coldhearted scientist وداد

Voy a hablar de la esperanza.

HOY SUFRO SOLAMENTE

As we know, I am a working man, although if I were a male academic I might not have all the same duties as I do. That, precisely, is why I am a working man in old fashioned terms: a working man works on an assembly line. At this moment I am grateful because when I called the Help Desk to get advice on Windows Vista they did not blink when I said I was using Open Office, or tell me I should buy Microsoft Word because it would be “easier for me.” But I must say I am very tired of course management software and all Microsoft products. I am also tired of hearing that Open Office is completely compatible with Microsoft Word because this is not true. I am tired of receiving posters and flyers as heavy e-mail attachments in proprietary formats without a note in the body of the mail giving basic information about the location, time, date, and nature of the event being announced. I submit that it is not I who am technologically behind, but rather those who send this kind of e-mail and/or do not see the problems I point out here.

SIN EXPLICACIONES

I have been a professor for 40% of my life now, but I still feel as though it were my first semester and I were trying to get myself set up to really work. That, I find, is quite amazing. My finances are as precarious, if not moreso, than they were 40% of my life ago. This is also most amazing.

Verily, the shock of my first day as a professor comes upon me still. On that day I realized that although what I had always been told, that our academic careers would be over when we got our degrees because there were no jobs, had not turned out to be true technically in my case, it was true in another way. My job seemed to be composed of three half time positions: T.A., executive secretary, and IT person. It added neatly to 60 hours, accomplished from Sundays at noon to Fridays at five. Friday nights were off, Saturdays were research days, and Sunday mornings were again off.

At the original moment of shock I thought, gosh: two of these jobs, the executive secretary component and the IT component, would be a full time job in business, and better paid – and I could live and work downtown. On days like today, I still think of that. The total number of days per month of being T.A+executive secretary+IT person must always be cordoned off and quarantined, and their multiplication prevented. Their power must be diminished. They must also be aggressively counteracted with research days. And I do mean aggressively.

I characterized a later job saying it involved being part state legislator, part sorority girl, and part professor. I left that job because of its first two aspects, but today being T.A+executive secretary+IT person I miss that.

SOBRE LA ESPERANZA

At one time I was appropriately agressive about cordoning off the parts of my jobs that were unprofessorial that. Then I was worn away at, like a stone. For another context Momo said this: We have to say YES to hope in ourselves before we can say NO to oppression. And I realized: that was what I unlearned in Reeducation.

Reeducation believed hat hope in oneself was ARROGANCE, CONTROL, and POWER. These were all bad things which must be extirpated. The effort to comply with that, of course, turned my job into drudgery. I embraced this because, since Reeducation looked down upon my job or at least upon me in it, I felt that if I were burdened enough, or suffered enough, Reeducation might understand that my job was actually work.

Reeducation’s suspicion of my job of course connected with old issues with those who during some periods of college and graduate school claimed I was having too good a time, and with my dissertation director, who kept saying that a suntanned girl in on a spring afternoon in tropical colors, pool-wet hair and Dr. Scholl’s Original Sandals (and I am dressed exactly that way now) could not be fully bright. And with the colleagues who claimed that my car was too old, my Joan Vass getup made me look too much like a rock star, and that my willingness to admit I preferred downtown Los Angeles to the suburbs, and Native American mole poblano to Euro-Argentine barbecue, were bad for my career. And with to the frightening and frustrating discovery, in the first days of academia, that it was not at all about the work, it was about being liked by an in crowd and moreover, an in crowd that appeared to have been the out crowd from kindergarten through college and now seemed interested in getting back at their internalized tormentors. “I am not the right person for this, I will never be narrow minded enough for this, that is why I have to leave,” I said. But I was already too weak to take action. Reeducation had convinced me that certain choruses I had always considered to be, or I had learned were mere silliness, were in fact the whole and only truth.

ON RESISTANCE

As Reeducation and academia chipped away at my jumping, laughing being I got more and more worried. It was dangerous not to look more unhealthy (although I never went so far as my colleague, who after gaining a great deal of weight by eating chocolate the year she came up for tenure, then claimed this was feminist because she was now a woman large enough to take up a man-size space). It was dangerous to be research oriented. It was dangerous to take pedagogy seriously. It was very important to be liked and respected and one of the surest paths to that was to wear ugly glasses and undertake drudgery with a smile.

I never believed in this and that is why I wanted to leave academia. It was clear that I could never conform enough. Yet I had not realized until reading Momo’s words how diametrically opposed Reeducation – which called hope arrogance, and felt that to say no to oppression would be to exert too much power and control – is to that idea. I also note that in academia, hope in ourselves has to be EARNED. One is not given $200 when one passes GO but has to first EARN them (borrowing can be done, but puts you on shaky ground). And those $200 are not $200 but hope in ourselves.

Yet in reality you have to breathe out oppression and breathe in hope even when your friends, colleagues, parents, dissertation directors, and everyone else you know including your therapist, say that is immature. Verily I say unto you that THEY are the immature ones, if immaturity matters, and they are only trying to justify their weakness. They have nothing to do with you. I remember being told I was “resisting” and snapping back, yes, I am resisting regression and that is a very good thing. I wish I had listened to myself more closely, for despite my snappy and astute response, what I actually did was go home carrying a new and heavy load of self doubt.

POST OBAMA

All of this is why Momo’s yogic sentence is actually RADICAL, and it is why the pro-Obama vibe is not even about Obama, it is about putting hope in oneself first, it is about shedding internalized oppression, it is about resisting NO YOU CAN’T, and that is why it is so contagious. I also hope, pace Field Negro, that it is NOT a personality cult and this is why it will not die even if Obama loses, or wins and turns into the Black John McCain.

Axé.