Not so much about me

Me and Jesse James

2006-10-03T08:12:00.000-07:00

I knew I was an outlaw at heart. The rebel astride a horse galloping across the American west ---no fences to impede my passage (I always forget that for the historical era to be right --- I would have been back at the grubby camp site tending to my 12 children, 5 of whom would die soon. Thank god, though, fantasy knows no gender so I can remain on horseback.) Don’t we all carry this fiction in our hearts? I, however, have legitimate claim. I am related to Jesse James, the infamous confederate soldier turned outlaw. My husband, the obsessive genealogist (boy, that’s a redundancy!) discovered the link while researching my paternal great grandfather on his mother’s side. For the uninitiated, he was looking for relatives of my father’s mother’s father, an itinerate witch doctor, who sold patent medicine on a Mississippi river boat and thought he could cure all aliments with an electric light bulb. A fellow traveler in the nether world of genealogy claims my great grandfather helped her grandmother to the grave by claiming he could cure bladder cancer, which of course he couldn’t. But her death is another story. My great grandfather, Asa Moses Thornell, born from a long line of dirt poor white trash had a sister named Mary Abigail who married Thomas Jefferson Mimms, a scion of an infamous Texas family, whose patris familias wore a hat most of his adult life to cover the scar from the partial scalping he received at the hands of the Cherokee in Texas before the Alamo. He likely deserved to have the whole thing taken off given that he and his family members were ruthless and not a little bit stupid. Mary Thornell Mimms died young, in childbirth, no doubt, as was the fate of many of my poor female relations spread from to Indiana to Iowa to Texas and back. She is buried with no grave marker at the end of a dirt road out there in the mythical Texas dry lands. Actually, I think she and Thomas Jefferson Mimms are buried in Brazos County between Austin and San Antonio. It appears neither dry nor dusty but this story lies behind the gauzy veil of fantasy where historical accuracy is less important than atmosphere. Mary was a short-lived coda to the Mimms legacy but the conduit for my path to infamy. The Mimms, despite their treachery and bad behavior, had several legitimate lineages spreading out from Virginia and North Carolina to Texas and Missouri. John Wilson Mimms from Missouri, the father of Zerealda Mimms, was a descendent of the upright part of the family, a minister and likely Thomas Jefferson’s second cousin. Zerealda, of course, married Jesse James on April 24, 1874, at the height of his post-war crime spree. Jesse was also a Mimms as John Wilson Mimms was his mother’s brother. And so it is that I am related to one of the most famous outlaws of the American West….my great great aunt’s husband’s third cousin’s husband.

Why does this story matter so much to me? Hmm. The narrative of everyone’s life includes equal parts fiction, filtered reality, oral history, and wishful thinking. We take in the parts of reality that suit our conception and stir them up with the things people tell us to yield some coherent way of negotiating the world. My fiction includes a fair amount of rebelliousness that I persist in clinging to despite years of the good careful middle class behavior of finishing degrees, having jobs, paying mortgages, and raising children. As the youngest of four children, it was always my role and my duty to do what I was told while resenting it --- hence the fictitious rebel without a cause. My father, the one with a real historical and behavioral claim on free agency, also had a strong streak of independence that he may have learned directly from all of those Texas wild men. Despite being the wrong sex, I always wanted to see the open road ahead and feel the Texas wind in my hair but I never have. Instead, I have run roughshod over bureaucracies everywhere with little to my credit except the continuing fantasy that a disdain for authority sets me apart. Someone forgot to tell me that this disdain works well in an open field filled with cows but is less useful in a room full of people with power over you. Oh well. Our semi-fictional narratives serve the useful purpose of setting us apart from ourselves. If I truly had to face my own compliant, routine loving, pedantic self everyday, I would join Mary Abigail Thornell Mimms down that dusty road a lot sooner than I should. The story of Jesse James and my crazy great grandfather, the swindling two bit con man, just gives me the whitewash with which to plaster over my bourgeoisie present. Look up as you drive across the Indiana Toll Road to get to your destination on either coast ---- you may yet see a crazy woman astride a horse, hat pulled low, wielding metaphoric six guns in her hands.

Hung Up on Redemption

2006-09-28T07:04:00.000-07:00

Standing in the parking lot of a Doubletree Inn on the Rockville Pike in the Maryland suburb of Rockville in my bare feet, a pair of jeans that replaced my frayed indecent black pj shorts, and my orange “Gay, Fine By Me” tee shirt at 12:30 am one recent Tuesday morning, I found myself in bleary eyed contemplation of all things human. I was in the parking lot with all the other sleepy guests because of a fire alarm that had blasted me out of a sleep that I had only recently wrestled away from my angry and confused self. I am never sure whether hotel rooms pose a physical or a psychological challenge to me but I need to be dead tired, dead drunk, or medicated to sleep well (or frankly at all) in hotel rooms. The alarm startled me so much that should the hotel have actually been on fire, I would have been left in the parking lot with only a hotel key and my empathetic shirt to lay claim to my humanity. The shorts I knew could not see the light of day but the shirt was an artifact of my days at a university where you had to proclaim your tolerance on your chest lest your heart be misinterpreted. Other than decisions about my clothes, I couldn’t seem to organize myself. Everyone else was prepared with coats and purses, phones and computers, and decent looking hair. Only one other person was barefoot and he was about 6’5”, 300 lbs and wearing an XXL tee shirt with Winnie the Pooh on it. The confusion looked endearing on him or maybe it was just the shirt. It made me look like a post-modern homeless woman taking advantage of a crowd to hide from the police. Needless to say, after the requisite half an hour in the parking lot, I went back to my room trying to figure out whether I would remember the duck tape in a nuclear holocaust or simply make sure that my overweight middle aged body was covered with fabric. After all, important decisions might be made about post-apocalyptic society based on whether you had visible cellulite.

