvet. The bed is puffy goodness. The pillows are legion, not the one or two creepy flat things you lump hopelessly under your head on a brick of a cheap mattress. Gf looks around, sighs, sits down happily, and asks why we ever have to go home.

Even dinner is a miracle. Driving around looking for restaurants, I spot the sign for a steakhouse. Inside are two big pits in the middle of the floor, around which people, mostly beefy heartlandish boys, are gruffly poking steaks, which they are cooking themselves. In a refrigerator nearby sit piles of thick red cuts, strips and porterhouses and filets and T-bones. Two middle-aged ladies with fading bobs cackle happily together at one of the grills, clutching big mugs of flourescent pink Mai Tais. We are loving them. We are loving this place. We are loving the cool taste of beer in a glass, and the charred burnt of grilled beef you can cook yourself even in the middle of winter.

Love Story is on the TV when we get back to the room. "We can't watch this movie because it will make me cry, " says gf. We watch it. She cries. We are happy.

Next day we get up and face the orientation. I get a packet of information, apartment listings, maps, and a couple of thick plastic orange pens that say "Class of 2009." I am Class of 2009. Omygod. We go to the opening remarks, and the Dean remarks on the diversity and achievements of this admitted class. He mentions Engineers, PhDs, an English Professor.

English Professor? Did he just say that?

We get a tour of the law school from two incredibly radiant, enthusiastic, lovely law students. They are happy. They love it here. We are happy. This is an incredible place. The building is panelled and beautiful. The foyer is airy, nice. The classrooms are big and plush. There is a new courtroom. The Law Library is breathtaking, with its hundred lovely little reading lamps and long tables and dark rich stacks of books.

We watch a class in criminal procedure. The professor is young and hip and smart. The students are a mixed batch of lame and aggressive. Like many classes, I suspect in here the ones not talking are the best students, quietly taking notes. Then we notice someone is playing Solitaire on her computer. The guy next to her is playing Solitaire. All the best students are playing Solitaire.

Still, the professor manages to keep their attention, to steer them kindly through the material. He is still awkward, just getting his footing. Afterwards we tell him we liked his class. He asks what we do and it comes out. He is suddenly shy. It is his first year as an Assistant Professor. Luckily, we have to go to another panel. I wonder if it will be like this, feeling strange about revealing myself to professors who should be colleagues. How can I be a student, be under the radar? I don't want to set people off, feel shame, be a target, or come off as arrogant. I am a student now, in this field, not a colleague. I tuck this away to think about more.

At lunch we are joined by two professors. One is fierce and logorreic. She brings up a subject in order to lecture you about it. The other professor is innocuous, with thick gray hair that looks like a seventies hairpiece, but is real, and parted in the middle. He listens with dark, thoughtful eyes. I learn from the student sitting next to me that Professor Thoughtful sings opera and runs an a capella group. He is known for belting "Capital Gains," a song my father later tells me is from the musical "Don't Sleep in the Subway," in his intersession tax class. The students adore him. Professor Manic asks what brought me to law school. I take a deep breath and try to answer her. She cuts me off after two sentences, ready to talk. I nod and smile until it starts to hurt. Professor Thoughtful casts his mild eyes on me and starts speaking softly about how I might be interested in education and employment discrimination law. He tells me this is a growing field, and one urgently needed. I thank him. I may indeed be interested. I watch him as he leaves the table, a kind, accomplished, modest, jaunty man.

The Assistant Dean stops me and asks if I am coming. He tells me that my story jumped out at him from four thousand applications. I am glad, and a little uneasy. Who wants that kind of story? But I am glad to be wanted. Very glad.

At the end of the final panel they give us T-shirts with the law school name on it, and the words, "Class of 2009" on the left sleeve. I take one happily. I am the Class of 2009. In the parking lot we run into one of the other admitted students, and we tell her how much we like it here. She is not sure; she wants to meet women in another city. We shrug and tell her we hope she changes her mind. We are a we now, in this together, making decisions together, trying to figure out life together. This feels nice. We get in the car to drive home, each expressing to the other the hope that the cats haven't broken anything major this time in the apartment. It is a beautiful sunset. There will be lots more like it on this road in the next several years. We look forward to them all.

Civility Procedure

If you want to feel better about your life, check out the "Wanna Get Away?" story on today's AOL News and elsewhere about freshly-minted lawyer Dianna Abdala's "bla bla bla" email to a potential employer turning down his job offer. This email, which he circulated to teach her a lesson about the necessity of civility and small communities, has apparently gone around the world, and has even been featured on Nightline. Reading the exchange, I understood why she was initially pissed off at this guy, though I can't condone her incredibly rude and entitled act of dismissing their email exchange with the "bla bla bla" response.

Apparently the guy offered her a job as a criminal litigator, which she accepted, but then he later reneged on the salary offer, claiming he had decided to hire two attorneys instead of just one. She decided to break up with him, er, quit, by email, and he retaliated by calling her immature and unprofessional. Clearly, neither one of them cares much for mediation and alternative dispute resolution, a conclusion made obvious by her strategy of lecturing him about the necessity of contracts, and his retaliatory threat to forward her email to all his friends to teach her a lesson about collegiality in a small community.

Did these guys sleep together? The nastiness on both sides is downright weird. Tired of the exchange, she writes "bla bla bla" when he threatens to expose her, and he forwards her email everywhere. He shook his dick at her and she called his bluff. So he whacked her with it, as hard as he could. Now the world is laughing at her, not him.

Their story is now a parable about professional conduct and email. But it could just as easily be a story about misunderstood sexual and gender dynamics. First, it is about how careful you need to be if you are a woman not to piss men off. Second, it is about how careful you should be if you are a man to remember that women, especially young women, get talked down to all the time, and that it is a sheer effort of will for most of them, every day, not to kick the next man who disses them in the balls. Would he have have cut her salary and expected her not to quit on him if she was a guy? Would he have called her immature and unprofessional? Would she have been so indirect as to quit by voicemail and email? Blown him off with such withering contempt, like he was a geek at a bar who didn't get that she was too cool to date him?

She was young and angry. He was older and angry. She was pretty. He was the boss. She quit. He lectured her. She didn't take it, so he threatened her. She was too stupid to see how the world works. She can't even tell the difference between "sew" and "sow." Now the world is laughing at her, not him.

And there's the lesson.

