Here is what Rob Brezsny has to say to me this week — fortunately since I am going on vacation for FOUR DAYS, during which I will only do teaching related activity and no research.
Let the boundaries blur a bit. Don’t stick too rigidly to the strict definitions. Play around with some good old-fashioned fuzzy logic. The straight facts and the precise details are important to keep in mind, but you shouldn’t cling to them so ferociously that they stifle your imagination. You need to give yourself enough slack to try open-ended experiments. You’ll be smart to allow some wobble in your theories and a tremble in your voice. Magic will happen if there’s plenty of wiggle room….
Academic advice is about discipline and as you see, I do not need it. At the same time it alleges to be about relaxation but really it is not — it is about not taking your work seriously enough for it to become competitive with the work of the dispensers of advice.
I normally get grief for: (a) knowing too much; (b) getting too much done; (c) having too much theoretical rigor; (d) not suffering enough; (e) not appearing to suffer enough; (f) having informed and principled disagreements with the alleged policy du jour; (g) asserting authority; (h) wearing dresses; (i) swimming; (j) having concrete knowledge of other research and professional careers; (k) having a serious and longstanding commitment to a political movement (it is traitorous, outright traitorous, to put something first that is neither paid, nor a mere hobby, nor a family activity).
All of these activities are ill advised for women in the humanities but they are in my nature. Academic advice says not to be this way and then castigates one for not having reaped benefits one can only reap from being this way … and then attributes the problem to a lack of discipline.
While exhorting people to be more disciplined and also to take more time off and be less ambitious, academic advice withholds needed information. I am against the entire enterprise of advice because it is anti-advice.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Enjoy your vacation!
🙂 Post does sound crabby, although really it is just my latest insight on all of that! I am enjoying …
I agree. In fact, academics will give you the worst advice, because they are in competition with you.
Relax, don’t do it.
I am not talking about anyone commenting here, of course!
I was also responding to this remark of Historianns, that I liked:
“I saw someone the other day pushing that meme in some article that “no one on his deathbed wished that he had spent more time at work,” a nostrum that’s meant to shame us all into spending more time with our families, or spending more time trying to make a family. But I think there probably are a lot of middle-class, educated women who *do* wish on their deathbeds that they had done more with their lives beyond organizing family life for a husband & children.”
…on this thread: http://www.historiann.com/2013/06/12/grad-applications-ca-1961-writer-phyllis-richman-gets-the-last-laugh-and-a-harvard-proffie-remains-clueless/#comments
Oh, yes—I have had that same thought about “on your deathbed.” I will probably wish I had published more.
I experience that “on your deathbed you will wish you spent more time with family” (which it really means) as some sort of repressive shaming statement. The same people who say it, are against fun and adventure as well — they believe one needs to do something “daring” like go to the mall. On my deathbed I will definitely wish I did not quail to these fools as much as I have — I already do wish that.
It’s the either/or thinking. I worked hard at what I cared about and let my life be a mess for years, and I’m so glad I did. I don’t have to live like my contemporaries. I can be very free.
Hard to explain, maybe, but the people who get the least out of life are the ones who try to have perfect lives.
Great point on the either/or — . The only way I have figured out not to suffer from anger/regret over the time I gave to psychotherapy and Alanon is to say, or realize that it is structurally similar to having gone to a war or something and then having to recover from PTSD … what it felt like was going to prison and being slowly convinced it was because I was actually guilty. If I don’t remind myself, look, you suffered a bad accident, then I am aghast at what I wasted.
Oh, I had to wander in the wilderness for years, too. I had an alcoholic mother. But I just kept on going and found my way out of the wilderness eventually.
I just wish I could have had more of that energy for other things, but what energy I did have I put to good use.
Wish I could have had more of that energy for other things, me too, but ah well. The thing I am most glad I did is get involved with the prison movement.