If you have a few minutes, read this article about initiatives to prevent unplanned pregnancies among community college students.  If you don’t, here’s a summary: community colleges don’t have health centers, and often CCs serve populations that wouldn’t otherwise have access to birth control, for financial, logistical, or other reasons.  So, says this article, we need to get those kinds of services onto CC campuses in order to help young women prevent unplanned pregnancies and thus finish their CC degrees.  Long story short: info and services related to pregnancy prevention shouldn’t be limited to high schools.

Ok, so.  I’m kind of surprised by my reaction to this.  Because, on the one hand, yes, unwanted unplanned pregnancies suck ass, and if you find yourself in that situation, it’s important to have access to birth control, emergency contraception, or abortion.

However.

Doesn’t this stink a little bit of classism to y’all? I’m not talking about the issue itself, I’m talking about the way the issue is treated in the article.  The assertion is that unplanned pregnancies occur in high rates among single women in their 20s, and that these pregnancies are probably unwanted, and if they are wanted, they shouldn’t be.

Right? Is that how it sounds? Or am I getting all weird and fundamentalist-y?

I guess I’m bothered by that core assumption that unplanned pregnancy = unwanted pregnancy. I’m also bothered by the notion that a pregnancy must be either wanted 100% or unwanted 100%.  Can I get a little nuance up in here?  Because I hate to break it to the patriarchy, but a good lot of us hover around the 50-90% mark most of the time.  When I found out I was pregnant, I freaked the hell out.  I didn’t actively consider abortion, but I did think, “Well, this isn’t the best time for this, and I’m not sure I can handle this.” Am I glad I’ve got a little dude sleeping on my belly right now?  Indeed.  But that doesn’t mean I was dreaming of onesies and playgroups from day one.*

So I guess what bugs me is this: my pregnancy was unplanned, but hey, that’s cool with my university because I’m 30 and married, and I’m in school but I’ve already got an M.A.  So finishing my degree isn’t that important to anyone but me and the fam.**  But if you’re, say, 21 and unmarried, all of the sudden folks have the right to judge the appropriateness of your pregnancy to their institution. NOT that people didn’t judge mine, and continue to judge it.  But those are individuals, not systems, doing the judging.  Big Difference.

Again, I’m not saying that these services SHOULDN’T be provided, because we all know that one thing this country definitely needs more of is cheap and convenient access to birth control. But by likening CCs to high schools, you’re saying that a 25 year old is as immature and incapable of making decisions as a 15 year old, and that’s just not true.  It’s troubling, too, that the people who want to help women gain access to birth control sound just as controlling and condescending as the people who want to take away our right to abortion.

Perhaps most of all I’m bothered by the emphasis on “retention rates,” which, again, would be cool if The Man were worried about the fact that these women want, and need, to get their degrees.  But what they’re really worried about is money, and the fact that pregnant student = drop out = less money in the bank for the CC.  Show me a woman-centered approach to this topic (free day care, anyone?), and maybe we can talk.

*Let me just remind everyone that we actually thought we were going into this marriage with fertility problems, so on one level we were SUPER super happy to know that we could conceive.  But we obviously didn’t time it, because we didn’t think we had anything to time.  So it was a bit of a mindfuck of, hey, praise be! my uterus works!  But, um, did it have to work right now?  BUT! Don’t take it away, god-like entity who might punish me for not being thankful 24/7!  Yeah, because in addition to the whole “your baby might not have a chin! and you might need an abortion at 22 weeks!” thing, we didn’t think we’d be able to get pregnant without the help of Science. So when I freaked out about being pregnant I automatically assumed that Ye Gods would have their way with me because I didn’t leave cookies on the hearth in their honor or something.  And to a degree, I still freak out about that, which is why I’m always qualifying statements about the unplanniness of The Baby.

