Shit!

I just looked at my long neglected blog to realize it has been a year since I started it. Have I done a year’s worth of graduate work in this time? Difficult to tell.

I did get married and go to Disneyland. But I think my supervisor only feels contempt for these things. Can I blame him?

I need to get my shit together and start to write. A chapter a day. Or faster. Any slower and I risk turning into the biggest fucking loser I know. Ha ha! I’m just kidding, I already occupy this position.

My goal is now to finish by Christmas so my wife can take me to her Christmas party without being humiliated by the suggestion that she is my sugar mama (she is.) But I don’t need some fucking yuppie lawyers telling me that.

And so, back to work.

Aftermath

The election is thankfully over though the afterglow remains. No we can wait to see what “change” really means. Something better, I hope. I have no cynicism in me for Barack Obama like some of the leftys I know. Or maybe I have just lost some of my energy for it after eight years of disgust over the Bush administration.  

In the aftermath, I am left feeling small and isolated as I return to the prospect of my work without the warm comfort of being incessantly connected to the happenings of the political world. My own work seems small and insignificant in comparison. I wonder if Obama campaign staffers are going through depression right now too? 

I wouldn’t call what I am feeing depression. I am just feeling burdened by my own shortcomings. It is year five, I’m far behind, and I seem to have little fire in my belly to forge ahead. Only the thought of finishing is positive, the thought of being able to move on to something else. But on the days of my worst malaise this motivation is seldom enough. 

I feel like I need three months of solid work and concentration, but my life has changed so much that it also seems impossible to find such focus. There is so much else to do and I sort of long for the days when I lived in my college town and could be at my office for twelve hours a day without anything falling apart as I did it. Being in a couple is great, but your responsibility load goes way up and sometimes it can make me feel harried. 

And then there is the constant need to maintain my own health, or the guilt if I don’t. I had my first big CT scan last week and I sat at the hospital thinking “this is funny, I certainly don’t feel like a cancer patient.” But I don’t want to forget that this is what I’m facing either because it needs some degree of vigilance. So I go to the gym five days a week, juice my vegetables, go to the health-food store constantly. But it all takes time and a concentration that eats up focus that should be on my thesis. Everyone has told me to slow down, worry less, take things at a different pace. But the thing this misses is that I’m fucking tired of being a student and going slower doesn’t make that any better. 

Quite a lot of complaining for one day. Will soon need to find a way to actually motivate myself and move ahead decisively. My article is nearing completion for submission to the American journal I was targeting when I went to the conference in Chicago. So this is one positive thing. Five months ago this outcome seemed impossible but success is nearly upon me. I just need to cross the finish line without falling over.

Vote?

The Canadian polling day is upon us. It has really been one of the ugliest campaigns ever and it can mostly be attributed to the fact that Stephen Harper is a fucking asshole. Everybody knows this, nobody is happy about the fact that he will win (except other assholes.) 

I think what is happening is that Canada is entering its own version of the American culture war with Harper leading the brigade. He’s tried his best to use wedge issue politics he learned by studying the Republican playbook of Karl Rove. In some ways it has backfired on him, robbing him of his chance for a majority and revealing him for the petty, spiteful and hateful individual that he really is. 

Harper would do well to look south and see the end result of this type of political division. It seems that McCain is the last old soldier of this type of politics, desperately sowing fear and mistrust in his pathetic attempt to become president. We are seeing it in the anger that is stirred up at McCain/Palin rallies. People are fucking pissed! And why? They can’t stand the thought of somebody different than them coming to power. They don’t want a leader who doesn’t pander to their most base fears and suspicions. I really think this could lead to real violence in the coming weeks. McCain supporters are yelling “kill him” and “sit down boy” when Obama’s name is invoked at these hate-mongering political rallies. Does McCain really want this legacy attached to his name? He will go down like Thurmond Strom, regarded as a sad relic of the past. 

