The Year in Review, or The Faint Glimmer of Hope that One Day My Life Will Be "Normal"

Scenes from My Life:

The whooshing release of breaks and revving engine means that I am late again, missing my bus by seconds because I am stuck waiting to cross the street. I am half tempted to dart through traffic as though I am Jack Bauer. The dilemma becomes one of waiting for thirty minutes for the next bus or driving to campus and paying $15 to park for the day. My bank account makes my decision, and I walk into work and class late and apologetic, getting off to a bad start.
***
The marching band is practicing below, their noise muted only briefly by the jackhammer of the construction crew that is ripping up the sidewalk below my window. This is what is sounds like to have an assistantship in the only office located in an otherwise completely vacant wing in a university auditorium. I put on headphones and turn up my music, effectively walling myself off from everything but my computer screen. I do whatever they ask me to do: making podcasts, researching competitors, writing ad copy. At the end of the day, when I walk back to my bus stop, I will have a line pressed into my hair from where the head band rested for eight hours.
***
Sometimes at night I can't sleep, my anxiety reaching an unbearable crescendo just as I am about to fade off. That assignment wasn't good enough. You need to do more research. It's effect, not affect, stupid. Stop procrastinating. Why can't you just get on with it--why does it take you forever to write something? Three more years of this crap. Then a lifetime. Yippee.
***
My home phone rings, and I ignore it. Then my doorbell is pushed three times in quick succession. It's a renters market and everyone thinks they are entitled to a free apartment. They show up in front of my door when I am still in my pajamas, expecting a tour and flinching at the notion of a deposit. When I don't answer the front door they wait outside the building, calling the landline over and over and over. I crouch down and peer from behind one of my blinds--they are sitting outside in a red van, cellphone to their ear. I jump back and lay on the floor on my stomach, counting to 100 before daring to peek through the blinds a second time.
***
Since I have not posted in 10 months, I thought I would re-engage with the world by following Zamina's lead and summarizing some of the highlights:

March, 2009: Recover from stay in the hospital; Conduct research at an area community college; Write a micro chapter for a new book on women in higher education; Wonder how academic publishing happened before email

April: Serve as an alum presenter at alma mater’s Phi Beta Kappa initiation ceremony: fake my way through Greek and Latin mumbo jumbo and then teach the generation of students the secret PBK handshake.

May: Go to Chicago with Bridgette: Art Institute, Hull House, vertigo, catfish Friday, cinnamon rolls the size of my head, 1 a.m. pizza

June: Get hugged by Tony Kushner; Start new assistantship with the provost's office; present at my first research conference; attend 10-year college reunion without proper accessories (e.g. husband, house, and children).

July: Learn HTML and Dreamweaver; fill out paperwork for the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at three separate universities so that I can begin a new research project; Presidential Road trip with Gintastic: Buddy Holly crash site, Surf Ballroom, Hoover Library, Arthur Bryant's, iPhone saves the day, Truman Library, Oregon Trail Museum, Eisenhower Library, Free State Beer, Jesse James Farm, romance novel on tape

August: Spend every spare moment studying for doctoral written preliminary exam; sit for 5 hours writing preliminary exam only to find out that I have to re-take one of the questions in January.

September: Write a second book chapter for the year with my advisor; turn 33 and celebrate with an evening at the Zombie Den; Serve as peer reviewer for an academic journal

October: Write 3, 30+ page conference papers; Received word that an article my advisor and I submitted to a top 3 peer-reviewed journal will be accepted for publication; Fill in as substitute teacher for one of my professors

November: Present at two back-to-back research conferences in Vancouver and Atlanta; Meet researchers who I idolize, and then find myself tongue tied when they give me positive feedback on my work; Begin new research partnership with the State office of higher education; Settle on dissertation topic

December: Work on writing 2 new articles to submit to journals; Cry over receiving first “B” in a course since high school; Attain an A- in statistics (!!!); Purchase tangerine colored KitchenAid stand mixer; have mini-nervous breakdown

January: Resolve to be less stressed and to have more fun in 2010.

On John Adams, Cylons, and Ex-Hippies

I just finished watching the last disc of the HBO mini series John Adams, the one that was pretty universally panned, and I totally cried for the last hour of it. Flat out bawled like a baby, especially the part where John Adams (Paul Giamatti, in terrible age-forward makeup, complete with age spots that move after every scene) and Thomas Jefferson (Stephen Dillane, who completely steals every scene he is in, and still manages to look attractive, even with ridiculous aging makeup) start to write each other just before they both die--on the same day. It was so sappy, and yet, I managed to well up a bit, just thinking about old white men and the death of revoluntionary dreams.