Foucault was right

One of my jobs these days is writing entries for an encyclopedia of sex and gender. This means that on days I'm not grading freshman comp papers rife with spelling and grammar mistakes ("fist love" remains one of my favorites from this quarter so far), I'm trying to sound knowledgeable about gender dysphoria, or polymorphous perversity, or dildos. Which sounds like fun, and is actually kind of interesting, but sexy? No way. Producing serious discourse about fun objects is nerdy fun, but not hot at all. What's hot is the idea of getting money for writing about, say, "the various forms of lubricants and their sexual uses." Money is definitely hot. The older I get, the hotter it seems.

On the other hand, thinking about this stuff is fun. Gender Dysphoria, for example, was amazing to think about. After all, it's a word coined by doctors to pathologize people for being uncomfortable and anxious about gender--something most of us experience to some degree every day--in order to make it possible for those who can't live with a fracked-up sex-gender system anymore to be able to have access to health care, counseling, hormones, surgery, identities, and narratives. If discomfort with sex-gender is dysphoric, what would Gender Euphoria look like? Could one find perfect happiness somewhere being a woman or a man? Or--better yet--neither? Where is this place? How can I find it?

Are there outlet malls there?

Happy Birthday, Amy

Yesterday was Amy Lowell's birthday. I first discovered her poetry when I was a teenager. I was in that adolescent girl poetry place, and managed to get my hands on the Poetry magazine anthology that contains "Venus Transiens." The first time I read it, I couldn't believe it. At that time in my life I had public boyfriends and secret girlfriends. My secret girlfriends were divided between best friends I had crushes on but would never be able to manage to sleep with, and friends who I had sex with but didn't love. We knew we had to keep things secret, but we got a kick out of our down low bisexual lives, we with our long hair and our boyfriends. We didn't have to make decisions. We made out in the hayloft. And there, with all of life and its choices laid out before me, I found this chivalrous poem from 1915, where one woman looks at another and literally feels the earth move. Sure it's schmaltzy and romantic, with its Botticellisms and pretty details. But it's also so damn lesbian. Impersonal speaker aside and all that, when you read it you KNOW, with the hairs standing up just a little on the back of your neck, that it ain't no man that's supposed to be thinking this on some wave-crashed shore. You know it's a woman. And this poem stays in your head. It's the one you scribble down in a love letter when finally, at college, you let yourself fall in love for the first time.

I'm not saying this poem made me love women, but it sure made me love that I loved women. A lot. And it made it ok because it was poetry, and it was history, and it was heartfelt. So happy 102nd, Amy. Your poetry certainly lives on.

VENUS TRANSIENS

Tell me,
Was Venus more beautiful
Than you are,
When she topped
The crinkled waves,
Drifting shoreward
On her plaited shell?
Was Botticelli's vision
Fairer than mine;
And were the painted rosebuds
He tossed his lady,
Of better worth
Than the words I blow about you
To cover your too great loveliness
As with a gauze
Of misted silver?

For me
You stand poised
In the blue and buoyant air,
Cinctured by bright winds,
Treading the sunlight.
And the waves which precede you
Ripple and stir
The sands at my feet.

The End of the Trail

There's no better way to cure one's self of nostalgia for academia like adjuncting comp sections. Your students don't want to be there. You don't want to be there. This morning there were two major accidents on the way to work, so I took an alternate route. I might as well have walked. I arrived half an hour late, after calling someone to tell the kids to wait. Wait for what?

I tried to explain what an Evaluation argument was. They looked at me blankly. It wasn't that they didn't understand. They just didn't care. They are tired. Worn out. They don't want to see films. They don't want to read New York Times editorials. They don't want to study logical, ethical, or emotional appeals. They just want it to be over.

This is the composition two class. It is one of only two English classes they have to take on the way to their degree. A Bachelor's degree.

Their faces are drawn. My face feels like a transplant. I talk but it takes effort to make my eyes open, my mouth move. I am talking under water. I am half me, half someone else. I need antirejection drugs.

I answer individual questions. These days, I am best at one-on-one. I rely on the kindness that is my autopilot mode. Can't we get through this together? What do I have to do, besides count down the days?

Last week I went to a friend's class at Prestigious University. As I walked across the gothic quadrangles, I noticed how young everyone looked. How thin. How pretty. They all wore expensive-looking performance clothing. They mountaineered their way from one class to another.

In class, we all settled down for a leisurely afternoon. There was discussion, as we knew there would be. Ideas might come, slide away, reappear again. Faces might flicker and go dark, like an electrical storm. They don't know where they are going, but they know they are climbing somewhere, up, up.

I know what it is like to stay too long on a mountain, to start too late, try to make up time, then get below the treeline just as the sun goes out behind slate hills. You walk down in the dark with your companion if you have one, trying to be cheerful, trying not to quarrel. Someone is at fault for the late start. Someone is disrespectful of something--time, nature, human endurance. You can't talk about it. You can't be afraid of bears or fisher cats. When you hear a twig snap, you say it's a deer, or a chipmunk, or a raccoon. Keep talking to each other. Keep walking in the darkness. You know it will turn out all right if you put one foot in front of the other, carefully, talking calmly, peering ahead, and stopping, every now and then, to marvel at the moon.

Wednesday Punctuation Police

If you really were cheating on your girlfriend, would you bring her--or your other dates--here and allow this lost apostrophe to blow your cover?

The Love Letter

So I sit all day in my desk chair indexing my book, because it has to be done and I can't afford to pay someone to do it for me. It's in the 50s and sunny in the middle of a Chicago winter. My butt hurts from the chair. I look out at the sunshine. I skip the gym. Towards late afternoon I realize that I have unconsciously reversed the names in a citation in my bibliography of a two-author volume that gf wrote with someone else. I have put gf's name first, even though on her book it comes second. I must have thought it SHOULD come first. This is further proof that really I am a bad scholar. I make things up, just like James Frey.

I panic about this. My book is in galleys and I will have to change this entry all around.

In an anxious phone conversation, I tell my friend in Austin.

"Leave it," he says. "No one will ever notice except the other author. Let the reversal stay hidden in your text forever, like a secret love letter."

It stays.

On Time

I woke up in a panic at 7:43 am. I realized it was Tuesday. I teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8:30. At a normal time of day it only takes about 20 minutes to get to school, but at rush hour Lake Shore Drive fills up. If I don't leave the house by 7:55, the traffic gets too heavy to make it to class.

