transition

No, it's not going to stop

so just give up

--Aimee Mann

Some kids want to be firemen or astronauts. Both options never really appealed to me...they both required more energy and physicality than I had. I was always a fairly sedentary child. My parents love to tell how I would always rather read a book rather than go outside and play.

It wasn't that I was lazy, per se. It's just that, given a choice, books always won out over running around. I would prefer to sit around, read, and think about what I had just read. Thinking was about figuring stuff out. It was about entering other words. It was about letting my mind go farther than my body ever could travel. The first books I can remember reading were the "Classics Illustrated" kid's versions of classic books. Then I graduated to the actual classics themselves (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was particularly vivid). Then it was on to detective fiction. I started science fiction and fantasy upon stumbling across Lord of the Rings in my middle school library. Then a friend introduced me to horror. Eventually, it was just any book, any story, any genre...as long as it transported me somewhere or let me think, it was where I wanted to be.

Somewhere in high school, my reading became subsumed by events...mostly work, guitar, and partying. Class took some of my time, but I got sucked into a job which occupied many more of my hours. I moved from part-time job to part-time job. Eventually, I found myself selling water as an operator-standing-by. When we were slow, we had permission to read, and it prompted a bit of a resurgence in my readings...I actually went through my local library's entire science fiction section.

Reading became important to me again...I found myself diving back into thinking, exploring, learning. There was, however, an unexpected result: I found myself increasingly aware of exactly how dead-end my series of menial crap jobs had become. I would like to say that I realized how little impact my various occupations (whether water seller, pizza maker, rat killer, or warehouse worker) made on anyone, and that I decided I wanted to move on to a career where I would make the world a better place, but the truth was nowhere so noble. Simply put, reading made me realize that I was tired of not feeling smart.

So I quit my water-selling job and went back to school. From the beginning, I wanted to figure out a way I could make reading and thinking my career, and pretty much from the start, this meant going to school long enough to become a teacher...in essence, I wanted to enter the university and never leave it. I wanted to become a professional thinker, someone who worked with ideas, explored theory, created knowledge. This implied teaching, but although I became very good at, enjoyed, and ultimately found teaching to be very rewarding, it was always about thinking for me, first and foremost.

I did everything I could think of to become a professional thinker. I studied night and day. I became a graduate assistant. I wrote. I read. I started my own literary journal. I wrote articles and published as many as I could. I expanded my vita as much as possible. Becoming a professional thinker--that is, getting a tenure-track professor's job--has pretty much been my focus since I went back to school in 1994. It has been the reason why I've read more than I ever thought I would, taught myself discipline after discipline, and spent my summers reading, writing, and thinking.

Unfortunately, my grand plan didn't work.

I got my Ph.D., entered the job market, and...nothing happened. I sent out over 500 applications in my time, and these did lead to a few phone interviews. The ones I wanted the most, though, I never heard back from the universities. I did get two campus interviews, but they were both at schools (including the community college I , and actually attended) where I really didn't want to work. I published more and more, but it's paid off less and less. It's been years since I've even heard back from any school where I've applied. No one, it seems, is interested in hiring me as a professional thinker.

Yesterday, I deleted all of the job announcement e-mail alerts in my in-box. Some time this week, I will unsubscribe to all my academic job feeds.

It's not, for the record, all bad. I do have a full-time job (albeit in a different field). I have published a lot of my writing, and when I last checked (which was a few years ago--in spite of my ego, I don't really sit around and google myself), some of them were used in classes and in other scholars' dissertations. But ultimately, thinking is not my career...and, as I will not be able to be on the job market for the next two years, there's little hope of me ever becoming a professional thinker.

Why did I not succeed? It's actually not a surprise to me. In an attempt to be different, I picked a topic that no one else was doing. Instead of being cutting-edge, though, my topic was just dramatically unhip. This prevented me from getting work doing anything other than part-time work for the first two years after graduation, and part-time teaching leaves utterly no time or mental energy for thinking or writing. Then, when I finally realized my dissertation was unhip, I rebranded myself...into something else that was also unhip. Then the economy imploded. Then many state governments decided that educators were the problem and that schools could survive without funding.

