MUSIC TO GRADE BY
It is a working weekend, so we will sing work songs! I never paid a great deal of attention to the Creedence Clearwater Revival but I associate them with California because when I was a child, they were on all the radios. As a result of this they are the soundtrack I associate with many famous views and monuments, and with driving on California roads. Now, of course, I can hardly wait to see that mystic ocean.
Cottonfields of home. We listened to these songs, and to folk and blues songs, and became nostalgic for our home in Louisiana before we had ever seen it. The West now also holds that combination of reality and unreality for me.
AWARDS AND ANTI-AWARDS
There are more awards and anti-awards due as I finish the last of the grades.
Anti-Awards go to:
1. All who argued that racism was invented by darker skinned persons and perpetrated by them upon lighter skinned persons, out of envy. That is ridiculous and it sounds truly silly coming from most of you. Yes, I know it is rough to be yellow, redskinned, or tan and to have white people on your case for being Black, while some of your own cousins call you “Whitey.” I realize that while these things are happening you are also having trouble with some of the most elite lightskinned people in town, who will not let you date their daughters for fear that so many generations of work to lighten the family gene pool will be for naught. I also understand that an important reason you want to date these daughters is to lighten up your own family’s gene pool. The cause of all this trouble, however, is not envious Black people but the system of white supremacy. White supremacy is the name, and racism is the game.
2. The young woman who claimed she wrote “death penalty” rather than “life imprisonment” because since there is a delay between conviction and execution the death penalty resembles life imprisonment, so “to her” they are one and the same thing. “To me” as evidence of facticity is highly inadequate.
An Award goes to:
1. Professor Zero, the organism. I have a very resilient organism which resists disease and fairly sprouts muscles just as soon as it begins to work out. It is a Cadillac.
THAT NOBLE PROFESSORIAL LIFE
And I have a question: should we make less? In other words, am I insufficiently dedicated to my field if I would not do my job for almost free? I do not think so. I’d do a movement job for less money, but not this one. And I am not alone – just look at administrators’ salaries, and ask them how little they would really work for. On the matter of academic work, what it is and what it looks like, see also Nate and his comments thread.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I could live yet more modestly than I do, but why?
I try to really, I do, and most of the time it is Mr. Glendower’s fault. It will be June or July before most of my friends and family learn what I got for Christmas year, (if they ever learn). I could not reveal it all (not that it is much in volume), it would be just too embarrassing knowing the economy is what it is. Well, not just what I got, but what my child is getting, and what Mr. Glendower bought for himself, and what we got fro the oldest daughter and the grandson.
I realise that I just did exactly that here, but take it as my Sunday postsecret. LOL!
Y’all, Kitty quotes a sentence I subsequently cut from the piece, and should probably bring back. I am all for living ecologically and all, but I am *not* into privation for privation’s sake! Good for Mr. Glendower!
hi Profacero,
I just had a thought – someone (not me, some social scientist) should write a comparative study on attitudes toward work, or rather attempts to inculcate attitudes toward work, in education and healthcare and perhaps another similar industry. A friend of mine told me a story once about someone he knew in nursing school, there was some go-round in a class during a discussion on the nursing shortage where the teacher put everyone on the spot and pushed them to say something like “yes, I’d totally be a nurse for free, this work is important.” And of course it is and really it should be done for free, but only if people got all the things they need for free. Might be interesting as well to chart this in relation to changing percentages of women in the industry. Or to compare it with conversations about mother on welfare supposedly having children just to get paid more.
take care,
Nate
Yes – good idea. There are parts of this job I do do for free, and there are other jobs I do and have done – the prison work, for instance – for free. And there are lawyers who charge for jobs they aren’t interested in, but do the ones they consider important for free. Etc.
But I am sure that the whole thing about providing service for free is ideologically motivated, is pitched to the feminine professions, etc. The more I think about it, in fact, the more I think it’s a brilliant thought!