Monthly Archive for June, 2007

“scholarly” writing, as always

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on June 25, 2007
in Academia, Books and Depressertation
. 3 Comments

As I promised myself, I am hard at work on the dissertation-finishing business. I just had to start this post that way [As I promised myself, I am...], because so rarely is that actually true. I spend so much time bribing, threatening, flattering, and ridiculing myself just to get myself to do a self’s basic jobs; it is ridiculous. Anyway, not today. Today (and the next couple of weeks, generally), I have succeeded in terrifying myself enough to get working, and I have hammered out four pages before lunch. Apparently, my self responds to fear.

I have a tendency, when drafting things out, to leave little notes in the middle of the paper — little reminders of points I wanted to make, connections I don’t want to forget, places to go back and smooth out a transition or resolve an unanswered question. With that in mind, here are some Actual Quotations From My Dissertation (none of which will, I hope, make it to the final version):

CHAPTER TWO: BLAH BLAH BLAH

Is now a good time to talk about this?

FIX

Try not to sound like a sarcastic jerk here, if that is even possible. Dude.

ALTER ALTER ALTER…

Suggest that more lies under the surface and we should not disregard things based on the ?corrections? made by our senile relatives over a bowl of slowly spoiling potato salad.

TRANSITION what the hell I hate this dude.

Compare picnic to imaginary picnic.

Should mention the thing about him being an idiot.

DISCUSS AT LENGTH. THIS SHIT IS IMPORTANT.

MORE.

What is a Proustian flavor?

FIX, ugh.

As you can see, things are going just swimmingly. And now, I shall consider lunch and an eventual return to work. Lunch-wise, I am hoping more for a (mysterious though it may be) “Proustian flavor” than “slowly spoiling potato salad.” Although, perhaps bad mayonnaise from an imaginary picnic wouldn’t make a person sick; who can say.

on discovering my temp-job nemesis

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on June 22, 2007
in Life in the Cube and Paedagogy
. 4 Comments

I just had a discussion with a particularly annoying co-worker in which he openly espoused the same worldviews as a Known Nemesis of mine.?

But first, some background: this co-worker is annoying for a wealth of reasons, most of which could be summarized by just stating that he is overbearing with his opinions and desires.??Then again,?when have you known me to be brief about the things that annoy me?? One sterling example of his character is that he spent the week MicroSoft released the Zune running around our offices telling everyone who would listen how the Zune was going to “kick iPod’s ass,” just you wait, and boy oh boy was he eager to see that happen.? I’m sure we can each think of no fewer than fifty things wrong with that scenario, not least of which would be the fact that none of us in the office could fucking care less, and, of course, no one had asked his opinion on the matter.?

So go ahead now, reader, and imagine yourself a teeming nest of annoyances like?this?one, and then hunker down in that teeming nest, all scratchy and festering, and you will have the background lurking behind everyone’s interactions with this dude.? Then, thrown boldly up against that background are his actual work-related behaviors, such as the fact that he is constantly?bungling things and then trying to deflect attention from himself, or to trick other people into rectifying his mistakes.?

Today he tried to convince me to start dissecting all the architect’s orders I receive and creating new spec files doing effectively twice as much work as usual just to create some kind of back-up for the next time he goofs, or, perhaps, to create the illusion that the thing he keeps fucking up is actually my responsibility and not his,?retroactively assuming the blame for his past mistakes.? He turns his own gaffes into an opportunity to come hassle me about whether some unused computer has Illustrator on it and where I would like the hole puncher, and by the way, here are pages 3-6 of some random ten-page document, you know, so I don’t have to print them out myself.

Basically,? I?can not stand this guy.

So when he started asking me today about whether I use the online course management system for my classes (you know, the one I believe we all agreed to call “Chalkboard”), I just knew something horrible?was coming.? Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite sense what it was, and I was unable to deflect the blow.?? It turns out that the annoying co-worker is of the opinion that his professors should all post his grades to?what he calls the “Chalkboard Spreadsheet,” so that he will always know what grade he “has” in the class at any given time (despite the fact that Chalkboard will in no way help him ascertain this; I have?described its mathematical inaccuracies and/or general unhelpfulness?before).? He is incapable of keeping track of his grades himself, see,?even if the professors report his grades to him when assignments are handed back.?

