Being rather than becoming

A strange thing is happening to me at midcareer: I find myself increasingly worried that I've lost something I once had or was good at: my writing isn't as lively; I'm not as creative; whatever was once interesting about me has vanished.

Objectively, I know that this is ridiculous. I mean, sure: it's possible for a human person to stall or lose her edge, but it's more likely that this is just an exciting new port of call for my personal cruise ship of anxiety and insecurity. When I was younger, I feared not being smart enough, not having interesting ideas, not being able to turn my vague intuition to some kind of account. These days, though I still start in an incoherent muddle, I feel pretty confident that my hunches will pan out and that I can complete any project once begun. Some of the work I've done in recent years is clearly superior to my first book, and on good days I dare to believe that I've hit some kind of scholarly stride.

And yet, alongside this sense of relative contentment is the nagging suspicion that while some things might be better, surely they've come at the cost of other things. I keep feeling that my writing has lost whatever distinctive voice it once had, and wondering whether the better ideas have displaced the better writing. And then I worry that even my greater contentment with my work and the number of projects I'm immersed in might themselves be signs of how boring I've become, with work crowding out the other things--I'm pretty sure there were other things!--that once made me an interesting person.

I mean, I never labored under the delusion that I was cool, in the way that matters to twenty- and thirty-somethings, and the invisibility that some middle-aged women complain about is more a relief than a loss. But I suppose I'm not free of the vanity of wishing to believe that I am, in whatever minor way, an interesting person. And now I've . . . lost that belief in my own fascinatingness. I'm just an academic. I write, I go to the gym, and sometimes I buy pretty things and make fancy drinks. Occasionally I read a novel or see a movie.

In almost every detectable way, this life is better than the one I had at thirty or even thirty-five. I know I was not happier writing those lively and eccentric sentences, much less wondering where my career or personal life was going to go. But apparently I need to feel a little lost and inadequate at every stage--so now I'm feeling nostalgic for my own earlier lostness and inadequacy.

Worst. Midlife. Crisis. EVER.

Always anticipating until it's over

It's that time of year when I keep expecting--at any moment!--to feel on the downward slope, where either the course prep and grading will have genuinely eased up or where I'll have crossed enough psychological thresholds (each class is now on its final text! I've passed out the last assignment sheet!) that I know the end is in sight even if nothing in my daily life has changed.

But just as I cross one big thing off my list, I'm reminded of another: peer teaching observations to write up. Essays to score for undergraduate assessment. My annual faculty report. An M.A. thesis from a student whose committee I'd forgotten I was on. An emergency three-hour meeting of that committee that hasn't met all semester. You know how it is.

Still, one of these days it really will be true: stuff will get crossed off the list and nothing new will get added. I'll submit grades, put an "away" message on my email, and for a week or two I'll luxuriate in a sense of satisfied completion.

In this way, my teaching and institutional obligations are unlike the rest of my scholarly life, where I'm rarely able to rest in a sense of achievement. This isn't about my being particularly disgruntled or hard on myself, but about the fact that even the biggest academic achievements tend to happen in endless increments.

I mean, let's say you're hard at work on an article for six months, a year, or two. When do you get to revel in its completion? When you send it out for review? When it finally gets accepted? When the last revisions are in? Or two years later when it actually sees print? By then I'm usually over it--and unsure if anyone has or will ever read it. (I may get nice notes later on, confirming that people have read it, but by then it truly doesn't feel like my work anymore.) The same is true for tenure: there are so goddamn many levels of approval that to celebrate before the last one is premature. . . but when the last one arrives there's no surprise and no suspense left to lift.

It's as if everything is incredibly far off on the horizon until the moment it's in the rear-view mirror.

The past six months have given me a lot of professional validation in a lot of forms. I don't want to make too much of any one, and I haven't publicized many of them for this reason; I'm at a comfortable enough place, professionally, where that feels tacky. Not only do I get more external validation now than I used to, but most of it's based on stuff I did a year or two or five ago, and I try to look forward rather than patting myself on the back for what's done.

But I suppose recognition, in our field, is always mis-timed and never feels earned (or maybe that's just me): either it comes for work that's past, and thus doesn't assuage my fear that I'll never do anything as good again--or it comes because I've succeeded in getting someone excited about work I haven't yet done, which likewise feeds my anxiety about not succeeding and not finishing.

And that's a stupid way to live. So I'm trying to find ways of celebrating, or at least marking the moment and pausing to feel good, when nice things come along.

I'll let you know how it goes.

An obsession in search of a medium

Downloading my blog is irksome, fascinating, and monotonous all at once: I've already hit 700 pages and am just at the halfway point.

It's an extraordinary thing, reading hundreds of thousands of your own more-or-less polished, more-or-less public words, all ruminating on basically the same set of topics over the years. As with my journals, I'm surprised both by how much I haven't changed--so many posts I'd forgotten about could have been written last week--and by how much I have.

But let's be honest: most of what's changed has to do with specific, discrete skills I've learned (I no longer fret over how to teach a certain kind of class or am puzzled by a particular professional conundrum) or with my having aged into different roles with students and colleagues alike. The existential stuff, the habits of thought, the kinds of things I'm interested in and worry about--those are all pretty consistent.

In some ways that's comforting: it's proof that I have a core self, an identity, or at least a set of obsessions that pass for a personality. But there are some continuities that are less comfortable, some obsessions I'm surprised to discover I haven't outgrown. Whatever narratives I may tell about myself these days, there are still some tattered personal myths I haven't fully replaced, whose ghostly presence is my only explanation for the disproportionate emotional reactions that certain tasks, conflicts, or ambitions elicit.

But the more interesting thoughts this process has stimulated aren't to do with me as a person, but rather with the kind of writing that this blog represents. Most of my older and original reasons for blogging no longer obtain--or the the needs they represent are ones now better met in other spaces. Facebook has absorbed probably 50% of what I used to blog about.

But I'm still blogging, even though most of my favorite bloggers and blog-readers have moved on to other media. Some are their hilarious, thoughtful, or political selves exclusively on Facebook and Twitter. Others occasionally write first-person essays or advice pieces for the Chronicle or IHE. Others do public writing for the LARB, The Atlantic online, institutional blogs, or print publications. Sometimes I think that if I were serious about writing nonacademic prose, that's what I'd be doing, too.

And yet, none of those seems the right fit for the writing I still feel compelled to do here. This blog isn't confessional, or a record of my daily minutiae. It isn't advice-oriented and doesn't (usually) pretend to great knowledge. I rarely talk about the details of my research or try to use my disciplinary training to talk about contemporary events or bring a neglected historical or literary artifact to public attention.

Rather, what continues to fascinate me, the kind of writing for which I've found no other outlet, is the project of understanding and describing the emotional and psychological realities of the profession as I experience it. What does it mean to be an academic at this cultural moment? Who are we? And what does it feel like to write, to experience rejection, to change jobs, to cathect onto particular mentors, colleagues, students?

