Square One

Well, it was a nice ride, while it lasted.

For a while there I thought that I'd found paradise. Away from the bloodthirsty pursuit of high-profile programs, I'd fallen into the perfect job.

Through the first year or so of work, it was in a way, complete bliss.

The chance to teach what I wanted. No real pressure to cover core requirements.

Speaking of which, no dumping work on new faculty.

Faculty meetings where everyone generally got along.

And were fed by the chair.

New offices.

Travel funding that stayed in the midst of recession budget cuts.

Coming from an intensive graduate program, it felt like the overall workload was actually less!

More money for less work, that's right, you heard me.

I'd talk with people I went to graduate school with, people much smarter and more hardworking than me, and so I had a definite reference point for my own situation, and a reminder of how shitty the first job can be.

So I'm coasting on this highway of bliss. Then I get assigned my first administrative duty. I'm on the department's annual review committee this year. Members evaluate the other faculty based on a submitted report, and recommend that their work be termed unsatisfactory, good, excellent... You get the picture. The chair makes the final call on these "grades" before sending them up the dean, but this little committee gives him a summary.

Is it busy work? Kinda. It occurred to me that unless someone smelled of loserdom, we'd be finding ways to call everyone "excellent."

Sure, that's a SOP I could get with. Looks like Debbie the aging hippie, the second member of the committee, thought so too.

Tamara had other ideas.

Tamara is machine. She's always in her office, publishes like she has her own printing press, and her hands in 50 things at once. I once heard the chair tell another assistant professor that her publication rate was due to the fact that the field that she'd chosen to squat on was so incestuous that the handful of names in its journals were essentially a cult.

I'd also heard Tamara deliver unsubtle digs at faculty who had retired with only one book. (The gall.) But that was the kind of anecdote you mentally file and don't think much of.

Not until you have more anecdotes. Completely psychotic anecdotes.

The annual review committee works off a set of university-wide criteria, differentiating what for instance, constitutes a "good" level of research activity, from what can be termed "excellent." The three of us first familiarized ourselves with the criteria and figured out how we were going to tabulate accomplishments.

Then we opened the first file.

"OK, Matthew Williams," I began, "let's see, teaching... he directed 5 independent studies..."

"I had 10 of those," Tamara stated.

Hmmm, that's kinda weird to say, I thought.

I continued, "...he also chaired 3 thesis committees..."

Tamara: "I chaired 8."

Um, really?

Debbie sought to cut this off right away. "This isn't a competition."

"I know," Tamara responded, "it's just..."

Debbie turned to me and asked, "well what else did Matt do?"

"OK, for research he said he wrote one chapter for an anthology, and has 3 forthcoming encyclopedia entries."

Wait for it... wait for it...

Tamara: "I had 8 entries, and I know what article that was because I gave him that chapter. I asked him to do it."

Now, you might think I'm exaggerating this for comic effect. Shit, I would if I weren't in the room to hear it. But I am not embellishing one fucking bit. This actually happened, in the way that I described.

Debbie and I soon figured out that we weren't ever going to conquer Tamara's one-upman-Tourette's. So we tried to move things along as best we could, in between Tamara's reminders of her own awesomeness.

I thought the 4 hours of work would feel like 8. It ended up feeling like 16.

I can understand if one is a workaholic, committed to scholarship and teaching, and wanting to ensure that the department's standards remain respectable. I can certainly understand if someone wants a meaningful definition of rigor, and a process that did not involve self-congratulatory back-slapping. The young faculty are not well-served by being told that they're great when they're not. Hell, no one is.

But what Tamara was doing went way beyond such concerns. It was clearly all about her. It was pathological. And since then, I've noticed her condition pretty much every time she opens her mouth.

Then I realized she's Penelope!



It depressed me for a while, because she represented the first real "thing about academics that pisses me off" that I found at the new job.

Still great though, but the bubble has burst.

Money Tip

I've written before about how academics tend to not live in reality. And because of that, they have about as much financial sense as a 2 year old. Thank God they... we have a retirement plan run by TIAA-CREF, run by just about the best fund managers around.

So in this shitty market, TIAA-CREF has been sending out emails more frequently, trying to calm frayed nerves. It's completely understandable.

These emails contain many FAQs about what one should do in this volatile climate.

Here's one question I'd like to take myself...

The value of my 403(b) retirement account is declining because of the recent market volatility. I am considering holding off on making additional contributions until the market starts to go up again. Is that a good idea?

TIAA-CREF gave a measured, rather educational answer. It explained as best it could how there's no single right answer for everyone. In a few paragraphs, it went over the wisdom of dollar-cost-averaging and set a tone of calm reassurance.