The only comfort for me is that Harper will get there too. The similarities between Harper and Diefenbaker are striking. Petty, vain personalities, deeply insecure, paranoid and spiteful. The type of Prime Minister for whom we might name a boat, but never erect a statue (except in downtown Calgary.) 

Anyways, go out and vote. Try to vanquish the old culture warriors wherever they might be.

Enough!

Ok, my election fever has gone too far. I’m not even American! I need to return to my actual work and just let the damn thing play itself out. I can no longer keep up the pace of reading every last comment on every story in every newspaper. After a while it all blurs anyways. Obama good, McCain evil, Palin stupid. Repeat. 

I’ll try to take a week off from all of this and get some work done. On that front, things are moving slowly. Cancer has been largely eliminated as a valid excuse so its time to face the bloody revisions. All writing in this blog must be only reflections of my academic work and not my political procrastinations. I’ll probably lose the three readers I now have.

It Gets Worse

So now according to CNN, supporters at McCain rallies have started openly calling Obama a “terrorist.” Speakers onstage repeatedly refer to him as Barak Hussein Obama. 

McCain was reportedly startled when the word terrorist was shouted at at the rally, but what the fuck did he expect? He sent Palin out to make this association, to insinuate it, and to plant the seed that Obama was as good as a terrorist for having known a man convicted of something that happened 40 years ago. I can only imagine that this is the best case scenario for McCain. 

This is truly George W. Bush’s America at work. A respected United States Senator is smeared as a terrorist for political gain, and the lie gains traction. My only consolation is that the redneck assholes who think that calling him Hussein somehow constitutes a victory would never have voted Democrat anyways. And the recent polls form Florida and Ohio seem to be demonstrating this. 

Still, it is now clear that there is nothing McCain will not say or insinuate to try to reclaim this election. What’s next – white women are at risk if Obama wins? He’s already tried to raise this spectre with the Paris Hilton ads (blonde girl/black man race panic.) Disugsting. Are Americans tired of it? It’s hard to say. If one guy at a rally will scream out “terrorist,” then how many were silently thinking it?

Sarah Palin Sucks

Ok, this is so goddamn obvious. But I wonder how much further she is going to descend into her own bizarro world. She knows very well that the New York Times cleared Obama of any real association with Bill Ayers. They come from the same neighborhood? That makes him a pal with terrorists? This is a new low. Does anyone believe that Sarah Palin even reads the New York Times? Doubtful. 

Even more disgusting is the veiled racism she uses to preach to soccer moms in Home Depot parking lots, telling them that Obama is “not like us.” She needs to whip up fear about a black man with a strange name so that her pathetic fucking principle can stay within reach in the heartland. If she wasn’t so good at remembering the carefully written lines Karl Rove’s protegés are feeding her she might slip and tell us what she really thinks. 

I can only hope that Obama fights her at every turn and will not allow himself to be swiftboated. I would like to say that the American public isn’t stupid enough to fall for this again, but I am more worried than that. 

And if that’s not bad enough, Palin solves her stupidity problem by going on the attack against Katie Couric. For what? Asking fucking questions Palin didn’t know the answer to? Now we call this “gotcha journalism?” 

Sarah Palin and her “first dude” can both suck it, the hate mongering red necks. I hope she loses and is subsequently impeached in Alaska. 

Also, the Canadian election is sad. Jokes about the Prime Minister’s choice of sweaters passing as biting political zingers that make the front page. I can hardly bring myself to vote, but I will.

Five Months?

It has been five months since this blog was started to try help me out of the doldrums of writing. The problem is that I’ve done very little writing since I started it. Maybe blogs = diminishing returns for a graduate student. 

I did get the big conference paper polished off, but the problem is that nothing is every really finished. I am still working on it and have decided I should focus on it until Christmas so that it is as good as possible before being published. This sounds productive, but it is also a way to avoid thinking about the larger project. I’ll be happy if the article is great by Christmas, but I’ll wake up in January and realize I have almost seven full chapters to write and that I am months and months behind. Depressing. 

