reminiscent

Per a conversation today with friends about some repressed (and sometimes not so repressed) misogyny amongst my colleagues, I give you this clip, reminiscent of more than few departmental functions or professional interactions:

special affects

Just to show you how ridiculous academics can be, particularly when they're on a self-reflexive bent, I give you an exchange between me and Professor X, who studies, amongst other things, media and affect, and who is currently teaching a course entitled Public Affect. He is relatively young, ordinarily quite poised, dresses hip (if you will) and is generally regarded as a cool character.

Despite the fact that I have almost no professional interaction with Professor X and have never taken a class from him, we are quite aware of one another's existence. In fact, in the week or so prior to the following exchange, we had run into each other in the gym, the noodle shop, etc. Until this moment, however, I don't think we had ever actually said more to one another than "hello." Not once. (I should mention too that Prof. X hails from the other side of the pond.)

Setting: a public lecture

Me: How are you?

Professor X: I'm good... Actually, I'm increasingly unhappy with how I answer that question. "Good" is an adjective and is therefore grammatically incorrect; one ought to answer, "I'm well..."

Me: Yes, Americans tend to say "good," don't they? In southern Africa...

Professor X: [not really listening] ... but adverbs don't seem like a good solution. "I'm well" sounds stuffy, and even "I'm fine" sounds defensive, as in, "I'm fine!

Me: "OK" isn't really going to be of help here, is it?

Professor X: No, not really... It's still an adjective.

a pause

Me: So, how's public affect?

laughter

I hadn't actually meant to be quite that droll; it was a fortuitous accident. But hell, Professor X just out-awkarded nearly everyone I know. Now I can't ever inquire as to his well-being without worrying that I'll provoke a crisis.

cult of affliction

Over beers last night I articulated a theory I've been working on for some time, to wit: You know you have been initiated into graduate school, or at least into the informal departmental sub-categorization to which I sort of subscribe--what you might call my cult of affliction--when you find yourself awash with two feelings: 1) bottomless performance anxiety; 2) jealousy. In order to make it, you need to get in touch with those two feelings but not be dominated by them. If you can do that, you'll be ok.

and so it begins...

I don't have TB, by the way.

I do have a problem child. I have that kid. The theory goes that every class has one -- and, if the instructor is lucky, no more than one. I've dealt with that kids before, but only as a TA. I've never really had to handle one head-on. But I'm pretty sure that kid, in his/her various forms, will be a constant feature of my teaching career, so I had better get used to facing the problem.

Figuring out how to respond to that kid with something that cuts between the Scylla and Charibdis of too much intimacy, on the one hand, and too much smack-down, on the other, is difficult. That kid is not a bad kid. He or she is usually confused. That kid's problems often have little or nothing to do with class material and everything to do with that tangled snarl of questions that connects Does mommy really love me? to What is the nature of the universe? and tries to work Durkheim's theory of totemism into the bargain. That kid can't write the essay because six pages on Durkheim feels insurmountable. This has nothing to do, I think, with that kid's actual grasp of Durkheim. And at the end of the day, it's really not a problem best addressed to the instructor. That kid needs a referral.

I think many of us can point to some painful and awkward communiqué we once launched at an instructor that seemed like a good (if not exactly appropriate) idea at the time. I'm fairly sure I did, though I don't really remember an instance and I have no record to prove it. Perhaps it's better that way...

accidents happen

So, um, I accidentally went on a date last night.

No, it's worse: I think I accidentally went on a second date last night. In other words, I didn't realize the first, uh, date was actually a date. It wasn't until the end of the second date that I realized that these were 'dates', not just... I don't know, social encounters of some other persuasion.

The country is small enough, and the expat scene within Gabs miniscule enough, that social networks double back upon each other all the time. You can wind up hanging out with all kinds of people, if only because you both happen to be disconnected Americans floating around the weird social space of a country with a population smaller than some major American cities (Metropolis X, included).

So I wasn't thinking much of dinner. I wasn't even thinking much of being bought dinner. I assumed it was the ploy of feeding the poor grad student who then tells you what are hopefully interesting things about wherever it is you happen to be. It happens now and again that someone takes me out and I sing for my supper (though it's more often lunch). I drove; he got to drink without worrying about driving.

Dinner was mostly a conversation about the paper I gave this week which, by the end of the evening, made less sense than it had when we sat down. Then the post-dinner conversation went in some strange directions, and the next thing I knew, we were discussing what I'm going to gloss as contemporary modes of sexuality in Gabs. Sigh. OK, I can gloss it like that, but some of those questions were more personal than I was really expecting. The whole subtext -- and to be honest, some of the text -- of the conversation caught me very much off-guard.

I guess the upshot here is that I'm incredibly thick, but I really thought this was a purely intellectual, or even (given the age of the person in question) vaguely paternal interest. There are some people here, mostly academics, with whom I have exactly that kind of vaguely advisorial interaction, and that's what I was expecting.

God, am I glad to be leaving in a week.

impala on ice

Last night, a visiting friend accidentally hit what she thought was a light switch. It turned out to be one of the 'panic buttons' attached to the house's security system. I have never heard a noise as loud as the alarm that went off, and my blood pressure is still normalizing.

But this even wasn't even remotely as shocking as the experience of looking inside my freezer yesterday morning:




Why, yes, that is half an impala in my freezer...




And now it's time for your impala anatomy quiz...




No, it's not wrapped in plastic bags or foil or anything...




One word: ew.

I knew my housemate was going hunting, but I didn't expect to find half an impala congealed into a solid block in the freezer. He says he's going to cut it and season in on Wednesday for a braai on Saturday. (He said this only after I asked; there's apparently no need to explain an unwrapped, un-butchered impala carcass thrown higgeldy-piggeldy into the freezer.) I don't see how he's going to get it out without de-frosting it. I expect it will be a bloody mess (in many senses).

And, freezing notwithstanding, the kitchen is a bit smelly.

fish out of water

Growing up, I spent the bulk of the summer -- which in practice was most of the year -- in water of some sort. We played a game called (for reasons unclear to me) 'Marco Polo', which was a kind of water-logged blind man's bluff. The person who was 'it' had to keep his/her eyes closed, and call out Marco. Those playing the game called back Polo, giving the seeker some indication of where in the pool they might be. If the seeker thought someone had hopped out of the pool and was moving about on dry land, they called out fish out of water, and those on land had to jump back in (thus giving away their locations).

Well, this past week I was fish out of water at a conference outside my discipline. There were a few people whose names I knew from their work, and a few I knew through one person or another. But it wasn't that kind of thick web of connections and reputations and citations one knows and feels (or, as a graduate student, aspires to know and feel) in one's own discipline.

But the most important lesson I took away from the event was that surly grad students can be found everywhere. I knew this in theory, and I certainly experience a certain surliness among my peers from time to time, but it was an interesting thing to observe a graduate student clique to which I had no aspirations of belonging and from which exclusion meant little. What surliness! What insecurity! What inability or unwillingness to engage with strangers!

There have been times when I have felt myself behaving like this with my colleagues at my home institution, and it has bothered me. Watching this clique, though, I felt a strange kind of dispassionate sympathy. Either I was a threat (it seemed) or I wasn't worth talking to. In actuality, I posed about as much threat as a blueberry muffin, and I didn't much care whether they talked to me or not.

The only thing I felt sorry for was that I couldn't easily convey any of this. But I stored these observations away in my head. I hope I can still find them when it's time to leave the field.