coldhearted scientist وداد

Let’s look at this massive cloud of pain that is passing through me.

1/- Every fall is so incredibly painful because of Spanish 201. Como tantas veces he dicho, I would take any other Spanish course, or any other courses in the other disciplines in which I have the 18 graduate hours or the equivalent, but the university’s idea of my greatest usefulness is for Spanish 201. I am about to crack from the pain. This year I kept it at bay until after finals, but I am paying for this fortitude now.

2/- It is also that the town offers little respite. It has events, but on a normal day there is no fully pleasant place except my house, and I am not one of those who likes to stay home. In a town like this you have to have work you are absorbed in, and not care about anything else. And my work in fall is Spanish 201, where they torture us, and the new plan is to torture us yet more.

3/- And I have decided to stand up to this, and I believe I can stand up to this, but more than one colleague says this is impossible. I am disoriented from the pain and concerned about driving because I know I half want to crash the car. If there were somewhere here where one could lick one’s wounds, change perspective, look out over water–but there are only the strip malls, world without end.

4/- When I hear this kind of doomsday talk I wish one again I had stood up to those who said I had to stick with this. If I had stayed in L.A., stayed in New Orleans, jumped when I knew I wanted to and could. If I had not listened to all those who said it was unfair of me to leave, I who passed exams, I who finished dissertations, I who got jobs. I had to do this to atone, I had to do it for the team, I had to do this so people would not worry. I had to do this because it looked right and sounded right.

5/- And now I am too far in and it would be much more tolerable without Spanish 201, or at least without the new program that is being put into place. I do believe it is important to resist the implementation of the new program in its worst form.

6/- “Nobody thought this was how things would end,” I was told recently. I knew, I could see it, because I am in field and I know what is happening. They did not believe me, but I told them.

7/- One thing that would help would be if after teaching Spanish 201 I could go walking in my neighborhood. But in this neighborhood, the one I can afford, walkers without dogs are assumed to be prostitutes, and in daylight I have been stopped by both police and hopeful clients for this reason.

8/- It just is not viable, and I pointed this out many years ago. And it is so far from the only thing I could have done, but I was not believed. It is shocking to me that I am so easily intimidated in this country.

9/- The impact of having to live in awful places, on low incomes, is very much discounted by academics. I think this last is a sign of their alienation, not of their dedication to work.

10/- I really regret having thrown away so much of what could have been a brilliant, interesting and useful life, and I wish I had had the strength to stand up. I do not regret the Ph.D., even though so many considered it “selfish,” and so on. I regret the form of atonement for it to which I allowed myself to be pushed.

#OccupyHE.

All right. So what did we have this semester:

1/- A good advanced class, and I did not fully melt down over Spanish 201 until after finals (although the pain started in mid October, and ramped up mid November, and this should be noted and planned for).

2/- A weekend in New Orleans and a week in Oaxaca, with a good conference.

3/- A nice Thanksgiving weekend, nice weather, nice hike in a place I should go more often, nice fall parties with creative people.

4/- A very good visit to Angola.

5/- Some nice visits to Baton Rouge.

6/- A series of serious memos written by me, standing my ground on Spanish 201 in a firm, yet non-divisive manner.

7/- An article to journal, a magazine article out, some other things like that.

I should not really complain, perhaps, but the thing is that I would like daily life to be less painful and I am not sure how to achieve this. What have we right now:

1/- I am angry, frustrated for the present, and worried for the future especially since I am told our next governor is David Vitter, and that we are going to be an amalgam of Texas and Mississippi for awfulness (since we are losing our alt-Louisiana characteristics so fast). However, I am still not depressed.

2/- The house is clean.

3/- There is something about mental health hygiene that I do not do right here. There are so many things I would do, but that are unavailable, and so many substitute things I should do, but that I do not do consistently because they are insufficient or disappointing. There must be something else, a something else that is realistic.

What would really do the trick:

An exit from the basic language sequence in Spanish. Honestly, that is why I so liked my two VAP jobs, which were at institutions that granted the Ph.D. in Spanish: there were books in the library and interesting talks on campus, for one thing, and interesting graduate students, but the main thing was that I was not teaching in the basic language sequence. All my tenure track and tenured jobs have involved this and it is always more time consuming than are other classes; here, however, it is also painful, like walking on knives, because of the politics involved and also what I would call gross mismanagement.

Axé.