Thursday, April 27, 2017

Highly rhetorical questions for the end of the semester


  • If you ask me a series of technical questions in a group email, and I jump right on it and spend 20 minutes answering them, and then you ask the same questions again in a slightly different form as if I had not responded, am I going to be passive-aggressive enough not to answer this one? To remind you that I answered the questions? To wait a few days before responding to any other messages? All of the above? Yes.
  • Is there a possibility that after the 1,751st draft of something in which we have collectively moved a passage from one place to another and back again, making inconsequential language changes and fighting about the MLA style each time, I will write an email saying, in more polite language, "Do whatever you want. I don't @#$@$^ care any more"? Yes.
  • If you're sick with some kind of deadly contagious plague, is it better to stay home or to come to work and buttonhole everyone you meet to tell them, "Boy, I can't believe I am this sick during the last week of classes! I really feel horrible"?
  • If you collectively dream up a position that not even Jesus with feathers on could successfully fill, is it someone's duty to point this out? 
  • If you are in a meeting and someone is being all pouty about something, is it better to let it get you down or to declare silently, like Roger Murtaugh, "I'm getting too old for this [stuff]" and get just angry enough to keep from being depressed? 
  • Knowing the volatility that everyone has at the end of the semester, is the best reaction to remember your colleagues with affection, keep your head down, and just power through? Yes. 

Sunday, April 23, 2017

Are you the colleague you want to meet in the hallway?

Figure 1. Edmund Wilson's version of auto-reply.
There's been a movement afoot to light on fire, in Twitter terms, anyway, anyone who tells a woman to "smile!" Next to "you look really tired," I can't think of any phrase that's less welcome, especially if you are really tired. Also, some of us have RBF and aren't going to look happy no matter what.

Just so we'll get the obvious out of the way:

1. Do people say this to men? No.
2. Do they treat women who smile all the time any better? No.
3. Are women who are all smiles treated well in the workplace? No, because they're taken less seriously.
4. Are women who are direct and/or abrupt treated well in the workplace? No, because they're seen as -- well, fill in your own uncomplimentary adjectives.

But despite this double-bind, you might want to think twice before embracing "grumpiness for grumpiness's sake," as recommended in  "The Case for Being Grumpy at Work." 

The author cites a number of studies about emotional dissonance, about the emotional labor that women especially experience when forced to pretend to be happy in the workplace, and so on. Women are expected to be more caring, which means that their anticipated response in the workplace is effectively lagniappe for employers, a trap especially for service workers like cashiers (been there, done that). 

But the author's equation of grumpiness with some superior form of pessimistic insight is wrong. You can be plenty pessimistic and not present yourself to others as grumpy. One's a way of perceiving the world. The other is a way of acting out so that the world can see that you have All The Feels. 

Look, nobody has to be happy or pretend to be happy all the time, especially at this point in the semester. I suspect that most of us cut our colleagues a little slack in April, knowing the stress we're under, and we hope for the same from others.

In other words, we're being the colleague that we want to meet in the hallway.

A curmudgeon thinks that this is a one-way street. Everyone should be charmed by his (or her) grumpiness, and all should cut him some slack, but he doesn't have to return the favor. You may think your grumpiness is adorable, but other people may not share your high sense of self-regard.

A "lovable curmudgeon" may exist in literature--who doesn't like to read about Edmund Wilson's famous postcards or Mary McCarthy's acid reviews?--but in real life, the term is an oxymoron.

One of the great lessons of adulthood is that except for a few of those close to you, nobody cares how you feel. They want to know if you get the work done. 

My approach is the same thing that I do in emails: mirror what I'm receiving. If you're professional and at least marginally pleasant, I'll respond in kind, and promptly.

If not, not.

I realize that this is a position of privilege and that not all jobs will allow this luxury. (See cashier experience, above.)  But at the very least, those of us who do have the ability to respond to rudeness or curmudgeons shouldn't indulge their behavior. 


Wednesday, April 19, 2017

What does a sabbatical do?

I've been on campus for a few things recently, and while it's nice to be missed (it really is!), the downside is realizing that the sabbatical is coming to an end. There's still the summer, but still.

Although I haven't done All The Things, I've done enough to feel reasonably good, though it still seems as though I wasted a lot of time. I'll keep working on All The Things.

But the main thing that the sabbatical did was to give me back a sense of joy and curiosity. If something interested me, I could follow it and read about it and above all think about it, often to good effect.

I know that this isn't the path to research that GetALifePhd and other efficiency experts, like Paul Sylvia,  recommend, where you state that you will have 15 points to develop by 7:45 a.m. on Tuesday and you just do it. Maybe if you have data, that's the way it works.

But maybe that's the difference between the humanities and the social sciences. We really have only a few weapons in our arsenal: curiosity, knowledge, and the ability to think about the two together in productive ways to see what's been done and what needs to be done in terms of research.

When you're pressed for time, as we all are during the school year, we're a little like our students. We don't have the time to follow those winding paths, or Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit holes, so we try to answer immediate questions. Our students use the first results on Google, and though we might not do that, we use the same process of working for efficiency in an answer rather than for complexity.

During the sabbatical, I learned a lot of things I needed to know, but I also learned a lot of things that I didn't need to know, or at least that I don't need immediately. That's not a waste of time. That's the point of a sabbatical.

Thursday, April 06, 2017

Nothing. What's new with you?

Still plodding along, still working hard, and still relishing a sabbatical that's almost over--that's what's going on here.  In other news:

  • A lovely trip to the archives in which I could revel in reading and taking pictures of materials all day long, and at the end of the day get something to eat and not cook or clean or do any of the other housekeeping stuff I've been doing all year. It felt like a vacation, though I was working hard every day. More archival trips, please!
  • Winter is receding, sort of, and has settled down into a grey skies, grumpy rain, and chilly wind pattern that beats the heck out of the ice, snow, and general misery we've had since November. Some day the sun will shine again, I'm almost sure. As a special added bonus, apparently the weather cleared up here while we had an epic snowstorm in Archive City.
  • About the sabbatical: so many ideas, and so little time!  
  • I've gotten so tired of seeing "woke" as an admiring descriptor that I silently correct it to the overused slang of another era, "peachy-keen" (1950s) and "bitchin'" (1960s) being two current favorites,  though maybe I should give "swell" (1920s) or "gnarly" (1970s?) a try as a change of pace.
  • Big collaborative project is going well.
What's new with you?