I recently got an internal grant to start a research project that could be the beginning of so many things. It's fabulous, fabulous news, but there's one small (yet significant) part of preparation for that research that I am unable to do myself.

Of course, knowing that I'm clueless about such things, I budgeted money to hire an expert (or at least someone with working knowledge) in that area, so I've got money to spend. But now I'm feeling a little like Julia Roberts on Rodeo Drive - I can't find anyone willing to work on the project.

I come from a place where people jump at the chance to make some extra cash. Here, it seems, no one needs it. So now I'm stuck, with money to spend and tenure to lose.

Where's Richard Gere, or at least a talented gerbil, when you need him?

I wish I could say, like Fraud, that I like my job, but my dirty little secret is that, at the moment, I don't!

My god, the whining, the never-ending whining. Most of it is from students that either can't or won't read simple instructions (much less the reading assigned for class!), and were apparently never taught the rudiments of polite behavior (hint, when calling a professor to ask a question, it is generally a good idea to preface the question in some way, perhaps by using the word "Hello"). These are upper level students, and I have to wonder how they made it this far. And that query is, at root, why I hate my job currently. Is that the ideal we are espousing? Because it's not what I signed up for -- I signed up to be a professor, not a teacher, to lead students to knowledge and make the introductions, not consummate the relationship for them.

I love the research part of my job right now, and, gee, it would be nice if I could do some of it instead of pandering to lazy little brats, covering for lazy old faculty, and teaching too many courses.

Someday soon, I hope that I can again say that I love my job, but right now the joy isn't here, just the overwhelmingness and overwork. I'm not bitter though, not at all. Because I'm sure that teaching is important for tenure!

I think that I have a great job.

I was walking across campus today, coffee in hand, getting ready to return to a "bang-your-head-against-the-wall" task (I'm writing a grant proposal, and feeling so frustrated lately) and I was genuinely content. For a brief moment I thought to myself, "This isn't so bad." The thing is, I think that a lot.

A part of me thinks that as an academic I'm supposed to be stressed out, frazzled, miserable, over-worked, under-paid, and generally unhappy. Don't get me wrong, I perpetually feel 27 steps behind (although this doesn't seem to inpsire me to do much about it), but I also feel really lucky to do what I do.

I think it's the autonomy - the amount of control I have over what I do, when I do it, how I do it, and so forth - that's the opiate of academics, at least for me.

What makes you love or hate your own position?

(Maybe I should check back in tomorrow. This optimism might be fleeting. Maybe there's more of that unhappy academic in me than this post suggests, or it's just waiting to rear its ugly head).

On a completely different note, I was walking toward campus this afternoon, and came to a fairly major street. There were no cars near, so I started across. Immediately afterward, a car turned onto the street from a crossroad, so I picked up the pace (even though, clearly, the pedestrian should not be held accountable for cars that turn onto the street s/he is crossing when gauging whether or not s/he can cross the street in a timely manner). Picking up the pace resulted in my keys falling out of my pocket, so I had to quickly stop, turn around, bend down to get them, then continue on my merry way.

So what does the driver of the car do? SPEEDS UP. I felt like I was trapped in a Frogger video game. Even so, I got across with about five feet to spare. Then the driver rolled down his/her (not sure which) window and screeched, 'I ALMOOOOST HIIIIT YOU!' This was undoubtedly followed by some expletives, only the car was already 50 feet away by the time the driver had finished reveling in the fact that s/he was clearly a superior person because yes, his/her SUV can go faster than a woman on foot burdened by a bag and a set of flying keys.

Now come on, was that really necessary? Granted, I was jaywalking, but everyone in this town does, and especially at the exact spot where I was. If you use the crosswalk, you have to walk pass the bus stop and get heckled by the homeless people. Sad but true. And it's not like I was slowly making my way across the street trying to be a menace to traffic the way the gaggles of high school students so often are. I mean, fine if you want to curse me under your breath as you pass by. (I'll be the first to admit that I say mean, nasty things about people all the time when I'm driving. Especially old people.) But was the energy you expended flooring your gas pedal, rolling down your window, and yelling at me really worth it? Did it really make you feel that much better about yourself to do that? If it made your day, I am happy to be of service, but geez, I sure feel sorry for you.

