Academia: the Last Refuge of the Coward

First of all, I give myself like three more years before I get arrested for doing something completely reprehensible to or with a student. Knowing me, it'll probably be some form of sexual harassment, but I can also totally see the possibility of me bribing my students to become my hired goons.

With that in mind, let me share with you another one of my personal Great Moments in Teaching.

Student comes in to see me to discuss student's paper. I like Student, and friendly chatter ensues. I am aware of the fact that all of my students are, at this point, doubly burdened: they are attempting to finish a novel and simultaneously produce working final drafts of their text-analysis essays. So I casually ask Student how Student is coming along on the reading portion of the week's work.

"Oh, I finished the novel this morning," says Student.

My black little heart is warmed by this revelation, and I congratulate Student, adding, "Isn't the ending of that novel depressing? I mean, every time I read it, I'm so emotionally worn out that I feel like I've been beaten. By the time you're done, don't you just want to kill yourself?"

Student laughs a little, agreeing that the novel is indeed not a happy one, and the two of us proceed to the matter of Student's paper. About two minutes later, I have a horrible realization.

Wait a minute, my dim reptilian brain kicks in as it slowly begins to process all relevant information. Student is the student who was out of class for a few weeks because of severe depression.

Fortunately, Student did not commit suicide as a result of our conversation, although one of my officemates that it really wouldn't have been a problem if that had happened.

"It's just good pedagogy," he said. "You're just trying to keep class size down."

Indeed.

Going to conferences seems, in the abstract, like a totally barbaric process, especially when you're at the bottom of academia like yours truly - in an area nobody cares about, not even dissertating yet, no published credits, etc. You just poke around until you find a conference subject you more or less could sort of have something to say about and then apply, knowing full well that it has the potential to turn into a barbaric wolf-pack type of savagery. You're about to be faced with a room possibly full of experts on something you possibly only know well enough to talk about for ten pages. Fortunately, many academics are so blinded by their own genius that the ones who ask the really hard expert questions end up answering those questions themselves. But as you're getting ready, as you're reading, as you're sitting on that panel, you always have that horrible sinking knowledge that someone, someone out there is going to ask one of the many possible questions that reveals you not only as a fraud masquerading as an expert, but a complete moron and waste of human skin that would have been better employed as an Ed Gein poncho.

This may not sound like an ideal situation for an admitted coward to enter into. This is why you must always approach them while at peace with the fact that what you're doing is totally insane.

One should be drunk during all steps of the conference process and only do the prepatory work when absolutely necessary. For the faintly OCD academic who needs some order in their insanity, you can make a highly structured drinking game out of the whole rigmarole. Notice a likely (or unlikely) call for papers, take a drink. Take subsequent drinks for each paper you've written in grad school which cannot be used at this particular conference. Take two drinks for each paper that could work. Of each of those, take a drink for each page you need to cut to get the damn thing readable in ten minutes. If you have no eligible papers, count the number of days between the current date and the date proposals are due, and take a drink for each. Repeat on the day the proposal is due, and only then write the proposal, emailing the poor incoherent little bastard child of your loins off to the conference peoples only when you're having trouble figuring out if you spelled your own name correctly in the top line.

This process continues on and on; I'm sure you can figure out the remaining intricacies on your own. The ideal conference paper should be written on source material you haven't read, in notecard form, no more than ten minutes before you're due to speak, while you're half-crazed with fear and at least twenty-seven sheets to the wind. Extra points for each four-syllable word you can squeeze into the title. That way, when difficult questions pop up, you'll have enough leftover adrenaline and Irish courage to start throwing boozy punches. Remember, everyone in academia is insane. Demonstrating that you're willing to perform for the kiddies as a particularly memorable, entertaining, and volatile insane person will guarantee you spots at many career-enhancing conferences to come, all of which you will apply to because you are, after all, insane.

This is my theory.