I don't know for how long I'll continue to blog; it's melancholy being part of a dying or superseded medium when most of the party is happening elsewhere. But since there's no evidence to suggest that I outgrow my obsessions, I'm unlikely to stop until I find a better space in which to pursue them.

The cohort problem

We go through most events in life on the same time-table as our peers. Some of this is about biological development--what the human body and brain are capable of when--and some of it is about the way we're socialized, but we experience most major milestones at roughly the same time and in roughly the same sequence as our peers.

Because if we don't, we find new peers.

Finding new peers isn't about shunning those who aren't like us (though, okay: sometimes we do reject a particular life narrative), but about the fact that we depend upon others to help us understand and navigate our lives. We need the example and support of those who have made similar choices or have had similar bad or good luck. If you have kids early, you're going to need other parent-friends no matter how much you may cherish your old ones. And if you remain single or childless long past the majority of your peers, you're likewise going to need at least a few friends who can see the world through similar eyes.

Because it's not just about knowing people who have experienced the same thing (whatever that thing may be). It's about knowing people likely to have had the full range of emotions that go along with it: the fears, anxieties, and expectations; the way the rest of your life gets reshuffled and redefined around that event. Because just as there are things that people who have been bereaved can't talk about with people who haven't--no matter how well-intentioned--there are things that I can't say to my parent-friends about being childless, or to my single friends about being married, or my nonacademic friends about being an academic. Or rather: I can say some things about those topics, maybe even a lot, but I can't say everything, or expect the same level of immediate understanding, advice, or mutual interest that happens when I'm talking to someone who's been there and is equally as invested in figuring out What It All Means.

Grad school is an obvious example of a peer-group reshuffle: When I was twenty-five and twenty-eight and thirty, I felt as if I'd stepped off the conveyor belt that was delivering my college friends to their destinies: they were buying cars and houses and getting married and advancing in their careers when I didn't have so much as a cat (and the most expensive thing I owned was an aging laptop). But grad school gave me a new set of peers and a new narrative, a sense of what follows what, and people I could talk to about all of this--including our collective sense of having been left behind by adulthood.

But such shuffles aren't necessarily permanent. Indeed, the big discovery of my thirties and forties has that both "cohort" and "life stage" are less rigid than they'd seemed. In high school and even in college it's a big fucking deal to do anything even a year or two before or after everyone else. But now, at age 41, I'm in roughly the same place as most of my age peers--whether I met them in high school or college, grad school or after: most of us are married and with mortgages; most of us have had some career successes and some career failures; and most of us have suffered at least one major loss. Those things didn't all come at the same time or in the same sequence, but in their outlines our lives look more similar than different.

Because even if the parameters expand, age remains central to how we define our cohort. Not everyone who's forty is my professional peer (some entered graduate school much later or advanced much more rapidly than I), and my cohort includes people half a dozen years older or half a dozen years younger. But I still have a very real sense that my cohort encompasses people of roughly my age and roughly my professional stage, because the two intersect.

But the problem with bonding so strongly with those of our cohort is that the next life or career stage remains perpetually mysterious and difficult to imagine. This is why we sometimes reshuffle our peer groups--to find a narrative that fits better or has greater explanatory power--and it's the reason for many midlife or midcareer crises: not so much the inability to see what's next (at a certain point, we know the major likely moves) as the inability to know how we'll feel about or be able to live inside those events when they come.

Sometimes when I feel angsty about the future I have to remind myself that people have actually done this before. People I know! Whom I see at work or at conferences, some of whom I even know well enough to gossip and get drunk with. Nothing my peers and I are going through is completely new (though the conditions of the profession may have made certain things easier or harder). But I don't generally have deeper and more existential conversations with those I feel are in a cohort above mine; the sense that we're at different life stages and that such conversations couldn't possibly be reciprocal is hard for me to overcome.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t value knowing that my seniors have gone through whatever I'm currently confronting. In my early years in the profession I'd feel a sort of electric shock whenever someone a decade ahead of me would say something kind and off-hand--and I'd suddenly realize that, holy shit! She gets it. She was here. (And she survived.)

I hope I do the same with my juniors, but I also realize that I, too, am not exactly who they need. I may think I understand what they're going through, and maybe I even do (though the temptation of the senior party is always to assume that nothing's changed and that our experiences remain exactly relevant), but they're at earlier professional and life stages. What they need, most of all, is the support of their peers. And I'm not that.

Or at least not yet. Cohorts don't retain their boundaries; both our seniors and our juniors may someday be our peers.

And then, perhaps, all will be known.

2 legit 2 quit

It's finally happened: most days, I mostly don't feel like a fraud!

Or to put it more positively: I feel, increasingly, like a legitimate Knower of Things.

I wouldn't say that this is the end of Impostor Syndrome, exactly; I'm still painfully aware of how clumsy my language skills are and how little I know about various things that are, technically, within my specialty (the Continental Renaissance! Most of the sixteenth century! Playwrights who aren't Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Jonson!). But I feel, finally, that I know enough about some things that all the stuff I don't know isn't totally discrediting.

This sense of legitimacy has been a long time coming. I submitted my dissertation eleven years ago and I've just finished my tenth year as tenured or tenure-line faculty. I've felt comfortable in the classroom for a very long while. But as a scholar I've tended to feel, at best, just minimally competent--in possession of exactly enough knowledge to write a given conference paper or article, without a datum to spare.

There are probably a couple of reasons it's taken so long. First, my first book covered 100 years and six authors (and focused almost entirely on noncanonical texts), so I really did know only a small slice about each of the authors/historical moments in which I was ostensibly an expert. And then, at just the point that I started to feel comfortable with my mastery of that material--as well as more canonical figures like Shakespeare--I started working on my second book, which immediately required lengthy detours into totally new areas (Patristics, the Middle Ages, liturgical history). So my sense of the shallowness and insufficiency of my learning is partly a side-effect of trying to be conversant in a lot of different things.

But some people emerge from grad school--heck, even from college--with a blithe confidence in their learning and the ability to speak glibly and persuasively about any manner of subjects. My own graduate program privileged both broad training and an easy, learned manner; the fact that I didn't have the latter (whether through introversion, modesty, or a slow brain) means I've always over-valued this kind of performance of intelligence. Doesn't it stand to reason that those who can speak learnedly are drawing on deeper reserves of learning than those who can't?

This past year, though, I've started to feel that my reserves are deeper than I thought. Say that a student asks an oddball or sidebar question--maybe it's a biographical or historical detail she saw in a footnote; maybe it's a big-picture question about the culture and its values. In the past, even when I knew a bit about the subject in question, I'd answer briefly and move on. These days I have to struggle not to share all the cool stuff I know about how early moderns read a particular biblical passage or what current scholarship thinks about some event in Milton's early life. Since such a digression usually isn't directly relevant to whatever we're doing in class, I rarely allow myself more than sixty seconds--but even sixty seconds of sharing freaky factoids reminds me of my own professors and how impressed I was by similar shows of seeming erudition.