** They’re also spending more on me than they make, but that’s a whole other issue.

Yesterday I was making Jello (the industrial kind–is there any other?) for Wizard  because he’s been in a Jello mood lately. I feel it necessary to add that I have to cook anything involving boiling water (e.g. pasta) because his coordination is so off that making him do it himself would result in a trip to the emergency room.  No, really.  This isn’t one of those “oh, honey, let me do it!” scenarios.  I think I’ve mentioned here before that he’s one of those genius-y people who can’t tie his own shoes.  Yeah.  So that problem extends to things like pouring hot water into a bowl, tying anything into a knot, and standing on one foot.  It’s weird.

I’d think this was just some huge ruse to get me to do shit around the house, except that I’ve heard a neurologist tell him that his scores on a series of hours-long tests were so abnormal that something should be wrong, except that it wasn’t, and it was probably just the same wiring that helps him compute things reallyreallyreally fast, so go along your merry way, and by the way I hope you don’t want a pilot’s license because there’s no way in hell anyone would sign off on one of those.

He was sad about the pilot’s license thing, surprisingly, not so much because he wants one as that he doesn’t like feeling “differently abled.”  And I’m, like, dude, I hate to break it to you, but you are the most differently-abled person I know, in all the senses of different one might imagine.

But anyway. Jello.

It’s pretty simple, that jello.  Powder in bowl, plus a cup of boiling water, followed by two minutes of stirring, followed by a cup of cold water and refrigeration.  If you came here looking for jello directions, there you go.  But it struck me last night that my mother always screwed up jello.  Either it got thick on top, or all the powder was clumped at the bottom, or something.  And as a kid, it annoyed the crap out me.  Who screws up jello?  Why does this taste so bad?  Why is it either watered down or gritty or both?

And then last night, I figured it out  While raising two kids, working full-time, keeping a house, and doing all the other crap you have to do to function as a human in the U.S., my mother didn’t have two spare minutes to stand there stirring the water into the powder. She just dumped it all together, shoved it in the fridge, and ran off to supervise sentence diagramming, or iron clothes, or grade math tests, or whatever.

It’s facebook, actually, that’s making me think more about time and how we use it, as people and as parents.  My facebook is divided rather unevenly into college/grad school friends (lots) and women I knew in high school who had two or three kids and are now trying to finish their college degrees (a few). At this time of year, you see a lot of status messages by grad students complaining about staying up all night, and not having a minute to do anything but write, and the rest of the hell that is a full schedule of course papers and teaching and grading at the end of the semester. I used to complain about those things too.  But now that I’m trying to write a dissertation and co-run a tutoring lab and take care of The Baby and sometimes even be a partner to a person who has yet to submit his dissertation revisions because he’s busy working full-time so the rest of us don’t starve AND because he takes the baby from me the minute he gets home so I have some time to work…(RUN ON!!!)…sometimes it’s all I can do not to post something snarky, like, hey y’all, why don’t you bring a thermos of coffee on over to my house and spend your overnight reading hours watching my baby, who tends to like chilling in his exersaucer at 3 in the AM?

That is, until I read the statuses of my old high school crew, whose lives involve getting three kids to three different places and doing  part-time work to supplement their husbands’ two or three jobs, all while busting ass to meet the demands of college coursework that will hopefully  score them a decent job in five years or so.

What am I trying to say here?  That it’s all relative, I guess?  That I thought it was tough being a student until I was a student-mother?  That any and all sets of circumstances are often difficult?  That I whine too much? That my friends whine too much? That my friends think I whine too much?  That my friends don’t want to whine to me because they feel guilty, even though I remain a good listener and am not nearly as judgmental in real life as I appear in this blog?

Maybe I’ll just say big ups to those of us trying to live in the mind and in the world at the same time, whatever that may mean. And good luck with finals.  And try to resist the urge to fail the kids whose full schedule of sleeping off their heavy drinking is the only thing preventing them from turning in their portfolios on time.

Tell me this: when did I turn into one of those people who considers college students to be consumers and sees her job as providing exceptional customer service?