I'm going out on a limb here, not giving you investment advice, but telling you how the way I see it, there is only one option.

Hold off on making contributions until the market gets bullish?

No.

I mean, HELL NO.

Now is actually the best time to MAX OUT your retirement contributions. Shares are "on sale". Whenthe market bounces back up, your returns go up exponentially.

After the Lehman Brothers collapse, after their shit and everyone else's hit the fan, I walked into the HR office and maxed out my tax-sheltered contributions for the year. I can fortunately afford to run a deficit in the short term.

That's right, from now until the end of the year, I'm spending more than I'm taking in. That money I'm putting off won't be taxed, and is gobbling up some delicious value. Mmm-mmm Good.

Words... words...

I have a student this semester who doesn't quite get the conceptual stuff of the course. It might be safe to say that she often leaves class with no understanding of what just happened.

She's a conscientious person by some accounts, is aware of her weakness, and is trying to catch up.

However, being a step behind her classmates has not stopped her from speaking up in class. Consistently, persistently, and all too readily.

The class literally halts when she speaks because 95% of the time, her words are quite simply incoherent. I've begun to notice other students rolling their eyes and shifting in their seats every time she starts up.

When I open the discussion to the floor, I dread the sight of her hand going up. She will begin, mention some keywords rather randomly, but shortly after, find herself lost and confused. At that point, she tends to then try to plow her way through the mental blur by continuing to just talk, as if in the hope that in building a wall of words, some of them sounds might just make sense.

They rarely do.

When she does stop, I hesitate to ask a follow-up question, since she will either be humiliated by realizing that she's just spent 30 whole seconds saying nothing, or, God!, she might begin another soliloquy.

Scary part? I hear her voice in Sarah Palin.

Master of the Amazon

I was relieved when the UPS guy finally dropped off my vacuum cleaner from Amazon. Finally, I could clean. My carpets were on the threshold where they might begin to trigger my allergies.

And, it's new stuff. Everybody loves new stuff. Oh boy.

I'd ordered the unit for $50, on sale from about $80. It isn't the most durable appliance around, and it isn't one of those fancy against-the-laws-of-nature Dyson models, but for an apartment of the size that I have, it was perfectly functional.

Man, it picked up a lot of stuff. I took the box out to the dumpster and stowed the vacuum in the corner.

But the next time I pulled it out, while undulating the electrical cord, I noticed a defect. A small chunk of rubber was missing on the cord. The white insulation underneath was visible and fraying. Convinced that it wasn't the fault of a giant rat with an appetite for rubber, I realized that this was obviously a problem. The cord heats up considerably during use, and would be a bit of a fire hazard.

I got on the computer and wrote to Amazon. I told them of the problem, offered to send a picture, said disassembly and thus reboxing/returning the item would be nearly impossible, and asked for a discount.

One of Thomas Friedman's little buddies, Rajiv, wrote back. He apologized for the trouble and offered a 20% refund.

But no one keeps his money by surrendering to the corporation.

I countered with an explanation that the parts and labor involved in repairing the cord was worth more than 20%, and pushed for 40%.

Another of Thomas Friedman's proofs that globalization is great replied. He agreed to 50% and processed the refund.

A few weeks later, the vacuum's price on Amazon went back up to over $70.

I paid $25. "Parts and labor"?... a bike ride to Sears for an 80 cent roll of electrical tape.

And that's partly how I managed to swell my savings on a graduate assistant's wages.

Numbnuts

It was the second week of the semester. I walked into class, picked up my roll sheet, and waded in between the desks to take attendance. I was still trying to learn students' names, and walking around enabled me to strike conversations that make it much easier to connect names to faces.

I came to Nate, a back-rower. You never know about these backbenchers, they can either be thoroughly engaged students who like the observational perch, or too-cool-for-schoolers who hate the fact that you're asking them to learn.

I pointed to Nate's Blackberry sitting on the corner of his desk. Sure, I could've seen the thing as a conversational piece, or communed with another smartphone user, but honestly, I was mainly conducting field research for tech stocks like Apple (iPhone) and RIMM (Blackberry).

As astonishing as that admission might sound, it is true.

"How's that working out for ya, Nate?" I asked.

"This?"

"Yeah... Blackberry, right?"

"Yeah, it's great, I have it for work."

"You like it?"

"It's great, it's my Crackberry, have you heard that term?"

"Yeah," I laughed.

"Although the battery is losing memory," Nate said.

"Why's that?"

"I didn't charge it properly. You have to let the battery run down before charging it, otherwise the battery develops this memory where it thinks it's empty before it actually is."

"Seriously? Oh shit, I charge mine everyday," I gasped.

