Dear Ms. Undine answers your top 3 nonacademic advice column questions

 

And now for something completely different: I'm shifting gears by resurrecting Dear Ms. Undine for a post.

As an avid if shamefaced consumer of advice columns, I've seen more than a few questions and answers recur over the years: these are the absolute perennials. The questions and answers below are replies to  just the relatively lighthearted ones, not the ones where people are trapped in bad situations, etc. 

Ms. Undine is going to dispose of these in a sentence or so, although advice columnists are much more nuanced.

Dear Ms. Undine,

I sent my young grandchildren gifts, but they don't send me handwritten thank you notes. Sometimes they call or text, but it's not the same. I am miffed and stewing over this incessantly. Should I stop sending them gifts? What should I do? -- Fretful

A. Dear Fretful,

Did I miss something? They're your grandchildren, as in children. Sure, you can stop sending them gifts, but tell me: how is this going to improve your relationship with them? Also: get a hobby. 

Q. Dear Ms. Undine,

I've been living with my boyfriend for seven years, and we get along well. I would like to get married and have a family, but he says "maybe later" or "I don't want to get married." How can I get him to propose? -- Limbo

A. Dear Limbo,

There's nothing wrong with living together forever without being married, but if you want to get married, he is not the person for you. If he wanted to marry you, he would. Sorry. 

Q. Dear Ms. Undine,

I am planning a destination wedding to Antarctica, and the wedding aesthetic for My Special Day is that everyone wear yellow with purple feathers in their hair or they can't come.  I've already told everyone that they can't get married/have children/get engaged in the next year because it is My Special Year. It's going to be amazing, but people are refusing to attend. How can I get them to stop being so selfish and realize that My Special Day will be the event of their lives? - Bride of a Lifetime

A. Dear Bride,

Have you considered that they have lives, limited money, limited vacation time, and perhaps a limited tolerance for entitled shenanigans? Sorry--stupid question. 

Dear Ms. Undine: What's July etiquette for academic life?

Dear Ms. Undine,

I recently wrote an email to a person in my department, trying to set up a meeting a month from now. This person had her email set to auto-reply, but she responded to say that the time was all right with her. Then I wrote to her again, demanding the answer to something very minor but more complicated.

I reasoned that she, like me, is simply dreaming of the time when school starts and has nothing better to do for the next month than answer my questions. Why isn't she responding?

Signed, 
Nothing Else on My Plate

Dear Nothing,

Based on her experiences in academia, Ms. Undine suggests that the person in your department indeed might have something else to do. This something might be research that she's frantically trying to finish, or relatives she's trying to visit, or maybe just a simple afternoon in which she can continue making burnt offerings to the goddess of summer so that fall will be delayed this year. In any of those cases, your email is not welcome.

Dear Ms. Undine,

I am a student and like to get everything done ahead of time; in particular, I like to read all the books over the summer and then decline to discuss them in class because I've forgotten the details. When I wrote to my instructor demanding a syllabus, however, the instructor said that it wasn't ready. I thought teachers have a vacation for the whole summer, so why isn't it done?

Signed,
Eager for Now

Dear Eager,

You are correct: instructors have nothing else to do all summer. Your instructor is making the very best syllabus possible, and that means that she is spending every spare available moment, many hours a day, getting it ready. You wouldn't want to spoil that kind of perfection by rushing it, would you?  That would be rude.

Dear Ms. Undine,

I'm an administrator and have great powers of vision, including being able to see through computer screens. I keep sending out cheerful messages about "Remember, the X event will be early this year!" and reminders about new assessment procedures, but when I do this, I see the recipients turn pale and mutter curses about July being the summer. Why does this happen, Ms. Undine? I'm just trying to give them a heads-up about exciting university events.

Signed,
My Time is Your Time

Dear My Time,

Your faculty members do not want a heads-up. They want to keep their heads down, plowing through all the work that they thought they would get done in June and over the July 4 weekend. Your email reminds them that time is not infinite, which as poor mortals they dreamed for a week or so earlier in the summer that it would be.  Do not remind them of their own mortality, or, more important, the mortality of their summer work hours.

Dear Ms. Undine,

All my friends on Facebook and Twitter are running circles around me in terms of research and having fun. They're getting more done, and it makes me despair at my own slowness.

Signed,
Sloth and Envy

Dear Sloth,

Mark Zuckerberg has a little-known patent on something called the Facebook Enhancement Screen, and I believe he licenses it to Twitter and Instagram as well. The FES means that everyone's life looks more golden than your own and that no one tells the truth about the days when all they could do is binge-watch Love It or List It and eat thin mint Oreos. There is no protection against the FES except not to look at social media. No one will think that you are less polite if you make stealth raids into it to like content that you don't actually read.