Now, I'm slacking a little bit on my scheduling, admittedly, but am currently attempting to write one paper for a conference I was accepted to a few months ago and a proposal for another conference (again for a paper I haven't written) which I believe happens just about the same time. I have to say this because I have completely forgotten when the first conference takes place - I think I remember which state it's in, but that's all - and am sort of vaguely hoping that the good people who let me in on the strength of my staggeringly incoherent proposal will contact me at some point to remind me to show up. So I can at least get my ten minutes' warning to buy notecards and vodka.

Made it back home from Singapore. Trip was about thirty hours, door to door. Part of that, however, was discovering that although I apparently have no problem making it halfway across the planet and back, I cannot remember my damn bus pass for the last three miles home. Also, I was a quarter short of bus fare home. So some of that time was spent alternately staring at passers-by and hoping they would sense my intense need for a quarter and making collect calls home hoping a housemate would eventually receive one (they did).

While this was frustrating, the worst bit, probably, was the final hour of the flight into the US. There was some really nasty turbulence, which started with a great "We're all going to die" moment, where the plane dropped suddenly and dramatically enough to make about half the people on it shriek like little girls. I did not participate in the shrieking. I was half-asleep, dreaming of stomping to death the demonic toddler across the aisle. So when my stomach, in accordance with the laws of inertia, attempted to leave my body through my nose, I was too disorganized to attempt a shriek but instead flailed wildly with my left arm and managed, after some bleary-eyed panic, to get a grip on the armrest. Because that would save me if the plane happened to come to a sudden stop. Against the ground. Or something. If I'm going down, then I'm taking this damn armrest with me, even if I have to dislocate my shoulder to do it.

After this kicker of a flirtation with gravity, there was a stunned silence, and then the intercom crackled briefly into life: "Uh, flight attendants, please be seated." Both awesome and timely. I tried to imagine stewardesses lodged halfway into bulkheads, like heroines in a Salvador Dali painting.

As my life in academia closes off more and more job options for me, there are some jobs I long after sadly, sure I would have been pretty good at them, if I'd only taken the chance. Being a pilot is not one of them. Besides the fact that I'm legally blind without my corrective lenses and easily distracted, I could just never manage the PR side of things. Teaching has taught me that being in a position of authority causes me to become inappropriately honest ("Yeah, I had a nine-year-old help grade your papers." "Can anyone tell me what this piece is about? Because I sure as hell don't know.") I can't imagine this translating very well into the cockpit:

Dramatic drop in altitude; passengers scream, flight attendants and beverage carts go hurling through the air like feathers at a cockfight. Plane levels off, passengers continue to whimper in fear.
*crackle*
"Uh, sorry, everyone. I dropped my bagel."
*crackle*

Yeah, we're all better off with me in the back abusing the free booze and trying to read Pyncheon while drunk and sleep-deprived. Score one for academia.

My mother and I took a two-day side trip to Kuala Lumpur. By my reckoning, the final count was:

Squatty potty: 1
Me: 3

Squatty potty: 2
My mother: 1

These being among the most memorable moments of the trip, I have a deep need to take a picture of me looking really sad in a stall with one of these. I do not, however, have a deep need to do so in front of an audience of confused, amused, and possibly irritated Asians of varying stripes.

Squatty potty = 1
CowardlyAcademe = 0

So we're staying with my incredibly generous (and wealthy) cousin, who has, among other things, made each of us the gift of an hour-long massage at the private club he and his family belong to. So this morning I went in to experience my first ever professional massage. A very pretty Indian woman showed me to the changing room and gave me a locker key. "Put on the robe," she said, "and the sleepers." Sleepers? Oh, slippers. "And the paper bahntee." Bahntee? I thought, while simply nodding outwardly. What the hell is a bahntee? Some kind of hairnet? Wrapped snugly in the robe, I unrolled the little paper package.

Ohhhhh. Panty. The word is panty.

Oh, this'll be fun.