It didn't take me long on the web to find out that the kind of memory deterioration that Nate was talking about didn't affect me, since my phone uses a Lithium-ion battery, not a Nickel-Cadmium battery where that problem occurs.

It should've been my first clue, though, that Nate was just a little full of shit. He seemed overwilling to display his techie knowledge, yet remained ignorant that his Blackberry uses a different battery. In hindsight, his Blackberry's position on the desk also seemed a tad ostentatious.

Fast forward a few weeks, to the review session for the midterm. I distributed the study guide, then answered a few questions about time limits, format and recommended prep strategies. When I asked for questions, Nate's hand was the first one up.

"What kind of questions will they be?"

"Short answers and essays." The topic had been addressed just seconds before, but I replied patiently anyway.

"No multiple choice?"

"What? Multiple choice? Ha. Yeah... no."

"Come on," Nate seemed to playfully plead.

I took a breath and said, equally semi-seriously: "Every semester, this happens at least once. There are students who try negotiating. I used to wonder why they'd think I was such a schmuck, but I came to find out that it actually works sometimes, and some teachers actually give in. Do I look like a pushover?"

The class chuckled. Nate smiled.

"And the other thing is, have some self-respect, you know? Multiple choice? What is that? This isn't [Rich College], know what I mean?"

"Rich College" is the private university on the other side of the same town. Expensive, well guarded and utterly unchallenging, it operates with the axiom that education is a service industry.

I like to use that line because it's part ridicule, part cheerleading, used in the hope that many of these working class students would see these classroom challenges as a validation of their intellects.

Like the rest of the class, Nate seemed to get the joke. But hours after turning in his midterm, he wrote to tell me that he was withdrawing from the class because of what his grade would do to his GPA.

A few weeks after that, before class started, I walked in on some students discussing this person they seemed thoroughly annoyed by. Unable to resist, I asked what they were talking about.

"That guy who used to sit at the back," Luke, a front-rower, said.

"You mean Nate?"

"Yeah, oh God he had such an attitude. When we would be outside waiting to come in, he'd just go on and on complaining about what the point was... like what's the point of a Bachelors."

"Really? He seemed all right in class."

"No, he was annoying," two other students said in near unison. One of them rolled her eyes.

Luke added: "I loved it when he asked for multiple-choice and you told him to have some self-respect!"

"Maybe he's just too cool for school." I said to a few final guffaws.

Nate really was fine while he was in the class. But it was a good thing he dropped early, because if he had stayed in and acted like an asshole, he couldn't hate the class more than I would've hated the fact that he was in it.

The Good Life

About a week ago today, my day began at 3:42pm. I woke up and dragged my feet to the fridge for something to eat. I couldn't decide between the tub of homemade granola that I store in those massive ice cream containers, and the leftover lamb and chickpea curry from 2 nights ago. After a few moments of silent contemplation, I decided that I wasn't hungry enough to need to decide. So I pulled a bottle of water from the door and watched cable news for a while.

At about 6 o'clock, my stomach began to growl. I scooped myself a cup of granola since it involved less preparation than popping the curry the microwave, and chowed.

Not long after that, the caffeine withdrawal headache and lethargy took its inevitable toll. I crashed in the TV Fort and woke up in time for The Daily Show. I then showered, lay in bed with a book and was out in less than an hour.

(The TV Fort is a 10 by 10 foot area in my living room bordered on three sides by my TV and a sectional sofa. It's got my TV, it's my refuge, and I defend it to the death. Hence the name, TV Fort.)

My friend Frank used to start conversations with me by asking, "How's the good life?"

In the throes of dissertation writing, I would reply, "What good life? Just drudgery here, man."

But these days, dissertation defended, tenure-track job acquired, summer classes over, I had to finally admit... this might just be the good life.

Today I woke up at 6am, made some breakfast to watch MSNBC's Morning Joe with, then biked to the nearby Whole Foods wannabe (all the organic food, none of the asshole customers) for some milk. I cracked open a can of organic cola, and sat down in a booth with my New York Times. I worked through the paper, gave up after 3/4 of the crossword, and came home in time for the late morning rerun of Jon and Kate Plus 8 on TLC.

It's 1pm right now. The landscapers are raising a minor ruckus outside with their leaf-blowers. My belly is bloated with a smoothie I made with the milk I bought. And this, I'm pretty sure, is the good life.

I can't say that this is typical. During the past semester, I pulled multiple all-nighters a week to prepare for classes. When I wasn't doing that, I was pulling my hair out trying to pound words out for conference papers. I'll soon have to interrupt this utopia with a manuscript I aim to complete during the summer. Someone did a study once and found that academics work as many hours as everybody else, they just have more flexibility and thus look like they don't work much.