Dear Ms. Undine does not tolerate April fools

Dear Ms. Undine,

Why do people like to play April Fool's Day pranks? Especially computer pranks, like Google's failed mic drop?

Signed, Pranked

Dear Pranked,

Ms. Undine has never quite understood this.  Mark Twain said (in Pudd'nhead Wilson) that on this day we're reminded of what we actually are during the other 364, but that's not a good enough reason.

Frankly, Ms. Undine thinks that the computer manufacturers play enough pranks on us every year, making us play hide and seek to find the features we depend on with each new iteration of software (looking at you, Microsoft Office) and with each new version of hardware (looking at you, Apple.  I have enough Mac dongles to make myself a hula skirt by stitching them together, and you just introduced a new connector?). If we had one "stable computer day" every April 1, now there would be a holiday to celebrate.

As for the other pranks: well, apparently human beings love humor better if it is crude and/or cruel, which is why we invented the internet after we made bear-baiting illegal.


Dear Ms. Undine,

I think you are a hypocrite.  After making fun of the awesome Cue Cat, you bought one recently. Why?

Signed,
Inspector Gadget

Dear Gadget,

Because all the lovely commenters on that post said it would be good for LibraryThing, that's why.  I haven't tried it yet, but I have already rounded up little catnip toys for it to chase.  It's the only non-rectangular thing on my desk and is already a fine distraction. Go Go Gadget Paws!


Dear Ms. Undine,

You write about mid-century male writers sometimes.  What did you think of Gay Talese's recent comment that he couldn't think of any women writers that inspired him?

Signed,
Surprised and Outraged

Dear Surprised and Outraged,

Figure 1. Supposedly Frank Sinatra, but maybe Gay Talese.

You should only be one of those (outraged), because how could you be surprised?

Ms. Undine admits that she had classed Gay Talese in her mental memory bank as a 1960s Esquire writer, sort of a ring-a-ding-ding generation Jonathan Franzen, who wrote something about wife-swapping way back in the day. He was brought up in a generation when it would have been a manly point of pride not to have read any women authors, and a look at his Google books just now suggests that that hasn't changed much.

In other words, Ms. Undine thinks this is a tempest in a gin bottle.  She recommends that women writers forget him right back and quit worrying about it since  there are bigger fish to fry, like this year's VIDA count. 

Dear Ms. Undine answers your March questions

Dear Ms. Undine,

Every day on the interwebs, I see new words that no one defines but that everyone seems to understand all of a sudden. I've seen "neoliberalism," which is something unspecified but very, very bad, and "intersectionality" (ditto), and "woke" as an adjective meaning "awakened." Do I need to look these words up every time I encounter them?

-- Signed,
 OED

Dear OED,

What you're encountering is the beauty of the interwebs. It used to take a longer time for words to trickle through the culture, but now they take over like a torrent. It makes for lively writing and an interesting culture. Here's a tip, though: do not simply google a word, especially if you aren't sure how it's being used, since there may be some regrettable, never-can-be-unseen images attached. Try Urban Dictionary instead.

Dear Ms. Undine,

Are these expressions cliches, or are they true?

1. "The perfect is the enemy of the good." 

2. "The best dissertation is a done dissertation." 

--Signed,
Afraid to be a Cliche

Dear Afraid,

Both. And do you know what they call people who are not afraid to be a cliche? Ph.D.

Dear Ms. Undine,

Sometimes when I am very tired, I watch House Hunters or House Hunters International. Don't judge me, Ms. Undine. IHE says we can learn from this show.

The house hunters used to be can-do types. "We can fix this," they'd say upon encountering a roofless shell with three crumbling walls.

Now, however, they mostly focus on their needs: "It needs to be an older house with charm, but totally modern rooms and bathrooms the size of an airport, in a perfect neighborhood." They also spend a lot of time ridiculing the homeowner's taste, like Ortho in Beetlejuice. Remember him? "Deliver me from L. L. Bean!"

I have two questions:

1) How do the homebuyers, who usually give their occupations as something like "freelance artist" and "visionary entrepreneur," afford $500,000 houses?

2) Am I a sociologist or a schadenfreude-filled hate-watcher for silently cheering when some of the more obnoxious homebuyers fail to get what they want?

--Signed,
Confessional Clara

Dear Confessional,

1) If you find out, please let Ms. Undine know.

2) Why did you pose this as an either/or question? Who are you, Pierre Bourdieu?

Dear Ms. Undine answers self-evident questions

Dear Ms. Undine,

Ms. Mentor calls October "exploding head month" because of all the grant applications due then.  A whole lot of local ones are due next week. How can I deal with applications that want to know how much money I need to spend on June 10, 2015 when I can barely get through the stuff I need to do for next Tuesday?