Probably since I moved from the classroom to administration. I used to grandstand about the life of the mind and goods and services and commodity culture and all the rest.  I used to think college was more than just an exchange of cash for degree.  But now? Now I’m working my ass off to make sure that there is a tutor for every tutee, and I’m not doing it because I’m concerned about their education.  No, I’m thinking about how if a student is turned away, that student will complain that s/he didn’t get what s/he wanted, which will in turn piss off the dean-ly people, which will in turn jeopardize our funding.  Our cash.  Our Gs.

I’ll tell you more about it later. Right now I’ve got a customer.

I wish my dissertation were still of feminist interest and import, because what I think (and subsequently blog) about often has to do with feminist-ish topics.  So what I’m saying is that this would still be a diss blog, sort of, if my diss were on something else, something more central to my everyday thinking.  Which it isn’t.  Which might explain why it’s languishing in a dark, wet corner.  I poke it with a broom every once in a while just to keep the rest of the world happy, but…ugh.  “Omelas” reference FAIL.

So anyway.

Long-time listeners might remember my childfree friend, CF.  More on her here.  Since having the baby (Dang, did I ever nickname him?  I’m sure I did, but I can’t remember with what.), CF and I have remained in better touch than I would have expected.  She has even been over to my house a few times, my house with its wipey smells and scads of toys and, um, infant inhabitant.  She didn’t hold him, and I didn’t offer, because I didn’t want her to feel obligated to do something with which she wasn’t comfortable.  I’m trying, you see, to be respectful of her beliefs.

So when am I going to learn that she isn’t respectful of mine?

Before I go further, I suppose I should acknowledge the fact that she’s a bit of a, oh, I dunno, blowhard?  What I mean is that she is of the Open Mouth Insert Foot School, and while she isn’t always happy about this and openly acknowledges it, she is what she is.  So while on many topics–race, sexuality, gender, lots of the big ones–she thinks before she speaks, there are some–kids–where she just doesn’t.  And the reason for this, I suspect, is that when it comes to race and gender, not only is she generally progressive in her attitudes, but she also cares about not coming off an asshole or otherwise hurting peoples’ feelings.  But when it comes to children, her beliefs, and her belief in her right to hold them, supersede all attempts she would otherwise make to consider her audience.

I’m starting to sound like what I want is for my friends to parrot back to me what I already believe.  Not so.  What I mean is this: say you  think women look terrible bald.  Sinead O’Connor?  Made you puke a little in your mouth back in the day.  Now, this is a personal preference you have every right to hold.  But you wouldn’t talk about it in front of a friend who just lost all her hair, right?  It’s not that you have to change what you believe, but you should think of other people sometimes.  Right?

No, really, right? Or am I completely wrong here?  Because it matters.

CF has recently taken up with a childless married couple whom I believe to be a replacement couple for Wizard and me.  And that’s cool, I guess, because the truth is that we aren’t who we were a few months ago, and we don’t really go out much, and when we do we don’t go out late, etc.  We have a baby.  Life changes.  So anyway, she’s all BFFing it with them now, doing the things we used to do, and she mentioned a remark that this couple made regarding disabled children.

It was disparaging, and I won’t repeat it here.  Basically, though, they were making fun of a political figure’s mentally challenged child.

And it wasn’t funny.  But.  It wasn’t like the worst thing you could ever imagine someone saying.  It definitely could have been worse.  In other words, it’s the sort of thing I normally would have let slide in polite conversation.  I would have gotten quiet, maybe, or changed the subject, but I wouldn’t have bluntly stated, “That’s not funny.”  Because let’s face it, when someone is laughing at something, and you stop the conversation and essentially indict their sense of humor…it’s awkward.