And it's not just in the classroom: the conference Q&A feels less terrifying than it used to, and I find myself more frequently offering advice, asking questions, and generally presuming that I have something to contribute to my peers and seniors. Maybe this is the long-deferred payoff of learning a small-to-moderate amount about a shit-ton of things, or maybe it's the confidence that comes with middle age and having enough professional credibility that I figure there's a greater-than-even chance that people will take me seriously.

Whatever the cause, feeling legitimate is a great thing. But there's a downside: believing that you know stuff and that people want to hear about it dramatically raises your odds of turning into a pontificating, digressive bore.

So for now I'll stick to fascinating/boring people for just sixty seconds at a time.

Enemies are bad for business

For some time now I've been thinking about how we acquire or defuse professional enemies. I've been fortunate to have very few (that I know of!), but I also think I'm pretty good at avoiding the near-occasion of enmity. I can sometimes be thin-skinned about my work or peremptory about that of others--someone who believed in humoral theory would say I'm choleric, which means I'm overly prone to snark and snap judgments--but I've trained myself to slow down and walk back any initial negative assumptions. Everyone acts or speaks carelessly at times, and when in doubt I chalk up most weird academic behavior and seeming slights to social awkwardness.

Because: even if the slights are real, there's no benefit to holding onto them. We all need a wide and varied network and access to lots of different brains. Enemies are bad for business.

So I was surprised to learn that someone I'd met and liked, and whose work I found interesting, seemed to want to burn that bridge--that is, seemed to be on an aggressive crusade against some things I've written in order to clear space for their own work. That's a known phenomenon in the world, I guess, but it strikes me as very grad-student-y: I remember righteously lambasting prior scholars in my dissertation, as a way of helping myself to believe in my own ideas. . . but pretty much all of that dropped out by the final draft, and certainly before the thing became a book. Moreover, though I don't mind someone disliking my work, I actually don't see major points of conflict here. At most, I think our interests are complementary or adjacent--and in some ways I'm not even sure we're talking about the same thing.

Obviously, this behavior doesn't make the other person my "enemy," and it's not something I'd hold a grudge over. But it puzzles me that someone would take an antagonistic approach rather than a more temperate one. I've met plenty of people whose work overlaps with mine, but usually after half an hour of freaking out, I realize that we're not really doing the same thing, and we're certainly not in competition. In a best-case scenario, we're working in effective, if not literal, collaboration. I want to keep on good terms with those people.

And even when I think another critic is totally wrong, the stakes of that wrongness just aren't that high: we're not talking about getting a digit wrong on the nuclear codes. Generally, even if I disagree about a conclusion or a method, there's still interesting research or local observations I can praise and build on--or at a minimum I can say that the other person's work has drawn attention to a topic that I also believe deserves attention. And because our scholarly world is small and none of us is getting fame or glory out of doing this work, we learn to disagree in ways that preserve friendly, or at least cordial, social relations. (A swift "So-and-so's fine article on X nevertheless leaves Y startlingly unaddressed" is typical of the way this game gets played.)

So who knows what this is about. But it's a strange feeling, being someone else's straw man.

Roads not taken

Although I'm a hopeless looker-backward and easily prone to nostalgia, I'm not much one for regret. Sure, I might regret that I said X or Y and hurt someone's feeling--I do regret that kind of thing, rather often--but I've never regretted a life choice and rarely even dwell on the alternate paths that once seemed open.

Lately, there have been a few exceptions.

1.

Earlier this winter I spent a weekend working with a colleague in a city and a state I'd never visited. At some point over the weekend I remembered--suddenly, and with force--that I'd applied to the law school at the neighboring university. In fact, I was accepted, and even offered a scholarship to do a combined J.D. and M.A. in English. Both the law school and the English department are terrific, and at some point the joint degree had seemed like an elegant solution: I could continue my literary studies while also doing something more practical.

But it also hadn't felt like a real place to me. I'd thought that I could see myself in law school--I had other friends at other programs--but I hadn't gotten into the three or four more prestigious and more proximate programs I'd applied to. An M.A. at my alma mater, though; that I could visualize. And I figured law school would still be waiting if I wanted it. (And as it turns out, I didn't.)

I've never forgotten that I applied to law school, but I tend to think of my applications as a bit of unserious casting about: the kind of thing you do when you're twenty-three and don't have any better ideas. Being in the actual city of that actual university reminded me that I really might have gone. I usually forget the phone conversations I had with current students tasked with recruiting me, or the time spent debating the pros and cons with friends and family. Had I made a different choice (I thought, as we drove around), I could have had a whole relationship with this city, and a whole set of memories and friendships connected to it and the surrounding landscape. I could, even now, be a lawyer.

Or an ex-lawyer.

2.

A university where I was once a finalist for a job has been going through a convulsive and seemingly unending series of scandals. My on-campus interview had been a mixed experience: it was clear that the institution was unhealthy and that the faculty felt alternately besieged and depressed, but everyone in the English department was lovely and the location was deeply attractive. I was trepidatious, but I would have taken the job.

I didn't get it, though. In mid-March I got an unexpected call from RU, which had not interviewed me at MLA, inviting me to do a phone interview, which was followed by a fly-out. RU was such a great fit that for years I'd been grateful I didn't get that earlier job. . . but again, it's not something I've spent much time thinking about.

The recent scandal, though, has made me feel just how near a miss that was. The stories in the press have featured shots of the campus, which have conjured up vivid sensory memories of walking around on a blustery January day, eating in the student union, and being escorted back and forth to interviews. None of the faculty being quoted are people I met, but reading their words made the names of those I did meet pop back into my head. And I saw anew how hangdog or anhedonic they seemed when discussing the place.

At the time, I'd figured I could write my way out if I wasn't happy. But knowing what I know now about my professional savvy in my first few years on the tenure track (and what I know about the job market), I'm skeptical that I would have.

After all, the person they hired instead of me is still there.

*

Maybe thinking about alternate paths is something one does more as one gets older, but it's also striking that neither of these is a positive vision, or even a misty "oh, what might have been!" Each is, to a different degree, a "holy shit! thank God I didn't do THAT."

And in neither case is the near-miss something on which I can congratulate myself: I just couldn't see myself at that law school, so I went with what felt like the easier option; I had a bad feeling about that job, but the decision not to take it wasn't mine.

Maybe that, too, is a sign of middle age: the grateful but somewhat abashed realization that dumb luck accounts for as much of our lives as reasoned decisions.

Nothing perishes

So maybe the first thing to say about turning 40 is that I got a tattoo.

Not, like, across my forehead--but not tiny and not in a super-discreet location: capable of being concealed by professional wear (and in my currently northerly clime for up to seven months of the year regardless of what I'm wearing), but otherwise pretty visible. That was kind of the point.