I wish there was a clear answer. What’s more important – publishing or finishing? My girlfriend thinks that one killer publication is the more important goal, and then I can finish off quickly with my ducks lined up. I’d love to have a great article in the works, but I feel strange about possibly staring down my sixth year in this program. 

I was such a sanctimonious little shit when I was in my second and third years. I could never imagine being in my sixth year, still writing, still not finished. Not so fucking funny anymore, is it? Now I reserve all my scorn for those poor saps in their seventh and eight years. How pathetic!

Also, the Canadian election makes me want to kill myself. Is it too much to ask that it appears to be serious and important? Our leaders are the smallest and meanest assholes who ever lived. Laurier and King would roll in their graves. Also, Justin Trudeau should just stop and go back to teaching high school. He is Canada’s Sarah Palin, but nobody can say it because of his last name.

Election Mayhem

The financial system is literally burning to the ground in the United States. The American banks are only lucky that John McCain selflessly threw himself into the fray to solve the crisis. Oh, they are also lucky that American taxpayers are largely in favour of dumping a fucking-trillion-dollars into Wall Street to save the financial system. 

It’s a strange time to be a leftist. I wish there was some sort of more programatic or organized response than smugness. But there is hardly an overarching opposition ready to take advantage of the crisis, let alone a revolutionary movement willing to seize the moment. The best rhetoric seems to be all individualized – “Bail Me Out Too” written in black sharpie. Not that’s such a bad sentiment. Somehow I think that the Canadian banks will manage to keep tabs on my student loans through the entire ordeal. 

Also, I don’t put much stock on McCain-as-war-hero type mythology. I think he has done a lot of cowardly things up until now (excepting internment in Vietnam.) Still, it is sad to see what he has become as he reaches out for the brass ring. As it slips away he becomes even more desperate and willing to debase himself. On the other hand, I guess I understand his debate strategy. What does he have to gain by showing up? The Republicans stock and trade is flouting the rules – cheating and obscuring issues until they don’t have to face the music. It’s just sad that McCain can’t even pretend to be above it. 

In our own little colonial election, things are also looking grim. I’d love to see Jack Layton’s big breakthrough finally happen, but I doubt it. Harper is (as always) revealing himself to be a mean sonofabitch and nobody cares (except Margaret Atwood.) If he wins a majority at least we can not think about elections for the next four years and Harper can turn Canada into the conservative wonderland he dreams about every night. I like thinking long term and wondering who will take the reigns of his conservative dynasty once it is finally established. It is some small comfort that even Harper will not be Prime Minister forever. 

And in my own small corner of the world, things are finally going better. I was in Chicago and met some really fantastic people working on very interesting stuff. I can’t tell how well my work went over. I felt like I was presenting at the kids table, but apparently some others read the paper and didn’t hate it. Triumph!

Vacation?

For the first time since last year (at this exact week) I am taking a week off. Even after my testicle surgery I was forced to work as much as I could to get my article out. Now I find myself with no pressing deadlines and I am trying to relax. I don’t know how to do it. What do people do?

Mostly when I’m faced with this situation I dream big about how productive I will be when I return to my work. I plan to become a master of Marxist dialectics. I set writing schedules that Marx himself could not keep. And I don’t relax. So now I am really trying to avoid all of these traps and just hang out for a week and not think about work. Impossible, but at least I’m not going to moan about Foucault over dinner.

Instead, I’ll moan about the Democratic National Convention. I don’t know why they don’t just lead with big posters of Bush/Cheney bathed in red and then give explicit examples of just how badly they have fucked it all up. I guess they need to walk a fine line and are actually courting people who may think that the last eight years are not so bad. It’s all so delusional and odd. I thought poor Ted Kennedy was a sad and inspiring sight at the same time, thundering from the podium like the insistent ghost of a past era. Our favourite moments on TV are where they cut from Obama to McCain and you realize what a cadaver the old bastard really is.