The fragile truce I had brokered with my psyche exploded with the lights and sirens. Sleep, yeah right. Following the false apocalypse and my stint as a po-mo bag lady in the parking lot, I snuggled down in the acre of mattress with 400 pillows to indulge in my other hotel-induced habit, watching really bad television. I bypassed my usual fare of reruns and cringing reality shows for a Larry King interview with Oprah Winfrey and her cast of 1000s for the Oprah and friends radio show. She covered the territory --spiritual, financial, health, physical fitness, literary, and psychological. Her ‘friends’ all shared a hopeful messianic physical presence that, given my recent encounter with my inner bag lady, oppressed me. My continued unwillingness to remake myself into the thin, empowered, sane, healthy and accomplished person they know I can be made my overweight underachieving lazy self feel bad. I can’t seem to get with the makeover program --- I know in the hands of professionals such as Oprah and Friends and all the “What Not To Wears,” “What Not to Buys” and “What Not to Thinks” I could emerge from my 40 year old chrysalis. I am as addicted to redemption as entertainment as much as the next middle aged woman. The underlying theory behind it provides us all with emotional salvation from our own ordinary selves. Given enough money, time, advice, and attention we can all be transcendent. I want very much to believe in this Cinderella fantasy that can push back time, neglect, and genetics to say nothing of years of ineffectual time management, hedonistic self indulgence, and my basic disregard for the trappings of femininity. By age 50, I could emerge as Brigitte Bardot, if I only I had the right trainer.

It would be a trivial exercise to trace the source of our national preoccupation with the makeover as entertainment and salvation. After all, does anyone really want to watch an overweight troubled young woman with poor fashion sense learn to accept herself and negotiate a judgmental world by learning to ignore social expectations? Naah. It is so much more fun to watch professionals pummel her to perfection. The fast-forward of the media also allows the transformation to be a sixty minute exercise. This is what I want --- not self knowledge and personal growth. I can acquire those after the 45,000 dollars worth of liposuction. The problem is, though, now my cellulite guilt is compounded by my inability to be on the path to redemption through exercise, diet, make up, clothes, therapy, and financial self discipline. I am using all my emotional reserves right now to get through my life. I cannot imagine where all the extra giddy-up is supposed to come from for the transformation that awaits me. It is no longer enough to feel inadequate --- we have added a psychological accelerant to the conflagration. You have to want to change…. Be thinner, smarter, better dressed, wealthier, more feminine, more accomplished, a better parent, a sexier spouse, a healthier, saner you…. There is even a multi-billion dollar industry and “Oprah and Friends” to help you do it. To say nothing of the health care industry that mixes in the fear of death with this transformation guilt. Yaahhh….

Laying in a bed that needed a map in a generic hotel room with bad art and carpets at 1 in the morning, I found the lethal combination of my recent stint in the parking lot and Oprah’s uplifting self help army almost unbearable. I thought longingly of the small stash of Vicodin I hoarded from a recent episode of back pain. But of course I had left it at home so that I could once again teach myself that I would triumph over hotel rooms if only I could change (ignoring data from 500 stays in hotel rooms over the last 20 years). Isn’t the relentless judgment we heap on ourselves enough? Can’t we go back to eternal damnation as punishment for sins of the flesh and weakness of the spirit? At least that option offers a long stretch of self indulgence and a high probability that it’s all a myth anyway. Constant calls for resurrection and rebirth within the context of a lived life sure makes it hard to get through the day. But if anyone wants to nominate me for the show “What Not to Wear,” I have been saving some really ugly clothes for just such an opportunity. The frayed black pj shorts for instance….

Recycling data

2006-09-21T14:57:00.000-07:00

I make my living trying to convince people to recycle data. I work in one of largest data consignment shops in the world, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. I think that the staff, as a collective, have heard every imaginable explanation for why people don’t want to recycle their data. “It’s too expensive to clean it up to give it to you.” “The government only gives us enough money to collect it and analyze it not clean it up.” “I worked hard to gather this.” “I don’t think anyone else would understand it; use it wisely; respect my respondents; or be interested.” Some of the excuses are legitimate particularly the ones about confidentiality (although I am sometimes suspicious that it is a ruse). I can guarantee that the group of people from whom we solicit data are also likely to belong to that enlightened class who carefully rinse out their glass bottles, bundle their newspapers, and compost their leaves. They are likely to be outraged by the lack of money for environmental programs and contemptuous of those who drive those big gas guzzling SUVs. These are all good scientists who are careful in their work and often brilliant in their conceptions of the way the world works. Yet, they are willing to waste a scarce resource largely paid for the government: data. I find myself totally stymied by this. Of all the things we shouldn’t waste, it is intellectual capital. We need every piece of information collected and every idea available to keep the world moving forward. I would much rather a plastic soda bottle goes into the land fill and a truck get 8 miles a gallon than a piece of data about human beings be lost through negligence or selfishness.