I didn't get the tattoo for my fortieth, exactly; I'd been contemplating it for more than a year and my birthday just provided a convenient milestone. Still, getting a tattoo at all, and getting this one in particular, is intimately connected to my sense of aging and my desire to keep faith with my past selves as I move on to whatever I do move on to.

Anyone who's been reading this blog for any length of time will recognize that making sense of the past and unraveling the relationship between history and identity--whether personal or collective--is my only real interest, the thing that drives pretty much everything I do; indeed, twenty-five years' worth of journals and letters show that this is far from a recent obsession. (If I'm constant in anything, it may be in my search for continuity and my fear of finding it wanting.)

So I guess my tattoo is another reminder of who I am and what I value, a way of both staking myself to a moment in time and acknowledging the unknown. I'm not afraid to see the image change as my body also changes.

That, too, is kind of the point.

Watch this space

In theory I have a million things to say about the liminal moment in which I find myself: 40th birthday just past, a variety of 10-year anniversaries on the horizon, and a big professional move in the works. I'm busy enough and happy enough, and I've even had the time to write. It's just that my brain feels like it's gone silent.

Ordinarily, I move through life talking to myself. In the shower, I'll go into a spiel about a text I'm teaching. On my drive to work, I'll start composing a blog post. Sitting in my office, I'll hold an imaginary conversation with a friend. At the gym, I'll summarize, under my breath, an article I just read, as if talking to a colleague or a hiring committee. It's not about anxiety. My brain is busy, always, with hypothetical Facebook and Twitter posts, emails to friends, arguments with people I no longer speak to, tricky bits of scholarly prose, descriptions of what I did last weekend. In a very real way, I don't experience my life except through language.

But lately that chatter isn't there. I'm still writing to-do lists and lesson plans, taking notes toward my next book, and cursing aloud when someone cuts me off in the parking lot. But there's not the usual verbal processing of whatever I'm thinking and feeling. I'm not bored or impatient, but it's very. . . quiet. I have the sense that I'm waiting for something: a reply from the oracle, a transmission from outer space; something.

Until then, though, it may be as quiet around here as it is in my head.

Writing when no one's reading

So about those journals. The first and most necessary surprise--necessary in the sense of allowing me to keep reading the damn things--is that they weren't nearly as cringe-inducing as I'd feared.

To be sure, there are lots of things I'm glad to have grown out of: endless fretting and insecurity, for one, and a species of boy-craziness I'd mostly forgotten about. I remembered mooning after various guys and obsessing over ones who didn't work out, but I did not remember commenting on the attractiveness of just about every man I met, or how many crushes-from-afar I apparently had. (Who's this cute Art & Architecture student I mention a dozen times? Or that barista I kept running into? Or the guy a friend dubbed "Taller Tom Cruise"? Not a clue.) I also forgot how sexually frank my journals were. Notional future children, I'm sorry for grossing you out.

But although I often wanted to tell Younger Flavia "snap out of it!" or "honey, he is not into you," that phase of my life is far enough away that I can regard my youthful silliness with more tolerance than I probably could have even five years ago.

What most interests me is the rich social world these journals conjure up. I'd forgotten just how enmeshed my life was with those of my friends--including friends who lived hundreds of miles away. My journals are full of references to two-hour phone calls or lengthy email exchanges or weekend visits, and I summarize in newsy detail all my friends' goings-ons: what they liked and hated about their jobs, their roommates, their significant others. I talk about which movies I saw with whom and what we said afterwards, and where we went and who we met up with--and why I really can't stand so-and-so's boyfriend. Young Flavia is often very funny, and good at characterizing people through a single quotation or brief anecdote that recalls them perfectly.

It's sad, in a way, how thoroughly that world has disappeared. In the endless catalogue I give of dance clubs and dive bars, coffee shops and restaurants, at least half are gone and another quarter I can't visualize or place geographically. More importantly, though I still have most of the friends I had then, we now have partners and kids and busy lives; I'm lucky to see or talk to many of them two or three times a year. Here they all are, though, living on the page not only in summary and paraphrase, but often in their own words: their insights, jokes and apt turns of phrase.

I'm also struck by how seriously my journals take the task of figuring myself out. Amidst all the mooning and insecurity, there's a lot of self-inquiry: why do I feel this way? What does this mean? Would I be happier doing something differently? I quote the things my friends say about me, turning over their assessments and agreeing or disagreeing, wondering if they're right. And I refer back, continually, to events that happened years earlier, sometimes consulting prior journals for reference.

Reading through several years at once makes growth more evident. Young Flavia's oscillations between madcap enthusiasm and weepy doubt become less extreme, and she's more inclined to be generous to others. I note with appreciation the friends who don't let me avoid difficult subjects or who make me admit when I'm mad at them--and I comment with pleasure when I succeed in raising a touchy issue myself.

There's a lot to miss about what I find in those journals. The close friendships and the apparently boundless free time are the most obvious, but I'm realizing that I also miss keeping a journal. Those notebooks didn't record everything, and towards the end they're especially spotty. But I'm sad, now, that the subsequent ten years have no comparable record. Reading about my early-grad-school lunacy reminded me of parts of the crushing grief of my big break-up seven years ago--but I have no record of the latter.

Naturally, I record bits and pieces of my life on social media and on this blog, and it has always been my goal to keep my blogging emotionally honest--not to paper over disappointments, anger, and frustration--but there's a lot that I can't say (whether due to professional discretion, personal discretion, or FERPA). For that matter, there's a lot I don't want to say in this format.

Indeed, in the era of social media and "don't say it if you don't want someone to see it," those journals feel vaguely illicit. I found myself grimacing occasionally at just how much I revealed about others' lives: their words, their actions, and my own occasionally nasty gossip or speculation. Though these notebooks exist in only a single hard copy, which no one else has access to, I've so internalized a sense of what I can't write about electronically that I almost can't believe I wrote such things at all.

I value my public writing, and I have no desire for it to be more rawly confessional. But I think I'm going to try keeping a journal again. The entries won't be as epic or as searching as they used to be, I'm sure--but I'm curious what I might have to say to myself when no one else is listening.

In a fight to the death, my odds may not be good

Last week I finally got The Article of Eternal Return off my desk and back to the journal that had it most recently. That means that pretty much the only writing I got done this summer was an R&R of an essay that was already pretty polished--and perhaps 2/3 of which I left intact. I did some reorganization and made some major changes to the conceptual framework, but nothing that should have taken me two months.

Worse, I did nothing but work on that essay. I mean, sure: I went to the gym, and I ate and I slept and I faffed around on the internet. Maybe once a week I saw a friend or went to a movie. But I let the yard turn into a jungle and I put off errands for weeks at a time (taking 60 minutes to go to Target was way too much of a time commitment!); even running a load of laundry felt like an imposition.

