Securities and Exchange

I've reached the point in this (second consecutive) summer of upheaval where I'm starting to feel unhealthy. Not been sleeping very well for a month; I drop off fine usually but wake up a million times. The packing has me mired in stirred up dust and fleas, probably, so I'm sneezey and my eyes itch. I've been drinking more beers/wine than what is my standard routine, smoking more cigarettes. And not sleeping. Plus, eating down the pantry is anti-healthful. I'm scared to buy any produce because of an overdetermined sense of the move being imminent. Pasta, quinoa, black beans, beer beer, rice, can of soup, beer, rinse, repeat. my god, we wouldn't want to have to move with this *vanilla*! Better use it up! More peanut butter cookies; in my weakened state I tend to bake only half the dough and just straight up eat the rest. Further, like all good hells, the eating down the pantry hell is all the worse because it is a hell of your unique making. I, for example, have a grocery store weakness for two-for-one specials, for boxes of rice/herb combos, for cans of refried beans, for on-sale granola bars, and for oversized bins of risotto. This is my processed carbs hell, for now.

I cleaned out the last bits of stuff in my office yesterday. Something I love about myself is the way I invest in a place and develop a relationship with it, but yesterday that investment, only a year long, felt like more than I had room to indulge. I felt exhausted and sad in my empty first office. I walked down the hall to drop off my key and three of the offices I passed, colleagues, have my kid's artwork taped on the doors.

I don't feel like I've written much about this job over the last year and now I don't know how much I trust myself because I feel weepy effusive. It would be, I imagine, for me, much easier to leave this job if it were a traditionally "really good" job. I know, y'all, its a tenure track job, it's a really good job. Just like the one I am going to, which is a 4/4 with tons of comp and a new institutional structure, is also a good job. I do know. But y'all know what I mean: the kind of job that my grad program trained me to think of as aspirational. R1, 2/2, minimal comp teaching. That scenario presents a clear dichotomy: privileging family togetherness over career ambitiousness, without entirely sacrificing the latter.

Instead the situation is this: my job, my first job, was a 4/4 with constant comp responsibilities and a spartan upper-level rotation that had me in my speciality only once every 3 or 4 semesters. I had weighty service responsibilities, very little funds for conference/research travel, and a very small salary. My colleagues have pursued relationships with my daughter and played with her feverish self while I taught. They hang her art in their office. They have hosted my family for bbq's and riverside crab eating. My chair, when I called her in June to say I was leaving, spent 20 seconds being sort of shocked and then 20 minutes assuring me that I was making the right decision and she was so proud of and happy for me. She also began scheduling meetings with me 2 months into the job to discuss things like my 3rd yr review file, how to think about the committees involved, how to game my committee responsibilities. Maybe most importantly, I am thinking, is that my colleagues here have worked so hard from the day I arrived to convey that I was the best fit for the job, that I was an asset to the department, that I made the school better. The did this because they are decent and because they meant it all, but also, I expect, because they knew how much it meant for a first year assistant professor - any first year assistant professor but especially one struggling with some single mothering and an absent partner - to be reminded of herself as a competent professional with an identifiable career trajectory. That is, at any rate, the effect it had on me. I feel, as I'm sure is clear by now, very sad about leaving these people and this job.

I was skimming archives and noticed that here, last summer, pre-move, I observed how sad people seemed for us when I told them I got a job, but Mr. V hadn't yet and we were shifting to a commuter marriage. This year, with this move, people seem so happy for us. It's much easier to react in an unambiguous way (especially to a woman) to positive family news than to positive career news. Even my colleagues are thrilled for us. And mostly I absorb that and it guides how I feel about the move: incredibly happy for us. But it's more complicated. Always is.

["Everyone wants to] fuck young girls."

Judges. Juries.

Everyone.

Good news for everyone then.

ETA: added missing preposition in title and added patented academic flair brackets to more precisely convey bottom line.

Still Eating My Sandwich

The last thing this whole Daily Show/Jezebel fracas need is another linkfest, so I'm going to (sort of) abstain. I thought the Jezebel piece was basically reasonable. Everything that has gone on thereafter (with much of it being extremely well-written and reasoned, other parts less so) has seemed to me like such total insidery inside baseball as to be a little cringey. But I will say this" I read Olivia Munn's interview at Salon today. Uh huh. So, yea.