So it is officially time to give up on the job market. I wish my friends on the market the absolute best of luck, particularly since they're no longer my competition. I envy them: they still live in the world of ideas.

Me, though, not so much. I still have my dissertation-to-book project to write, and I still have three papers in circulation. I might still send out some apps when, in 2013, I'm able to reenter the job market, but I don't really have much hope. If I am honest, I've known for quite some time that I will never be a professor.

There is still tons to do, though. I have become a performing musician. I have pretenses of just being a writer...maybe an essayist, maybe a writer. And I still have article ideas, so the academic world isn't done hearing from me.

It's time, though, to admit that I'm transitioning into being a hobbyist thinker.

riding the writing cycle

Each school year follows a predictable pattern. No, I'm not talking about the prep, making syllabi, and tracing my students on the path from sheet utter panic to comprehension. I'm talking about my own journey as a writer.

The summer is my major productive time, where I write and write and write. Basically, I try to break it up with exercise, glasses of iced tea, and such, but most every summer day is spent either on the couch reading theory or chained to the desk, writing on the computer. I have lofty goals in the summer, ones that require "total dedication."

Of course, although I get an awful lot done (one of my bosses tells me I'm producing tenure-track workload even I'm in a heavy teaching job), I never really come close to completing my "vacation" writing agenda. When the Fall starts, I tell myself that it will be different this semester...I'll find a way to both write and teach. As is, I did pretty good this past fall by getting a brief revision and resubmit out and one conference presentation, but that's it. I never even got that conference presentation written up in draft.

The Christmas break will, I always swear, be the time where I get an article out--this year, it was going to be the Fall conference paper. Unfortunately (for my productivity, that is), there are always visitations, family gatherings, parties, and similar distractions. I always enjoy myself immensely, but again, I never get any writing done.

I tell myself, "well, at least I have Spring semester to write"...but by this point do I really need to go into detail on this semester's work failure?

I'm thinking about these cycles, because although I am still several weeks away from the start of summer, I am at what is most accurately the starting point of my scholarly side. I am at that magical dead space in the semester where the students are buried in their own work and don't really need much hand-holding on my part. I have very few classes left to plan, and I am between conference weeks. This means I have a certain amount of time on my hand, and Summer is on the horizon, I can actually start working without worrying too much about losing momentum in the forthcoming grading/conference period.

There's only one problem: by this point in the year, it's been entirely too long since I ever had to think about anything at all. I know I have mental chops, but it's been way too long since any of them were flexed. My major goal now is to try and get my brain primed and ready to go...so that when the summer finally hits, I can dive into my scholarship.

And I do have a ton of it on the summer "to-do" list...my CSI article, starting a journal with friends, finishing my revision attempt on the music article, the theory-heavy Neuromancer article, and (tee hee) getting a draft of the book done (the latter of these will almost certainly never leave the "dreaming" stage). On top of that, I have a brief smattering of an idea for a paper on the Robert B. Parker Spenser series...as if I need any more work.

I'm starting the brain recharging by reading Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. If you've only seen the awesomely fun film adaptation, you should know they are nothing like the same story. Heinlein's version is much more proto-fascist "go military" (although a much-smarter-than-I friend has already engaged me on my reductive descriptions), as opposed to the anti-hierarchy film. Honestly, even though I'm an ex-military brat, my sympathies are with the movie, but the film is more of a think-piece...and I think maybe it's the perfect way to ease me back into mental operations.

With the stupidly heavy workload in my on-deck circle, you would think that I would be in panic mode, but it's not really the case. Instead, I feel like I'm coming back to where I belong. I do love teaching, and I find it ultimately enriching, but the research, the writing, the scholarship, that's what really what drew me to this life in the first place...and that's nice to remember.

I have never come anywhere near where I want to be professionally, but I know I am far from alone in this. I don't know if the writing will help me in my career or not. The one thing I do know? Writers write. I might be stuck teaching "welcome to college" classes in a field far from my own, and I might be doing this forever. Doesn't matter, though. My writing is my true work, and I think it's important to realize that it's valuable in its own right.