But that’s the thing:  I cared more about the wrongness of the comment than I did the awkwardness of pointing it out.  And it occurs to me that I am changing, become more conservative, perhaps, or maybe just more defensive.  Maybe I’m just growing old.  I’m not sure.  I worry sometimes that I’m becoming a cliche, or worse, an essentialist.   Example:  you know how you always hear how difficult it is to put away your baby’s first clothes?  Well, it IS.  It’s tough.  You squeeze them into a too-small onesie one more time before putting it away “for the next one,” and you find yourself thinking about the next one far too soon.  What’s strange, though, is that I didn’t expect I’d be the type of mother who lovingly petted a newborn-sized diaper.  Yet there you’ll find me, kneeling next to the under-crib storage.  I don’t know who this person is, this person who pines for size 0-3m and can’t let a bad joke slide.

Yet more often than not, I’ve not been “that mom.”  In the latest dust-up over definitions of the maternal and maternal normality, commentators have bandied back and forth the notion of “newborn qua narcotic,” the idea that one falls madly in love with a child, becomes obsessed with him in the same manner that an addict’s world narrows to the scope of the drug.  I’m sad to say that my baby never had that narcotic effect on me.  Would that he did.  I struggled (still struggle) with depression so deep I didn’t know it existed.  It was, like, 11th dimension depression.  I worried (no longer worry, happily) about the strength of my bond with my son.  We’re good now, but at first I’d have sworn he didn’t like me.  (Note: Much of this has to do with early breastfeeding and nutrition struggles which sadly didn’t end until the failed attempts at breastfeeding did.  So, yes, I’m THAT mom.  The one who says no to breastfeeding when it passes the point of hellish undoability.)  My point: “Moms” do things that I, Perpetua, don’t do.  And while on one hand I feel that this is right for me–that’s it’s right for me to explore motherhood outside its narrow definition in popular culture–on the other hand I find myself equally alarmed when I a) fit that definition to a letter (e.g. cry over clothes), and b) explode that definition completely (e.g. didn’t know what the hell my MIL was talking about when she asked, a day after baby was born, “how it feels to be in love”).

So when my childfree friend makes a remark that the pre-mom-me would have shrugged off, and I find myself, days later, still perturbed, I recognize that my worldview has shifted, that my child, and children in general, matter to me in a way they didn’t before.  And it bothers me sometimes that becoming a mother has changed me much, so quickly.  My academic feminist self wants to deny this power, not only because it leads to an essentialist mode of thinking and a glorification of the maternal that is more dangerous than useful, but also because, dammit, it’s not equally applicable in all cases.  That is, I am very much a traditional mother in some situations and not at all in others, and I think this range of mothering sensibility (for lack of a better word) exists in each of us as mothers and in all moms as a group.  Becoming a mother has changed me both radically and not at all.  Speaking as an academic feminist mother, then, I can say that it isn’t so much that we wish to deny the power of the maternal as we need to view it as one aspect of an infinite range of parenting experiences.  However, we fear that by accepting its power, we run the risk of allowing that version of motherhood to overtake all the others, likely because it is already so dominant in our culture.  Acknowledging the power of motherhood, then, requires an equal acknowledgement, and acceptance, of its lack.

I don’t know how to write a dissertation after having a baby.  I truly don’t.  But I titled the post as such to lure here those of my ilk, the other parents and caregivers of children who have dissertations to write and babies to raise.

See, every once in a while I google that phrase above, and I get some crap from the Berkeley something or other network (nice people, it seems, but they are different from me in that they have access to nannies who themselves have access to public transportation), and advertisement websites from dissertation coaches.  I’ve yet to find people blogging about the hell I’m currently in, the hell of my own making, which for me can be defined as wanting to lay on the couch and stare at the baby as he figures out how to use his fingers when what I really need to be doing is working.

I don’t think childrearing-while-dissertating is that different from any number of “personal issues”–caregiving, illness, divorce, dating, whatever–that chew up your brain.  Kids are just one branch on a particularly gnarled tree.  But.  It does have its particulars–difficult sleep schedules, absence of solid blocks of writing time, occasional guilt, whatever–and man do I wish there were more folks blogging about those particulars.  It’s hard enough to find dissertation bloggers as it is (hi, PauvrePlume!), let alone dissertating parents.