This is not a woman I had heard of prior to the aforementioned fracas (Munn suggests in the interview that various articles about the dust up are attaching her name in order to get page hits. I wonder, can that happen? Does everyone else know who she is?]. Now that I am acquainted with her, I have this to say: Feminism is for everyone. I think you, Olivia Munn, should benefit from its paradigm, its achievements, its humanistic hope for the world. Etc. I understand that you feel like the forces of feminism often work imperfectly (and even self-destructively) - a true fact - hence your statement that, "this [Jezebel] article was picked up and pushed out and these women sit behind this very thin veil that I can see right through, this idea that "we stand up for women." If you stand up for women, then don't bash me." Hmmm. I feel doubtful about the notion that because one is a feminist, one cannot critique other women or reflect on antifeminist forces that may be at work in their career trajectories, but maybe it really became a cabalistic sisterhood when I wasn't looking. Also, were you "bashed"? Hmm. So then, as I continued to read the interview, I thought, just who *is* this Olivia Munn and what has she been doing that is so insulated from feminist analysis?

A bit further down in the interview, re: people who had negative things to say about her Maxim cover shoot or her relationship with the new Captain Kirk: "And I really still believe that anybody who's sitting there judging my relationship does need to get the shit fucked out of them." Hmmm.

And then Lindsay Beyerstein [so, ok, this post is linky anyway] showed me the moving images I needed to see to complete my picture of Olivia Munn's contributions to the representation of women within dudely geek culture. Lindsay writes:

[T]he least Munn can do is stop acting all butthurt when feminists call her out. We geeks are not renowned for our social skills, but there's one thing we do know: You can't suck up to the cool people and dump on the other rejects and expect the rejects to like you. A corollary applies to women who ingratiate themselves to men while tearing down other women.

True. I mean, talk about manufactured outrage. Or, at the very least, total lack reflexive awareness. And, also, this "I'm easy to hate" and "expect them to like you" language is precisely the problem: this is, or was anyway, actually not a middle school catfight. Things - shows, public personae, career trajectories, workplace sexism - exist in real life. They are scrutable, legible, analyze-able, potentially educational. Introducing the language of petty jealousy is what turns it into a middleschool catfight.

All in all, in conclusion and since the beginning of time, the whole thing is wicked less soothing than packing and I am sorry I spent any time with it.

Abusus Non Tollit Usum

Cannabis advisory for Denver Colorado: this summer's most popular flavors are as follows:

ICE - named for la Migra

PurpleXTrainwreck - named for the trainwreck

Western Buddah - named for the satori of sativa

Fayaka - named for the Steel Pulse lyric

Rey and Angie came to visit for the week of the Glorious Fourth and brought this news. They tell me marijuana dispensaries in Denver County now outnumber Starbucks.

And the most unlikely suspects are getting into the business. A guy we know, a fucking teabagging Republican who used to run a private security firm, has gone totally hydroponic. The warehouse he formerly used for housing the tools and implements of the private police business has now been given over to tanks and grow lights and bags of vermiculite and long tables of fragrant budding indica. The minions who formerly jiggled doorknobs and bounced revelers from rodeo beer stubes now patrol the dress-right-dress ranks of hemp stalks for aphids and cutworms.

There may even be some commercial opportunities for old school growers of customary Conejo county Verde Sol, cultivated, in the ancient way, broadcast along the arroyos and canyon watercourses of the Four Corners and dried in adobe sheds that reek of chiles and alfalfa and the earthy tang of Dineh ponies.

Makes my eyes red just thinking about it.

How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Move

Moving itself is a bitch, but I rather like packing. It appeals to the frenetic organizer in me. Also, if there is anything better than organizing, it is throwing away/donating. So liberating! I am ruthless and have very little sentimentality when it comes to this sort of thing. Eating down the pantry is goddamn awful, but other than that, reducing inventory is fabulous-feeling.

I have tended to have one major weakness in this process and have finally, in the last week, overcome it. I am here to share my enlightenment with you. If you are reading this blog, there is a strong likelihood that the insight is one you need. Here it is: your books do not love you. They are objects, and not morally superior to any other object in your house. Again, books are not morally superior to any other objects. They are just heavier.