I have thought a great deal about the arguments presented by those who collect data. “It’s too expensive to clean it up to give to you.” Collecting data is a bit like cooking a good meal. If you clean as you go, when you are full and sleepy you will have much less to do. Documenting and cleaning data are good scientific practice. It should be very little work to make it ready for someone else. “I worked hard for this.” You should want the world to share it with you. Papers only illustrate part of your brilliance not all the thoughtful and interesting steps you have taken to get there. “People won’t use it properly.” Hmm. Can we dictate how other analysts use our written work? The scientific discourse is one of error and correction. The literature is filled with such exchanges. If we prevent people from entering the conversation because we are afraid they might say something stupid, haven’t we violated the basic principle of science, which is that every statement is valid when supported by evidence or until proven wrong? Data are the raw material of those conversations. The only excuse I find stunning is the idea that if the data are released to the public, someone may happen upon a great discovery and scoop the person who collected the data. Hmm. There are so many reasons I find this absurd. First and foremost, I am a social scientist. The degree of interpretation in social science is quite broad. We even have difficulty replicating each other’s work when the scientific question is explicit let alone when we each come at it blindly. Second, I am naively committed to the idea that even social science is an open discourse that wobbles its way slowly toward truth. Hoarding one’s data to avoid the wobble violates one of the fundamental norms of our shared profession.

So maybe if the government gives us a tax break and puts a green “data” bin with a circle of arrows around it on our front porches, we will stop losing valuable information about ourselves. Until, then, I will be traveling the world with my trinkets and useful tips and tricks to convince a reluctant public to recycle their data. Look for me on the side of the road… black and blue ICPSR bag in hand.

Men's voices

2006-09-17T18:33:00.000-07:00

Five or six years ago, I had an embarrassing addiction to boy bands. At the height of their popularity, my elementary school daughters listened to them night and day. I really liked those sweet harmonies and high voices. I made the mistake of telling my graduate students, who seized on it as a sign of my mental weakness. I am fortunate my daughters grew up because they recently have supplied me with much better substance for my continued weakness. Jack Johnson and John Mayer can lay claim to the title of musicians as they actually play their own instruments and write their own songs. No more synthesized pop written in Sweden for me. Just sweet upbeat longing. My teenagers and I are drawn to the same thing in these man-boy voices but for different reasons. The sound of their voices carries a longing intensity and raw gentle emotion that is not reproduced in the smooth glib jazz voices or raucous testosterone driven rock and roll voices. Neil Young sounds like a howling wolf with a guitar. Jack Johnson sounds like a Labrador curled at you feet whose warm brown gaze is meant only for you. My daughters love these cracking, wanting voices because they think that this is what grown men are like. I love them because I know that those voices last maybe an hour. Men’s emotions get tucked in behind a lobster’s carapace at about age 25. Occasionally, a claw gets ripped off to show the meat but the shell grows over it pretty quickly. Those magical voices, though, remind me of that hour so long ago. I don’t have the heart to tell my daughters the truth. Let them believe that on rainy mornings their lovers will make them banana pancakes, sing to them, and try to keep them inside all day long. Or at least as long as there isn’t a game on TV.

Why pot roast might save the world

2006-09-14T08:25:00.000-07:00

I just finished this hilarious book called I feel bad about my neck by Nora Ephron, which is probably only hilarious to women over 40 but funny nevertheless. In one chapter she waxes nostalgically about the disappearance of cabbage strudel in New York City. It reminded me that I have been working on a theory for several years about how pot roast may save the world. My sister Amy, the chef, is appalled by this idea, I think primarily because she was scarred by pot roast as a child not because it is a bad idea. If you don’t know from pot roast, it is a dish shared by midwesterns, Jews, the Irish (who make it badly and call it New England boiled dinner and I am only including it because my husband’s of Irish descent), the French (who boil it and call it pot-au-feu and claim they invented it), and the Italians (who throw in lots of other body parts from other animals to keep the cow company and call it Bollito Misto). The common denominator is a hunk of cheap meat, some vegetables, heat, and a lot of time. To eat it, you cannot be scared by food because it violates every single rule of healthy eating laid out by the food Nazis: it is one giant piece of the dreaded antibiotic, genetically engineered, mad cow infected red meat, swimming in fat with vegetables cooked beyond recognition, and, most importantly, it must be eaten with emotion. How you can not eat emotionally I have NO idea but that apparently is an important part of a healthy diet. Eat like a robot. Pot roast cannot be eaten without nostalgic tears of joy running down your face. So if you can lift your fork without a shred of irony, empathy, or joy, my theory will not work for you.