Margo, darling popped her bird's nest head from under the covers and blinked at me, unbelieving. Then she ran to the kitchen to make me an emergency cappucino for the road. I dove for the shower, threw on a sweater and black jeans, grabbed a banana, and ran for the car. It was 8:05.

I was ten minutes late, but the students were sitting quietly. Many of them had come from the dorms. Some had been up for hours already. The pastry chefs. One walked in even later then I did. She made a funny face when I announced that next week would be movie week. I figured I'd give them a break from the monotony of discussing how to write research papers by actually watching documentaries that perform research and evaluation as part of their overall message. I chose "Supersize Me" because of its links to issues of food, nutrition, class, and politics. I chose "Fahrenheit 911" because of its easily identifiable political positions around the current war.

Later the student who had come in late lingered with her pastry toolbox. It is big and yellow, and in it are tape measures, a whole set of pastry caps, aprons, pastry bags, and other stuff I can't remember. The student is genial and slightly androgenous, with one of those big open faces that smiles naturally and often. She doesn't want to watch "Fahrenheit 911." She's just come back from Iraq and she doesn't want to think about it.

She tells me she and her fiance met over there. She thinks he probably has to go back over in May. She doesn't want him to go. She herself could get called back at any time because she still has time on her contract. I ask her how old she is, and she tells me twenty-one. I ask what happens if somebody is in school, in the middle of a quarter, and they get called up. You drop out, she says. You drop everything and go and come back to fix things when you can.

I ask her about the armament controversy, about trucks sent out with no protection and soldiers without body armor, and she laughs at the folly of installing door protection all around the outside of a vehicle that has no reinforcement underneath to soften the explosion of driving over a land mine. She is smiling when she says this, and her eyes are not the least bit cynical.

I tell her why I am showing the film and ask her if she talks about her experiences much with her friends. She nods to the row where a clump of pastry chefs sit together every day in my class, and tells me that they know her stories. She apologizes for being late. She tells me she doesn't live in the dorms because she got tired of living with women in Iraq. She laughs about her misguided attempts to move back in with her parents when she got home from her tour. I make a lame remark about how that is also a universal experience shared by most college students, and she nods politely, but we both know her experience is nowhere remotely the same.

I think about her fiance and muse about how their heterosexual domesticity must be a blessed respite for them, a private world outside the mandatory public homosociality of military service and school dormitories. So different from my domesticity, for me a private world outside the mandatory heterosexuality of offices, schools, public spaces. I tell her she can leave if the film gets to be too much. She nods and smiles and hurries off with her big yellow toolbox to her next class. I think about what it must be like to know you have until May together before you separate, not for a week at a time, or even a month, but for months on end. Months that could be forever if somebody drives over a land mine.

This morning I had the leisure to peruse the newspaper, and read a story about former employees of Enron still looking for jobs. One 50-year-old man rejoined the Marines, hoping to go to Iraq. He claimed he had patriotic reasons for wanting to go, but acknowledged that before he joined he had eaten Ramen noodles regularly to help make ends meet. Now he trains soldiers and lives, in the winter, in an oceanfront house. Come summer, when the rents go up, people who can afford it will move in, and he will go elsewhere, perhaps to Iraq. Right now he is happy just to have a meaningful job, and because his 9-year-old daughter can visit him on weekends. I imagine him making her a sandwich on a Saturday, looking out his window at the grayish ocean, happy to make a home with her, however fleeting, out of the little minutes and hours.

Action Station

So Law School #2 just came through. When a door closes a window opens? Maria, what is it you cahn't face?

Big State U Law School just let me know I was accepted for fall semester. Big State U is a top 25 law school and 1/2 the price of any other law school anywhere because I qualify for in-state tuition. My Texas friend says his shoulder slump for me is lifting. Now gf and I have to decide how we feel about me 150 miles away. Not exactly long distance, but not exactly home. Not exactly an academic job, with its semipermanent separation of the two of us, but 3 years of semester-length distance. An agricultural campus in the middle of cornfields. Phone intimacies. My 175K mile car on a wing and a prayer for 3 more years. The flat darkness of the deep midwest on one's own.

Today lunch at the culinary school featured shrimp etouffee, cooked at an "Action Station." I like the Action Station. You watch the chefs in action, tossing the contents of their pans over big gas flames. A line begins to form. You wait. One young chef eyes the crowd and shouts nervously for reinforcements. She never looks directly at us but feels us watching her hungrily as she tosses the shrimp, first in clarified butter, then in a roux-based tomato sauce, then onto rice. She tops the whole thing with scallions and hands it over with a flourish. I love watching her flip the shrimp in the pan. When I bite into my etouffee, the shrimp pop against my teeth.

Today my freshmen begin to understand, dimly, that this first paper coming due might be harder than the ones they wrote in high school. They are boisterous and good-natured. I show them editorials from the NY Times and joke with them about how my class is probably the only news they have time for. They shake their heads at 1pm and tell me they'll be in class till 11 that night. My class at 90 minutes is one of their shortest. In their other classes they'll have an hour or more of lecture followed by three or four hours in the kitchen.

Sometimes, one or two of them will argue with me. One might turn around the questions I ask; another challenges the slant of an op-ed piece I project on the board. I feel like the newspaper reader in a cigar factory, keeping people informed who are busy working long hours. We cruise the editorials for topics that might interest them and forms of argument they might use. This week is a definition paper. Eventually, they will have to propose solutions.

I watch them stir uneasily at the injustice of sending soldiers into war with bad body armor. They tilt their heads at the idea of Fox News inventing A War on Christmas. They look off in the distance at the scandal of a minimum wage that is only $5.15 an hour. They seem to want to speak. I watch their minds yawn, crouch, and stretch. Their eyes gleam between the desk rows, like the sleepy eyes of lions.

Behind Blue Eyes

Reading La Lecturess about the Green-Eyed monster of job-market jealousy got me thinking about the colored eyes of other emotions. Red is anger, yellow is slyness or cowardice, black is fury, brown either sadness or sweetness. And of course, brown eyes turn blue, at least in songs, with melancholy.

Tonight I saw the caller ID of an old student on my phone, and I was stupid enough to pick it up. I like this one; she is together, foreign, and really, really smart. She also a little butch thing, 24 going on 40. She thought she wanted a graduate degree. Now she's completely freaked out. I can hear the cognitive dissonence pulling her two ears out from the middle of her head when she speaks the names of her professors. Her voice is full of respect, but the content of her words is bewildered, disillusioned.