I know, though, that we’re out there.  So if you’ve come here looking for an answer re: living a human life while managing a (sometimes inhuman[e]) academic task, I don’t have it.  But you should stick around anyway.

I am so royally fucked, and I’m depressed about my state of affairs, which makes me want to crawl back into bed, which has necessitated the drinking of coffee, which I feel bad about because it’s bad for the baby.

So I have two major problems.

Problem One:  We are completely unprepared for the possible impending I-hope-so coming of this baby.  Possibly because of the major drama at the beginning of this pregnancy, but most likely because we are just neurotic people to begin with (and thank god you don’t have to pass psychological tests to get pregnant “naturally,” because Jesus Christ if we had to pass the kinds of tests people who want to adopt have to pass…I just don’t know.  And thinking about the implied injustices there…well, let’s just not think about them, either).  Right.  I really need to stop with the parentheticals following subordinate clause intros because how can I reasonably expect you to follow that train of thought? Let’s start over.

The just-so mix of reality and neurotic fantasies has made us afraid to buy baby stuff before the baby comes out alive.  So right now my parents are taking care of the clothing needs.  But as far as I can figure out, we can’t take him home (assuming there’s a him to begin with–see how I have to qualify every fucking sentence?  CRAZY) without a carseat, obviously, and he needs somewhere to sleep, too, seeing as he can’t exactly sleep 19th-C. style in a chest of drawers.

So.  We have to get over it and buy some stuff.  Because he is due to come out in two months.  And unless we get it together, if he does come out, in 20 years he’s going to probably report, while sitting with the sixth therapist who doesn’t know how to help him deal with his problems, a strange feeling of nakedness that manifests every time he hears someone open a drawer.

Problem Two:  I have no career prospects.  Last night, awake in bed at 3 AM, I realized why I can’t make progress on the dissertation.  And the reason is:  I no longer believe in what I’m doing.  The way I got through my MA thesis (which can’t compare to this kind of work, but it’s the closest I’ve got) was by believing, really believing, that the work itself deserved to be done.  That even if nothing came of it and it were never read (and it hasn’t been), the work itself was ethically necessary in the sense that “attention must be paid.”   Even if I were the only one paying that attention.

Somehow I lost that focus, and I think I lost it because I rushed through the proposal process without really making sure that what  I was proposing had that kind of personal relevance.  Because let’s face it, I’m getting a Ph.D. in English.  I cannot pretend that what I’m doing will ever be relevant to anyone but me.  And if I can’t make the argument for ethical necessity, then I’ve got to come up with something else, or I will be ABD for ever and ever amen.

P.S.:  Found this article on the untenability of Humanities Ph.D.s a little too late.  Do not read if you are in a “mental place” similar to what I’ve just described.

I admit to being cryptic in that last post, but not by design. It was more of a cryptic-by-exhaustion sort of thing.

I’m stuck in a state of perpetual in-between-ness. Looking back at the beginnings of this blog, I realized that when I started, on June 26th,I was just about a month away from finding out I was pregnant.  The irony is that I started this blog out of a desire for something new, but I had no idea what new would come to mean.  At the time, “new” just meant that I was transitioning from a year and a half of exam purgatory to the greater unknown of dissertation writing.  So it was fairly simple:  I was writing a dissertation blog.

Now I don’t know what I’m doing, though I admit that this has more to do with how I feel about my life than how I feel about this particular space in it.  It’s true that a blog, like a person, is never merely one thing.  My life would have made its way into my writing with or without the baby.  But I think there’s such a thing as a primary versus a secondary identity, and all of those pieces are in flux now.  Join me, won’t you, on a trip through my currently fracturing selves?

