“How do you deal with these people?” a colleague’s spouse asked me one night. We were smoking on a porch in the dead of winter, shivering through our conversation. There was snow everywhere. I had been quietly listening to two white dudes from the philosophy department alternate between a discussion of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and reminiscences of traveling to Paris in the summer for research, how wonderful the city was and how hard it had been to return to the provincial United States. In my head, which had started to throb, I was thinking, “You guys have it real hard here, don’t you?” Another guy from the English department launched into a monologue about his recent publication in some fancy academic journal. No one seemed impressed. No one there seemed impressed by anything other than themselves.
“Oh my god, have you read so-and-so’s book? It’s terrible. She doesn’t understand Deleuze at all. I can’t believe Harvard published her!” I looked at my colleague’s spouse, a bit tipsy. “Save me,” I mouthed. We went inside. There was a glass of wine in her hand. “Here,” she said. “Sedate yourself. It won’t make it stop but it will numb the pain.” We started talking and laughing. And that was when it hit me. I was someone who always made friends outside academia, who would rather engage with the spouses or bartenders and servers I encountered than the fancy senior faculty around the table. It was suddenly clear; I would rather be a waitress than an academic. full: http://www.salon.com/2015/12/20/sixteen_years_in_academia_made_me_an_a_hole/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
