Gratitude Schmatitude

While there’s no reason to argue against giving thanks to our cherished loved ones, there is of course the dark side of “Thanksgiving.”  As myths go, this one is a tad problematic.  Yes?  And, no, I’m not talking about the football, the gluttony, or the poor factory-slaughtered turkeys.

Via Maude, I found Center of Gravitas’s point to be well-taken:

“[T]hings in the world that I am not at all inclined to be thankful for this year:  Holidays that hide the brutality of imperialism by pretending that the colonized welcomed their own oppressors.”

Enjoy your sweet potatoes!

Call it what you will, but I found the magic ticket!

Dateline Crunchyville.

Kid wakes up early, obscenely early.  Foggy-headed, yet thankfully well-rested, mother pours a cup of coffee, puts on an episode of Mister Rogers for Kid.  Mother does deep breathing and stretching exercises in bedroom (with white noise machine at eleven).  After exercises, Mother returns to living room.  Rogers is over.  Kid begins to unravel.  Mother bargains: let me change your wet diaper and you can watch some Sesame Street (aka “Sessy”).  Kid falls apart.  No diaper, just TV.  Mother stands her ground.  Light bulb goes off in Mother’s head:

It worked, I tell you.  After the unraveling of the child, we reached a bargain.  Although, hold on, I think I need to put the earplugs back in.  Sessy is over.

would you like some whine with that cheese?

Today I had to issue a fail to a student who pretty much bombed hir qualifying exams.  [Fail = student must revise said exam essays by the end of next quarter.  OMG!  What hard work!] Said student has since gone on to broadcast the fail to all of the other second year students who have passed.  They “all agree” that the problem is not the student, but the exam format.  As their disgruntled spokesperson, zhe reports that they all have “issues” with the exam because they feel its expectations are unclear. What skills are they supposed to demonstrate?  What, exactly, is being tested? What’s the purpose of reading books and then writing intelligently on them?

Zhe has requested a meeting with the graduate coordinator, my colleauge, for the following reason:

[I]t would really help and reassure me to be able to speak with you about the purpose behind this new exam and how I can better understand how to go about demonstrating whichenever skills necessary to pass. [sic]

Excuse me? Aren’t you actually teaching composition to our beloved undergraduates?  Have you not written essays before? Do you really not understand what it means to write coherent, organized, focussed essays on texts and criticism you chose to write about in the first place?  Is it too much to ask that you write grammatically correct sentences?  To develop and sustain an argument?  To demonstrate the ability to think critically?  To make sure you do a modicum of research so that you don’t refer, for instance, to Harriet Beecher Stowe as a”black woman writer”?

OK, so I understand zhe’s feeling the pangs of rejection, pangs that only worsen when zhe started comparing hir work to hir peers’ work.  And I understand that the exam did not come with some sort of grading rubric.  (Although, seriously, at the graduate level, grading rubrics are somewhat pedantic and, well, unnecessary.  Or at least they should be.)

At the end of the day, hir essays read more like some of the weakest undergraduate essays I have read in my ten-plus years of teaching.  At the end of the day, zhe didn’t answer hir own questions (PS: don’t tell us that one of the questions was not “in your area.”  You don’t have “an area” yet and, well, YOU WROTE THE QUESTION.)

Really, it all comes down to what my colleague (the second exam reader) said: sometimes in life it’s necessary to experience something that whining won’t resolve.

“l’enfant unique” (French for ‘only child’)

Bump has figured out how to climb out of his crib.  This means two things: he wakes us up at 6:00 and I am more convinced that I do not want another child.  Sleep is essential to my well-being.  A second child? Not so much.

Does this make me selfish?  Will I regret this decision when he turns 18 and splits?  Is it appropriate to answer “Are you having another?” with “Not unless you wake up every morning for the next ten years.”

Anyway, this crib milestone?  Killing me.  It’s like we’ve regressed back to That First Year.  That would be 365 days of sleeping an average of 5 hours/night; 365 days of marital spats and (almost) no sex; 365 days of postpartum depression; and, yes, 365 days of avoiding mirrors and hair salons.

I love my son more than life itself.  But, people, other its daily moments of sheer joy and belly laughing, That Year is one for the dustbins.

So, yeah, normally I can’t imagine another First Year.  Unless I see a baby, any baby, at which point I can almost feel myself lactating again (nursing memories?) and I start talking in that totally annoying “baby” voice.   And then there are moments like the one I experienced this evening, when a colleague told me that his partner was fifteen weeks pregnant with their second child.  My heart sank.  On the outside, I was all smiles and congratulations.  On the inside, I felt guilty, selfish, and unnatural.  I felt as though Bump, Mr. P, and I were going to miss out on something big.  Something important.