There are always binge weeks here and there in the life of a project where I eat, drink, and dream whatever I'm working on--but usually they're pleasurable periods of mania when everything seems to be going right and all I want to be doing is writing. It doesn't feel grindingly painful. And it doesn't last for six weeks straight.

This tells me it was probably a mistake. Not the actual work I did, but my decision to gut it out until it was done. I'm in a dark psychological space with this piece, and probably the sane thing would have been to take a break, set it aside, and work on something I felt invigorated by and that might give me some renewed confidence. (In other words: what my advisor made me do with my first chapter.) But I don't know how to do that. I only know how to bite down hard, hold on, and not let go.

The world cannot support that many ballerinas

Today's NYT Home section features what I can only describe as the schadenfreudelicious story of an "academic of independent means" whose attempts to turn her Connecticut home into an arts retreat have run into trouble. Many of the problems are practical ones--the neighbors are protesting that her institute is a bad fit for a residential area; she hasn't yet come up with a way of marketing her program--but though there's a real story here, the "delusional dilettante" aspects are the juiciest.

Who is Michelle Slater, the thirty-nine-year-old founder of The Mayapple Center for the Arts and Humanitites? So glad you asked!

Home-schooled until the age of 14, when her mother, Euphemia Brock Slater, a Mayflower descendant, died of complications of rheumatic fever, Ms. Slater has been on the move ever since, accruing degrees and experiences in the manner of a Henry James heroine: boarding school at Interlochen, the fine arts academy in Michigan. . . undergraduate work at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and the University of Colorado. . . graduate work at Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins and the Sorbonne; and various grand tours through Europe, India, and the United States.

Slater has real academic credentials, though nothing grander than you'd find on the average vita for the average job applicant these days. In addition to playing the cello, she "has a doctorate in German and Romance languages, as well as two master's degrees, has written articles on Derrida, run study-abroad programs, been a Woodrow Wilson fellow and taught French."

More notable is the passion she's put into her home. A self-described "recovering perfectionist,"

[Slater] chose each stone in the multicolored slate roof [by] traveling to a quarry in Vermont to find just the right mix of yellow, purple, blue and black Welsh slate. For her front and back doors, she looked at French and Italian Renaissance motifs. . . Inspired by the interiors of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, her dining room has been hand-painted in "a quasi-Fabergé look," as she put it, with colors drawn from her Versace Russian Dream china pattern. . . . [On the grounds] she laid in a vegetable garden, an Amish chicken coop and a clutch of bee hives. She thought hard about the Transcendentalists: What would Emerson do?

Um, maybe not paint his dining room in a way that evoked either the Hermitage or Versace? I'm also pretty sure that Emerson would not have designed a logo for his institute "inspired. . . by the color of [his] favorite Hermès scarf."

Though the article is most interested in Slater's biography and the work she's done on the estate, buried in the middle are a few more substantive paragraphs about how competitive and diverse the "artists' retreats" market is these days; some of Slater's problems come down to not doing enough research or hiring the right people to help her navigate her options. For instance, she lined up faculty to give seminars on various topics but gave less attention to participants. Slater imagines her program as appealing to scholars and artists, but it's hard to see what would be in it for them; from the way the program is described, it seems better geared toward artsy laypeople. In the end that's who she wound up with: unable to find enough artists willing to pay $1,200/week, she resorted to inviting friends and friends-of-friends in order to have some bodies populating the classes.

That, I think, is the real story: Slater is trying to build something for which there's no pre-existing market. Artists and scholars could surely use Slater's money and her enthusiasm (as could plenty of struggling humanities organizations), but they can't use it on her terms. She seems to want to run a salon or be an artistic impresario, and there's nothing wrong with that goal; bringing the right mix of people together to spark collaboration or conversation is a gift, and one that plenty of artists themselves lack. However, it isn't clear that Slater has that gift, or, more crucially, that she has those friends. Having the right network is more important than having money. With the right network, Slater could probably get something off the ground that would actually be useful to artists and scholars.

Running a salon doesn't take a lot of money. But it does require knowing people. No one comes to a dinner party where they don't know the host, at least by reputation--and that applies a hundred times over if you're expecting them to come for a week and to pay for the pleasure.



------
*Title courtesy of Mad Men's Marie Calvert: "not every little girl gets to do what she wants. The world could not support that many ballerinas."

High risk, high reward?

I haven't had much to blog about while consumed with article revisions (it took weeks, but I'm finally at the point where the work is interesting again), but two items from last Sunday's Times have been rattling about in my head for days.

The first is a piece from the Sunday Review that gained some traction on social media: "The Secret of Effective Motivation." It summarizes a study of more than 11,000 cadets at West Point that sought to determine what kind of motivation is most likely to lead to success--in this case, both in school and then over the course of a career as an Army officer. Unsurprisingly, the study found that internal motivation (doing something because you care about the thing itself) is much more likely to lead to external markers of success (better grades, a better job, a promotion, a raise) than "instrumental" motivation (doing something because you desire those external signifiers).

What is surprising is that the study found that strong instrumental motives are damaging to the likelihood of success even when they're accompanied by strong internal motives. Whereas you'd think that the two in combination would be the most effective spur to achievement, apparently that isn't true. Or (to put it in my own pejorative terms), if you sully the purity of your love for something by also desiring success, you've ruined your chance at it.

Now, I understand that this is a short, general-audience summary of the research in question, and I'm sure plenty got left out or had to be generalized. I'm also sure that there are differences across fields. But I'm left with a lot of questions: is the desire to earn a living or have a secure job "instrumental"? Is hoping to get tenure or move to a job with better pay or a better quality of life? Or is it only instrumental if you're focused on issues of status or prestige--on how something will make you look?

Just about anyone who's gotten a Ph.D. has to have been strongly internally motivated; you don't spend five to ten years writing a dissertation and foregoing other opportunities if you don't care intensely about your work. But most of us, absent a stable employment situation or a supportive academic community, would not keep doing our research. I wouldn't. Is the measure of whether your motivation is "internal" whether you'd keep doing something without external rewards?

When I look at my own motives, I find it surprisingly hard to tell which are internal and which are instrumental. Take this article that I'm revising for the third or fourth time now: on the one hand, I wouldn't be trying to incorporate my latest reviewer's suggestions if I didn't genuinely think they were smart, compatible with my own goals, and likely to make an already strong article even stronger. I could just take the thing elsewhere. Indeed, I could have the thing on my C.V. this second if I were to sign the contract sitting not three feet from me to have the essay included in an edited collection. (Long story, but the editors of the collection know the score.)

On the other hand, I'd be lying if I said I was continuing to work on this fucker purely because I wanted what's best for my argument. I also want this journal, or one of its caliber, on my C.V.

*

The second item I've been turning over in my head also deals with ambition and motivation. It's just a few brief lines from an article on Richard Linklater's new movie, Boyhood, which he shot over the course of twelve years, following its young star as he grew up in real time. The article talks about the unusual career choices that both Linklater and Ethan Hawke (another of the movie's leads) have made, and the odd coincidence that both men had fathers who worked as risk assessors for insurance companies.