But for the rest of us. Here’s the theory. Pot roast is the answer to three important contemporary social problems --- the war in Iraq, all sins of instant gratification including consumer debt, drug abuse, and teen pregnancy, and, finally, the rise in the divorce rate. We have spent billions of tax dollars on these problems when a $5 dollar chunk of meat and about 2 bucks worth of vegetables and potatoes would have done the trick. One characteristic of pot roast is that it takes planning and a lot of time. You can’t come home from work at 6 and say “Honey, lets have a pot roast.” If you are lucky, you will eat at midnight. Also, who has a chunk of meat in the freezer and more importantly 5 carrots, 5 stalks of celery and a bag of onions, all of which must not be dried up, shriveled and lurking in the corner of the vegetable bin from the last time you made pot roast? The recipes for pot roast are quite variable so other than the meat and veggies, you worry. Wine no wine? Brown floured meat in butter or in oil? Bay leaf? The dreaded ketchup or barbeque sauce because it didn’t thicken? These decisions consume you as it cooks. You have to concentrate.

Now imagine that George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld had all gotten together to make a pot roast one Sunday afternoon before the war in Iraq started. George says to Dick –“Did you remember the carrots?” but Dick purchased the baby ones washed in a bag, which are great for diets but useless for pot roast. So, Dick has to take time to go back to the store and get the RIGHT excuse for a war, I mean, carrots. What if, at about 5 p.m., George opens the oven door, takes off the lid of the pot roast and sees that what they have is pot roast soup not that nice thick sauce that doesn’t need a bowl but just a big wide-lipped plate? And he says to Rummy – “Hey, Don, your plan didn’t work. Pour in the barbeque sauce.” So, George will have to hold Rummy responsible for poor planning and FIX it before they can eat. One more thing about pot roast… as much as I love it.. a little goes a long way. The greasy, bloated feeling that comes from trying to digest all that meat reminds you that it is a pleasure you want to indulge in only rarely. Although much less palatable, war is like pot roast in that respect. Maybe Gulf War I was enough for awhile. And George Sr. probably would have been just as happy if Jr. had made him a pot roast.

The other thing about pot roast is that you have to wait so damn long for it. It is worse than a Thanksgiving turkey in that respect. From the moment the onions, garlic, and meat hit the oil to brown, you’re hungry. The sizzling, seasoned fat makes you not just hungry but grizzly bear, flesh ripping, camp-site destroying ravenous. Turkeys only give you maybe an hour or two of this feeling near the end. For pot roast, it can last up to four hours and it changes character over time from the grizzly bear variety to the mellow wine-drinking, crackling fire, “I need my mommy” hunger near the end. Turkey cannot do this for you. The problem with it is that pot roast cannot be hurried. If you eat it in two hours …. the disappointment is so acute that it may destroy your faith in mankind forever. Believe me, it has taken me years to recover. So, pot roast teaches you patience and the art of anticipation. Think about how useful these lessons could be. If you are able to anticipate the joy of a new couch or a 200 dollar purse or that new dress just a month or so longer, maybe you will have the money. If you can delay the joy of sex by lots of slow-cooking, long-lingering touches, maybe you could remember to buy condoms when the pot roast finally comes out of the oven. And drug and alcohol abuse, in addition to the idea that a little goes a long way, pot roast boosts your serotonin levels and is a much better sedative than drugs and alcohol. Let’s ditch Chapter 11, abstinence campaigns, and all rehabs programs. I think I could get federal funding for the pot roast therapy program. And, it would be cheap.

Conservatives tell us that all the evils of the world can be traced to the rise in divorce. Of course that’s completely silly but because I am in the midst of a long, mostly happy marriage, I do think that marriage keeps you off the streets at a minimum. Most marriage therapists tell us that the key to good marriage is communication. Bullshit, it’s pot roast. How could all these well-trained caring therapists be so wrong? The thing about marriage is that you just want to feel loved, cared for, and appreciated. You can put up with poor planning, overflowing garbage cans, stupid decisions, howling name calling fights, and a lot of small lies if in the end you feel loved. Walking into a warm well-lit house on a raw dark day in December to the smell of pot roast affirms that you are, indeed, loved. You may be able to fake ecstasy but you can’t fake that pot roast smell. Premade stuff will not have suffused every crevice of the house --- your hands will not smell like garlic and your skin like wine. Sorry. And whether you walk into that house or you are there all day to move through the stages of hunger with your loved one, you will know that the pot roast maker loves you enough to do this for you. Aside from reveling in the pot roast itself, the cook will be lavished with praise and joy. Appreciation, caring, and love. All in a hunk of poor quality meat, root vegetables, and time.

I think pot roast can save the world. Really. A couple of weeks ago, I called my mother (who I had run an abbreviated version of the pot roast theory by before) crowing over my sautéd veal scallops in wild mushroom cream sauce. On a random Tuesday, I created it without a recipe, which I rarely do with expensive stuff like veal and wild mushrooms. A couple dollars worth of cheese and some pasta I can see sacrificing to experimentation but not 10 dollars worth of veal and 8 dollars worth of mushrooms. After about 25 years of cooking, though, I was ready to take the plunge and it was spectacular. I am preening and strutting and my mother, who is smarter than me by a long shot, says “Are you going to rethink your pot roast theory and switch your allegiance to wild mushrooms and veal?” Wow. Talk about shaking my world view. The answer to that I think is no. In fact, I think my veal is indicative of what’s wrong with the world. Although it tasted good and displayed my enormous talent as a cook, it is elitist. Costs too much. With pot roast, even if you just add water and salt and pepper ---it tastes pretty good. But my masterpiece would have been ruined by cheap veal no matter how hard I pounded it. Second, it was also all about me. The kids and hubby liked it, I guess, but not nearly as much as I did. And I liked it because it was my skill that created it. With pot roast, time creates the magic not an individual. All in all I think I will stick with my original theory that pot roast and its multilingual cousins not only can but will save the world.

