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.

AKA, Somebody stop me before I unleash my pent-up fury on not just the MIL but my own parents as well.

All three of them are in the house.  In the livingroom. Right outside my door, the door behind which I’m supposed to finish at least another quarter of this fucking chapter before I send it off (days late) to my diss group.

I’d fare better if there were three elephants out there.  Or one ovulating monkey.  Or a clutch of finger-painting four-year-olds.  I could go on.  I’m not proud. Or tired.

Today’s barely suppressed scream is brought to you by: “Your mother came here to help with the baby, not clean your house.”

Um, yeah.  But see, I didn’t say clean the HOUSE.  I said it would be good if she could CLEAN THE BOTTLES.  Because I need to sit and work, and if I start in on household chores I’ll just keep going.  So yeah, it would be helpful if she washed the bottles while MIL plays with baby and Wizard goes to work and I go to write and my father, I don’t know, sits around watching Turner Classic Movies. It would be abundantly helpful.

But apparently it’s only okay–with my father–if my mother does something on her own; I’m not supposed to ask.  My mother, meanwhile, doesn’t care.  I could ask her to paint the ceiling and she’d do it.  She’s like that.  So I’m careful to not ask too much, because she’s naturally inclined to do too much.  I figure cleaning the bottles isn’t anywhere near too much. I see where my father’s (over)protective impulse comes from, but, really? Dude? How big of an asshole do you think I am?

A pretty big one, I guess, since what was once a diss blog is now a “Listen to me complain about my family, everyone!”

But it’s that or scream and throw shit, and that kind of stuff you can’t do around infants.  Dammit.

Question:  How many times can one (passive-aggressively) express one’s disagreement with the number of toys one’s grandson possesses via conversation with said grandson?

Answer:  I lost track.  But I’ll tell you what, the woman’s capacity for invention is endless.  Every game with the baby is a game that starts with “You don’t need a _____ when you can use a ________!”  Example:  “Let’s see if you can make noise.  You can play drums with a spoon.  What else do you need if you have a spoon?”

And the thing is, it’s not like the baby lives in a Palace of Fun and Amazement.  He’s got a thing he lays on with toys over the top, an exersaucer, a seat with some toys attached, and some other random stuff, like Lamaze dolls and rattles.

That’s it.

But it’s too much.  We’re “confusing” him.  Or at least, that’s what she tells him.  He’s confused by the number of toys, can’t get to know just one at a time, and thus knows not what he wants.

Nevermind that the kid gets tired of certain toys after awhile and clearly expresses his desire to move on to something else.

Christ.  Perhaps I’ll just stick him in a wooden crate with a spoon and a towel and call it a day.

Happy Election Day.  I’m going to rant.

I like to think of myself as an informed voter who weighs the issues, but the truth is that I ultimately vote on one issue, and that issue is Choice.  I don’t care how good a candidate might seem otherwise.  If he (oh, it’s always he) wants to rummage around in my uterus, that’s a no-go.

I’m also using my “pregnancy makes me say crazy things!” card to say this:  Obama is not as pro-choice as I want him to be.  Sure, he’s not using air quotes on “health of the mother,” but I want the kind of Change that means I don’t have to worry about my reproductive freedom forever and ever amen. I want it to be a given.  I’m tired of it being up for debate.

Here’s the truth:  I was never as pro-choice as I was on the day I peed on a stick and saw the word “pregnant.”

This is who I am:  I am upper-middle-class.  I am white.  I am 29.  I am married.  I like my husband.  He likes me.   We are financially stable.  I am on a career path.  My husband is on a career path.  We have an apartment.  We have two cars.  We have a family that supports us and our decisions. We have a network of friends. We want to have a child together.

And yet.

Seeing the word “pregnant” was one of the scariest things I’ve seen in a long time (not counting that damned ultrasound report).  It doesn’t matter that I’ve got the support network I need, and it doesn’t matter that this is a wanted pregnancy.  The truth is, when you see the word pregnant, it shakes the foundation of your entire world.**  Getting married was nothing compared to this.  This?  Utterly transforms your life.  Since August, I haven’t “forgotten” I’m pregnant for even a second.  It is a constant state of being.

