coldhearted scientist وداد

As we know, I was told not to go to graduate school because it would lead to being a professor, which was bad because it was a research job and might be located in a snowy climate. I might have ceased and desisted more easily had I been given better information on the actual disadvantages of being a professor.

One of them is not having a research job and having to live on this hot and humid bayou. Another is that having finished paying bills for the month, I see once again that only my exchange student, who pays rent, is keeping me from having to live on credit until 30 November. I am choosing what to buy in December: shall I continue my memberships in professional societies, or buy the shoes I need if I am to preserve my ability to walk for the next forty years? Me cago en la puta leche.

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I have already had to give up going to conferences for financial reasons and I am going to have to give up buying books, which is a problem since the library has nothing from this century. On the summer fellowships you can get to libraries: I will apply, yes, but to accept these things you still have to have some cash of your own. I gave up a Fullbright once because I did not have the cash I needed to actually take it.

I knew on the first day of my first job that I was not suited to this profession in most of its iterations: I am at once too traditional and too unconventional, too strong a personality.  My thought upon realizing this was to move to Los Angeles, the largest city in my state and actually quite economical, and finish my studies of Arabic and Near Eastern Studies at UCLA. I would work for an international research entity. It was a good idea and I should have done it.

I lacked that last 10% of confidence I needed to go out into the wilderness, I needed more encouragement and less criticism, but I should have done it. And a few years later I had my law school illumination. At first, at the very first, I could have done it by going to a Louisiana school. I hesitated because secretly I like my field and my research and teaching and then when I really decided to do it, I also wanted to leave here, and I found I could not finance it. I should have done it when I thought of it, when New Orleans rents were low and when I was still fascinated. Before Katrina, before the oil spill, before Jindal, before the future ended.

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Now, I believe I am completely hemmed in. I cannot afford to move. (That, actually, seems in some way to have been my perpetual problem since freshman year: I could not take a quarter off because the time it would take to arrange for that would mean time away from studying, which would crash my GPA and limit my future options.) Anyway, I will see whether I can write these books, books I can feel might be like home runs.

I am so tired of negotiating, pleading, starving, limiting and never using any muscle. I knew when I took this job that the situation would be bad, but I did not realize we would have to beg each day to even work in a marginally rational manner.

And so many were angry at me for the alleged egotism of doing the Ph.D., and said I did not deserve to do it, that I thought I had only been let into the program as some kind of courtesy. And if it was egotistical I have paid for that over and over again. I am so tired of being told we have to pay the price for our poor judgment in studying, that we must sacrifice and lament.

Axé.