Hasta la vista. Bitches.

So what happened?

From where I sit (pinned down by a cat), honestly, the title and raison d'etre of the blog really no longer apply. I've been out of academia now for something like five years--long enough that I'm not actually sure how long it's been. I still have strong opinions, but the severe unhappiness and depression that were, to be honest, major drivers of the urgency and bitchiness of the blog are also things of the past. For now anyway, and I hope permanently. And most importantly of all, my primary purpose in starting the blog has, I think, been met: there are *tons* of people out there who are also depressive/bitchy/feminist/mama/academic/anxious/funny/cynical/etc. types, who experience at least some parts of the world in ways that are congenial to me, and I to them, and the blog has, I think, been a successful part all of our discovering that the internet is a really awesome way to ditch the facades and talk, honestly, about our experiences. Even the pseudonymous part of doing so feels almost like an afterthought: it's been quite some time since Bitch was a fairly transparent (though still quite enjoyable) nom de plume, rather than a proper mask.

That plus it sort of feels like Bitch PhD is a more or less complete body of work. Not that we don't/won't continue to have things to say on the blog's topics--feminism, politics, society, recipes, even academia--but we, the various Bitches, have each reached a kind of closure of the parts of our lives that the blog served. Sybil has a job she's happy with, but it's not blog-friendly. Ding has switched jobs and found a man, for god's sake. LeBlanc got MARRIED. Taddy claims he hasn't changed, but he got cancer, recovered, is returning to his real life and (most importantly of all) has realized, I think, that he is a damn good writer. I'm a housewife, and Pseudonymous Kid is old enough now (10 next week!) that he has started to censor what I write about him, the little shit.

We may not all be living happily ever after, but I think we're all at transitional stages and ready to move to something new.

But as I said, that doesn't mean we're, like, dead or anything. Ding and I are both thinking of starting book blogs; LeBlanc may be getting annoyed by DC blog politics, but she's nonetheless become Somebody among the big boys and girls; Sybil may be blog-free for a while but she seems to have become a semiregular twit. Taddy, well, you guys gotta talk Taddy into starting a goddamn blog of his own.

For now the blog will stay exactly where it is. Lauren at Feministe has offered to archive some "best of" posts, and I may get around to taking her up on the offer. If/when I get my own domain (which I'm totally going to do with the next blog; some asshole has been squatting on bitchphd.com for years now) I'll try to figure out how to move everything over there. In other words, stuff will still be around, hopefully to be occasionally discovered by new readers as well as fondly printed out--EVERY SINGLE PAGE--and bound in gold leaf by each and every one of you.

I shall forever remain your humble servant.

Bitchphd

Everybody's So Different I haven't Changed

In my family we hate to be parted but we love to say goodbye. We love the weepy, beery farewells, the exit calls to have one more drink, one more bite, to stay just a little longer. The grown ups embrace and the little kids cling to each other, screaming as we pry them apart. You'd think they were being sold into slavery. We each press each other as if ...we may or might never all meet here again.

And we press a sack lunch on the departing, something for the road. Frequently, there is a bale of hand-me-downs the children of the hosting house have outgrown but which will do just fine for the children of the departing. We slip dollar bills to the little kids and tell them to buy themselves a treat. We slip a ten or a twenty to the older kids and tell them not to spend it all in one place.

I guess that's why the wake is our clan's supreme expression of solidarity. We love to say goodbye.

Its too bad the internet won't support a wake. Or maybe I just don't know how to have one on the internet. There's a lot of things I didn't know about the internet until I came to BitchPhD.

In fact, this blog has been a revelation to me, one revelation after another. I came here following a recipe search for pan de dulce and was introduced to a sweetness I never imagined. A complicated sweetness, one requiring a palate sophisticated and discerning and learned. This is, after all, BitchPhD, not SweetHoneyintheRockPhD.

I thank you for being so sweet to me. Thank you for many kindnesses. Thank you for giving me time to become a little learned and listening to me while I struggled to express what I've learned. Being invited to join the bloggeen of the Sisters Bee has been a great honor. I will never forget it. I will never forget you.