A very long treatise on surviving a non-linear academic career

2006-09-12T06:59:00.000-07:00

I have spent my entire adult life in a non-linear career arc, careening from graduate program to graduate program and out of academia and back in with no status then some status then no status again. Because of that, I have become a connoisseur of non-linearity yet I have very little to say that is helpful. I lacked the basic foresight to make choices at each stage of my academic career that were thoughtful, self-interested, and cumulative. Hence, the non-linearity. I made choices that allowed me to live with husband, pay the mortgage, have kids, not lose my mind, and not teach four courses a semester, which I would be terrible at. All of those things conflict with the standard march through an academic career. I guess all I have to offer is the consequences of non-linearity and a psychological strategy to cope with it. I have no Oprahesque (Ophraesence…Oprahish…. Come on, the suffix is there somewhere) story of redemption to offer as I continue to move constantly sideways. The redemptive stories belong to people who make the non-linear choice only once not over and over again.

There are five parts to the strategy for survival, albeit not success. They include: (1) never expect non-linearity to pay off; (2) never respond to incentives in any institution; (3) try to avoid being exploited; (4) never act your status; and finally and most importantly (5) never expect the grass to be greener anywhere else. The first of these is the hardest to accept. If you make a choice that is inconsistent with the usual career path of academics, it is hard to fit an appropriate predictive model to your behavior. Ergo, you are unlikely to re-enter mainstream academia as successfully as you might like. I have unfortunately been on enough search committees and recruiting efforts to have that skepticism hammered into my reptilian brain. My rage had to be subdued by various combinations of alcohol and medication when faced with enlightened statements such as: “Well, how good could they be if they chose the government after graduate school?” or “Their interests seemed to change substantially when they worked for “x”, it shows a lack of continuity in their research agenda.” Both of these ridiculous statements belie an ignorance of why people go non-linear and what they do when they get there. While your time as a research associate, government employee, or consulting firm guru may really enhance your skill set and make you both a much better teacher and more thoughtful researcher, do not expect to be rewarded for it. Successful upwardly mobile career paths, most particularly in academia, remain the province of the well-behaved not necessarily the most meritorious. So, don’t expect a job offer at Harvard unless you are coming off a stint as Secretary of Labor. The only acceptable non-linearity is before the Ph.D. (“Oh, isn’t that quaint, he was a policeman) or in an acceptable non-linear fashion (“The JRR Tolkein Post-Doctoral Fellowship of Fantasy Studies”). Hanging on to the example of the iconic few who make it big after non-linear moves is like carefully reading about the lives of really long-lived people to convince yourself you can avoid dying. Hopeful but deluded. In both cases, the right hand tail of the distribution, which is four standard deviations away from the mean, is the foundation for our dreams. There is a very high probability you will die before 90 and also never become a famous academic if you make a couple of non-linear choices. But in both cases, you are likely to be happy anyway.

The second part of the strategy is not to be a good girl in any institution you work for (I say “girl” because, you know, it is usually women who do this non-linear thing and besides men very rarely respond to institutional incentives anyway… sorry for my sexism, it’s a blog I don’t have to temper my words). Institutions have reward structures that shape your behavior as a professional. Unless you want to stay forever, pick what you do. It invites some hostility when you selectively choose your work in an environment where collective action is the name of the game. You also have to be careful in an educationally diverse environment not to use the Ph.D. as a cudgel or shield because you will be called out (“Oh my god, she has one of those piled higher and deeper things…” or “Did they suck out the common sense out when they gave you that piece of paper, honey?”). I became incompetent at the things that made no sense to me. It is a strategy men use to avoid all kinds of domestic labor and I use to avoid the family finances --- learned helplessness (enough mistakes got me kicked out of the family checkbook right quick). This is hard to do because most of us get Ph.D.s because we want to be the brightest little boy or girl in the room. It is painful to give up that over-achieving mantra. By selecting areas of competence you can reserve time that will get you out or, at a minimum, keep you sane. Once you respond strongly to the incentives of an institution, you are likely to stay there because you will be rewarded and stroked for things that have little value elsewhere. The only thing editing data by hand in the government did for me was give me a headache. No one else cares.