I could get depressed by my age. I could get depressed by the fact that I rely on hand-me-down cars from my parents. I could get depressed by having to rent a house in the student ghetto because I can't get out of credit card debt. I could get depressed by the very real possibility that most of my friends will be gone in four months, and most likely not even to better places and situations, because damnit, I want all my friends to get great jobs in vacation-settings, so I have places to visit.

I don't know if doing the work will solve anything. I have no idea if it will ever get recognized. Ultimately, I don't even know if the work has value. But I suspect. I believe.

It might be a cliche to say "the work will set me free"...but I'm okay with cliches...at least at this stage of the writing cycle.

on an overdue happening

I have seen the mountain. I have been to the mountain. Unlike Jimi Hendrix, I did not "chop it down with the edge of my hand." In this, Jimi was temporarily acting like a wimp. If he wanted to be tough, he should've done what I did...bite down that damn mountain with my bare teeth.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, hyper-intelligent cats and fuzzy reptiles from Alpha Centauri 8, I am here to tell you how it is. Remember my repeated moans about "The Paper That Would Not Die 2009 Edition?"

The Paper That Would Not Die is finally dead. Hallelujah.

A little after 1pm, I put the finishing touches on my draft. After many trials, after much avoidance, I have finally finished.

This is, for me, a momentous occasion. Some data to help you understand why:

• I started this back on May 19th with a simple blog post I couldn't quit thinking about the topic, though, so I wrote the paper.
  
• This means I have been writing this damn paper for 57 days, excluding my Florida trip. This is a long time for an article.
  
• During this time, I have done three outlines and six major paper reorganizations.
  
• My computer file for this essay has 93 files in it (drafts, notes, pdfs, & such), for a total size of 69 megabites.
  
• My Works Cited page is currently going onto the 6th page, with 45 entries. I still have to pare these down, but there will still be ahellofalotta sources.
  
• The draft itself works out to 26 pages, with 8,084 words. This will inevitably shrink during revision, but still, pretty damn long.
  

At this point, I plan to give it a once-over for stupid mistakes before checking all my sources (making sure everything that's used as a source in the paper is on the Works Cited & eliminating anything that I don't use). But then, this paper rests for a while. Three of my friends have offered to give the paper a look, so I'll send it off to them this afternoon. But, for at least a week, that's it.

As is, I'm pretty sure that a lot of this is fairly solid. I think it might just be notable and say things no one else has said. I do know the paper needs tightening, and I'm also pretty sure the conclusion will need a polish-bordering on rewrite. For now, though, I am going to take great pleasure in not thinking about this article for a little while.

Except, however, to ask one simple question: who da man? I suspect it might be me.

deconstruction and the academic

There are mixed joys inherent in being a renter rather than an owner. Chief among these is maintenance. Our house seems to need this more often than I would like (noted by things such as the great shower collapse of 2007), but on the plus side, at least I don't have to pay for it. However, this also means that I experience, over our humble abode, a complete lack of control. This, of course, has massive effects on my writing. Why wouldn't it?

The plan was, after 2 weeks off due to a faux reunion, an aborted evening of bocce ball (which, of course, morphed into a night at the sports bar), a day drinking beer out of plastic buckets while listening to polka and contemplating leiderhosen, and an afternoon traversing the grocery store mecca that is Ann Arbor, to get back to work on what I have started thinking of as The Paper Which Would Not Die, 2009 edition. I always end up writing papers that require I learn whole fields of knowledge of which I am unversed before dismissing them wholesale. This year's edition of this paper involves studying political economy--more specifically, trashing Marx, Frankfurt school Marxism, and British Culture Studies. It is not a task for the faint of heart. Moreover, it does require concentration.

So, Monday was spend doing errands (recycling, getting stamps, house cleaning, and shoveling wild yak carcasses out of the study). Yesterday, I was to refresh my theoretical chops by plowing through several Gramsci-related articles. Today was to be The Day of Drafting...or more accurately, the day of trying to remember what I was thinking when I abandoned drafting to go down to Florida.

So how well is this working so far? Well, to truly understand, you must understand the principle of deconstruction.