But having said that, for weeks in the summer like this, the trade off is more than reasonable.

Frankly, I don't know how many hours a week I work. My schedule is so flexibile that work and play can and often does tend to merge. I also enjoy the work so much that I often have trouble calling it labor. I laughed at myself the other day, and couldn't stop snickering because I quite literally couldn't believe that I get paid to do this.

Is the money worth all those years in grad school? Probably not. Is the life worth all that investment? Yes.

Tony, a student who graduated with me, isn't feeling as hot these days. His adjunct contract wasn't renewed and he's screwed, for now. In my mind, Tony knows more than I do and is smarter than I am. Why am I in the good life and he in the throes of depression? I don't know.

The academic game is a random one. So many factors go into hiring decisions, 80% of which can have absolutely nothing to do with the candidate's qualifications.

I feel guilty about my relative success. Especially when people like Tony are struggling.

The book I'm reading right now is Then We Came to the End. The funniest book I have ever read, set in the office of a Chicago advertising firm. Douglas Coupland meets pitch-perfect verbal comedy. I can't say enough about it. Buy it, read it. You'll be terrified to find out how much you resemble these characters.

Part of it involves a fired employee who despairs at how he seems to have ceased to exist to his former colleagues. I always thought that the same would happen to me once I graduated. Former fellow grad students would run into me when I returned for a visit, say hi but scurry along with their own lives, their own dissertations to stress about.

Surprisingly, for the moment I appear to have a legend that is growing. I'm apparently discussed in near mythical terms as "the one who got out." Like the escaped prisoner who was never caught. The one who finished his dissertation, transitioned straight into a job, living the good life.

Part of their obsession comes with the territory. Grad students can't imagine graduating, let alone find work. Like right now, I can't imagine getting tenure, let alone get promoted. It never ends.

And before you know it, I've talked myself into believing that the good life is cause for depression.

You can take the man out of grad school, but you can't take the grad student out of the man.

I'm tired. Caffeine is a hell of a drug and I have none. I'm probably going back to sleep, and it's not even 2 o'clock in the afternoon.

The Fourth Annual Father's Day Repost

Reading over this entry, I rue slightly some of the original choices I made. The tone does at moments sound juvenile. Maybe it's because the mood this year was made more somber by the death last Friday of Tim Russert. I haven't read his book about his father, Big Russ and Me, but I would like to now, from hearing about it over the last 2 days more than I ever wanted to. I have a natural aversion to books and narratives like that, because they tend to fall into the superficial and dubiously existential category populated by Tuesdays with Morrie or the more recent "Last Lecture" by Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch.

Tim Russert's passing connects with me a little more, though. I heard MSNBC anchors pay tribute to his relationships with his father and his son, and the responses that he received from readers that Big Russ and Me was exactly about their fathers. Knowing what I do about Russ and Big Russ, I can't say that either is a reflection of my father. But I am struck by what did resonate.

Like Big Russ, my father personified the stoic self-sacrifice that's nearing extinction with today's narcissism. He complained occasionally about his lot in life, but pulled back when asked about it, wanting to protect his family from the burdens that he thought were his alone to bear. Best of all, he hated "phonies."

And like Tim Russert, my father gave me both an interest and a clarity of perspective for politics. He earned the loyalty of everyone worked for him, and found uncommon joy in children. But like Tim, he had his excesses, and was taken in his fifties, in the middle of a great year.



"Hey pa, you really need to get us to confirmation class on time," I pleaded.

"Nah," he said as he drove us to get Sunday's lunch.

"C'mon, man, we're always late, and the teacher scolded me today."

"It's nothing."

"What do you mean, nothing? He said that if I continue to show up late, that I won't be confirmed."

And this was when my father laid one of the shiniest pearls of wisdom that he ever did on me. "Look, they're never going to not confirm you. The church wants members, there's no way that they'll turn anyone away."

Holy shit, he was right. The world started to become so clear after that, this is how bureaucracies work, this is how they keep people in line. And more importantly, it explained why my father, the classic lapsed Catholic if there ever was one - he whose only education took place in Catholic school, who was an altar boy so hard core that serving in Latin masses actually taught him the language, whom no one less than the Archbishop knew by name - couldn't give a shit about getting my sister and I to catechism on Sunday mornings.

I sometimes think about what if anything in how I was raised led me to choose academia. My mother was a elementary school teacher, so that explains a lot. But what was dad's part?

He wasn't the most involved parent. He looked at my college applications and said, "you did all this in school?" Nor was he the most affectionate human being. I can remember hugging him no more than a handful of times, and every one took place in an airport.