I can't believe that I haven't posted, or that I failed to celebrate this blog's 5th (!) birthday. I used to be so idealistic and regular about posting, and now that I actually have things to say, I find that I actually post less. I blame it on graduate school, that all-encompassing behemoth that is slowly sucking out my soul and leaving me with constant neck and back aches. Fast forward to my own aging scene, set in a Cylon-esque future where my fingers have been turned into a keyboard and my brain is wired directly into the education research databases. That takes the whole "publish or perish" thing to a whole new sci-fi level. Can you tell I've been watching BSG? And if you don't know what BSG is, you aren't living. Or are you?

The best part about grad school is the freedom to devote time to ideas, and the worst part of it is the amplified, high stakes "you've no one but yourself to blame" rhetoric that seems to keep said "ideas" from truly taking form. It's an awful Catch-22 of late nights, nearly missed deadlines, and obsessiveness that I sometimes find stimulating; lately, I've been experiencing the confluence of large ideas and nowhere to go with them via hospital IVs, hives, and a sea of $10 drug copays.

A few weeks ago I managed to crank out a 15-page book review in the span of one week. This was my first, first-authored piece, and I was terrified of submitting it, but knew that I had no choice in the matter. The positive is that the book review was accepted for publication (Yay!), the negative is that the experience of living through that week did such a whammy on my immune system that I developed a staph infection that was severe enough to require spending two nights in the hospital with a 102-degree temperature and an I.V. antibiotic. While in the hospital, I managed to destroy my cell phone, miss two key assignment deadlines, and get myself so far behind on my own research projects that I think my advisor is starting to hate me.

To top it all off, my body decided it was allergic to one of the antibiotics, but it chose to have this reaction after I had finished two weeks on the drug, so now I am on an antihistamine regimen that, quite frankly, frightens me (5 benydryl, 1 claritin, 1 zyrtec, and 2 [forget what it's called] each day). I've been so zonked out from these drugs and self-conscious about my body's utter disregard for decency (hives+rash=not really wanting to leave the house) that I've managed to get myself even further behind on my research and classes.

It's currently spring break, and I've thus far spent all of it alternating between crying over John Adams and hunching over my computer, staring at blank Word documents that are not writing themselves. I know perfectly why I can't write, but as each day passes, the problem is becoming more complicated and difficult to manage. Instead I read, serf the databases, and manage to think myself down a rabbit hole that is becoming so big and flippin' theoretical that I scarcely make sense when I talk. The other day, I put on two different colored socks, and I left the house wearing a shirt with a stain down the front.

This is exactly how the stereotype of the crazy, absentminded professor came into being. The elbow patches are needed because the obsessive academic spends all of her time with her elbows propped up next to a keyboard. The patches probably serve the double purpose of keeping long-sleeves from showing holes and helping ease elbows away from a callused existence.

The one bright spot is that I am currently taking a methodology course which is creative, challenging, theoretical, and taught by a K-12 art education professor. My professor is probably in his mid-late fifties, has white hair and a goatee, and wears an earring. He only recently finished his PhD (at Stanford), and is all about bringin' some NoCal counterculture to the very conservative school of education where I am enrolled. About three weeks into the semester, he tried to poach me from the higher ed admin program. He can't imagine me studying policy, and I guess that I can see why. In his class, I get to put on my creative writing, art-loving, nerdy-joke-making, literary theory consuming, English major persona. I make my art education classmates look bad cuz the stuff that I submit to the class' webpage and for my assignments is often so "out there" that only the professor "gets" it. Imagine--a classroom space where I get to deconstruct (and then reconstruct from the pieces) higher education policy by way of Bhaktin. I can't imagine a happier place to be...

Then there's the rest of my classes. Uggg. Compared to my methodology course, everything else is a complete snoozefest of "been there, done that" policy regurgitations that make my skin crawl. If you ever wanted to know why no one in education policy leadership seems to have any creativity or vision, it's probably because of the grad school courses we take (and the material we're then forced to memorize and re-hash in our dissertation lit. reviews). All of those staid ideas are presented as "current" thinking, and then, to top it all off, the field itself is so conservative and afraid of "not getting funded" that it self-edits and self-regulates itself into discourses that often date back to the first Clinton administration. It's enough to make me wonder sometimes if my art education, ex-hippie professor sees something about me that I am too afraid to acknowledge for myself--that secretly I am in education only because I know that there are slightly more faculty positions available in this field than there are in the arts or humanities.

And with that glimpse into my state of being, I will close. I won't even get into how my assistantship funding got halved for next year (thanks, Gov!), or how I am basically prostituting myself out to make sure that I have enough assistantship funding for next year (have fingers, will stuff envelopes). Yeah, I'll save that for another posting. Maybe one for June.