No, I don't mean Derrida-inspired deconstruction but that of the home repair genre. Since the spousal unit and I moved in, there has been problems with our brick facade on the front of our house...mainly, it has been cracking and falling down. I suspect they did not use weather-proof bricks. The landlords, in their infinite wisdom, decided this week was the time to repair our houses...but in stages. Friday, the contractors pulled out a few cinder blocks holding up our front porch but did not replace them. Monday, they finally replaced said blocks, but they also removed a row of bricks, thus exposing the structure to one house wall when there was a (thankfully unfulfilled) 75% chance of rain. These bricks only got replaced yesterday....when the contractors removed all the bricks off our neighbor's facade.

Come to think of it, this is actually exactly like Derrida deconstruction.

Anyway, just when I thought the worst was behind me, just when I thought I could get back to writing, just as I'm walking to the study with my coffee (which is, after all, a vital part of the writing process...right up there with Tetris and Solitare), the construction crews break out a jack hammer.

At this point, I don't want to know what they're up to. Did the repairs really need to be done this week? While I should feel thankful that our landlords finally want to start improving this place (and how about a good extraction fan for our bathroom?), I also gotta think that the house has stood like this for five years. Why now?

My latest theory is that the contractors are secretly agents from some communist country (is Albania still communist? Mongolia?) sent to undermine the American education system by creating distractions which stifle the academic advancement of some poor non-tenure faculty stuck in Bowling Green who desperately just wants to write scholarship that does nothing for his job but can't concentrate because of the damn jackhammering.

Hmmm. Now I'm feeling rampant paranoia. Luckily, that also is a vital ingredient in the writing process...so I'm hoping that these balance out in the end.

hot fun in the summer

This morning, my alarm went off..and a large part of me regretted it. My first act, rather than jumping out of bed and rushing through a morning routine (speed shower, speed breakfast, speed drive across the countryside to traverse devastated roads to get to the university) was to shake the dream fragments from my head (some like B horror scenes, some like a sitcom version of my life, some of people I don't recognize, but strangely enough, no pizza making dreams) and wonder why I set the alarm in the first place. After a minute, it came to me...it was all about motivation.

During the course of the normal school year, I am up to my neck in schedules. I have my teaching schedule, schedules in each of my classes (each of which balances out my students' assignments into some master schedule), my office hours schedule, my lesson planning schedule, and others (including to, but not limited to my vague relaxation schedule). These all balance out with my lovely spousal unit's schedules. Some of these are mandated, some of these are by design, and some of these are by default. Regardless, they all rule my life in many ways, throughout the course of the semester. I don't have to question what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, because it's all mapped out.

However, the summer is quite different. I don't have a set natural schedule. I don't have any specific, gun-to-the-head obligations. I don't have anything I have to do. Everething is entirely up to my personal discretion.

At least, that's what the narrative of "teacher over the summer" says. The reality is quite different. I'm non-tenured, and I very much want to become tenured. Because I'm non-tenured, I really don't have to do service or scholarship. It's not part of my job. However, since I want to become tenured, I have to do a lot of scholarship to make it visibly apparent that I'm still an active thinker. My job allows me absolutely no time to do scholarship. So guess what I do over the summer? So I gotta do a lot of scholarship, because I want a better job, and doing the work of an assistant professor on top of doing the work of a lecturer is not optional.

Moreover, it's a requirement of my ego that I stay active. While I absolutely love teaching, I ultimately did get into this business to do scholarship, to think. If I don't do it, I feel more like I'm a warehouse worker than anything else.

And a lot of this ego-business is preemptive. On top of the pure random luck involved, my success on the job market next year will depend on how much work I get done this summer. So, while I could still possibly sit around unshowered and play video games in between watching television every single day, it would mean that much heartache and depression when the rejection letters start rolling in. Of course, getting a lot of writing done is no guarantee that I'll get a job (see the last two years), but it does make me feel that much better...okay, less whiny.

However, while my need to do unpaid work is not really optional, I still have to deal with the workload while knowing that I have no schedule. I am master of my own summer domain, true, but this only really means that I can't count on outside schedules to provide guidance. Instead, I have to set my own plans, keeping that fear and need for ego as my motivation.

