coldhearted scientist وداد

I

Our featured post for this evening is Undine’s, on academic and actual housework: Does Any of This Count?. It is our featured post because I have almost finished cleaning out and reorganizing all of the work related files I have in the house. I have also finished my Federal income tax return, Form 1040 (long), with itemized deductions (Schedule A) and a 2106 form (Employee Business Expenses).

In graduate school, a seminar I took was assigned to a basement room in the Life Sciences Building, so dismal that the professor decided it would be better if we met in her house. She refused to make coffee in the break, however, on the grounds that she did not have a wife to do it.

I keep saying I need a secretary, a research assistant, and a maid. I do. Our job is defined as taking 60 hours per week, 9 months per year, but what I could get out of those 60 hours if I had a secretary, a research assistant, and a maid is very different from what I do get. And old-style professors did in fact have a secretary, a research assistant, and a maid, in the form of a wife. Shocking. And wives organized one’s social life, as well.

II

Cleaning out the files has been an excellent exercise, however. I am further reborn. I have discovered in the process that I was not actually been depressed and desperate about the Profession for 15 straight years. It was actually 5 years in the first episode, having to do with Reeducation, followed by 5 clear years, followed by 5 years of desperation having to do with being tenured faculty at this particular institution and all that that entails. But in those 5 years – the 5 years of files I have cleaned out in only 3 days – a great deal of very interesting work was begun.

Axé.