According to Hawke, his dad tried to talk him out of an acting career based on the low statistical probability of success:

"It wasn't as if he didn't think I was talented or something," Mr. Hawke said. "He's just an actuary, and the actuarial tables were not good. I remember him saying the statistical chances of being an Eastwood were just so small."

But Mr. Hawke studied the careers of actors he admired and deduced that they had taken big risks, not avoided them. "My dad and I talked about how if the goal is a lifelong profession in the performing arts, then the actuarial tables of not taking chances are actually much worse."

This, I love. It's not really any more comforting than the other article, but it's framed in a more helpful way. When you're in a risky profession--as academics are, at least in grad school and early in their careers--you have a better likelihood of success if you're doing work you really care about, and if you're doing it boldly and the way you believe it needs to be done.

I hope that's what I'm doing with this article. I hope the reason it's getting more pushback than anything I've written is that it's interesting and important work--and I hope it's worth the cost of waiting to see it in a better venue (if and when it appears in one).

But of course I don't know that to be true. I might actually be wasting my time doing something "safe" (endlessly revising this one piece rather than going on to new things) while imagining myself as boldly taking risks.

Unfortunately, the actuarial tables have nothing to say about that.

Two demented people

Seen around Facebook: "How We End up Marrying the Wrong People." I have some quibbles with the title--the piece is as much about how relationships work as why they don't--and I find its use of the first-person plural both wearying and a little odd, especially given its lack of a byline.* Nevertheless, it speaks to a lot of things I believe about relationships.

Here's a taste:

All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We're distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature. . . . A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren't many of these on the planet), it's one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening conscious accommodation between their relative insanities.

Or as one of the smartest observers of relationships I know once said, "The choice of a partner is the choice of which incompatibilities you're willing to live with for the rest of your life."**

We believe we seek happiness in love, but it's not quite as simple. What at times it seems we actually seek is familiarity.

Human beings aren't good at sorting signal from noise, or identifying which part of a person or relationship is triggering which reaction. I may respond positively to a relationship that feels comfortingly like an old one, without seeing what else is wrapped up in that feeling--or I may react negatively to someone who reminds me of someone else, even if the thing triggering that feeling is unrelated to whatever bad experience I previously had.

We imagine that marriage is a guarantor of the happiness we're enjoying with someone. It will make permanent what might otherwise be fleeting. It will help us to bottle our joy. . . . [But] getting married has no power to keep a relationship at this beautiful stage. . . .In fact, marriage will decisively move the relationship on to another, very different moment: to a suburban house, a long commute, two small children. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.

I've got nothing to add to that one except to say that I don't see as much of this as I used to--which is to say, I know fewer catastrophically mismatched couples and fewer people who rush impulsively into long-term commitments. I don't love each and every partner of my each and every friend--occasionally I even prefer one of their exes--but most the people I know are now in relationships that work, where their partnership feels well-balanced. Often this is because the bad matches have broken up or gotten divorced, but in other cases they've gone through years of growth, with or without therapy.

Most people get smarter about relationships as they age, learn more about themselves, and learn more about other people. Or put another way: they get better at recognizing their own dementedness, and seeking out a complementary form of crazy in someone else.


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*Once I clicked on the website I realized I'd dimly heard of the organization behind it, The School of Life (which I'm pretty sure is pronounced The School of Life).

**I think this is a paraphrase of something in John Gottman's outstanding, if cheesily titled, Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.

Pardoner syndrome

Academics and other high-achievers are familiar with "imposter syndrome": the conviction that one doesn't really deserve to be where one is (and sooner or later will be found out). A lot has been written about this phenomenon and its problems--and occasionally its unexpected upsides. Imposter syndrome may keep someone from fully recognizing her own strengths, acting authoritatively, or taking risks. On the other hand, it can sometimes act as a spur to excellence (inspiring her to become the person others believe she already is) or serve as a healthy check on arrogance.

I'm interested, though, in the more vicious sibling of imposter syndrome, which I call "pardoner syndrome." A long time ago, I had a professor whose reading of Chaucer's Pardoner stuck with me. The Pardoner, of course, is the guy who sells pardons--years off your time in purgatory--and other weird miracles associated with the religious relics he carries around with him. In the course of his prologue and tale, Chaucer's Pardoner tells all the other pilgrims what a stupendous charlatan he is and how he goes from town to town, fooling the rubes with his fake relics (pigs' bones instead of saints' bones; a magic mitten) and sermons that prick their guilty consciences until they fill his purse with gold.

It's a mesmerizing performance. Then, at the end of it all, the Pardoner invites his fellow pilgrims to come up and buy his pardons and kiss his relics. The outraged Host tells the Pardoner he's gonna make him kiss his relics (if you know what I mean!), and is only barely prevented from beating the Pardoner up.

A question readers often ask is, why the fuck does the Pardoner do this? Why, after letting his audience in on all his tricks, does he then treat them like just another bunch of dupes?

My Chaucer professor argued that the Pardoner is in the theological condition of despair--he knows the way to salvation but believes he's too wicked for God to forgive--and that although he's contemptuous of his listeners, his whole performance is one of self-loathing. On some level, he wants his audience to see through him. If he can fool them, great: he'll feel briefly superior and briefly better about himself (and he'll keep raking in the cash). But what he's actually looking for is someone to thrash his ass.

I'm not a Chaucerian so I don't know if this is an eccentric reading or a common one, but it strikes me as having real psychological truth behind it. If it's not what Chaucer intended with his character, it's still a recognizable phenomenon in the world. If an imposter complex involves, let's say, believing that you were an admissions mistake at your fancy college and fearing being found out, a pardoner complex involves repressing the full knowledge of that fear and transforming it into arrogance. So maybe you half-ass all your schoolwork and act like a dick to your peers and professors, as if daring them to call your bluff and fail you (as you secretly believe you deserve).

The pardoner is someone who half buys his own bullshit--and who desperately needs for others to buy it--but who's just barely holding things together. Rather than doing something to help compensate for his anxieties and insecurities, he decompensates by underpreparing, being a jerk, picking fights, as if to force his own worst outcome. We talk about criminals who "want" to get caught, for example, or certain emotionally abusive partners whose own self-loathing means they're both desperate for love and contemptuous of anyone who thinks they deserve it.

I'm not sure I've ever seen pardoner syndrome in action in the workplace, though I'm sure it exists. Actual frauds and con men are probably more often sociopaths than victims of pardoner syndrome (and from the outside it can be hard to tell the difference between pardoner syndrome and blazingly clueless overconfidence), but there must be people who, for example, go up for a promotion with an embarrassing lack of credentials, or give a major presentation before a client while woefully underprepared, who fall into the category of half-seeking their own comeuppance.

