is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Upside.
Let us not dwell on what sucks about academia, however. At that same conference, mentioned yesterday, I saw many old friends, and had many good conversations�some were serious and filled with ideas, others light-hearted and booze-fueled. It was a lot of fun.
I also saw some good papers (and, inevitably, some not-so-good papers), caught up on who�s-doing-what-where, and got to talk about my current work with people who have similar interests. Spending all these last months shut up in a windowless office writing on my own, I had lost sight of the fact that I am not a talentless dolt. It�s easy to do. A bunch of putting out without any outside input can leave you (or, at least, me) feeling like a fraud with nothing new to say. So giving a paper and having it praised and talking to people about my work and theirs, getting excited about ideas, offering to exchange papers and give feedback, it helped a lot. I feel re-energized, and ready to face up to the mass of writing I�ve committed that is currently in a distressingly disorganized state. I will tackle it head on and hopefully learn that it can be put into an order that tends toward book form.
You would think that academic life is full of opportunities to talk about great ideas. But instead most of the talking that academics do with other academics is about bureaucracy and intrigue�all the things you wish you could have avoided by choosing the life of the mind, only to find yourself stuck squarely in the midst of a bunch of people who never left school and so, for the most part, utterly lack perspective on what is good about the life they chose. That is a gross generalization, of course. I do NOT underestimate the great deal of frustration that accompanies the �service� aspect of academic work, nor the need for service work, nor do I deny the need to vent frustration by speaking of it to colleagues. It�s just that if everyone took a step back and thought about what they have, what they could have, and how they contribute to what actually happens, things might get better. It is disheartening to face a set of circumstances where change is needed, and yet some of the same people who want and need it will not let it happen due to decades old resentment about lack of change. That�s what the ivory-tower types call irony, no? Larger institutions seem to present new employees with a longer learning curve when it comes to how to negotiate it all.
But the conference was fun. Even though I had to be on panels at 8:30 AM both days of the conference! I am NOT a morning person. Still, it did make me laugh when a friend of mine, one of the organizers of the conference, said that in a meeting to finalize the schedule someone actually said, �um, do you realize you have scheduled Jill Stauffer to be on two 8:30 am panels?!� Ha. At least they know me. And, anyway, I lived through it, though by the time I got to Marilyn�s place Saturday late afternoon I was quasi-catatonic from lack of sleep, what with the combination of insomnia and having to get out of bed at 6am in order to be coherent by 8:30. You know how sometimes you can get so tired that it almost feels like you are hallucinating? Yeah, that. Marilyn handled it well. We had some wine and she cooked a bunch of yummy food, and we sat around talking all night, got some sleep, then went out for a yummy brunch in the morning before I had to catch a train back to NY.
11:38 a.m. - April 13, 2009
Texas Cousin - 2009-04-13 22:59:17
I dream of those days before children when I could sleep in later than 6am...
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js - 2009-04-14 14:32:50
Ha! Yeah, I know, or at least I've seen it. Perhaps if that happened to me, I'd learn how to go to sleep early.
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