I do not have the kind of body one would write home about, and was raised with a pretty healthy sense of shame about it. I'm not morbidly obese or anything, but I am flabby, pale, and have unsightly hair in all the usual places. I followed my masseuse into the darkened spa room, horribly, horribly aware of the fact that I was nearly a foot taller than her and possibly double her weight. Suddenly all of my bulk, usually useful for looming over students and small children, was more horribly embarassing than the everyday shame of looking like a land whale when wearing shorts.

"I'm really a good person," I wanted to say to her. "I know I have the regulation white-trash tattoo, but I belong to a really specialized kind of white trash known as liberal academia." I had this great need for her to see me saving a puppy from a burning house or helping a little old lady ford a bustling Singaporean street. "I know my body is disgusting," my eyes pleaded with her dumbly, "but my heart is pure." (Quiet, you. If I can't lie about my body, I can at least lie about my morals.) I could just imagine what the conversation would be like afterwards in the back room at the spa:

"How was your last appointment, Wendy?"

"Oh, flabby, pale, with unsightly hair in all the usual places. Regulation white-trash tattoo."

The massage itself felt great, physically. Though fingers were thrust -hard - into places that not many have dared to tread. The shame, however, was horrific. You lie facedown on the table, see, and there's a little space for your face to peek through and you stare at the floor - where they've put a sunflower in a bowl for you to contemplate. I ignored the sunflower in favor of obsessing over my pudginess and the etiquette of the massage. About five minutes into it, she asked, "S'okay?" to which I responded "Yes, thank you!" This sounded incredibly stupid and I began worrying about whether I should keep up some sort of running commentary during the massage to let her know she was doing a great job. I determined finally that this would sound sort of weird and sexual ("Ohh, yeah. Yeah, right there.") and that if I started suddenly doing so after ten minutes of near-total silence, she would think I was having some sort of seizure. So the two of us remained in grim silence, interrupted only by her comment as she reached my shoulders: "Too much computer."

How'd she know that? Maybe my shoulders were all tense from playing too much tennis or - oh, wait, that's right. She's just seen all of my flabby white ass in its paper panty.

By the end of the massage, I'd mentally composed a tiny essay that I did not relate. It contained such rich information as the fact that the massage was a gift and she honestly probably made more money than me and this was my first massage and I was fully aware of the implications of colonial history and the problems of occidental vs oriental beauty and I was a good person.

"Thanks very much," I simpered. Definitely a simper.

"You come back," she beamed.

Ha ha ha ha ha no. I'm so glistening with massage oil I feel like the entire Rambo series and my head smells like peppermint. Okay, the peppermint-head thing isn't so bad and my back feels awesome, but no. Thank you for letting me in on your mad oriental massage skills, Wendy.

I am currently on a most-expenses paid trip to Singapore. I'm staying in an incredibly nice house for free, just down the block from the French Ambassador, I get to hang out with family I haven't seen in a long time. I should be ecstatic.

But no, oh no. See, I'm a grad student in a department that likes to focus on global concerns and problems of representation.

This means that I've read Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place for two separate seminars. I'll probably read it again. At the rate I'm going, I'll probably end up teaching it. If you've never read it, it's an excellent, moving non-fiction work about the island of Antigua, its colonial history, its postcolonial present, and the problems of identity and living in a tourist-driven economy.

This means that I can't exist in Singapore without feeling massive, massive guilt. "Oh, well," I thought to myself, "At least I won't be staying in a hotel. It won't be that bad." Failing to reckon, of course, with the fact that the cousin with whom I am staying has a Filipina housemaid. Who is incredibly nice and makes all the meals and sort of generally, well . . . servile.

I tell you, you work and you slave and you build up your ideology and you buy organic and you learn postcolonial theory and at the end of the day, you're still the white oppressor. Guess I'll go on down to the Raffles Hotel tomorrow and throw back a couple of Singapore slings and be all fat and American. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.