Signed, Future Shock

Dear Future,
Here are some possibilities:
1. Start last year.
2. Start tomorrow for next year.
3. Seriously, practice a little time management.
4. Comfort yourself in the knowledge that with grant support so tight (NEH funds 6% of its individual scholar grants) you are likely only to be bragging fodder for its glossy brochures anyway: "We got 10 zillion applications and only funded 5! Look how selective we are! Yay for us!"

Dear Ms. Undine,

Clay Shirky, a famous person on the Internet, has pronounced laptops a distraction in the classroom and restricted their use, something I figured out and did a long time ago.  Now the fanboys who have called me a Luddite and blamed me for not liking the Shiny Things are falling all over themselves pronouncing the Wisdom of Clay.  Why is this so?

Signed,

Not Ned Ludd

Dear Not Ned,

Because you are not famous on the Internet, and because, I fear, you are not a guy and hence to fanboys do not have the mental equipment to think intelligently about Shiny Things. Think of yourself as the secret Queen of the Internet who predicts all things but whose power would be diminished if anyone listened to you.  In other words, get over it.

Dear Ms. Undine,

Out of idle curiosity, I looked at the MLA Job List and discovered that there are only 5 jobs in the country, 3 in something resembling my specialty, at the associate or full level!

Signed,

This is a job market?

Dear This,

Unless you have spent the last 30 years in silent meditation and prayer, surely this cannot be a surprise to you.  Ms. Mentor had a column about this recently, which if the CHE had a search feature instead of a Ouija Board, I would seek out and link to.  Surely you can find better things to do with your idle curiosity, like putting your books in some kind of order, or writing something, or taking a walk around the block, or, better still, helping your students and junior colleagues to get prepared for their job applications. 

Dear Ms. Undine dispenses more wisdom

Dear Ms. Undine,

In between admin, prepping classes, meeting, and still trying to keep some time for writing, I take out a few minutes to read higher education sites for distraction, which are filled with stuff I already know--teaching tips, how to handle email, and the like as though it is a fresh, new thing. I could have written them myself. This annoys me, because it violates my prime directive of not wasting my time. What should I do? 

Signed, Been there, done that

Dear Been there,

You know the answer to this one: you are looking for distraction in all the wrong places, and you, not they, are wasting your time.  

Those sites are for people who are just starting out, and to them, those things are exciting and new.  You know how kittens and puppies get intrigued by things that your cat or dog now ignore, and how nice you think it is that they are excited by them?  This information is valuable, just not to you. Be happy that people find them valuable, and stop reading them, or you'll be saying, "hey, kids, get off my lawn" at the next faculty meeting.  Oh, and pick up a book instead.

Dear Ms. Undine,

I noticed that you wrote about your lengthy syllabus with lots of policies, and there is a recent Slate article about the same thing. I have two questions. First, how did two people decide to write about this at the same time?  Second, do you agree with the article about just writing tl;dr and protesting the syllabus?

Signed,  Mysteries of the universe

Dear Mysteries,

There are only two explanations  for your first question: either (1) I have massive powers of telepathy and the ability to make the universe bend to my will by echoing my thoughts or (2) it's the beginning of the semester and everyone is making up a syllabus. Obviously the first is the rational explanation. 

About your second question: No, I don't agree that the long syllabus is the decline of academia as we know it.  When you explain the syllabus, you can emphasize certain parts, but if it's all there, they can read (or, okay, ignore) it on their own. They are not going to follow a link, and everyone knows it, so that's a non-starter. My only regret is the absence of sealing wax. 

Dear Ms. Undine,

I had a conversation today in which someone observed that her male teachers were more apt to share information about themselves when introducing themselves to the class than her female teachers.  Do you think this is true?

Signed, Gender difference or coincidence?

Dear Gender,

I don't know, but I'm curious about this.  Readers, what do you do when you introduce yourselves, or what do you think? 

Dear Ms. Undine answers more questions

Dear Ms. Undine,

From Shutterstock

Someone just wrote a book that is entirely composed of tweets about writing a book. People post about how they are writing (#amwriting) and how good they feel about it. The author says that it's not cruel to make fun of these people. The book sells for $9 on Amazon.

If I cite this using MLA, do I put it as an edited book? Did I miss the boat on collecting other people's words for free and charging for them? Is it possible that making fun of random strangers who post on Twitter could be considered cruel?

Signed, Soft-hearted Susan

Dear Susan,

Yes.

---

Dear Ms. Undine,

I want my class to be a success on the first day. Do you have any advice?