The Wife/Mother?/Woman Sort of Person: I am okay enough about my marriage to be able to admit that when I got married, I wasn’t thinking in terms of “forever.”  Don’t take that the wrong way.  I wasn’t treating it as an experiment or a starter situation.  But my mother gave me the same advice her mother gave her:  Try it out.  If it doesn’t work, you don’t have to stay married. That looks pretty bad when you type it out, I know, but it was the only sane way for me to enter into such a huge commitment.  If I looked at marriage as this complete and total identity shift from “Ms.” to “Mrs.” I wouldn’t have been able to do it, no matter how right a choice it was.  So when my co-workers (my helplessly heterosexual imperative co-workers) ask me, “What’s married life like?”, it’s true when I say that it’s no different from unmarried life.  I remain in a committed relationship to a person who is my best and sometimes only friend.  But I kept my name, I kept my bank account, I kept everything else the same.  I’m married because I don’t want to have a life with anyone else. But I’m still the same person I was when I was a girlfriend.

But being pregnant feels completely different.  Motherhood seems like the radical shift that some people find marriage to be, and it’s scary.  And it’s even scarier when I see my new face reflected in the people around me.  In my OB who says, “everything you do, you are doing for the both of you.”  In everyone who asks how the baby is doing before he’s even outside of my body, before he is more than just a part of me.   But me?  I’m still me.  I still feel like me, I still act like me.  But I don’t know who that person is going to be in a few months from now.  I know I’m supposed to embrace this shift, and I know I’m lucky to have the chance to do it.  But I’m afraid of losing myself, and more so of losing the self others see me to be, along the way.

The Daughter of Parents/The Parent of Son: The good and bad thing about graduate school is that you sometimes feel like the 5th-year senior who never moved on.  Sure, my breaks are working breaks, but I can’t deny the fact that this is like the fourth friday afternoon in a row that I’m not on the job.  And in that sense, I’m not quite a grown-up.  Some graduate students are better at this than I am; some of them are straight-up 9-to-5 adult-y old people.  But not me.  And nothing drove this point home like staying with my family for a week over break.  I slip right back into “kid mode.”  I don’t have to cook for myself!  I don’t have to wash the dishes!  Oh my, the floor, how miraculously clean it can be!  And I LOVE it.  I love being taken care of (and the pregnancy just makes my family all the more care-oriented.  Not that they weren’t before, but man, I’m not even allowed to carry the groceries?  Nice.).  I ended up depressing myself over the fact that this is the last winter break where I am the youngest at the table.  I have to grow up.  And I don’t like it.

It’s not like my family won’t still take care of me in many respects.  Hell, if I manage to go through with this crazy exclusive breastfeeding business, someone is going to have to feed me and remind me to shower.  Every two hours, these babies eat?  Seriously?  Holy good lord.  But I’m going to be somebody’s mother, and I can’t fuck it up (speaking of which, going to have to curb the foul language around the house as well).

The Student/The Slacker: No one at work/school knows yet.  And I don’t know what’s going to happen when they do find out.  Once again, I work in a very…family values sort of environment.  So I anticipate that I will shift from scholar to mother/scholar in an instant (and perhaps, to some, I’ll just be “the one with the kid”).  I have a problem with this for the regular reasons, of course:  it makes me squeamish to think that there will be people on both sides of the motherhood fence (the “kids come first” side and the “you can’t expect us to take you seriously now” side) who effectively demote me based on the contents of my uterus.  But there’s another, bigger problem looming.

I’m kind of lazy.  Maybe you noticed.  I’m not proud of this.  I wish I was as driven as I used to be.  But I’m just…not.  Blame it on burnout, burn it on life changes, blame it on whatever, when you come right down to it, I’m not casting myself as Superwoman.  I’m not going to be the department’s example of how you can do it all and finish on time.  I could be, if I pushed myself harder, but it’s unlikely that I’m going to push myself harder.  However, it was easier to be an academic slacker when I only had myself to blame.  Now I’ve got both a legitimate reason and a convenient excuse to keep pushing back that dissertation completion date.

Sometimes I think, “Hey, if I can make a baby, I can make a dissertation!” or “Look at me, I’ve got dual production value!”  But most of the time I just think, “Damn, if I can’t focus now, how am I going to focus on zero sleep with a stinky person clamped to my chest?”