Hello.

It has been quite a while, but not without good reason. My good reason? I’ve had nothing to write about. My advisor has no life and expects too much of me, my research stinks, and I’m stressed about school starting again. No one here wants to hear about that sort of yadda yadda yadda. Welcome to the sad life of a graduate student, right?

But here’s something somewhat interesting. Yesterday when I was in lab, one of my colleagues came in to inform me that Sardine was sick, dripping green snot, and could not be at daycare. My first reaction was of course to be annoyed, because I happened to be working with radioactive compounds, and I get really stressed when being interrupted means possibly spilling something and mutating my DNA. I was also annoyed because Sardine goes to daycare once a week, and she got sick exactly a week ago, after spending 4.5 hours at daycare. If she isn’t allowed to be at daycare with green snot, then how is it possible that she actually caught the green snot at daycare? Yes, I know a bit about microbiology, you are contagious before the snot turns green, but it’s the principle I’m talking about.

But that’s not actually what annoys me most.

What annoys me the most is that the reason Sardine is in daycare at all is because of the colleague who came into lab to inform me that she was sick and had to be picked up from daycare. Said colleague (SC) and I both teach the same lab. SC has some seniority over me because he has been teaching longer and has already completed his degree; however, I have some ‘seniority’ over him because graduate students have priority over people who have already finished their degrees and are supposed to be getting real jobs already.

SC and I are on friendly terms because we’re both friendly type people, although we’ve butted heads on several occasions throughout the semester. One of the head-buttings was because we could not find a time that worked for both of us to do a lab prep together, and resulted in our supervising professor telling me that I needed to ‘stop using daycare as an excuse’ and be more flexible. Never mind that I had given six times I was available to do the lab prep, plus offered to do it alone if we couldn’t find a time that worked for both of us. Apparently SC didn’t feel that I was capable, and that he just had to be there to supervise me. Whatever.

Anyway.

When it came time to set our teaching schedules for this semester, SC took all the sections he wanted, which happened to be the same ones I wanted. When we got together to ‘discuss’ this semester’s schedule, SC approached it as: Here are the only times left, if you can’t do them, let the chair know so she can start looking for someone else. Which is total BS. First of all, graduate students have top priority for teaching positions for this particular class. Therefore, I can basically teach however many labs at whatever time I want if my teaching evaluations don’t suck too bad. So I just said, ‘Well, I don’t know if I can commit to those times yet so maybe I just won’t be able to teach.’ Of course he knows damn well that if I tell that to the chair, she’ll ask me what times I CAN teach and I’ll get whatever times I want (which is what happened last semester). I mean, I don’t really want to make waves and piss people off, and I do want to be as accommodating as possible, but it’s really hard to find child care in the morning, and teaching isn’t that important to me. I mean, I LIKE teaching, but I’m not doing it for the money like he is; my advisor supports me financially by paying my tuition, and my husband makes a lot of money.

SC knows that if I piss and moan I can get whatever sections I want, so in response to my ‘I don't know if I can do it,’ he said, ‘So what if daycare weren't an issue? What if my wife were to watch your daughter for you while you were teaching?’ It’s as if he anticipated my response to being stuck with the sucky lab sections and had a plan already worked out. Basically, his wife has an at-home daycare that just happened to have an opening for an infant during the times that I would need to be teaching. Honestly, I couldn’t turn him down. His wife offered me a good deal, mainly (I think) because my happiness with the situation directly affects SC’s situation and therefore hers and the family’s well-being.

The irony is that here is someone who complains to our supervising professor that I don’t have adequate care for my kid. He volunteered his wife as an affordable way out of my ‘dilemma,’ and yet yesterday there he was telling me that I needed to go pick my kid up from his house because of her green snot. It was okay yesterday, because school doesn’t start until next week, and in theory I could have left the lab to go retrieve my snotty baby. (Fortunately, my husband had the day off of work thanks to Martin Luther King, and could go get her.) But what if it had been a week later? Would he walk into lab while I’m lecturing and tell me I had to go get my kid, then complain to the professor about my inadequate child care situation?