So, what's on tap? How do I proceed? I have my plan lined out, step by step.

1. I have to remember how to be an academic scholar. This basically means I have to read a whole lot of scholarship and theory so I can have quotes and experts at my disposal.
   
2. I have to remember what my book is about. This means revisiting my dissertation and the pile of revision notes scattered across the study and computer...after, of course, trying to find everything and get it into a system of piles which makes sense.
   
3. I have to remember what I was thinking in the big theory chapter. That means reading all the chapter-specific notes, theory, texts. It means re-reading the 50% of the chapter I've finished, hoping to get back into whatever groove I was in when I had to abandon this. It means reading my old fragment note, maybe writing some new ones.
   
4. I have to finish said chapter, which takes all my theory and half of my literature review from the dissertation and pushes them through the grinder with my analysis of the novel Neuromancer. It takes on postmodernism, as well as a whole bunch of Haraway derivatives. It's also where the main point of the book comes out and moves into "this is exactly what I'm adding to the cultural conversation." In other words, it's the most important part of the whole project.
   
5. I have to see if there's updated stuff I have to read for any of my other chapters...and since I've been working on this project for eons, you know there will be books galore.
   
6. I have to revise everything else, getting it to read as much like a popular book while not diminishing the intricacies of the thoughts swelling around my head for the last several years.
   
7. I then have to proof everything and send it off to the editor who was interested...not to mention hope that said editor is still interested.
   
8. Time permitting, I have a 90% researched paper on CSI: that I would love to bust out.
   

Piece of cake, no? This is why I have to set the alarm, avoid hitting the snooze, and actually do something...which is cool, because I do, after all, enjoy the work.

I have to admit, however, that I still have to fight the temptation to just goof off...which is the true peril of the summer academic.

the break that is--the mental edition

For me (and, I suppose, many academics), vacations are a double-edged sword. It might be sold to us as a time of rest and celebration, but really, it's the time when we learn whether we should be laughing or crying.

On the plus side, the break is a chance to get away from the often crippling teaching load and do some of the scholarly work which played such a huge role in drawing us into the life to begin with. I, for instance, entered this academic vida loca because I loved reading. Furthermore, I love writing about what I have read.

I gotta be more specific here. While the actual drafting process usually makes me want to drive spikes through my eyeballs, jump in a swimming pool of loose gravel, and then pour lime juice and salt over the resulting wounds (with some tequila thrown in for good measure--it adds to the pain and also makes a tasty margarita), I love having written, I love planning out my papers, I love finishing a nice draft, I love establishing an analytical order for everything. In the final account, I love the writing process and am truly a better person for it.

This break, I had (as I always tend to have) grand plans. I was going to finish the Great Book Revision, the one that's been driving me into the light pole for ages. I was going to knock out the theory revamp/refiguring chapter...it is, after all, the most brutal part of the project. It is where all the "aha"s take place, and it largely spells out everything else I've been hinting at throughout the other chapters. After this chapter is done, I really can fly through the rest. There is plenty of language polish afterwards, but that's an easy task for me. There's an introduction to write, but I've been writing that one in my head for years. There's a conclusion, but that's gonna be a mash-up of several existing pieces. In all, this all hinges on the theory chapter.

It figures, of course, that I haven't actually been able to write word one on the thing all break. I think I have the organization figured out, but I won't really know until I can do some sustained blasts o' writing. And I haven't been able to do said blasts because of...well, family commitments, shopping, celebrations, day trips, and all that...the standard mundane holiday tasks which seem to just suck up every spare moment.

Now that it's after New Years, I thought at first that this would be a prime writing time for me. However, I also haven't done nearly enough of my class prep for Spring, and my utterly fabulous teaching load for the upcoming semester is me basically starting from scratch for four different preps. So, instead of my pre-semester binge writing next week, I will instead be slamming together assignment sheets and setting up my Blackboard online course shell...which is both as fun and as vital as it sounds. It's definitely a sarcastic "weee" moment, but it's one which I cannot not do.