Hormones be damned.  HORMONES BE DAMNED!

A Strange Exchange

I haven’t been blogging much on account of being busy and boring, the latter of which makes me happy, not sad. When life is boring, life is good, at least in my little corner of the universe.

All has changed, though.  Things aren’t as boring as they were a week ago. Hence the post.

So, you might recall That Conversation I had with the department chair (DC) a while ago.  The one related to Operation Greener Pastures?   If so, you probably know how That Conversation lead to Mr. P getting two more sections this year, one being our very coveted “Lit and Culture of the 20th Century” course.  This is a non-writing intensive lit course for our majors.  Very dreamy when it goes well.  What you might not know is that that during said conversation,  I never once asked for more classes for Mr. P.  Although getting Mr. P more sections was on my agenda, I ended up not going there because I had decided, prior to the talk, to postpone going on the market.  (Ph.D. advisor talked me out of it for several good reasons.  Thinks I have it good at Crunchyville, and that I’ll have more leverage once book is done.)  As it turned out, Mr. P came up  after the meeting (although likely because of it).

Cut to the short: DC came to my office minutes later to ask if Mr. P would be interested in teaching a *third* course next quarter (i.e. not semester).  I told him he’d have to email Mr. P., who (I wanted to scream) is a real person with actual thoughts and opinions and I although we are married, we are not one.  So, yeah, don’t ask me what he wants.  ASK HIM. Granted, I knew what Mr. P. wanted, and I was so excited by the question, but still.

So fine.  More money.  Better class.  We’re cool, right?  Not so much.

Exhibit A:

[Faculty Lounge, early morning]

DC: Hey Pocha.  So those extra classes of Mr. P’s will help with the finances, eh? [Grin, nothing sinister or ironic.  He knew that Operation Greener Pastures was all about earning power.]

ME: Oh yeah, totally [something like that.]

DC: Now Mr. P has to work *really* hard [wink, smirk].

ME: Expressionless nod [inside monologe: WTF? He  ALREADY works hard, Mr. Man.  He teaches the most god awful boring 300-level class in the department; he always volunteers for the fucking 8AM classes (and, trust me, if Mr. P is against anything, it's waking up early); and then, of course, he picks up most of the childcare during the week AND weekend so that I can work on publications and what not.  In other words, he's teaching AND raising our son.  And that, Mr. Man, is "already" hard work.

DC: [Softer voice as if to suggest secrecy] “Listen, this new class [Lit & Culture] has to go *really* well, because I put myself on the line for it.”

ME: Expressionless nod and a VERY FAKE “Oh yeah, I know.  Thank you SO much.”

First, we never asked for the lit class, or any class for that matter.  DC asked me if Mr. P. would teach this course.  So you put yourself “on the line,” fine, but we didn’t ask you to do this.  Seriously.   Second, why are you telling me this in the faculty lounge?  Why aren’t you telling this to the person who will actually teach the special class?  In case you didn’t know, Mr. P. is a real person.  He exists.  And he’s actually quite affable, wicked sharp, and seriously interested and well-read in the content of special class.  Finally, don’t you think Mr. P. himself wants the course to go well?  Your ass on the line or not?

Here’s the thing. I sense that DC– who is a genuinely kind person who I respect –  doesn’t consider Mr. P. legitimate teaching material, even though he has a M.F.A. [read: terminal degree] and college teaching experience, which are, last I checked, our lecturer teaching requirements.  I’ve always sensed this and it’s always bothered me.  It also seems clear to me that, for this very reason,  Mr. P. has to do more than most to prove himself.  I truly understand the sensitive politics of our situation.  In a time of dire budget cuts, my partner is getting an extra class (although he did not teach a full load last year).  But, Mr. P. was offered this class because I had to give it up in order to take over a Gen. Ed. class for a colleague, which is a  huge favor that only an assistant professor anxious about tenure would take on, because teaching Gen Eds. is hard, hard work. Finally, there is the obvious assumption that Mr. P. doesn’t work hard.  That he’s perhaps a freeloader husband of a tenure-track professor, one whose south-of-the-border “ethnicity” means she herself is not entirely legitimate (Read: she got the job, not because she gave a strong job talk and teaching demo, but because, well of course, she “brings diversity.” As bell hooks would put it, and I paraphrase, she is the spice that enlivens the dull dish of whiteness.)*

Fuck that.

I know there’s nothing practical I can do, and I realize I might be reading too much into this very uncomfortable exchange.  But it really bothered me.  Obviously it still does.  And, of course, we’re both feeling incredibly anxious about this class.

That’s all.  Just venting.
Pocha

* bell hooks does not think white people are dull, of course. She’s just referring to the exotification that goes hand in hand with being a woman of color, especially in academia.