Avoiding exploitation is really hard. This happens more often to research associates and project managers in universities. It happens because these jobs come wrapped in hope. The dangling carrot is the opportunity to work at a great institution, on a fascinating project, with a big name. The swinging stick is that you do all the grunt work. The day to day management of large research projects can be substantial and the skills are not things you learn in most graduate programs. There is really no way to avoid exploitation ---I think the trick is not to feel guilty that you don’t get more done. How could you? Project managers have the wonderful job of managing staff, or worse student workers, budgets, and resources yet they lack the basic power to make decisions. So managing without power creates the seven circles of hell. A computer breaks--- can you buy a new one? A staff member doesn’t work or won’t work. Can you fire them? The graduate students on the project treat you like Mother Teresa and a doormat simultaneously. Can you shut your door? The research design falls apart in the field because the grant was a fantasy to begin with --- and you’re supposed to fix it. How? It is, therefore, not surprising that you don’t publish the 10 articles needed to promote you or lever you out. What I never figured out is how to just let projects fail – let the computers break, the students flame out, and the project go to shit. This is the only way to avoid exploitation but it requires a personality different from mine. The only thing I can say is wear your martyrdom proudly and with panache (I have often thought a blood red feather boa should be the symbol of martyrdom not a cross as it is a signal that martyrdom can be fun not just painful) – and don’t feel guilty about not being more productive. The upside (if there is one to exploitation other than really good blues music) is that you learn how to make big projects work. The downside, of course, is that you stay where you are because there is no value attached to making things work in academia just in being the public voice of the things that worked. But you get to wear that feather boa!

Surviving non-linearity also requires a certain amount of savior faire (or je ne sais qua or joie d’vivre or some other French word… bete noir … I could go on forever here). Never, ever act your status. It will destroy your soul. Other people will do enough to remind you of it. My favorite story is the time I was editor of PAA AFFAIRS, which is just the newsletter of the organization, and they gave me a little ribbon at the Population Association of America that said “Editor” or something to stick on my name badge at a meeting. Some arrogant new assistant professor from UCLA came up to me and said “What could you possibly be editor of?” because, of course, my badge also said “National Center for Health Statistics.” If I was not convinced before that point, his jab turned the tide. I never act my age, my weight, or my status. It isn’t hard to do initially but it gets harder as the social feedback undermines your sense of yourself. I can’t say that it is easy to act out of your role. I have been slapped back into place many times for the presumption that I have something valuable to say. But the slapping is less painful than silence. You, of course, will be met with lowered expectations and condescending surprise at your competence. All of which must flow around you and over you like bathwater as it is basically a warm, weightless, and essentially unimportant substance. Like martyrdom, status dissonance has a lot to recommend it. Fundamentally, it means that your abilities will always sneak up on people without fanfare. Without trumpets and streamers, it is a lot easier to be smart. Never forget rule number 1, though. Do not expect to be handsomely rewarded for your brilliance or your competence. The trick is to hold your ground ---that is the part that saves your soul.

The final part of this survival guide to non-linearity is to live where you are instead of where you think you should be. If you go from graduate school to some type of non-linear employment directly, you image an academic world where you stroll across a leafy campus in your tweeds and your classrooms are filled with students who sit adoringly at your feet absorbing you every word. Even if you are not that deluded, it is still difficult not to fantasize about autonomy, intellectual control, and freedom. The first couple of years will certainly feel that way. Then, the inherent conflicts of academic life will hit you. The first problem, of course, is that the behavioral traits that make you a great teacher prevent you from getting your research done. Adequate preparation, engagement, enthusiasm, passion, an open door policy, and, above all, practice foster great teaching. Good research, even of the cooperative type, requires long stretches of unbroken concentration. Institutions vary in how they weight teaching and research but it remains the case that the latter will get you farther faster than the former. Even if you choose early, the conflict will haunt you because most Ph.D.s are trained in institutions that value research. It is like growing up in a religious household and making a decision at 21 to deny your faith. It is your choice but you must turn away from your pious mother and the lingering smell of incense to get there. If you choose research, of course, you still have to face your students 2 or 3 times a week most of the time. No matter how you rationalize this (“Ahh, they are lazy …they don’t want to learn anyway.” “They don’t put anytime into it, why should I?” “Good research makes good teaching.”), you still face the daily responsibility of educating people. While very few students turn their faces up like baby birds in search of intellectual nourishment, it is hard not to feel guilty when you shortchange them. The second conflict of academic life is the free rider problem. Professors by definition and temperament are not communal beasts. They do not form herds easily nor do they willingly follow the shepherd into the barn. Academic institutions do little to foster or reward those with communal instincts and they are few penalties for being a renegade (except the dreaded “not collegial”, whatever the hell that means). I guess it would be fine and, in fact, preferable for departments and universities to be filled with renegades if there weren’t so many things that needed to get done in the collective unit… curriculum development, graduate student committees, departmental and university governance, and the list goes on. There is little reward, however, to being a good citizen. In fact, the red flags start waving if you succeed on a committee or make a success of a program. These are things you must save till you are granted tenure (by which time you have developed the habits of a life time and can’t remember when you still cared about whether things worked properly) or written your first book or got promoted to full or when you meet your maker and he or she asks you what you have done for other people. The heady feeling of personal freedom you get when you step into an academic position after years of being pinned down by an institution fades rather abruptly when the inherent conflicts of academic life fit you full force. Other types of jobs both inside and outside academia pose fewer emotional and moral dilemmas of this type. As long as you can face the status thing and the lack of rewards, facing yourself turns out to be much easier.

The Unbearable Lightness of Power Point

2006-09-04T14:29:00.000-07:00

I know I have stolen this title from someone because it is too clever not to have been used. My apologies. I know I should be vehemently antagonistic to PowerPoint because it allows for the evil ‘bulleting’ of thought. I can hear the screech of the ‘true intellectual’ like the call of the carrion bird circling a dead badger --- “it simplifies and corrupts complex ideas, it negates narrative flow, it is symbolic of our inability to think clearly.” Ok. OK. I get it….and the advent of email means that none of us will ever have sex again.