On the Canadian front, it looks like the federal leaders will contort themselves into an election any day now. Hopefully they can avoid this as I can’t take the media overload that two simultaneous elections will produce. Also, I don’t feel like going through the angst of wondering who to support. The NDP? Jack Layton has betrayed the left in so many ways in his pandering to “working families.” Who is he speaking to? But it is also against my instincts to disengage totally or throw away my vote on the Marxist-Leninist Party or the Greens. At least the NDP has the potential to stand as an (ineffective) bulwark against the worst instincts of Canadian neo-liberalism. They ain’t no CCF. I showed my students a video of Tommy Douglas speaking and they were amazed at how good he was. Jack Layton should just show the same videos – try to reclaim that heritage in some way. Instead he chips away at the Douglas legacy and the very idea of socialism. What does he stand for? Nobody knows.

I will at least enjoy putting a huge fucking NDP sign on my balcony and watching the condo board go into fits trying to get me to remove it. The campaign is only 36 days long and I can easily ignore them for that long! They shouldn’t have been so fucking pernicious about the bird feeder issue!

Back to the Future

Finished teaching last week and it left me as big finishes usually do – lost. I had gotten so used to being stressed out and unhappy that my class finished and I went on feeling stressed, but about very minor things. I finally had to realize I need to take a step back from what has been going on for the past month.

After worrying myself sick about cancer for the past six weeks I am trying to take a new direction. You can’t go through life like George Costanza when something terrible is actually happening to you. You’ll go psychotic. So I’m trying to be more zen like about it all, but there is also a pressure to move in this direction. If you get cancer you are supposed to awaken spiritually, count your blessings and become a better person. It is bullshit, but I still feel like I’m supposed to be different now. I suppose I am just lazy.

However, I am trying to move in a direction that at least says “I treated cancer” instead of “my god, I have cancer.” Probably an important distinction and it at least allows me not to panic all day long.

Now I can go back to panicking about my work. I submitted my paper to both my supervisor and his partner and they both proclaimed it wonderful. I think maybe they were just feeling bad for me. My supervisor said congratulations because apparently the first draft was so awful and he never believed it could be whipped into shape. Were they just being nice because they thought I was down? I don’t know. Anyways, my paper is off to the conference. The other papers on my panel read like economics textbooks. I am the wrong type of leftist maybe because I don’t understand a goddamn thing. But part of me also thinks that I’m not this stupid. Maybe I’m the wrong type of leftist. Anyways, I will show up again and do my little song and dance and then skulk away uncomfortably. It is my niche.

Led Zeppelin

I have been at home all week recovering from the loss of my left testicle (both physically and psychologically.) I hear Lance Armstrong was given a prosthetic one (he would) but I don’t think I’ll go that route. Seems like vanity at this stage would court further disaster! 

Through the general fatigue I am trying to get through my paper for the BIG American Conference I am going to. I don’t really know if it is that big or not, but my supervisor has given me the impression that I would be well advised not to fuck up or litter my submission with careless vocabulary. How do I know what these Americans want from me? I’m bound to transgress some cultural sensitivity of the American Left and be blacklisted forever. Not that it matters because I don’t think American universities are hiring many Canadianists these days. 

In any case, paper revisions are going slow because I am generally feeling tired and sorry for myself. I wrote to the conference people and begged for another week to submit and they never replied. Maybe I am blacklisted already. 

And now I am listening to early Led Zeppelin and thinking that it sounds like music made on another planet. It is 40 years old, but it doesn’t sound old. It also doesn’t sound current – just otherworldly. Good music for matching my otherworldly mood!

Fuck Cancer

Since I returned from conference number one everything has gone a little bit haywire. 