It seems graduate school isn't what she thought it would be. She wanted a Master's, maybe more. Now she's horrified by teachers who call her racist when she does a presentation on an assigned politically questionable theoretical essay, an essay by a professor in her department who she looks up to. She can't figure out how to critique it but knows she wants to. Still, he's the most prestigious name she knows. What can she say?

The teacher who assigned the presentation is cross. Why can't the student critique this guy? The student is adrift. Who is she to have an opinion about anything? She thought she could follow. She thought wise ones would lead her, letting her take baby steps to knowledge.

I hear the despair in her voice. My heart sinks. I'm not there anymore. Why do I still have to be part of this? But I like her, so I breathe deep and try. "Look, there are only two kinds of jobs. You know that, right? There are research one jobs and high-teaching jobs. Research one jobs are the ones everyone in graduate school thinks they are going to get. High teaching-load jobs are the jobs most people REALLY get."

She is quiet on the other end. I paused. "What I am telling you, is that if you don't want to teach, and teach a lot, don't bother going to graduate school. Things may work out differently for you, but almost everyone I know who is happy and valued in their jobs is teaching at least three courses a semester or quarter. You will be LUCKY if you get a job like this. Imagine it. Now see how you feel." I knew how I felt. Suddenly I wanted to tell her more. I wanted to tell her how fun teaching could be. I wanted to explain the joy of writing so intensely you forgot your body, your room, your hunger. I wanted to reassure her that the time could come when she would be rewarded for her diligence, but that diligence really was its own reward, no matter what the world thinks of you. I wanted to warn her and encourage her, protect her and scold her, guarantee that heaven awaited her and show her the fiery pits of hell. I wanted, in short, to download my life into her hard drive, and hope that she learned something useful from it all.

There was noise on the phone and I asked what was going on. She was taking the stairs down to the lobby to let in a friend who had dropped by. "I have to go," she said "but we should talk later." I was quiet.

"Look, all I'm saying is that you have to think about what you want to do, what you really, really want," I told her crossly, a shrill note entering my voice. "Don't take your unhappiness, use it to commit yourself to even more grad school, and then justify the whole process because you are sure that among all the hundreds of public university graduate students out there, you will be the one to land the perfect job that will make your life perfect and your choices all seem perfect and your poverty perfect and your sexuality perfect. Don't marry your best friend for a green card, then follow him to New York for graduate school because he wants to an NYU film degree. Think. What do you want? What do you want? What?"

"I have to go," she said, "but this has been a really good conversation. We should talk soon. I'll think about what you've said."

She hung up and I felt sick and sad. I wanted to tell her to go to grad school for the Ph. D. I wanted to tell her that the last thing she should do is go to more grad school. I wanted not to care. I wanted out of this moment.

But there is no outside. There will never be one. I think about the composite Tiresius, and wonder if there were things he'd found out that he'd rather forget. I can add on to who I am, but I cannot subtract who I have been, and every now and then, no matter what disguise I am wearing, someone who sees the professor I always was and always will be in my heart will call me back into the life I can only pretend to have left behind me forever, and my eyes will flash all the colors of the rainbow as I struggle to tell them something that is about them, and not about me, not about loss, and despair, and utter futility, but about the joy of a thing done for itself, for its challenge and discipline, its optimism, and all of its aching hope.

The Four Things Meme

Ok Dr M(eme), here's the Four Things you Tagged me for. Though it's gonna be hard to match a guy who lists a Big Wheel as one of his four vehicles.

THE FOUR THINGS MEME

Four Jobs I've Had

1. Washing dishes in a restaurant where the cooks thought it was fun to bowl pots and trays of dishes down the entire length of the back kitchen at my feet, making me jump over them. The game was called "bowl-a-rama." I was 12.

2. Refinishing antique furniture. The worst part was working with stripping chemicals. The best part was the two gay guys I worked for, who made me lunch on the weekends I worked there. Also listening to Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts. I was 15.

3. Working as a clerk in a general store in New Hampshire. Locals, tourists, and summer campers stopped in regularly to buy beer, cigarettes, newspapers, and sandwiches, among other things. The clerks hung out and partied after work. One summer Henry Fonda picked up his New York Times there every morning when they were filming On Golden Pond. I never saw him because his wife got the paper, but I used to write "Hank" across the top instead of his full name, which I thought was hilarious. I was 16.

4. Working at a group home in New Jersey for developmentally disabled adults in wheelchairs. They were fun people, and the staff cameraderie was pretty nice. The whole place had ramps everywhere. When the President signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, we took a big field trip to a park to celebrate their getting access to it. I was in grad school (27).


Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over

1. The Celluloid Closet
2. Queen Christina
3. Gone With The Wind
4. The Wizard of Oz


Four Places I've Lived

1. Center Harbor, NH
2. State College, PA
3. Lambertville, NJ
4. Miami, FL


Four TV Shows I Love to Watch

1. The Daily Show
2. Medium
3. The "L" Word
4. Battlestar Galactica


Four Places I've Been on Vacation

1. Provincetown, MA
2. Austin, TX
3. Paris
4. Napa Valley


Four Blogs You Visit Daily

1. kinesthesis breakthrough
2. between an oxymoron and a redundancy
3. what now?
4. writing as jo(e)


Four of Your Favorite Foods

1. Tom Kha soup
2. pot roast
3. salmon
4. caesar salad


Four Places You'd Rather Be

1. someplace warm and tropical
2. New Hampshire
3. in a bar
4. Napa, on a bike

Four Albums You Can't Live Without

1. Joni Mitchell, Hejira
2. Jefferson Airplane, Volunteers
3. Dionne Warwick, The Dionne Warwick Collection
4. Bach, Goldberg Variations (Glenn Gould)


Four Vehicles I've Owned

1. A 15 year old, 15.2 hand bay 1/2 Thoroughbred, 1/2 Quarter Horse ex-barrel racer with a white boomerang on his forehead named, naturally, Boomer. He cost 150 dollars and I bought him with babysitting money.

2. A 6 year old, 16.2 hand chestnut Thoroughbred ex-race horse named Navy Pennant, supposedly from the War Admiral line, who didn't know how to do anything but gallop and who you could never, never tie to anything. I bought him dirt cheap (because he was nuts) and worked with his traumatized self for a couple of years before I went to college, when I had to sell him. Watching the trailer go down the road with his chestnut tail hanging out the back, I wept.