And it took that moment to make me pro-choice. I mean, for real.  Because I’ve always been pro-choice.  But in the back of my head, it wasn’t “about me.”  I have had access to birth control, and the training to use it, and the willingness to refuse sex with men who refused condoms, my entire life.  So, you know, I just wasn’t going to get knocked up.  I knew that when I got pregnant, it would be by choice.  Oh, sure, rape and incest, yes yes, but I was pro-choice because it seemed obviously right, not because it meant something to me.

But now it means something.  Because now I know that a wanted pregnancy still scares the shit out of you.  And my god, what an undertaking all this of is–and despite the ultrasound shitiness, I’ve had an easy time of it.  That anyone would be forced to do it without looking forward to the end result makes me…enraged.

And then you’ve got my lovely fetus and his conditionally conditional condition.  Since the government’s got its arm so far up my vagina it can’t shake its own hand, we are operating under a deadline.  The genetics counselors tell you three things:  we cannot comment on the results at this time, we will combine these results with the results of your 18-week scan in hopes of having a clearer answer, and all decisions must be made by week 24.

Y’all know what decision we’re talking about here.

I might need an abortion.

I refuse to call it a procedure.  I refuse to call it “necessary termination.”  It is an abortion.  And the sooner we call medically necessary abortions by their real name, the sooner we respect the fact that this is never, ever, ever an easy choice.  If we find out the lovely fetus we say hello to each morning is going to die on his way out, we will abort him.  And it will test our health, our strength, and our marriage.  That is the reality of a “necessary procedure.”

And that is the reality of every abortion.

Abortion is not birth control.  Abortion is the nasty thing that happens to your body when, for whatever reason, you cannot carry your pregnancy to term.  The only politician who has ever made sense when talking about this issue was Howard Dean, who recognized that abortion under any circumstances is a difficult choice, a choice that should always be between a woman and her doctor.

And honestly, here, where I sit, at the beginning of week 17, I am still waiting for the men who rule my uterus to understand that.

**Unless you’ve been going through fertility treatments, in which case the word “not pregnant” would likely do the same.  I know other couples would kill to see that word, but it’s still scary.

I don’t talk much about pop culture here, probably because I’m too busy whining about school and work and stuff. On that tip: still working on the diss. proposal. Made it through one “bad” draft which was, I kid you not, faulted mostly for being badly written as opposed to full of bad ideas. Now working on the second half of the second draft which is not so bad, actually. By the way, it is very, very embarrassing to be told you “write toward your thesis” when you are an old-tyme grad student who has taught writing, including how not to write toward one’s thesis, for four years. (How not to write toward your thesis: either 1) spend ridiculous amounts of time outlining and drafting your intro so your thesis/writing plan is solid and just needs to be carried out; or 2) write with demon-speed, finally figure out what your thesis is after writing the whole paper, and then revise like hell to make sense of the thing.) My problem? I am normally the type who follows method one, but in this case I followed method two, only with minimal revising. Bad, bad Perpetua.

So while I am quite the reality television junkie, and could tell you right now why this season’s Real World/Road Rules Challenge is a radical feminist paradigm (but not in the way you’d hope it to be), I haven’t talked about it much. But I want to post something I read about Kenley, the Project Runway Person I Hate the Most:

Do you remember that girl you knew in college who was fashionable in this timid, darting way. Who things never seemed to go quite right for until they really did and there was something so smug and self-satisfied about her success. And then you’d see her at parties or in the dining hall and she was always talking to boys, only boys, perhaps one out-of-her-league fellow in particular, in this cloying and sad and infuriating way. She would get a little too sloppy at parties and quietly profess her sad love for this boy—who probably played club lacrosse or rowed crew and had some family money and was kind but aloof to her—and she would glare at any girl in a shrill passive aggressive way if she felt encroached upon. That girl was someone you felt bad for, sure, but mostly you couldn’t stand her. Because she was a poor representative of Women….

