Ouch, My Head

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!

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.) 

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

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. 

I keep telling myself that I am coming up on a period where I will need to work myself to death just to keep up. It is not quite here, but I can feel it looming. I think it will officially start when I start to teach and realize I need to bring 40 pages of teachable material with me twice a week. 

I’ll have to sleep a lot less when this happens. Right now I am getting a solid eight hours a night and it is fantastic. I feel great, but it can’t last. 

When things were rough earlier in the year my girlfriend would open a can of Amp Energy drink at around 9:45 to power us through until our customary 2:30 a.m. bedtime. It’s like drinking sweetened batter acid, but it really keeps you up. All the sugar will make you sort of bloated looking, but its possibly a fair trade off. 

Some students in my girlfriend’s law class are taking their children’s ritalin on the sly so they can hone in on their work and really get something accomplished. It sounds like a  great idea, but getting a prescription for an adult is hard and taking actual speed would probably kill me. 

Also, a good diet and lots of exercise supposedly work wonders. Psshhhfff.