There are several things, though, that it does really well at least for presentations at meetings and elsewhere. First, it forces some sort of discipline on the speaker. I know that for me when I am preparing a talk, the blank face of PowerPoint forces me to put order and structure in the presentation. I have to think about the warp and woof of the ideas in order to create bullets for the slide. Many a long-winded talk would have been saved by the visual imperative of PowerPoint --- you have to be able to summarize. Like writing, I often use Power Point to think through a presentation or a problem. It forces me into logical, cumulative narrative that has a beginning, middle, and end. You can wander off the page verbally –not so with PowerPoint. That little add slide button and the slide show sorter both conspire to make me organized when I would rather meander through a subject. “What’s next?’ it whispers … “what’s next?”

The second advantage is the visual relief for the audience frees the speaker from angst. A darkened room, a focused colorful light, and rapidly changing scenery all rivet the audience, and, thus, liberate our poor speaker. When I speak without PowerPoint, I am constantly thinking about my hair. What if it is all flipped over to the side and looks weird --- what if I am up there the week before I am due for my ever more frequent clandestine visit to the hair dresser? If you are a man, I suppose you are constantly worried about something equally inane. But still, the visual distraction of PowerPoint loosens up that reign of terror – it means, I can be a disembodied mouth spouting wisdom instead of tied to an imperfectly presented body.

But my praise for PowerPoint stops when I get into the classroom ---where I feel neutered by it instead. When I taught at a Catholic college, which will remain nameless, I took great joy in telling my students as I stood under the ubiquitous classroom crucifix (which inspired me to all kinds of other inappropriate statements), that teaching with PowerPoint feels like having sex with a condom. Distant and lacking in intimacy. Teaching requires some meandering --- students have to see you think. This implies vulnerability. The armor of PowerPoint must be set aside with the sword and saber. It is also true that I needed my whole self (including that imperfectly presented body) when I taught. The knowledge you are trying to sell means the students have to be invested in you as a person and, thus, in both mind and body. PowerPoint shields them from your imperfections and, therefore, from you as the conduit of ideas. In teaching, organized is good but slick isn’t. PowerPoint makes you glib.

If you don’t remember the plot of the movie The Unbearable Lightness of Being – it is about our simultaneous desire to be unhampered by the demands of others and the pain of disengaging from intimacy. Of course, it is about sex not Power Point. But, you see my point.

Family matters: fear and grief

2006-08-29T14:52:00.000-07:00

I woke up Sunday morning in the middle of a dream about my youngest daughter being captured by Africa rebel fighters as I watched from a car nearby. By the end of the day, I learned that my dad’s heart is beginning to forget to beat, which isn’t surprising because he has forgotten everything else in the final stages of Alzheimer’s. The dream was lit with African sunshine and the smoke of Third World countries. My daughter got onto a tractor in a scrubby field looking for her bathing suit. Men who looked like defenders of Laurent Kabila swarmed over the tractor and drove away with her before I had a chance to shout. I woke up soaked with a hammering heart. The symbolism is too trite for words given that my eldest daughter is a senior in high school and my youngest is learning to drive. The fear attached to being a parent had not felt so palpable in awhile, though. I had forgotten that freefall of anxiety with allowing the first step. And every step thereafter. You suppress the fear gradually to let them become something other than your child. When they are teenagers, you ignore it to find peace. But on a sweaty morning, it galloped in and took my breath away. It is a fear that you will fail in the basic job assigned to you by nature – to protect them from harm even if that harm is imaginary African insurgents. I can feel the fear in my DNA ----pounding along, whispering…”what if they die because you weren’t there; what if the fever is actually malaria; what if you let them out the door and there are wolves; what if you let them go to house with a known pedophilic rapist…” Rational calculation of risk and an inability to be constantly vigilant are two really useful hedges against insanity. But, it never goes away –ever. So, I have a pretty elaborate plan now on how to identify African rebels the next time my daughter decides she needs to find her bathing suit. It involves infrared binoculars and something other things I can’t reveal.

On the other end of fear is grief and the other end of the family is my father. My brother called to say that my father, who has been a nursing unit now for about a year a half, is finally making his way toward death albeit slowly. His heart is slowing down as often happens with Alzheimer’s patients. Eventually they will not be able to rouse him and it will be over. My father would have preferred an epic storm to sweep him off a sailboat on the Cape of Good Hope to a gradual slide into oblivion. But unless you’re crazy, you don’t really get to choose. Like fear, we hold grief in abeyance as long as we can I think. His death will be a simple coda as his loss was almost complete 2 years ago when he stopped being able to assimilate any of us as human beings. The grief though came with surprising force when I found out that his body will follow his mind sooner rather than later. I am not clever or talented enough to say new things about the death of a parent --- the psychological issues are so many and varied. Its’ urgent and raw impact caught me unawares. Like fear, holding grief at bay must sharpen its thrust. Unlike my daughter, I have no plan for my father. Vigilance on my part will make no difference. Maybe the solution is to have it not be about me …the loss of him not the loss to me. Displace, displace, displace.