But boy did he teach me about how the world works and how to spot a moron, especially one in a suit. He'd drive me to political rallies in election season, stand at the back taking it all in, and mock the candidates on the drive home and laugh our fucking asses off. We'd do impressions of their bullshit speeches through the night. He'd bunk on the floor of my bedroom and we'd laugh ourselves to sleep in the dark.

He grew up dirt poor. His grandfather was pious, struck it rich and built churches that still stand today. But my grandmother depleted the fortune by helping new immigrants build their lives. Dad couldn't go to college because the family needed income, and he saw his friends who did go to university climb the social and economic ladder with double steps.

He got a job, bought a house, started a family, and saved like a motherfucker enough to send both his kids to private colleges of their choosing. But without a degree in a bureaucracy that prized paper qualifications, he hit a glass ceiling and found himself carrying the load for incompetent graduates who would eventually be promoted over him.

The Guinness gene skipped a generation. Dad had a liver problem that prevented him from drinking. But he never kept booze from me even as a kid, and as a result, I learned how not to abuse alcohol. Or how to abuse it correctly, at least. But he smoked a pack a day for forty years, and taught me that cigarette taxes are a tax on the poor, because no one else is stressed out enough to need to smoke.

During Christmas vacation of my senior year, as we were watching television late one night, he gave me a lesson on substance abuse.

"Anything new with you?"

"I don't know," I said. "Not much... I started smoking cigars occasionally."

"You better not. You'll get addicted and never be able to stop."

"But it's only cigars, and I only do it once a week."

"That's all it takes. That's how it starts. You'd better watch it, it's a dangerous habit."

"C'mon."

"I'm telling you, you should stop. It's going to happen, you'll get addicted."

"Only once a week?"

"Yes!"

"Whatever."

Gee, I guess he thought smoking is bad. After a few seconds, he asked: "Anything else new with you?"

"I guess I smoked the ganja!"

"You better be careful with that," he said. And that was all he said about it.

Classic.

On that break, we talked about his upcoming retirement, and the family's trip to my college graduation. He'd bought a suit for it, the second one he ever owned. He married my mother in the first.

We hung out, mocked the world's bullshit, and laughed like hell. I almost pissed myself when he told me about how he was run over by his car. The man's 5'5", about a buck and a half. He'd pulled in the driveway, forgot to pull the handbrake, and was doing something behind it when it started to roll down, trunk open, towards him. He ran up to try to stop it, but tripped and fell underneath.

Brump-ump! - the back wheel went over his chest, then Brump-ump! - the front wheel. The car kept going and was eventually stopped by the curb on the other side of the street. Brother man, 5'5", buck and a half, just picked himself up like nothing happened. As he told it, it was the funniest thing I'd heard in my life.

Christmas and New Year came and went. We ordered many late night pizzas even while in the middle of food comas, and laughed ourselves to sleep again. Leaving for college had brought us closer during my vacations. At the airport, we hugged.

When he'd call me in my final semester, he talked about my graduation. He was excited about it, more than he was about any trip, about anything in his life.

In the final days of March, just three months after his retirement from a job that had been complete drudgery for at least a decade, and six weeks from when his first-born would be the first one in the family to graduate college, my mother found him on the floor of the bedroom. Apparently putzing around in the middle of the night, he'd collapsed from a heart attack.

I remember the phone call in the middle of the night. To this day I jump when the phone rings unexpectedly after 2am.

He was buried in the suit that he planned to wear to my graduation. I wrote his eulogy, and included a jab about how he was unappreciated at work. When his old bosses came for the wake, my uncle read it to them, and made sure they heard the line. The secretaries who bawled when he retired, were completely devastated.

In a way, he probably hastened his own death. He stressed himself out a lot, and kept it in like a good repressed Catholic. He hated doctors because he dreaded bad news. But he was also scared shitless of "Uncle Charlie" and is probably glad that he went so quickly.

He never knew me as an academic, never heard any of my stories. He almost never verbalized any affection, though I knew that he'd do anything for his kids. He wished that I'd become a doctor. I always wonder if he'd be proud of me.

He was a savage critic of hypocrisy, hated pretension, was a man of his word and knew what was important. Sometimes genius, sometimes a moron (in both good and bad ways), but never, never, a douchebag.

Coolest Thing EVER!

Last night, before Michelle Obama left the stage for Barack Obama to deliver his victory speech at the end of the presidential primary season, the couple shared a fist pound.

A fist pound!



Look, there are any number of substantive and rational reasons why I support Obama.

But you know, I also really really want a First Family who fist pounds.

Come on, wouldn't you?