No one has the advisor relationship they want

Last weekend I was hanging out with some other recently-tenured friends when the conversation turned to grad school and our relationships with our respective dissertation directors. We're all in different fields, went through different programs, and the nature of our advisor relationships were also quite different. But the conversation made me think, not for the first time, that dissertation directors trail only one's family of origin and certain romantic partners in their emotional and psychological impact. And as in those cases, an advisor's importance has less to do with what they actually do or don't do (i.e., whether they're objectively cruel, thoughtless, or neglectful) than with the fact that they're intimately involved in our lives at a crucial and difficult stage.

At this distance, I feel confident in saying that no one has the relationship she wants with her advisor while a grad student, just as virtually no one has the relationship she wants with her parents while a teenager; the problem is that you're not yet the person you want to be--whoever that is--and you're radically dependent on someone else. This complicates even the best relationships.

But here's the thing: unlike one's parents, the only purpose of an advisor is to get you to the point where you don't need him or her--where you know, experientially, that you can write a persuasive chapter, a publishable article, a dissertation, a book. And any advisor who helps you get there is a good advisor.

Now, don't get me wrong: there are certainly better and worse advisor relationships. Some are objectively bad (an advisor who doesn't read your work, belittles it, steals your ideas, makes sexual advances) and some are just bad-for-the-individual (a personality mismatch). And a bad relationship can do real damage. But few advisor relationships are so good that the advisee is never anxious, embarrassed, playing the suppliant, or terrified of letting his or her advisor down. And everyone has to learn, sooner or later, to trust herself and her own intuition, to find other mentors and collaborators, to do work without the (literal or figurative) voice of her advisor in her ear.

Accordingly, there are "good" advisor relationships that don't serve the advisee well: a close relationship isn't helpful if you depend too much, or for too long, on your advisor's advice or approval.

These days, I'm happy with where my relationship with my advisor is at, and I don't think much about its past. But if there's a bigger lesson here, it's that one can't escape the need for external sources of approval, especially in one's early years (as a child, as a scholar), and it's normal to cathect on those individuals or imbue those relationships with all kinds of magical thinking. But one is happier the more internally-motivated one becomes. Mostly, this just comes with time. But it's never too early or too late to try to separate one's sense of self from extrinsic sources.

Gimmicks and gambits and bits

On the last day of classes I ran into one of my colleagues and we chatted about how things were winding down. He talked about the research presentations his students had done, and then he mentioned a particular student by name.

"You've had her before, right?"

Yes, I said, in three classes: two last semester and one this semester.

"I thought so. She's absorbed some of your teaching persona."

Now, it's one thing to know that one has a teaching persona and to be occasionally aware of dialing it up or down or modulating it for a given circumstance; it's another to think of it as something readily recognizable by others and available for appropriation.

But of course we've all constructed our teaching (and our paper-delivering and maybe even our networking-at-the-conference-bar) selves from somewhere, and usually from many somewheres: just as we pick up bits of knowledge and pedagogical tricks from our own teachers and colleagues, so do we pick up ways of embodying authority and collaboration or whatever else we do in the classroom. We choose the techniques and the modes that work with our own personalities and values, and we make them our own--but probably relatively few of us think we invented our teaching selves wholly from scratch.

As for me, I can't itemize all the parts of my teaching persona, and I'm sure I've been influenced by people I'd never suspect and in ways I don't recognize. But two of my college professors I can immediately point to as foundational.

Both of them were literature scholars, and both were young or young-seeming, though they were at different points in their careers and one was male and one was female. What they had in common, in addition to their youth, was a wacky, irreverent, and colloquial way of talking about the difficult texts they taught. I never doubted the ferocious intelligence of either, but they had a warm enthusiasm for the material that conveyed how much fun all this geeky arcana was to them. Both had a habit of paraphrasing or summarizing in hilarious shorthand ways (some of which I have preserved in notebooks or book margins to this day). And both dressed hyper-professionally, even extravagantly, perhaps to compensate for their youth and informality.

And, uh, that's me. I mean, I'm not either of those professors--not as a scholar and not as a personality. Probably no one who knew either of them and who knows me would recognize anything other than the vaguest of similarities. But I see it. The high-low approach that I associate with both professors is pretty central to my own self-presentation in the classroom, in part because it's what made me feel able to be a scholar, and to overcome my own insecurities and self-doubts. (The combination of dressing the fuck up and being relentlessly self-mocking means you can get away with a lot.)

I'm sure both those professors would be weirded out, were they to know how influential I feel their examples were for me; I'm a little weirded out to hear that one of my own students has apparently adopted some of the same mannerisms from me that I feel I learned from them. But I suppose it's a tribute, all around.

*

Do you have professors (or colleagues) whose personae you've adopted or adapted? And if so, what made the fit feel right?

Who you are is what you do--but what you do can change

My corner of the internet has been full of justified outrage at the sympathetic slant of much news coverage of the convictions in the Steubenville rape case. CNN, among others, chose to dwell on the emotional devastation of the two star football players--the rapists--and the dashing of their once-promising futures. I share the outrage. Whatever errors their victim may have made, they were errors merely in judgment; none of her errors involved treating another human being as an object, as a disposable toy for pleasure and amusement. Any coverage of the case that downplays the wrongs done to her while inviting our sympathies for the perpetrators is indefensible.

But this is not to say there's no place for sympathy for the perpetrators.

Let me be clear: they deserve their convictions, and whatever follows from those convictions--including never playing football again, not getting into the colleges of their choice, being registered sex offenders, and having this case turn up for the rest of their lives whenever someone Googles them. The perpetrators' apparent remorse and tearful apologies don't absolve them of their crime or entitle them to forgiveness--either the victim's or the public's.

However, although they did a monstrous thing, that doesn't mean they are, in some absolute or final way, monstrous people. At the same time, hand-wringing over the perpetrators' lost "potential" is not the way to support them or emphasize their humanity. Focusing on what good boys they are doesn't allow us to acknowledge, to really acknowledge, that someone can be a good person and still do something terrible. And it also doesn't provide a path toward repentance and growth.

As a culture, we're obsessed with the idea that we have some kind of core, essential nature--and usually that nature is good. And when we (or those we like) do something bad, we're unable to assimilate that information. I'm not really a bad person! Or, okay. I did that one bad thing. But I'm really sorry! And can't you tell that I'm actually a good person? (And if the answer is no, it's the other person who's victimizing us by denying our essentially good nature and virtuous intentions.)

We see this all the time in discussions of racism or sexism (and I've even talked about it in connection with plagiarism): a person knows, deep down, that he couldn't be racist. Therefore, it's impossible that he said or did something racist. And how dare you call him that offensive slur, racist? The perpetrators and their supporters can't imagine them as "rapists," and--as I written before--I understand why. The term suggests an unchanging state, a psychological disorder, a permanent condition.

If you rape someone, you are a rapist. But that need not be your primary identity.

