This blog is about how despite sacrifice and penitence I am not as great a sacrificer or penitent as is required, and would like to become less of one and not more.
I was expected to be a housewife and my marriage would have been abusive because that was what I had been taught relationships were. So I only gained by going into academia. Graduate school was the best part of it and not staying in the area to adjunct and so on was the next best part.
What I gave up to stay in academia was the career I really wanted. I had majored in humanities and not social sciences to gain family approval and also to sort of make something up to them. I was not getting married or going into the arts, and I was not going to a small liberal arts college, so I had to make some sort of gesture toward the family interests. Social science would have betrayed every value they held. And I really did want to learn foreign languages, many of them, and to do research and to travel, so a degree in comparative literature was not a bad compromise at all.
I had thought I could work for an organism like UNESCO, as I knew from the outset there were no academic jobs and teaching was not rewarded or respected. My thought was to work for a large international cultural and research organization. I got swept up into the academic job market, and I am here.
At 24, already with an M.A. and in a very interesting Ph.D. program, I understood what my true major should have been: Economics — and it was late then. At 35, already well into my second decent tenure track job, I understood what I would have done with that Economics degree: law, so as to work on trade, immigration, and the prison industrial complex.
Studying these things from the point of view of my present field is a solution that has been suggested to me, but it is no solution: I want actual training in the disciplines in question, not the dilettantish work of those literature professors who decide they do not like literature. I want the law license so I can do the kinds of things you can do if you have it, and I want the time spent on foreign language teaching to be spent doing legal fieldwork.
If I cannot do these things — and I cannot, every time I get my actual financial aid offers from law schools I see that I cannot afford to move there, let alone live there; I have looked at this every way I can and I cannot see my way, and it is so late now — I am interested in studying literature.
I am not a recreational reader of novels but I really am interested in words and abstractions and theory. I do not believe in these luminaries in my field who are against literature. I sometimes think they are the ones who should have resigned and retrained in something they might like better.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
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