I had an ultrasound done in June which turned up three tumorous masses in my left testicle. This is somewhat ironic because I have always feared testicular cancer in a big way. So much so that my girlfriend couldn’t even take it seriously when I started telling her I was having some pain “down there” and thought I should see a doctor. I don’t really blame her. 

So there was some wrangling with the stupid medical system and I was originally given an appointment weeks in the future. This was all accelerated when I went to the hospital on the recommendation of a friend of my parents’. She sent me to the urologist on-call and he admitted me right away for surgery. This was good because I didn’t have the chance to freak-the-fuck-out about preparing to lose my testicle. 

Three hours later I was being wheeled into surgery. And then I spent the weekend in the hospital and at home recovering. Now I am freaking out about the fact that I had to cancel a whole week of classes and I need to both return to my article to get it done by the 1st of August and somehow be ready to teach again next week. 

I think losing a nut will only get you so much sympathy around a history department. In any case, I’m waiting to see if the tumors they removed are cancerous or not. I am prepared to face it down if they are. It’s therapeutic to say “fuck cancer.” What else can you do?

Phew

Day one of the conference was a success. I gave my paper to a pitifully tiny audience. You would have thought that Derrida was in the session next door. Or maybe nobody came back from lunch. 

But the session was populated with spies planted by my supervisor. All of his close friends huddled together near the front looking grave while I flailed about onstage. None asked a question or offered much comment afterwards, but by that time I didn’t really give a fuck. I skipped the official banquet and went to see The Incredible Hulk and it was time well spent. 

 

Effin’ Conferences!

I am off today to finally give the first of two conference papers. The lack of entries in this unread blog are because I was killing myself to write a talk that months ago was “no big deal.” 

Last week I officially crossed that dangerous threshold where I had spent more time on my conference outfit than my paper and so I really had to bear down. Now that it’s finished (mostly), I look at it and think “why would I travel anywhere to stand up and deliver this information?” It is a lethal question, but it contains the truth. 

The only consolation is that nobody else is giving anything groundbreaking either. It’s all the same stuff that you won’t remember by next week. It’s just a bit depressing to be a part of it all. 

Being an academic is much like when I was in a band. You’d play a show, and many people would come and tell you things like “That was the best show I’ve ever seen. You guys are amazing.” Now I give conference papers and people say “You should think about turning that into a little book.” I could barely scrape together 2,000 words for the conference, so the prospects of a book are always hilarious to me. But it stokes the ego and I leave thinking “I will write a little book about this topic! It would be so easy!” 

On top of the horrors of the conference (I’m stuck on a panel with a paper about the Post Office…) are the pitfalls of socializing with my “peers.” When you go to these mixers other grad students are generally a wash because they are to weird, insecure, or vain to really speak to. It’s all a complex dance of trying to name drop who you know, what you have written, and what scholarships you are holding. My contribution is slim because the answer to all three categories is “nil.” The key is try to find some sort of faculty member who hates the whole thing as much as me and commiserate. An old disgruntled Marxist is usually the best bet. 

Breakdown and Don’t Come Around Here No More

Surprisingly, things are not going that badly. I hit rock bottom on Saturday and my girlfriend sat me down to figure out why I have accomplished nothing in three weeks (not counting a feeble 2,000 word introduction to my paper.) We hashed it out and the issue seems to be internet addiction combined with laziness. 

Ok, the discussion was a little deeper than that, but the long and the short of it is that I had better wake the fuck up and take control of things before my career ends up in the dump. What career? 

Since then, I have had some highs and lows but I am cobbling together a draft of my paper that may not be too awful. My girlfriend has agreed to read it before we go away for her birthday on Saturday night. 

This is risky because the biggest fights we have ever had resulted from her reading my work. I can be an insecure ass, especially when somebody suggests I don’t know what I’m talking about (I don’t.) But I prefer denial. 