***

So.  That’s what I was trying to say with the video below.  Somehow it summed up all of those conflicts:  parenthood, selfhood, slackerdom, childishness, responsibility.  Plus, it has puppets and fiddles, so you really can’t go wrong there.  Oh, and also:  I fessed up to a lot of not necessarily popular feelings here, on marriage, on mothering, on the whole bit.  So go easy on me, won’t you?  I am but a hapless, confused gamine-with-child, and I know not what I do.

Well, hi.  I’ve been gone so long that wordpress looks completely different.  When the hell did that happen?

I’ve been “away” from all things internet and diary-like because I’ve been dealing with some stuff.  Stuff of an identity crisis sort (which is far better than and certainly preferable to stuff of a “what the hell’s wrong with this fetus?” sort, but duh.  Of course it is.).

I don’t feel like explaining myself right now, so I’ll sum up my current state of “who am I?” with a video.  You should watch it.  If you dislike children’s programming and/or puppets, you might want to get directly to the song by fast-fowarding to the first minute.  If you really, like for real hate puppets (what’s wrong with you?  I understand primordial fear of those Punch and Judy wooden things, but otherwise, you might want to get that aversion checked out), search youtube for “dr. stringz” and Andrew Bird, which will give you a short version of the song without the muppety fluffiness.

As the whine-a-roo post below indicates, I’m immersed in 9/11 lit, and it’s depressing the hell out of me, so I’m not capable of posting something coherent right now (which is not to say I’ve ever posted something coherent, come to think of it). My dissertation is not exclusively on 9/11 texts (note to self: update wholly inaccurate “Dissertating” page), but a lot of what I’m reading right now will most likely make it into some of the chapters.  So in lieu of something interesting, here are some back-to-school observations:

1. This year’s cycle of freshmen?  Young’ns.  It’s amazing how different the groups look from year to year.  The class of 2012, despite being the first group of true 90s babies, has the puffy look of youth and abandonment about their wide eyes.  Last year’s group was more sophisticated, more “grown up.”  These kids are more my style: shlubby, pale, undone.  I hated the year I taught a MWF 8 AM full of freshmen who consistently came in full hair and makeup.  I looked a bit like their zoned out, dressed down drug dealer in comparison.
2. There’s an asshole in every class.  Part of my new, non-teaching fellowship requires me to make quick visits to classes to talk about writing (and yes, it’s even worse than it sounds).  So far I’ve only been doing this for a week, but initial studies show that, wow, everyone gets saddled with that one dickhead kid who, according to law and contract, you’re not allowed to throttle.  Or perhaps it’s one of those “nature abhors a vacuum” things, so that in each class an asshole is made, if not born, out of necessity.  At any rate, I used to think it was just me.  Or, just me and most of my friends.  But I’ve been to a bunch of classrooms this week:  tenured profs, well-respected and adored profs, even the class of the “cool guy” prof, and in each case there was some smirky, dicky, slimy jerkoff.  Gender analysis aside, they were all male students.  One might blame that special blend of “gotta get laid before Labor Day” hormones that accompanies all of them this first week.  All’s I knows is, NOT MY PROBLEM.  Not my students, not my smirks, not my grading, not my annoyance.  Woo.
3. College isn’t a mall, but you wouldn’t know it to see it.  I don’t know what’s going on on the rest of your campuses, but at my school (which needs a nickname, does it not?  It’s a religious-affiliated school, so let’s go with Jesus Loves U–JLU) they just keep buying up property and turning that property into…no, not classrooms, try again.  Parking?  No way.  What about a state of the art multimedia facility?  Stop kidding around.  No, they’re turning that shit into a strip mall, complete with restaurants and coffee places and a freakin’ Barnes and Noble (which, granted, is the way all school bookstores are headed, but still).  I don’t know if this is on the meal plan.  I don’t know if this is just supposed to assure anxious parents that their kids don’t have to leave campus for bad burgers and stationery.  But let’s just say that if the school REALLY wanted to be helpful, they’d have built a small, maybe even low-price supermarket so that the students wouldn’t have to travel several miles through The Scary Unwalkable Part of Urbanville just to get their poptarts.  But hey, that would have benefited the surrounding community, too, and we can’t have that.  So let’s just knock down the affordable (though admittedly decrepit) housing and put up a Starbucks.