Clearly I’m not alone in my feelings about Kenley, but any time a lot of people are hating on a woman, you have to pause and ask why. Why the hatred of Hillary Clinton? Of Sarah Palin? Of Tzipi Livni? I’m not trying to equate reality stars with politicians (though why shouldn’t I, really). It’s just that, when the media turns against a female, I start to worry. When I share that hatred, I worry more.

So, what is it? Is she simply annoying, in which case I’m entitled to dislike her? Yes, partly. Does she remind me of this blog I used to read, written by a woman whose life I followed like a soap opera until she up and made her blog password-protected, leaving me with no end to the story arc?** Oh, yes indeedy.

What bothers me, and what the quote above helped me realize, is that Kenley exhibits a very specifically defined female brand of power. That is, Kenley Is A Girl. She defines and is defined by her girlhood, by whining and giggling and backstabbing and bitching her way through each challenge. That may not be who she is, but that’s what television makes of her. And she may be a talented designer, but her designs are secondary aspects of her personality, a personality I can’t stand in part because I feel that the show is taking a step backward for the first time in its history. PR was the rare reality show that featured designers who happen to be male/female/gay/straight/of color/of size/etc. Kenley might be the show’s first Girl, and everyone hates her.

I hope we hate her for the right reason: because her personality, like her style, is dated. Kenley designs for and designs herself as a retro 40s pinup-in-the kitchen-type. The Bettie Page type. Bettie Page was a quasi-feminist icon because she exemplified sexual power and claimed it for women. But that was only one (necessary but partial) step toward selfhood. To locate power solely there is a mistake, and we all know it. That’s the kind of thing that leads to the femme fatale, to Girls Gone Wild, to a notion of female power as tied directly and only to powerful sexuality. And it’s a trap, I tell you. A god-damned trap. Because what should be about empowerment ends up being about service. And sadly, we’re not talking self-serve here.

***It sort of doesn’t fit with the narrative, but that blogger was fascinating, though probably for the wrong reasons. She was able to tell great stories about her mundane life, which is why I kept reading. But she also did fucked up sorts of things, like having NSA sex with dudes who had girlfriends. I don’t know why I’m alone in thinking that it’s shitty to do that to other women. Yes, OF COURSE, it’s totally the guy’s fault for cheating. And if they hadn’t been with her, then they would have found a dozen other women. But still. Powerful sexuality shouldn’t involve fucking a dude and then laughing at his girlfriend when you see the couple together. That’s just some straight-up nasty anti-female shit. Feel free to disagree, though. I hold this opinion strongly, but blindly.

Hi.  I am happy to report that I have gotten over my recent and ill-advised whining, crying, and heavy sighing the only way I know how: America’s Next Top Model Marathon.  I am also lucky in that I have absolutely no shame about my tv-watching habits. I come from one of those departments of oneupspersonship where it starts with “I only get my news from NPR” to “I don’t even own a television” to “I live in a yurt and drink my goat’s milk straight from the fucking goat.” Except without the curse word.  So, yeah.  It’s not the place where you’d admit to spending Labor Day on the couch watching Top Model, your unused laptop with its unwritten essay that’s due kind of soon languishing in the corner.

To quote “Alice’s Restaurant,” I’m not proud.  Or tired.

So anyway, what’s brought me back to posting today is something that, like most things, I know nothing about and yet feel the need to bitchify.  I am, surprise, not a “professional” blogger.  Nor do I have such aspirations.  I’m not that interesting, my writing is whiny and common, and you know, it’s just not going to happen.  I don’t have the kind of dedication it takes to do well at this and get yourself known.  I’m here primarily because I was hoping to find other people in my stage of the Ph.D. game (because, as you might remember, I hate most everyone I work with and thus need internet camaraderie to get me through the diss). I’ve found that, and more, and so I’m satisfied.