One person who doesn’t prefer denial is my supervisor who tells me I suck every time I give him anything. Sometimes he does this directly, sometimes subtly. Once I wrote him a long e-mail about Nikolai Bukharin, trying to work something out and asking for his opinion. He replied, “you don’t need to worry about Bukharin.” My girlfriend said I was an idiot for asking in the first place. 

In any case, I push forward, I keep plugging. 

Also, title refers to the fact that I need Tom Petty tickets and there are none to be found. Of course, I had some in the eleventh row on the day they went on sale. But then I felt remorse about spending 300 dollars I don’t have and abstained. I’m an idiot. 

Enjoy Your Weekend

Spent the day shopping for a gift for a baby shower and driving into the country. Things that normal people like to do on their weekends. For me, they are a source of endless anxiety because not only am I not working on my conference papers, in my mind they seem to be regressing and creating even more work the longer I don’t look at them. 

Am now returned to my cocoon home office (no windows) and fretting about the fact that I’m not out enjoying my day. Why hate golfers? Why not just quit grad school! The easy solutions are right in front of your face (except when it comes to my paper. There is no solution to making it suck less.) 

 

Rerun

Another day of panic, flailing, and worry. I’m not sure this is really worth seven grand a year. 

 

Student Life at 30 (almost)

One of the hardest parts of being a student for your entire twenties is the way that you seem to stand still while everyone else around you rockets into the financial stratosphere.

You are doomed to living in a crappy apartment and never going on vacation. And then you are forever going to house warming parties for your friends buying infills in trendy neighbourhoods or hearing about their trips to fucking Machu Picchu and absolutely straining to feel excited about it. 

This is not their fault, these people aspiring to be yuppies. I’m just saying that it’s not that much fun living with so much bitterness and fear about the future. And what can be worse is when these people tell you how worthwhile it will all be in the end. Nobody is convinced of this. 

I prefer the honest response – when people say things like “you get paid how much to teach a class? Wow! Brutal!” At least they try to identify with the pain of it all. 

Middle Ground and Research Woe

I have trouble writing about anything. I don’t know why I resist it, but if I am writing the history of prison medical services (which I am) I manage to amass 200 pages of anecdotal evidence without ever figuring out the basic administrative structures or events. This makes it nearly impossible to write anything coherent once I start to put things together. 

The result is that I finish with a draft that is all mood and impression but with no hard history. Maybe this is the result of being a grad student in the last decade where all we did was criticize every work of “hard” history we came across as being too instrumentalist, too determinist, too boring, not social enough, not theoretical enough. And so when it came time to sit down and write something real and not just a critique I found myself unable to do it. 

So I have made myself feel better in the past by saying “this stuff, the administrative details, have been covered by other writers. You need to get at the social relationships and developments that fall out of the view of the traditional historian.” And this is what motivates me to copy out every social exchange I come across in archives without ever thinking that maybe I should look at a box of ministerial files or at the letterbooks of top administrators. And now I have too much grit with no way to link it together into any sort of notion of what actually happens. 

Maybe this is the inevitable process of maturing. Last year I recanted on a long standing obsession with individualism, normalization, and Foucault in general. I wrote a mea culpa e-mail to my supervisor explaining why I had been a naive ass and how I had seen the error of my ways. From now on I would only try to understand social relations and class struggle and I would disavow myself of the need to worship the individual like some sort of neo-liberal political scientist. Like most encounters, my supervisor’s response tot he e-mail was underwhelming. He thought I was only going through the the process of painting myself into a corner so that I could paint myself back out. And he was right – this is all a process that I needed to go through. He was probably dismayed at reading my last drafts to discover that I had made the same foray into leftist political economy with similar disappointing results. 

I just wonder if I am running out of time to paint myself into a better place. And according to my supervisor, there is nothing more dangerous than somehow ending up in the dreaded “middle ground” where nothing is terribly meaningful and historians don’t have to take any clear position on things. So I find myself up here on a tight rope trying to do some sort of circus routine to gain some sort of approval while the audience looks away.