3. 1984 Rabbit Sport (black, the moonroof rolled back by hand crank)
4. 1982 Volvo DL Sedan (red, rusty, beloved) named Wilma. I suspect she was pure Bondo.


Four taggees

1. Margo, Darling
2. What Now?
3. pronoia
4. winter woods

Thanks But No Thanks

I had been talking to my friend in Austin. It was late morning, but we were both still trying to wake up. I was drinking coffee; he realized he didn't have any and surmised that this was the reason he was grumpy. I heard the phone in the other room, faraway, under water. When we hung up I checked the messages. A message from my MLA interview school--Oh My God!!!!! I had time to hear his name, and "we are calling" before the phone cut out. What could it mean? They must be calling me for an on-campus interview! Of course they were. People don't call you if they don't want you.

With shaking hands I dialed the phone, not realizing that it had probably cut out because it needed to charge. I reached the man who had called me, and his voice sounded tired and sad, but friendly. I explained what was happening with the phone, and he told me that he had been calling to apologize because the committee had made their list of candidiates to bring to campus, and I wasn't on it. The phone cut out again. This time I called him on my cell.

I explained how much I had enjoyed meeting them. He told me how outstanding I had been in the interview. He mentioned how much he had enjoyed our conversation about chivalry and queer comportment. I realized that I had probably been his candidate. Ah, chivalry. I remembered moments in the interview when he had steered me away from lesbian modernism towards themes of nation and national belonging. I remember thinking at the time, with a shock, that he was maybe homophobic. Now I realized he had been trying to protect me, push me to show my breadth in front of people who might have been skeptical.

He asked if I would be staying on at my university. I told him I was already gone, that I hadn't gotten a book contract in time for tenure. He commented that I really was on the market, then. I replied that I really, really was. I told him about the culinary school where I was adjuncting. He asked if I was teaching literature there. I told him I was teaching composition, but that I got free lunches. He hid his surprise by cheerfully mentioned possible jobs in the spring list. I grunted politely, though I think we both know associate jobs never come out on the spring list.

He told me again how important my work was, how well I had described it, how interested everyone had been. I bit my tongue, wanting to tell him that this would probably be the last of it. But we were, of course, courteous. He is a charming man. There was sorrow in his voice as he thanked me again. He insisted that if there was anything he could do . . .

For a minute I wondered what he meant, exactly. Could he recommend me for something? Not exactly. Could he put exlax in the coffee of the people who had voted not to bring me? That was an idea. Better yet, remember this conversation when all his candidates turn down the job in April because their schools gave them what they wanted in salary boosts and spousal hires. Tell them to call me. (Phone sign with hand beside my head. Mouthed words: Call me.)

I hung up the phone and went back to planning my comp classes for tomorrow. I thought of the girl in the front row of my beginning freshman class, the girl who writes with a pink pen with a big fluffy pink feather at the top, like she's Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. I feel fond of that freshman girl's love of beauty, her insistence that her pen be pink, and pretty, and all about her very own style. I feel protective of her. I wish there was something I could do to make sure the bravado of her pen could always sail high beside her, and that she might wield her beautiful things proudly aloft, like a standard-bearer in a battle of old. But all I can do is wish her well, and hope her courage and dignity is enough to carry her through this world.

MLA

The night before your interview, you meet a few people for dinner. As you stand in the lobby, you recognize someone you've lost touch with, someone you used to consider a friend. She is talking on the phone like an actor, making facial gestures and grandly pacing back and forth. You want to run up to her, but you feel shy. Then you realize she has probably seen you and is pretending she hasn't. You feel confused for a minute before you realize you, too, are hiding, positioning a tall person in your group in front of you so your old friend can't see you. Then an older woman comes down to the lobby. She and your old friend hug, and their body language says advisor/advisee. The older woman walks by and checks out the woman standing next to you. It is clear she recognizes her, but can't decide whether or not to say hello. You watch her physically, visibly decide not to say hello, and you think not-so-nice thoughts about academic generations.

Just as you stand there feeling bummed out, an old friend of your girlfriend who you've only met once runs up to say hello. He doesn't have to say hi. Your girlfriend isn't even there, and besides, they lost each other taking sides in a divorce. He says hello to you anyway, even though you are the Other Woman. He is making an effort, and your mood brightens.

At the dinner, you drink too much wine. Darn! You said you wouldn't, but it was tasting so good.

You wake up the next morning feeling fuzzy. Oh no. Order room service, start drinking coffee and water. Lots and lots of water. Lasso a friend and make them ask you questions about your book, your teaching philosophy, your next project. Take a shower. Put on a suit. Use concealer to hide those bags. Change your shirt three times.

Polish your shoes with the hotel polisher cloth. Pee, again.

Take a taxi. Walk across the main conference hotel lobby. Watch people run up to each other and ignore each other. Go to Starbucks and get a double espresso. Pee one more time.

Call up ten minutes before your interview. Panic because no one answers. Call a minute later. And a minute later. Finally get hold of them four minutes before your interview. Listen to them tell you to go all the way across the world to the hotel tower on the other side of the building.

Run.

Go up, go in, go on. Realize that they are genuinely interested in a conversation. Lap it up like a thirsty plant. A plant with a tongue. Shake hands. Help someone in the elevator who is lost find her interview. Go down to the lobby and take note of your irrigated armpits. Decide not to take your jacket off. Go home. Change. Get lunch and a beer. Make it three beers.

Darn! Tipsy again. Time to go to the cash bar party. You meet What Now and her girlfriend and enjoy talking to them. You go into your university reception and it feels like a high school reunion, only more fun. The same faces you went to grad school with show up a little kinder, but still ready to dish. Some of you have gotten famous, others have lost jobs or never gotten them. People are frantically happy to see each other and wish each other well. The same profs who used to have a little too much to drink at the wine and cheese receptions are still dancing around wearing lampshades. Everyone is friendlier than you remember. Enthusiastic. Jovial. This is not just because of the wine. You feel a strange sense of family, of cousins under one roof again.

Seven o'clock comes too soon. People start to drift away. You turn in the doorway to watch the last groups cling, undulate, and break apart down the red carpet hallways, washed out on the tide of another year.

You are still smiling as you walk through the lobby and into the night, thinking that sometimes the nicest things get passed down academic generations.

The Interview Suit

"We would like to interview you at the MLA." The hoped-for words flashed across an email one evening, and I grimly savored them for a tiny private moment before turning to my Person seated at a chair on the other side of our shared office. "I got the interview."