But that doesn’t stop me from passing judgment on the professional bloggers and internet journalists who’ve been whining up a storm about how oh so difficult it was to blog the DNC.  You get a lot of stuff about how much walking they had to do, and where are the floor passes, and the food is terrible, and there’s so much to see and not enough time to see it, and holy shit, you mean there’s no time for breakfast and we have to get up early???

Now, I won’t go into how this pretty much sounds like a family vacation in the sense that, if you’re a mom or dad, and you take your kids on the kinds of educational vacations we went on when I was young, you pretty much face a week off of work spent getting up early, walking far and wide, having bad or little food, and, on top of that, handling the demands of children away from home. Unless you go to, like, Club Med, which I’m convinced isn’t real at all but is just some kind of trap for upper-middle-classers.

It’s surprising to me how surprised a lot of these people are by the work they’ve chosen to do.  What, exactly, were they expecting?  I understand that, if you’re a professional blogger, you’re screwed in that you get a press pass and little else.  No one is catering to your needs and shuttling you around.  But…lucky you, people love your blog and turn to you for information they can’t get from the mainstream media.  It would be nice if that information were a little more interesting than “my feet are tired and WOW the line to get into Invesco is LOOOOONNG.”  Indeed.  It’s like the line to get on the greatest amusement park ride ever that is only open for one day.  I’m not surprised that, you know, it takes a long time to seat 70,000 people.  Tell me something I couldn’t deduce.  Who did you see in the bathroom?  What were the fights and arrests like?  Tell me what the news won’t.  Please.  Or don’t bother to go.

What’s more annoying, though, are the reactions of the internet journalists.  They’re being paid, not necessarily well, but hey, get in line with the rest of the underpaid and under-appreciated.  As these are professionals with an editor and hiring standards, you’d expect more in the way of interesting reportage and less in the way of “it’s so hot in Denver!”  Granted, these people receive none of the perks of the box-sitting Anderson Coopers of the media.  But then again, it’s not like you hear Christiane Amanpour exclaiming over the potholes in the roads of Sarajevo.

Minor points, these, but I’ve been annoyed for days.  Leave the whining to the ranks of me–the many, the unabashed, the mediocre–and get on with your work.

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).

I’m going to the library today to pick up a dissertation that I ordered through Interlibrary Loan.  Muy interesante, no?  No, not really, except that it raises issues of class and the academy.  Ordering a dissertation would cost me something like $40 if I weren’t affiliated with my institution.  I’m not entirely sure why (maybe because the library of the issuing institution only holds a few copies?), but unpublished dissertations are pretty much the hardest things to get your hands on when you’re doing research, and yet they often prove vital to your work (cf. my particular case of discovering that someone had already done a thesis very similar to the one I had been planning to do).  So I ask:  how the hell do independent scholars navigate these costly waters?

I know the academy is all about class (and gender, and sexuality, but we’ll save those for another day).  I am well aware of the hierarchy within and among institutions.  At the bottom of the ladder tend to live the adjuncts (my sibling is one–oh, what a nightmare), the community college instructors (who are in some ways blessed, some ways cursed), and the independent scholars.  One of the conferences I attend usually has a few independent scholars floating about, but I don’t know any of them (due to lack of social skills, not snobbery), so I don’t really know how they function as researchers.  Do they keep borrowing privileges at their former institutions?  Rely on public libraries?  How do they get their work done?  And why does the system seem so intent on working against them?

A computer glitch recently demoted my library status from grad student to staff.  Through the glitch I have learned that faculty are allowed to borrow 75 books at a time, grad students 50, staff 25.  Borrowing periods vary, but are similarly organized.   Does an independent researcher rate at all in this system?  I suspect not.  What I love (read: hate) about the academy is that we are often so big on theory, small on practice.  One of the Big Time Marxists in my department is also one of the biggest elitists, constantly reinforcing the dynamics of research over teaching.  This kind of thing gets me raging to the point that I’d only be satisfied if I could stand by watching while he eats every highlighted, dog-eared page of his Communist Manifesto.

So. Anyway.  I’ve got to go to the library, and now I’m in A Mood.  Damn.