The only good thing that came out of all this is that my advisor was in the lab while this exchange between SC and I was taking place, and I think it helped to clue him into the realities of life with a baby. As in, I’m not lying when I say that it really is hard to find consistent, reliable care for a kid. I’m not sitting at home eating bonbons and watching soap operas when you think I should be in the lab. Kids are a full-time time job. Deal with it, assholes.

Sincerely,
I'm really not as angry as I sound, but I could be if I wanted.

I'm pretty sure I've complained before about the thesis committee meeting I should have scheduled about six months ago. I gave up on it at some point last year because I was sick of repeatedly being ignored by one committee member (the chair, in fact). I recently started trying to organize it again, after being threatened with not being able to register, but I feel like giving up again.
First, I sent out a list of 15 possible times and one committee member's assistant vetoed every one of them. Then, I emailed that assistant twice, asking for some guidance on what would be a better month before I spammed the whole committee with another long list of dates that wouldn't work. No reply. Today, I gave up on that idea and just sent a list of 30 possible times. Immediately I get a reply from the assistant who ignored me, saying only two of those might work (and pointing out that one of the dates I suggested was a holiday). I've still heard nothing from the chair, who I'm beginning to suspect doesn't use email at all. The phone number I have just rang and rang without even going to voicemail, too.
Any hints on getting three professors in a room together sometime before I get kicked out for failing to have this meeting?

Update: It's a miracle! I just got an email from the previously email-less chair! Maybe I should post here every time I have a seemingly insoluble problem. :)

I am overwhelmed with everything going on so I was just thinking: I need to take a mental health day today. Even though I have a bunch of things on my work to-do list, I may just skip work today. But I started feeling very weird and guilty about this idea. Is it okay to take a mental health day? The idea has never occured to me before and it's certainly not something I've ever done, not consciously anyway. I pondered this for a few minutes.

Then suddenly I realized that this whole line of questioning was insane. Why? Because it is Sunday AND I'm actually sick, as in physical ache and pain in my body due to some stupid bug. And despite all that, the only "excuse" I could come up with for not working was a "mental health day"!

I think this just answered my question: I am definitely due for a mental health day.

One of the best things about winter vacation is the time for reading and reflection. I started by actually reading the book for my reading group (which means that I am allowed to speak - a written rule, one must read to speak - at the upcoming meeting, unlike the last one), and then read a few books tangentially related to my research and teaching that I've been putting off, and today I revisited an old self-help favorite, Loving What Is.

The Work is a process where you analyze a stressful belief by reflecting on four questions. A belief like, "I'm a failure" (hey, some fleeting beliefs we have are this outlandish). You ask yourself:

1. Is it true? (Uh, this paper got rejected for the third time. That sucks, but does it mean I'm a failure? Nah.)
2. Can you absolutely know it's true? (How does one measure "failureness"? If that can't be done, then I can't absolutely know I'm a failure.)
3. How do you react when you think that thought? (Well, it makes me want to go home, or close my work window and open Napster, or, most importantly, gives me an excuse not to send out this other paper I've been working on.)
4. Who would you be without this thought? (If I didn't have this nagging, negative self-belief I would be a confident academic, who could focus on their work and not on their faults).

My favorite part of the process is actually a fifth step (although it's not called a step), the turnaround. In the turnaround you do something to turn your thought around. You turn the thought around to yourself or another or to the opposite or to realizing it's a simple thought. So, if you choose the opposite option, "I'm a failure" becomes "I'm a success" (you could also turn it into "The paper is a failure" or "I only think I'm a failure" or something else). Then, as the second part of the turnaround, you ask yourself. Is that statement true, or truer? Using my own fleeting thought, and my own personal experiences, I have many important successes that trump my failures, and the turnaround is actually the truest of the two.

Sometimes we're so good at beating ourselves up that the more "comfortable" thought is the immediate one and the turnaround it a tough pill to swallow. It's worth it, though. When you're thinking to yourself, "I can't finish this paper," and it's actually that you know that you can finish the paper, it's both liberating and scary at the same time because you have to do it, and you know you can.

I went back and forth about writing this post, but I think that academics spend a lot of time in their own worlds, and that those worlds can sometimes get depressing and self-defeating, and for me The Work works to get me through some of those times (ice cream sometimes works too).