Signed,  Newbie

Dear Newbie,

You can find a good list at Vanderbilt or your own university's teaching and learning center.  That list is mostly great advice, although I don't follow this part under the "sharing information" section: "Personal biography: your place of birth, family history, educational history, hobbies, sport and recreational interests, how long you have been at the university, and what your plans are for the future."

I figure if they know that I'm a humanoid life form and where my office is, that will about exhaust their interest in me.  If they want to know more, they will ask.

---

Dear Ms. Undine,

I would like to save paper by not printing a syllabus but by putting it in Blackboard/Canvas instead. Students will read it there before they come to class, right?

Signed, Dances with Trees

Dear Dances,

Long ago, in a classroom far away, a dewy-eyed Ms. Undine believed as you do.  Then she checked the usage statistics to see how many students had looked at the syllabus and emerged a broken woman.

You don't have to hand out print copies of everything, but a print copy of a syllabus is like a contract for the class.  Just the physical act of handing out something on paper will help them to take it more seriously.  They are online all the time, and what's there is ephemeral to them. Since a piece of paper is no longer the norm, it has more weight than a bunch of pixels.

Dear Ms. Undine answers some more of your academic questions

Dear Ms. Undine,

IHE recently reported that colleges in Michigan are outsourcing their hiring of adjuncts to something called EDUStaff.  The colleges are delighted because they can chisel even more money from adjuncts stop retirement contributions to faculty and, in one case, "ending retirement contributions saved the college at least $250,000 in the first year." I'm guessing the money went toward a climbing wall, more luxuries for the football team, and a new no-books atrium for the library, but I'm concerned that individual schools won't get to know the people who are teaching their students.  Am I right to be concerned?

Signed, Miffed in Michigan

Dear Miffed,

Yes.

Dear Ms. Undine,

Recent essays on being published and on mistakes humanities scholars make in trying to be published  seem to say that publication is a possibility and that, in fact, "if you're not a writer, you're not a player." Being a player makes me feel like Frank Sinatra at the Sands circa 1960.  Do I have to be a player to be a writer?

Signed, Ring-a-ding-ding

Dear Ring,

Not unless you have Sammy and Dean and Angie Dickinson on speed dial.

Dear Ms. Undine,

I want to submit an article, but I am now terrified of the "mean girls" who constitute a totally vicious academic universe. I'm picturing Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man, but meaner. Is it true that peer reviewers live to inflict pain?

Signed, Anesthesia

Dear Anesthesia,

No. Although there are exceptions, they live to carve time out of their own writing time in order to provide what they hope is helpful feedback to improve someone's article.  Some academics are mean, but then, some people are mean, and the internet is a whole lot meaner.


Dear Ms. Undine.

All I do is get up and write or revise all day long. Sometimes, just to shake things up, I recite poetry to the cats.  I'm pretty sure they listen to me. Is this normal behavior for a writer? Is this normal behavior for cats?

Signed,  Wonder while I wander

Dear Wonder,

Your question is in two parts, so I will answer both.

1) Yes, totally, totally normal, no problem here at all, no sir.
2) Yes. Cats will listen to anyone with opposable thumbs and access to the food dish.

Dear Ms. Undine Answers Your Questions

Dear Ms. Undine,

All the academics I know on Facebook are on vacation or hiking in the mountains or traveling in Europe, having a fabulous time. I am slogging away at writing. I am happy for them but also envious. What do you suggest?  -- Running in Jello

A. Dear Running in Jello,

Stay off Facebook. Sheryl Sandberg wants you to lean in and feel bad, and she's not a bit sorry about it, either.


Dear Ms. Undine,

I am supposed to write in the morning, but if I check email even for a second, I see a lot of messages requiring a reply. Many of them are about things that people want me to do for them. What should I do?  -- Curiosity killed the cat

A. Dear Curiosity,

I saw a message the other day that is just made for you.  It goes something like this: "An email inbox is a to-do list that is made for you by other people. It reflects their priorities, not yours."  If you pay attention to this message and don't check your email until late in the day, you will feel better.

Dear Ms. Undine,

Twitter is full of something called the World Cup and also full of outraged people.  Which do I have to pay attention to if I want to be well-informed about the news?  -- Christiane Amanpour, Jr.

A. Dear Christiane,

Neither.

Dear Ms. Undine,

I keep telling myself "this piece of writing won't write itself," but secretly I think it will if I just leave it alone so that the pages will multiply. Am I right in thinking that the pages will multiply?
-- Hope Springs Eternal

A. Dear Hope,

Sadly, no.  Pages are not like guppies. Instead, they are like books, which will move around on the shelves until you can't find the one you want. There will be the same number of pages that you left, but you will find yourself lost when you go back to them if you don't keep your eyes firmly on them.

If you have questions to ask Ms. Undine, please leave them in the comments.