"What???" She squawked, kicking her chair away as she dashed to my side. She silently mouthed the contents of the very short email. Her first words sounded panicky. "What will you wear?"

It tells you something important about her that this was her response to my kind-of triumph. After all, I was a girl that had been asked to dance at the last minute. I wouldn't have to cancel my prom plans. Some university out there thought I was attractive enough to ask to the MLA. But like the girl she is, she immediately starts worrying about the prom dress.

She wasn't wrong to worry. I bought my first and last interview suit 12 years ago this month, and I haven't exactly kept my shape since. Fifty pounds--yes, that much--stands between me and the Liz Claiborn pinstripes I pulled off the rack back then. I still go to the gym, even run three or four miles a couple of times a week, but 50 pounds sits on my 43 year-old shoulders in a way it didn't when I was 31, although I remember, way back then, thinking I probably needed to lose some weight. That suit is long gone, as is the girl with the shining face who thought it all would somehow, magically work out for her in the end. Those pounds weigh on me like a metaphor, like the years that have dragged down my flesh and my heart until I ceased to care much about either. How could a suit fix these pounds, years, sadnesses? What did it matter what I wore?

"What are we going to do?"

I assured her that I had dressed myself for years and could continue to do so. She told me she just wasn't sure. I told her to stop treating me like a baby. She told me she just worried I wouldn't get around to it. We stopped the conversation at that point. After a few minutes she told me I could go shopping on my own and I told her I appreciated her interest, and would be grateful for her company and shopping expertise.

How did I come to this pass?

She is an expert, that must be granted her. I have never seen a woman move around a mall with such swimmerly confidence as that California girl breast-strokes through racks of clothes. The problem, when we finally got to the mall, was which department to start in first. Men's or Women's? Casual or Career? Plus Sizes? That one was easy. Should I find something funky and bohemian or invest in a suit I could wear in court, should I end up in law school next fall?

Since I wear men's clothes, my first instinct was to shop in men's, but I could see her getting agitated at the thought of too much tailoring and long, baggy, boxy cuts. I agreed to go to women's, much as I hate the undignified cheap lines of most women's clothes, which seem to me to have been designed to enforce castration rather than decorate it, which usually means making women's thighs and asses look so balloonlike and ponderous as to rob them of all grace and beauty. As soon as I tried on my first women's blazer, cut long and roomy, GF smiled. "It fits you," she said happily. "It actually fits you." Feeling like I was shopping with my mother, which I was, I determined to find the most mannish, no-nonsense suit I could, which I did. It was black. It was that polyesterish suit material, but at least the pants had a front fly. GF found a snappy shirt on sale. We both began to breathe easier.

She nearly had to go and ruin everything by mentioning bras, a four-letter word if ever there was one. But I had already recognized my own denial and negativity. I knew I had to carry on the masquerade of masquerading to the bitter end.

There is no moral to the story. After trying on bras that seemed to bite and scratch as I struggled to squeeze them on, I finally agreed to just one as a sort of tribute to the 350 dollar suit I wanted to look nice wearing. The bra cost more than I used to spend on a week's worth of groceries (50 pounds ago) and points me forward like twin missiles on the verge of a launch, but I figure their sculptural effect will give me a sense of direction. Upward! Forward! On to better things!

The suit is getting altered. Sadly, I am not, though my snappy suit will help me pull off the embodiment I drifted away from years ago, the together, genderbending young academic woman going places, thinking up a million projects, imagining thousands of different job scenarios, places to live, lives to lead. My on-the-market suit will hang in the corner of my room at MLA, like an older, yet newer, self, and when I take her off her hanger and put her on, she will remind me, sadly, of the girl I left behind long ago, the lighter, younger girl who believed, who still believes. I will have only to look down at my new suit, at my reanimated self, to remember her strength, her confidence, and her faith that things might just work out after all.

Slam Dunk Santa

Here's the Santa at the top of our tree. We got it last year in part because gf loves women's basketball so much. Especially Pat Summit's Lady Vols.

This year there are at least four reasons to be happy about Santa's slam dunk.

1. Rene Portland is finally going to get hers. ESPN's web site is covering the story of Portland's long reign of hate, and this coverage is going to reveal, even to Portland, that the times have at last caught up with her. She can't wreck any more young lives just because she thinks players might be lesbians. She can't take away their scholarships, chance to play college ball, chance at a career in women's sports, or chance, even more simply, to get a college education. Even if it isn't yet ready to grant queer people their full rights, America doesn't support this kind of discrimination anymore. Score!

2. I got an MLA interview. It's only one, but since I'm not anywhere near a beginning Assistant Professor, and since there were only three Advanced/Associate jobs out there this year in my field, I'm pretty psyched that I got an interview at one of them. Score!

3. I got my first law school acceptance of the year today. Score!

4. What Now got tenure. It's true that her president gave her tenure then asked her to resign from her Catholic school in the next breath, but she should get to savor her victory, at least for today. Score!

Finally, for the anonymous commenter who wanted to see the snow out my livingroom window, this picture below is for you. Happy Holidays!

Happy Season

The tree is up. What else matters? GF decided on Friday that the tree had to be hunted down. I think she imagined that Saturday would be some sort of Tree Rush day. So to beat the rush, off to Home Depot, site of last year's tree. Last year's tree was reasonably priced (35 bucks or so) but died within two weeks and proved to have been painted to cover brown tendencies. This year, although many cars with trees strapped to their roofs could be seen on many streets, Home Depot hadn't yet gotten its act together. Its gates were closed, its trees were all bound up, and there was almost no help to be had binding and tying up the tree of one's dreams. After fruitlessly walking up and down several aisles, trying to imagine what various trees looked like inside their net stockings, gf and I gave up and drove home. It was bitter cold. She was cross. It wasn't working.

Next day was much nicer. We decided to try again, this time closer to home. So much closer to home, as a matter of fact, that the temptation to go out to lunch first and have a beer could not be avoided. As we ate it began to snow. By the time we emerged on our errand once more, the streets were truly festive. We went to the garden store down the street, one with what I have always thought of as an unfortunate choice of name--Gethsemane. Why in the world would someone name their garden store that? Doesn't that name alone suggest that someone could get their ear cut off by your bird bath? Or that your backyard barbeque guests will claim not to know you?

I warned gf that this store tended to be pricey, and that we could pay as much as double Home Depot's price for a tree. I wish.