My time posting here has coincided with one of the most tumultuous phases of my life. Shortly after I started posting, I left my little home on the mountain to work in Wisconsin for what I expected to be a few months. Nearly two years, six months of chemotherapy, one ghastly surgery, two hospital stays, and several months of physical and mental therapy later, I'm back in my mountain croft. I never, ever, ever, want to leave again.

Not sure what I'm going to do from here on. I've got a lot of catching up to do. I need to find my place, again, among the members of my household and among my friends. It may or may not be worth writing about. The Great Recession has caused much dislocation for our people. My experience is unique to me but has probably been repeated, in similar form, millions of times over the last couple years. Just look at the BitchPhD staff. No one of our bloggeen is in the same place and situation they were two years ago.

Except me. I'm back where I started. Mostly, I want to play my guitar and have a drink with my friends. And wake BPhD.

Dr B said the internet is a big place and it is. The world, however, is really a very small place. Who knows where we might run across each other again? Anywhere people crowd in for a drink and a dance and a bit of a joke, that's where to look for me.

I'm the guy at the end of the bar, chatting up your sister.

The Social Network

I'm not sure what I ever hoped to accomplish by blogging. I think it was more a compulsion than anything. I had stuff to say, damnit, and I wanted to know if anyone would listen. I needed more, always more social interaction, especially when I started blogging, which was when I was in law school and dealing with a lot of isolation and not having enough fun. I figure there were people on the Internet who wanted to have fun conversations and shoot the shit. I would have always said that I was trying to do some kind of public service. I still think that's true. I think blogging can be incredibly important to people who feel isolated or alone, people trapped in bad relationships or shitty towns or a dead-end job. In some sense, I became a feminist blogger because I felt trapped in the activity of being a woman in patriarchy, which is a real pain, and I wanted to reach out to other women in a similar position and see if we couldn't come up with something good that made sense of it all.

And we did.

Moving to DC made me like blogging less and less. I met a lot of people who are journalists and writers and bloggers and it seems that so many people are connected intimately to this internet, more so than they are to each other. I got tired of vitriolic comment threads where it seemed like everyone was itching for a fight. I get enough fights off the internet. I got tired of people trying to score points. And I can blame bloggers and commenters all I want, but let's face it, the truth is this: I don't have as much to say any more. I have less patience for trying to convince people who disagree with me. I don't find it fun anymore.

I'm sure this won't be the last time I blog. People change, circumstances change, and again I'm sure I will be moved to say something, to get it off my chest, to vent, to write it out and pull things together and make something coherent out of living, in words. When I do, it will probably be at Tiger Beatdown, where Sady has kindly offered me the space to do it when I feel like it.

Thank you all for reading.

More than that, thanks to Bitch for asking me to blog for her, which at the time and for several years after was huge for me. What an honor. Thanks to all the rest of the crew for entertaining me and for being my friend.

Until then, I hope I see you all in the real world, and we can emphasize with hand gestures instead of html tags.

Fireside chats

When I was a grad student, I TA'd for a professor, now a friend, who liked to say, "The best thing about semesters is that they end." He had the right demeanor to pretend he meant it cynically, but I heard him weave it unto an undergrad lecture once and know he had a whole Benjaminian kind of thing going on (that and he is more earnest than he let on). Semesters are great like stories are great like novels are great like movies are great: they have a beginning, a middle, and an end and in giving us a narrative to inhabit from start to finish, they give us the sense of experiencing the only thing we all really want to know about but can't: how the/our story ends. "What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about."


So you can see where I'm going with this: closing down Bitch PhD is like dying.

Not that. But it is something I'm trying to feel satisfied about, something I want to let be an ending in the best narrative sense of the world. This blog was an important part of a narrative for me. It was the first blog I ever paid real serious attention to. It informed so very many of my opinions while I was a grad student. On things like this and this and this, just to name a few. It was through this blog that I met my first ever internet people in real life. And hey, remember when we did this? Ah, the times.