So the adults in Steubenville who feel so sympathetic for the perpetrators are not helping them by telling them what good guys they are--much less how they've been wronged by the system, or how their only mistake was circulating the story and images via text message and social media. Anyone who sees the perpetrators as good guys with potential needs to help them deliver on that potential by telling them, frankly, that they did a terrible thing and deserve to pay a penalty, but that they can become better people, that their story isn't over, that they can learn and grow and still contribute good to the world.

I don't know these kids. I know nothing about their potential or their essential nature. But neither does anyone else. It's what they do that matters.

Duking it in dark corners

I'm teaching the comedies and romances half of the Shakespeare sequence this semester, and one of the issues that this particular batch of students has found most fascinating is the number of rulers who assert control ineffectively or unrealistically, attempting to set limits to human emotions or behaviors that simply can't be legislated. Maybe it's the fact that it's a election year, but my students seem endlessly interested in characters like the King of Navarre in Love's Labour's Lost (who pledges himself and his friends to three years of fasting, study, and isolation from women); the King of France in All's Well that Ends Well (a well-meaning but simultaneously autocratic and impotent ruler who imagines himself as a maker and enforcer of marriages); and Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure (who, among other things, manipulates characters into excesses of grief, repentance, and forgiveness).

This pattern interests me, too, though I'm less compelled by the spectacle of bad leadership than by the way that Shakespeare dramatizes the failures of self-knowledge and the mania for control that often accompanies those failures. Frankly, it's an impulse that I recognize in myself. I'm not a "controlling" personality in the usual sense of that term, but I do have a hard time letting things lie. I want to fix everything, immediately, and that includes interpersonal relationships.

Indeed, I'd say that my greatest weakness is a belief in my own rectitude and rationality--the conviction that I understand my motives perfectly, that they're entirely justified by circumstances, and that any other interpretation of my actions is wrongheaded, misinformed, or rooted in some mysterious and inexplicable personal hostility. (This admission will, I realize, come as a total surprise to readers of this blog.) As I've gotten older, I've gotten better at recognizing and curbing this tendency, and I'll readily acknowledge that my narrative of a given set of events is only partial and subjective. Still, it remains difficult for me to accept that other people might have their own, very different interpretations of events that involve me--and that their interpretations, and whatever emotions result from those interpretations, aren't wrong.

Oddly enough, teaching has been helpful in training me away from my impulse to correct other people's experiences of the world. You might think that being in a position of structural power over my students would be a license for the worst forms of this behavior--forcing my views, ideas, and methods upon others--but in fact the structure of that relationship means it's easier to recognize my students as entirely other. They're my juniors; they're at an earlier stage in their processes of intellectual and self-discovery; and I've been teaching for long enough now that I know it's impossible to predict who they'll become and what changes they'll undergo. It can be mind-blowing how different a student can be in her senior year compared with her sophomore year.

So when a student doesn't understand or agree with something I'm saying, I listen. I take his ideas seriously, and explain my own. I lay out my best case... and then I let it lie. And when a student is angry with or seems to dislike me, I don't take it personally. I get that I may be misreading her, that she may be dealing with shit unrelated to me, and that, in any case, it's not my job to get her to like me. My students' emotional responses, like their intellectual responses, are their own.

It's harder to let things lie with the other people in my life--my friends, my family, my colleagues. But until I'm appointed Duke of Vienna and find an usually fetching friar's robe, I'm working on being more laid-back. And possibly cultivating more self-knowledge.

Small kindnesses

I spent a few hours last night in the emergency room at the local hospital. It turned out to be nothing--I'd had discomfort in my chest and neck and running down my left arm that I thought might be cardiac--but once I was there I had to stay there, for a long and boring while, getting tended to maybe once every twenty minutes. I had a book and I had PBS's pre-debate coverage on the t.v., but what I found most engaging was watching and listening to the hospital staff bustling back and forth.

Ever since I started this job, I've found myself enormously interested in the worklives of others whose jobs don't occur in a typical office environment--and especially those whose jobs involve continual, short-term interactions with the public: hairdressers, for example, see a different client every 30 or 60 minutes all day long, while clergymen and -women spend a certain amount of time "on stage"--but also have an endless series of individual meetings, many of them urgent, with couples getting married, families planning funerals, individuals in crisis. A clergyperson's worklife is probably most analogous to a professor's, in the sense that it involves roughly the same component parts (there's an administrative and office component, a performative component, a caring-profession component, and also a solitary and studious component), but I think of my hairdresser every time I schedule a day of student conferences and have to gather my energy up to make friendly chit-chat with each of fifteen successive students who walk through my door with a first draft of a paper.

I also try to remember, when I visit my hairdresser or meet with my priest--or buy stuff at the grocery store or take my car in for servicing--that although the other person's job may involve serving me, it's a dynamic relationship: I have a right to good service, but I'm the one entering their workplace; what I do there can make their workday more pleasurable or more exasperating.

So in that same spirit, I was interested in the ways the hospital staff interacted with each other and with me: the in-take nurse was brusque and impatient, putting me on the defensive and making me feel very small and stupid (why hadn't I called my doctor first? why would I think these symptoms could be cardiac?), but everyone else was warm and friendly and kind. I was handled by at least eight different people, not counting the front desk staff--three nurses, one physician's assistant, an EKG tech, two X-ray techs, two transport personnel (who wheeled me to and from the X-ray room)--and every single one introduced him or herself by name and job title, explained what they were doing, and made pleasant chit-chat in interstitial moments or as time allowed.

I came away very impressed with the hospital staff, not just their professionalism and training, but also all the intangibles that amount to bedside manner and putting a patient at ease. The X-ray techs were solicitous about my bare feet (which weren't cold, but they insisted on finding me socks) and had an amusing routine involving the questions they were required to ask me (said one, deadpan, in a G-man voice "we need to know. . . what you know"), and the transport personnel were cheerful and funny, joking with me about whether a hospital, in the name of public health, should even allow patients to watch the presidential debates.

Coming as this visit did just at the middle of the semester, when I'm emailing students about exam and paper grades and setting up appointments to calm anxieties and suggest strategies for improvement, it reminded me that small interactions matter a lot. The brusque nurse wasn't intending to be mean--maybe she'd had a bad day, and I'm sure she sees lots of hypochondriacs who panic and go to the ER for every little thing. But if she'd been typical of the hospital staff, I'd have left ashamed and reluctant ever to return, lest I be scolded for crying wolf. The other personnel were efficient and obviously very busy, but they listened when I talked, they smiled, and they treated me and my symptoms seriously. I left feeling reassured--and very pleased with my local healthcare community.

I need to remember this when a student drops by my office unannounced when I'm frantically prepping for class, or goes on and on about some irrelevant thing long after I've answered their questions and I have three other students lined up outside the door. Being brisk needn't mean being unkind. And we could all stand to work on our bedside manner.