The trees we were shown started at 65 dollars. GF wanted a tall tree. I wanted a fat tree. The trees got taller and fatter. 85 dollars worth, and still not fat enough for me. At last, I saw it. The tallest, fattest tree of my dreams. Ten feet worth of tall, and 100 dollars worth of fat. We looked at each other. It seemed a ridiculous price to pay for a tree. But it smelled wonderful, like the forests where I'm from, and where my family will gather this Christmas without me. Its Frazier Fir needles were firm, soft, and blue. When I held it, I got sap all over my hands.

GF eyed me. "You like it?" she asked. "It's too much money," I answered, nodding my head yes. "You got it," she said, all five-foot two of her lipstick femme self. "Wrap it up." She added that at that price there probably wouldn't be much to put under it, so she hoped I was happy. I was.

And so in this season as we wait for the MLA interviews that may never come, and spend the holidays apart from family because of the possibility of MLA interviews that may never come, and wait to hear from law schools that may say no, and apply for adjunct sections, two of which pay as much or less than unemployment, we sit at the feet of our tree, surrounded by our friends (and maybe a roast chicken or two), and celebrate its fragrant greenness in the midst of winter, and its bright lights in a season of early darkness. Good luck to everybody on the market, and everybody hoping not to have to go on the market, and good cheer, and good friendships. May your trees be the tallest and fattest of trees, and may the many lights on them remind you that brighter days are just around the corner.

Abolish the Tenure System

One of the hottest debates this week in academe--at least, academe as defined by Inside Higher Ed-- seems to be about whether or not the tenure system should be abolished. Inside Higher Ed features an article about David Horowitz's campaign to abolish tenure because he fears it discriminates against conservatives, and also links to Critical Mass, which points out that the growing number of adjuncts proves that the tenure system is already being phased out. I started to write a comment on the lively thread at Critical Mass, but it turned into a rant which felt more like a blog entry. So here goes.

I have maintained since the first day I was hired as an Assistant Professor that tenure should be abolished. It appeared to me even then that it was a system designed to weed out individuals who were smart enough and useful enough to hire and exploit for six years, but not "good enough" (i. e. "enough like us") to keep. When I said as much in one of my first faculty meetings in my first tenure-track job, my words were met with horror by a dean who remembered the Vietnam era and claimed that only tenure had allowed professors against the war to keep their jobs. Since the dean was raising the question of the relationship of adjunct professors to the tenure system, I thought I should say what I thought about a system I already had deep misgivings about. Having spent four years on the job market chasing a tenure-track job, it seemed to me then that the entire tenure-track system was unfair, biased, elitist, and ridiculous as a marker of intellectual "excellence." I sensed then that such a system would never tenure me, having barely allowed me in in the first place. I thought then that if the process was opened up to have some adjustment between the pathos of the grossly underpaid adjunct and the terror of the tight-lipped, head down tenure-track junior professor, we might eventually get a system of fair work for a fair wage not premised on the weeding-out processes of hiring and tenure.

The truth is--and my apologies to those adjuncts who feel as if their positions are tenuous--I never felt freer than when I was an adjunct. I knew I could be fired for my opinions, sure, but I also knew there were other jobs out there like the one I had, and that if I was a good teacher, I would either be retained where I was or find work elsewhere. I felt as if I could say what I thought, write or not write as I chose, pick projects that interested me, and lead my life. i would be poor--very poor--but my thoughts would be my own.

Not so in a tenure-track job. One of the first things my chair in my second job said to me was that I would have to write a literary book in the field in which I had been hired in order to be tenured. Immediately my horizons narrowed. I was not free to follow my inclinations, or even the trends in a publishing industry moving away from literature monographs. No, I had an assignment. If I wanted to keep my job, I had better write what they wanted me to write.

On the social front, the real story of tenure is that its process allows departments to blur the boundary between the personal and the professional, as fear of not getting tenure forces nontraditional academics (working-class people, single mothers, people of color, queer people) to desperately try to fit in in order to keep jobs they know are very rare. In smaller departments junior faculty are forced to socialize extensively with their colleagues. Is your family-oriented department going to like you if you are a single lesbian? Is your all-white department going to view you as a minority hire with a chip on their shoulder? Are the old men in your department going to read your feminism as strident if you are a woman, or your effeminacy as threatening if you are a man? Can you come out as transgender? When that one faculty member asks you to cover his classes AGAIN because of his trips to Italy, and "jokes" with you about how he'll be voting on your tenure, do you ever have the freedom to say no?

Now that I don't have a job, I feel my horizons expanding again. I find myself interested in more things, and projects suggest themselves to me all the time. Without the job to support the research, the research may never get done, which is one of the conundrums in this problem of academic freedom and the tenure system that supposedly supports it. I know my situation is far from ideal. But even though I could not be more different from him politically, I feel a certain sympathy with Horowitz on the question of the "star chamber" tenure system. Tenure cloaks the personal preferences of individual faculty members, and allows blatant discimination to go on in the name of, of all things, academic freedom. It's time it was abolished, its secret meetings suspended, its fagging practices dismantled, and all of its biases subject to the clear light of day. Only then, I truly believe, will we have some standard of fairness and something that resembles academic freedom.

First Snow

In what seems like only a week the leaves went from sunset orange to afternoon gold and dropped away. Color gradually leeched out of the world, leaving pale tatters on the branches, wet charcoal streets, and dirty skies. I don't write much in my blog these days because I don't really go anywhere or do anything that seems exciting or conversational. Mostly I sit at home day after day and write law school applications, academic job applications, part-time work applications. My friends complain about classes to plan, papers to grade, books to order, and I remember what that feels like, but only from a faraway place. I plan freelance work, and money comes in, but only a trickle. My family writes to ask about Thanksgiving in the northeast, and I tell them maybe Christmas. Maybe. The days drag sluggishly on and nothing seems as if it will ever happen. I need a winter coat but can't decide what kind would do the most all-around work.

Now today the first snow dusting of the season sits on my car, its little bits of styrofoam in that valley between the windshield and the hood where the wipers sit and the leaves and twigs collect. I can see it from the livingroom windows. The wind is blowing hard. Inside is cozy, but also a trap, and I feel overcome with the desire to keep going nowhere, keep staying inside. The windows rattle softly. The midwest has become a land of little golden interiors, little places to gather in the dark afternoons, its windows spilling out onto what's left of the prairie, and I know, finally, that even if tomorrow or the next day happens to be warmer than this, the last surprising days of soft air and warm weather are gone and fled, and when they return, none of us will feel as if we remember them, and they will seem completely new, and deeply strange.