This blog was important to me long before I wrote on it and B's voice was probably the first feminist voice in my adult life that really resonated with my concerns, my glibness, my anxieties, my ambitions. I am sure the story is the same for a lot of you. And a lot of you!! You've been so great to me since I have been writing here, making me feel so sure that my stories were interesting, funny, and really worth all the space they get in my head. And that my recipes are sometimes good. And the lovely fellow bloggers, with their complicated lives and fierce commitments and sharp brains and short short tempers with trolls.

It's a love fest, the whole thing.

And now everyone gets a chance to put, if not a period, perhaps a semicolon or maybe even a comma on the story [Confidential to my students: the latter two of which continue to NOT be able to be used interchangeably]. Which is a comforting luxury, in its own way.

I doubt I will blog again somewhere else. Clearly, my momentum of late has petered. Moving, new job, family back together, 5 yr old, 30 Rock, it all takes a lot out of me. I got to do the thing I never imagined would happen: I found a tenure track job in my field in the town where I have the most friends and where my husband's career is solidly planted, where we can afford a house and like the school district and the weather and the restaurants. I am not sure that the academic blog world needs my story, that anyone is really served by having this story told. It's happy making, which is a service, but you know what I mean.

It would, in some ways, be good for me to be writing about the job. There are a lot - and y'all, I mean a lot - of things about this institution and the the way the place works that make for SERIOUS blog content. But for a variety of reasons I feel that it's likely I would be un-anonymized by someone there, sooner or later, if I blogged regularly, and for a variety of reasons I feel like I would likely get fired if I were found out while doing a lot of unsavory blogging. It's just not a good idea. And neither is glib happy blogging.

So for now, my blog story ends with what is probably a period. The Vane family is back under one roof, LV is happily-ish ensconced in a new school where she is not being secretly taught about Jesus. Instead she is mixing up other traditions and came home a few weeks ago announcing that on Eid, a person gets to stay home and eat apples and honey all day. She is planning a vampire faerie costume for Halloween. I am reading wikipedia articles on chemotherapy (seriously) and visualizing clumps of hair on my beautiful wood floors in an attempt to psych myself up for the Next Great Smoking Cessation, to begin when the weather gets genuinely cold. I am comfortably in the midterm mode of my teaching performance and my students seem so far to respond in the ways I expect them to; they like me, for the most part. Mr. V and I are remembering how to share parenting during the weekdays; the inevitable quibbling that results is nothing in comparison to the luxury of having someone else to pack lunch and do end of day pick up. The CAT has settled on her favorite sun spots on the back porch and the front porch. She never kills songbirds, despite all that you readers gave me to look forward to. I miss football this season, but I can't root for Ben. I made amazing manicotti last weekend. And sweet potato pie with vanilla whipped cream. And the bakery down the street sells amazing baguettes.

You can imagine the tedium that kind of material would produce, as far as posts go.

Thanks so much for talking so much with me. Thanks to Delia, to Silvana, to Taddy, for being allies and for being so goddamned smart. Thanks to B for hosting for such a long time. If I make my way back somewhere, you'll be the first to know (so I should get your numbers. So we can text. Or something).

ETA: Also, I forgot to note that I do wonder if B is really shutting down the place because I did that fucked up thing where I made the comments go backwards-wise and I never figured out how to fix it and everyone just hella hates it still. My bad, y'all. I broke the place.

The elephant in the room

We, the Bitch Collective, think it is past time to acknowledge an unfortunate fact: this blog has withered on the vine. There are various reasons for this, and some of us will write closing posts in the next few days which may address them. But in any case we will be putting Bitch PhD out of its misery in the next few days.

That said, most of us will continue to blog elsewhere, under our real names or other noms des plumes. It's a big Internet. We'll see you around....

...and, farewell.

It's been loads of fun, poppets. But I gotta go.
Life is calling and I've been postponing it a bit with all my navel gazing, jeremiad-ing and general bitchiness.
But don't worry; I have not been tamed. Me and my afro, we're in the dulcet-toned environs of philanthropy and I expect several apple carts to be overturned over the course of the year.

Maybe you'll see me again. Maybe I'll be the woman to throw a pie in Rahm Emanuel's face.
Whatever the case, catch me over at Screed. Or on the Twitter, @DeliaChristina or @DeliaC.

Ciao, bellas!

Delia Christina