Monday, May 23, 2005
Academia: The Job that Goes Everywhere and Nowhere
I'm leaving in a week to go to far-off shores and have been desperately trying to figure out how to pack productively. I own no appropriate clothing for where I'm going, which I'll just have to work around, but of more concern is how I'm going to get some work done while I'm on the road. Various levels of my own cowardice and scheming have trapped me. Witness:
Problem the First: Serious issues of fear in regards to your intellectual abilities. Anxieties about revealing your complete incompetence to your peers.
Solution: Focus on an academic area in which there are no experts in the immediate vicinity. This has served me well. Going to a small Christian undergrad university and doing your honors thesis on "Post-Stonewall Depictions of Women in Gay Men's Literature" means that all your committee's going to be able to do is blink in confusion and give you an A.
Resulting Problem the Second: Nobody gives a crap about what you're studying, so the books are really obscure and hard to find. Also, you are a seriously cheap bastard.
Solution: Librariness. University libraries are required to keep around stupid useless texts that nobody cares about except for you. Which means you can check them out, renew them indefinitely, and no one will ever notice until you finish your dissertation and skip town.
Problem the Third: Travel. You're taking a long-ass trip, and you'll have plenty of time where you're forced to sit around doing nothing. An ideal time to catch up on all the reading you should have been doing all along. But, being a fine, upstanding citizen, you don't want to take along library books to a different continent. And the few books you do own on the topic were so damn hard to find you're sure as hell not going to risk losing them in an airport in Tokyo.
Solution: Drink heavily every single day until you leave on said trip, then haphazardly fling into a suitcase all of your underwear and some porn. Enjoy.
. . . okay, so solution is still in progress. GodDAMN, books are heavy.
Problem the First: Serious issues of fear in regards to your intellectual abilities. Anxieties about revealing your complete incompetence to your peers.
Solution: Focus on an academic area in which there are no experts in the immediate vicinity. This has served me well. Going to a small Christian undergrad university and doing your honors thesis on "Post-Stonewall Depictions of Women in Gay Men's Literature" means that all your committee's going to be able to do is blink in confusion and give you an A.
Resulting Problem the Second: Nobody gives a crap about what you're studying, so the books are really obscure and hard to find. Also, you are a seriously cheap bastard.
Solution: Librariness. University libraries are required to keep around stupid useless texts that nobody cares about except for you. Which means you can check them out, renew them indefinitely, and no one will ever notice until you finish your dissertation and skip town.
Problem the Third: Travel. You're taking a long-ass trip, and you'll have plenty of time where you're forced to sit around doing nothing. An ideal time to catch up on all the reading you should have been doing all along. But, being a fine, upstanding citizen, you don't want to take along library books to a different continent. And the few books you do own on the topic were so damn hard to find you're sure as hell not going to risk losing them in an airport in Tokyo.
Solution: Drink heavily every single day until you leave on said trip, then haphazardly fling into a suitcase all of your underwear and some porn. Enjoy.
. . . okay, so solution is still in progress. GodDAMN, books are heavy.
# posted by FriendlyInstructor @ 2:30 PM 
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The real reason theory is so prevalent in our department: pure density. Sure, it may look like an innocent 300-page collection of Heidegger's writings, but the damn thing reads like a 3,000-page nightmare. (Question: Why do they bother to translate Heidegger? It would make just as much sense to most of us if it bloody remained in German.)
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