People Are Nicer Than You Think, or, How a Conference Can Make You Remember That You Are a Human Being

I admit that I wanted nothing to do this year with the conference I had attended faithfully for the last five years. I did not volunteer to give a paper, even though the conference was coming to my town. I have traveled to England and Canada for this conference, to the northeastern and southwestern U. S., but now that it was on my doorstep, I refused to take part. I wasn't sure how I'd feel having to write a paper if I didn't have a job, or how I'd even pay for the conference. I could imagine standing up in front of people and feeling stupid, like a fraud, and ashamed. I imagined how I'd have to dodge the inevitable questions: "Where are you now? What are you doing? What are you going to do?" I felt tired. I had done enough. I wasn't going.

I gave my partner input as she wrote her paper, listened to various versions, and helped track down images for her presentation, all with serene detachment. I had moved beyond this now. I was professionally dead and I had to let go, move towards the light, and not look back.

Then the conference came to town. My ex had brought an entourage of graduate students and wanted me to meet her for dinner (sans my current partner, who she has yet to forgive for taking up with me). A scholar I admired was giving a plenary. My partner was viewing and reviewing the program on line.

She noticed that some of my old colleagues were all in the same reading group together on Sunday night, and wondered aloud why they would want to clique up at a conference instead of just talk in the hall at school. I wondered if I would see them at the conference, and shuddered inwardly.

I decided I would sneak in for my partner's evening presentation, and sneak out. I would sit in the back and no one would see me. I could remain removed, yet benignly share in my partner's triumph. Let the young and enthusiastic partake as I passively passed the torch.

The train in to the city was quiet on a Friday evening. That was good because my heart hurt. I had ridden the train for so many mornings to work. I had listened to homeless people quote Bible verses and sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" in return for donations to their paper cups. I had watched the city unfold and fold up again like a beautiful diorama as I sped by its storefronts and bedroom windows.

I walked in the hotel and sailed by the conference registration desk, badgeless. Upstairs there was a reception. I lurked behind a column and waited for my partner, sullenly watching people I recognized plunge through a doorway into the sea of voices beyond. My partner saw me and trotted over, all smiles and conference excitement. She stopped twice on her way across the room as people she knew collared her for conversation. One of my ex's graduate students came over to talk to me. Then two more of them came over. My partner brought her friends over. Eventually we were all a small group in the middle of the room. I excused myself and fled into the reception I had been avoiding, thirsty for a drink. No sooner did I have a bourbon in hand than my partner found two nice lesbians for us to hang out with. I recognized one of them from previous conferences. They were nice, funny, rueful, and sarcastic without being bitter. One of them had just gotten a tenure-track job after years of commuting 90 minutes each way to an adjunct job. They knew what life was like for academics, for women on the market, for lesbians, for junior faculty trying to get tenure and keep their relationships from unraveling in the face of commuting and distance and job loss and homophobia and low pay, and they were still cheerful. Jolly and optimistic, even. I suddenly felt much, much better.

They asked me what I was doing and I told them, but they only nodded, shrugged, and congratulated me for keeping my options open. Nobody edged away, or changed the topic, or abruptly began talking to someone more promising, the way my graduate professors had at MLA cocktail parties when I or someone I knew had expressed doubts about an interview, or the job market, or the sanity of hanging on year after year hoping for that elusive tenure-track job. Instead, these people I had just met knew what the profession was like. They knew that success was a crapshoot, a turn of the wheel, often coming down to being in the right specialty at the right moment. It didn't mean you were brilliant or worthless. It didn't brand you forever as a star, or a loser. Too often, success or failure wasn't about you.

They seemed like some of the sanest people I had met in a long time.

The whole evening was like that. The whole weekend, really. My partner's paper was fabulous, the audience was enthusiastic, and people I had known from grad school were in the audience. We all were genuinely happy to see each other. They had carved lives out for themselves. Some of them had families and had made career compromises for their children's schools or their spouse's jobs. All of them were really, really happy to hear papers, talk about ideas, and catch up. All of them were encouraging, and kind. How was it that we hadn't been better friends when we were young? They seemed so balanced, so mature, so wise.

A few of us went out to a pub and drank beer. We talked for hours and told stories. We analyzed politics. By the end of the evening, I felt so happy. I realized I hadn't seen my ex colleagues, the ones who were convening on Sunday night, anywhere, because they weren't going to actually attend the conference. They were going to duck in and duck out, only going so long as to discuss their own work among themselves. Maybe they thought they were too busy. Maybe they thought they couldn't get anything from the people around them. I realized that even though I was no longer one of them, I had wanted to insulate myself from contact with other people in the same way. I realized that I was really glad I had stuck it out today, instead, with the ones who tried to go to other people's papers, who still believed in attending panels on writers and topics that interested them. I think I got, for the first time in a long time, that being part of an audience is a huge gesture of generosity and good will, and that that kind of energy is worth magnifying and setting loose in the world, to everyone's benefit.

I don't know if I will attend another academic conference or not. This time next year I could have another job, getting ready to write a paper for next year's gathering, or I could be on my way towards something else entirely. But one thing I learned from this conference, this meeting that I was dragged to kicking and screaming, where I took away so much cameraderie and good will. What I learned is that despite the bad meetings and bitter differences and pompous self-presentations and ideological splits of many departments, despite the hirings and firings and anxieties, despite the therapists and xanax prescriptions, the public hunger for fame and the private sniping for power, and the tendency to isolate one's self from one's colleagues, most people in academia are not fancy, or elite, or talking heads, or snobby, or judgemental. They don't think they're smarter or better educated than their colleagues. They don't necessarily look down on you, or me. They are trying to stretch low paychecks, keep gas in the car, have a lover, stay informed and enthusiastic, get tenure, write something, make a difference, raise kids. They are, most of them, really, really nice people who just want to remember why they got into this business in the first place, which is to go to papers, schmooze, drink beer, and swap theories. They still believe in a community of ideas, which is why they schlep across the country to these conferences in the first place, sitting at panels hour after hour, sometimes deep into the evening, taking notes, squinting hard trying to think up questions to help the presenters and their audiences take a thought, a beautiful idea, further, further, further.

They--and the conferences they loyally attend, year after year-- are, actually, really, really important, and really, awesomely nice.