2006-08-27T14:09:00.000-07:00

On failure …

I recently read a blog about failure. The writer was a successful sociologist who failed his Ph.D. exams. I think he wanted to convey the sense that failure turns out not to be an impediment albeit certainly a kick in the pants. He included a picture of the letter delivering the news of his failure on the site as well as his scrawled message of failure to himself. Wow. I am a veteran of failure on a much more massive scale and do not have the ability to self-flagellate quite in that way. It could be that later redemption allows you to decorate your life with signs that you were once not so grand. But for those of us for whom failure has been closer at hand, shame has a way of making you hide the evidence.

So, what do I think about failure? There are legitimate things to say about it bringing clarity, determination, and humility but they have been said, I guess. As a chance for personal growth – I am not sure I would recommend it. Mission Inn and Spa in Napa Valley provides a much less painful vehicle for that. There are many difficult things to say about how failure lands on people. As a hypodermic needle for self-loathing it can’t be beat. Where it doesn’t eviscerate, it embitters. “Ah…there all against me.” The lethargy and paralysis that follows can be of the legendary variety. All and all not an experience I would save souvenirs from.

But this is America, so I must close the self-help circle. Ingar Bergman would let the hypodermic needle metaphor lie and walk away. Ron Howard would not. I must be more Opie than not because I have to write this next paragraph. Failure has a way of helping you allocate chunks of responsibility. Multiple failures particularly afford a window to what is you and what is not. I read a book called Stumbling Toward Happiness which was not so much about happiness and intermittently glib but it had a concept I really liked. The author talked about psychological immunity. Like the physical body, sane people (of which I count myself, sometimes unfortunately) have psychological mechanisms that help bring them back to psychological homeostasis. One of those mechanisms is the ability to rationally discount evidence that does not favor your well being. So, faced with evidence that you are not so great after all --- the initial period of psychic flu that comes from failure is followed by some reconciliation of feeling with facts. I have done this by dividing up blame into manageable chunks. I try to reserve the middle sized one for me. It is just enough to prevent whining (I like the British word whingeing better but I can’t afford the pomposity yet) but not so much it fells me. But then the other parts have to be allocated ---so, the mismatch between you and the world has to be sorted out. It is not that you learn what not to do again; maybe, it is that you learn to do it somewhere different.

Generosity and compassion are also the natural outgrowth of failure. I feel the radiant heat of failure from people and I just want to wrap them in a blanket and rock them like the mother I am. “Been there, done that.” It is an isolating experience for which other people do not have appropriate words. Outrage, shock, pity, and the possibility that it might be contagious are some of the script lines available. None are really useful. But having failed, one allows others graceful ways of defending themselves. You allow them to spin whatever tale is necessary to save them ---and you man the barricades for them.

So failure …. no pictures for me, I guess. Just a change of scenery and large tote bag full of Kleenex or swords depending on the occasion.

First try

2006-08-26T15:24:00.000-07:00

Not much about me …

Blogs are hard for me to consider as a legitimate way to communicate. The hypocrisy of writing one when I don’t really know if I think they have value strikes me as criminal. After many years, I have finally learned to think through writing and maybe the blog is a valuable way to force that writing into the fresh air. What I don’t like about blogs I suppose is that the combination of intimacy and multimedia makes me feel like a voyeur on the lives of others I don’t know. Pictures of people’s dogs and the details of their fear of flying make me feel like a ghost at a birthday party ---unable to sing or eat cake. The other blogs I don’t like are the serious, opinionated, annotated essays looking for an unedited home. The internet is a legitimate place for such thought but can’t this media offer a certain immediacy and intimacy that frees us from the turgid prose of self-presentation. I can feel the straining toward brilliance…the wires are everywhere present and annoying. I want these bloggers to exist in real time --- I want their brains visible not hidden behind well crafted political or social rants. The final thing I guess is the strong sense that no on spends time actually writing them. The need to keep “up” with them means that the writing falls apart for people who actually can write. And that seems sad also because I love good writing, loaded with individuality and opinion and rich with personal detail. Think of the consequences for the biographers of future famous people who currently blog. Instead of the richly textured biographies based on letters and journals, we will have short often bulleted lists with pictures and musical sound clips instead of words. The biographer will sketch the outline of a life in 3-D with sound and we as readers will have to put the pieces together. I am not sure my pre-modern brain can manage. I have only learned how to think by watching the structured minds of others work through prose.
But I have backed myself in middle age into a corner where what I have to say has finally become important to me albeit probably to no one else in the world. Unlike the content of the blogs of the young and young-at-heart whose writing fills the internet, little of what I have to say is about me. It is certainly informed by who I am but it isn’t about my current or past journeys. When you are young, you need writing to help define and shape yourself. As you get older, you need writing to help you finally gather the thoughts that have been whipped about by the children, mortgages, jobs and cars that have intervened between you and those youthful years. Perhaps a very low tech blog where I try to polish the writing as best I can and try not to pontificate too freely will work. Maybe if I reveal state of mind and heart but not my current use of steroids to solve my back problems will make this feel like something worth doing. But then again, like every other hypocritical thing I have done ---these are promises made to salvage my pride and I should just get on with it.