“I just don’t wanna keep track of them,” he whines, sounding exactly like a thirty-five-year-old version of those kids on MTV whose parents throw them hundred-thousand-dollar birthday parties and buy them custom-made “hot couture” gowns [sic], which the kids?then complain are “hideous” and “not hot” and which they then ask if they can take out back and burn, just to escape the multi-thousand-dollar, custom-made, hand-beaded, perfectly-tailored hideousness.? I seem to have digressed a little bit, but while I’m here, let me just say that you should by all means check out this show if you are in any way dissatisfied with your boring, pedestrian, bourgeois life, because these children will make you so, so thankful your parents never bought you a? horrifying, diamond-encrusted watch or a ninety-thousand-dollar car?just to embarrass you.

In that moment, though, when my thirty-five-year-old, ex-military, married, college-educated, reasonably successful co-worker sat there moaning and groaning like a rich brat whose mother had ruined not only her quincea?era but also her entire life, I realized something.? I saw those ridiculous whippersnappers who, with one instance of bad behavior after another after another, become my nemeses, and I saw exactly what is going to become of them.? They are all, every last one, going to be fucking up simple tasks in offices all across America, and trying to trick their colleagues into not only fixing things for them but taking the blame, too.? Keep your eyes open for them, all of you.? Contant vigilance.

not dead, just drowning in nivea and bobby pins

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on June 21, 2007
in Academia, Cheese Sandwich and Depressertation
. 0 Comments

I figured I had better post something here or y’all would start thinking I had expired and gone off to the great beyond. (Gracefully, of course, with my hand delicately thrown across my lifeless eyes, no bloating or weird, smelly decomposition.) (Or perhaps quite grodily, all noseless after the cat had begun to feast on me, and sidenote: did you know they eat the nose first? FACT.)

Things have been positively hectic lately, what with all the regularly scheduled planning, plotting, scheming, and worrying. In between my restless thoughts about moving, dissertating, and starting a new job in a new state, I have been traveling a bit. It just sort of worked out that I had a weekend trip to the coast (documented in part by the intrepid Brandon of Welcome to Blog) and a week-long trip to the Far Side Of The Country to visit a friend and her new baby, who is like a wiggly little kidney bean of love. Things in that respect have been smashing, and having the chance to turn the fret-level on my brain down to a dull hum was just what I needed.

I am cranking out my last few days at Temp Job and, on my off days, working furiously on the dissertation, which means that (with all this time I’m logging at various computer screens around town) you may be seeing more of me here in the next couple of weeks. Or radically less, who knows. I also have to clean out all my old crap from my apartment — The Great Purge, I’m calling it, where I’ll bid an unsentimental farewell to tons and tons of useless baggage before starting out fresh again. Just the essentials, I keep reminding myself, thinking all the while how much I am paying to move my shit across the country. For me, of course, “the essentials” includes probably twenty or so boxes of books, so it’s not that I am exactly embracing minimalism, just paring down a substantial amount.

I have acres of stuff to get rid of — might you be interested? You would not believe how many papers I have from past teaching. Anyone out there need about forty extra copies of some old German 201 homework sheets? How about a diagram of the enthymeme, complete with a stick figure depicting a hapless discourse community trapped (TRAPPED!) in the tenacious triangle of your logic? A near-library of photocopied articles and book chapters whose margins are crammed with doodles and bitchy annotations, e.g. “smug name-dropping twat,” “nice list of synonyms — is he getting paid by the word?” I also seem to have acquired, over the years, no fewer than four hundred bobby pins, six lint brushes, and eighteen types of moisturizer. So, like, yeah, let me know.

a very important update about my pants, among other things

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on June 7, 2007
in Academia
. 6 Comments

It is eight fifty in the ay-emm as I write this post, and I may in fact still be drunk from last night. In fact, I feel I most certainly am still somewhat wasted, as it is very hard to control my floppy fingers on the keyboard, and I am afraid if anyone talks to me and I have to respond, my voice will come out all slurry and hilarious, but also all gravelly and gross from the eighty-seven cigarettes I smoked last night.