So, that’s what I learned at school this week.  How about you?

Surprisingly, this delusion lasted me through an M.A. program and at least two years of a Ph.D.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about full disclosure (don’t worry, I’ll come back to the college thing). When I set out to write an anonymous blog, my assumption was that I would feel free to write about anything, from work problems to relationship rants to any of the other boring stuff of life people it necessary to record in electronic blips and send out into the webby ether. What I didn’t anticipate is that this process would not at all feel anonymous. I am still “me,” speaking as “me,” and “me” has trouble opening up. For example, I recently started seeing a therapist. I lasted longer than most other people in my program, all of whom are in various states of medicated bliss (which I have so far opted against, by the way). I could talk more about this experience, but to talk about it at all raises my Shylady Resistance, which says, variably, “Maybe the Internet doesn’t want to know about your crazy brain,” or, “If the Internet finds out about your crazy brain, maybe it won’t like you.” To which I reply, “I’ve shown the Internet pictures of pizza. Surely this cannot be more boring than that. And the Internet already doesn’t like me, as evidenced by the slowness of my database searches today.” But still. Strange, how anonymity ain’t what it used to be.

Whatever was it? Something odd about the internet age: circumstances of daily life change so quickly that you hardly have time to live one version of “innovation” before the next comes along to replace it. Similarly, our brains are being rewired, and not necessarily in good ways. Lest I start sounding more like an anti-tech fear monger than I am, I’ll end this digression. But my point: despite my proposed anonymity, I remain truer to my reserved self than I thought I would.

This brings us back to: college. And the things I want to say about it. Way back when, I talked about the perils of academic/blogging, including the things you don’t want potential employers to know about you. What anonymity allows me to say is this: the American university system is a scam, possibly a bigger scam than big oil, and certainly more unethical than big oil, big tobacco, and big mortgage lenders combined.

Phew. Still with me? Let me explain.

I used to think college is for everyone. Translation: everyone should go to college. Let’s parse this. I, me, educated and pro-education, used to think every person ought to attend university. Assumption: college turns you on, tunes you in, and in many ways makes you a better thinker, a better humanist, a better human. Thus: college should be accessible, affordable, and universal. Single parent? College should provide childcare. Working poor? College should work with you to accommodate schedules. Private schools would still exist, and tuition would be what it would be, but public university systems, of which the U.S. has many, should strive to provide an education to everyone, an education on par with that of expensive private schools. Which is to say, if Public University should suddenly find itself flooded with huddled masses yearning for Public Speaking and Intro to Calculus, P.U. should not limit its offerings or lower its standards.

Keep in mind: this is a fantasy, and I haven’t exactly thought through how states would fund such an enterprise. But the point is: I thought university education should be universalized, in the same way that secondary education was mandated in the early 20th century. My grandfather? Dropped out of school in the 8th grade. Mined coal. Died of black lung. Not Good. Such things might be preventable, or at least can be ameliorated, through education. Evidence my great-uncle, who stayed in school (as the youngest, the fam didn’t need his labor to support the household), went to college, worked a regular job, and died of oldness at the age of 97.

So. When you are me, and you go to a good public high school full of smart but poor kids, kids like you who live about a mile or so from the mines where all of our grandfathers worked themselves to death, kids who never make it to college and end up frustrated and perpetually poverty-stricken, you find yourself thinking, “Shit. There but for the grace…”. And then you think, “Surely there must be a solution for this.” And you think, “Education. The balm for all that ails.”

Until, that is, you start teaching college.

As this has gone on long enough, I’m going to pause and return later. If you found part one boring, rest assured that part two will scandalize and titillate. I swearz. (‘Cause it’s the part where I’m going to go on a tear about the evils of American universities).