So why the ridiculous drinking on a school night? And why do I not have the decency to feel a little ashamed of this bad, bad behavior? And what the hell was I doing out last night when I should have been warmly ensconced at home, snorgling my cat and dog and writing my dissertation and searching for academic jobs? Why all this? Well sit down and I shall tell you.

It all began with a phone call I received at work on Tuesday morning. Of course, though, I did not actually “receive” the phone call in the sense where the phone rang and I answered it, but rather in the sense where the building I worked in blocked the signal to my cell phone, sending the call to voice mail, where I then found and listened to it over lunch. So there I was at lunch, just about to tuck in to a deleecious chicken burrito, listening to my voice mail. The message was from one Professor Firstname Lastname, of Wordsmith University, where I had recently applied. He was hoping he could chat with me. Eeeep. My heart leapt up into my throat, making it largely impossible to swallow any more than three bites of burrito. When I eventually gathered my composure from where it lay scattered all over the cafe floor and called Prof. Lastname back, it turned out that this was an impromptu phone interview for the position. “Surprise, lady! Tell us about your teaching philosophy for Composition! Ooops, not done yet, lady! Tell us about your qualifications and approach for teaching World Literature! Oooh, veddy inteddestingk!”

Apparently?they had waited until that last possible minute to to all their decision-making (or “decisioning,” as we used to say when I worked in banking) for this job opening, and after the talk with me they would be meeting the very next day and deciding about the hire. I was one of the finalists, he said, and I’d find out the next day, or possibly the day after that.

I woke up yesterday anxious about what I would hear from them, if anything at all, and knowing that I might wait all day only to hear nothing. At about 7:00 am, I was in the bathroom, finishing up my morning toilet business and steeling myself for the nerve-wracking day ahead, and I was just about to yank my pants back up from around my ankles when my phone rang. Actually, see, it vibrated, and being in the pocket of my pants and thus next to my ankle, it felt just the same as it feels when my downstairs neighbor turns on his bathroom fan. I almost didn’t even notice it. Luckily, though, I answered in time, because, as you already have guessed, it was the professor calling me back, and I was able to talk to him again. At seven in the morning, with no pants on.

It took me approximately 0.0042 seconds to decide whether to accept their offer, which was a great offer and one of the better positions I had seen. I accepted immediately. Here’s why:

1. They do not mind that I am merely “ABD,” and I will be able to finish my last chapter of my dissertation down there, in very close proximity to the Archives and Special Collections at Another? University, where I can go get my fill of special, hard-to-find?information on That One Author I Study, if need be. (This will ease my separation anxiety about leaving my current library behind — I’m sure the libraries at?the new place?are great, but I’m just so used to mine!)

2. Also at Another U.: one of my, like, total BFFs and her new baby, so, when I go visit them (aka make a “research” trip to those “archives”) I can get my Current School to pay for it, since I will still technically be enrolled there and finishing my diss. MWA HA HA, I am creating scams already.

3. I will also be within a short drive of my parents and various other friends scattered around the Southeast.

4. It’s rural enough that my smallish (but, relatively awesome, to me) salary will go very, very far.

5. No one there will ridicule me for being from the South; they will merely ridicule me for having spent so much time out of the South, which will be an interesting change of pace. (Also, I mean, living here in Zembla, where everyone is so, like, totally tolerant and awesome and enlightened has been so hard for me, what with how I have to keep pretending not to be an uneducated, illiterate, racist, intolerant, incest-having, barefoot, toothless hillbilly. It just gets so exhaustin’, y’all.)

In addition to all this, I consider it no minor miracle that I even got a job offer at all. NO ONE expected me to. I haven’t even officially finished my PhD yet (but soon, SOON, bitches!), and I waited until long after the big hiring season to even start looking for jobs. By the time I even checked the job postings, there were only 20-30 that I was qualified for. Most people in my field apply for anywhere from 50 to 150 jobs, and they might not get one. I am unbelievably thrilled that I beat that frightening statistic, and I CAN NOT WAIT to see the look on the face of my department head (who doesn’t really like me for reasons unknown and who agreed to write me a reference letter and then never got around to it) when I tell her. IN YOUR FACE, LADY.

And that reminds me: I am definitely still drunk. I just went to the restroom and saw that I had managed to put my drawers on backwards this morning, at which point I sat there on the toilet in a fit of giggles for at least five minutes. I feel pretty great right now.