On top of that, most other thinking things are stuck in what seems a perpetual holding pattern. There's the CSI: paper which is, at least in the noggin, completely done but waiting for me to finish the damn book. There is now the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles paper festering in the Buffy-esque "I've got a theory!" mode of existence. There is the House, M.D. paper which is still caught in journal reader limbo (6+ months and counting), and there is the New Orleans paper, which is also in reader limbo but has been accepted for a conference....the day before the discounted "early bird registration" ran out. Sigh.

So, in terms of my writing, where does this winter break put me? There's a scene in that magnum opus Big Trouble in Little China where the good guys are captured and blindfolded. Jack Burton tries to covertly ask his friend Wang Chi where they are, but one of the evil Furies (Rain, I believe) instead responds with a forceful and dismissive "you are nowhere." Yep, that's me.

Then there's that other side of the winter break sword. For those of us on the job market, the winter break is the breaking point of the first big wave of jobs. The deadlines have since passed, and most institutions are notifying applicants and setting up interviews. This is particularly true if one applies for jobs in the English field (as do I), because much of this interviewing takes place at the MLA, the big mac-daddy of all English conferences.

Well, me and the MLA, we have this arrangement. Every year, a few months before the conference, I look to see where it is and start contemplating if I should attend, in the lucky event that someone wishes to interview me. I fret about this for a while, send out some more applications, and fret again. When December rolls around, I pay special attention to my cell phone and e-mail, in case anyone tries to contact me to schedule a last minute interview. When the conference date itself arrives, I get mean, bitter, and lash out at whomever is nearby. After the conference has ended, I chant some empty mantra about how the job search is not over, that there is still a chance I will find other jobs, get an interview later, then I both hope I haven't alienated any friends and become very thankful that the spousal unit is both forgiving and loving. It's not a great arrangement, but it is, by this point, tradition.

This year, in the final reckoning, I did not make it out to San Francisco for the MLA. There was, apparently, not a whole lot of call for Mike at the conference. Neither did anyone try to make alternate arrangements. This lack of popularity, while certainly not surprising, is at least familiar.

Strangely enough, though, I did not fly into my normal bout of depression. Instead, I've been in a fairly decent mood all break. This I do not understand...and at any rate, my lack of depression is starting to depress me. I'm really hoping I am not becoming resigned to my fate.

At any rate, I know that my success at the job market is by now inextricably tied to my success getting stuff published, and up until this break, I've been doing good on the production front. Over the summer, I did everything I could do. I had a Dec. 2007 publication (it was in their cue for years) that led to an anthology article...that one comes out sometime in 2009. I pumped out 2 book reviews, already published. I sent out two essays that are, in my eyes, the best things I've ever wrote, even though they are still awaiting judgment elsewhere.

But this break has been mostly writing-free, which puzzles me. And it's not like I've been killing too much time in my "I need to have fun" activities. Hell, my guitars are all about in their 6th month of staring at me in neglect. Yes, I have a Wii, but I really have only been using that when all I would've been doing is watching football pregame shows or Food Network programs.

I'm really hoping this is not the resignation phase. I still want this. I can still do the work. I still have ideas that need to be heard, that no one else is saying. I still need the critical engagement. I still have been singing Two Cow Garage's line "I'm not gonna burn out 'cause things didn't turn out like I planned." Honestly, I'm still into the whole scholarship bit.

I just need to produce, and it needs to start happening post haste. Is frustration better or worse than paranoid drive? Than desperation? Than gloom and doom? What negative emotion will yield the most positive results, at least in terms of production?

These are the questions which will drive my new year.

events are conspiring against me

At the beginning of the week, I was looking forward to a long Wed.-Thurs.-Fri.-Sat.-Sun. stretch of writing. I planned to do a lot of work on the (now overdue again) book manuscript, get that damned theory chapter that's been bugging me out of the way, bust out pages like nobody's business. So what happened?


Wednesday, I had a doctor's appointment. When I gave myself runner's knee over the summer, the doctor gave me a knee brace. Said brace did stop the knee, but it also made me walk just differently enough to tweak my old heel spur in the other foot...and it just would not die down. Now, I have a nifty new night splint I get to wear. It's awkward. It takes 5 minutes to attach. I now have to limp/stumble if I have to go to the restroom at night. Plus, I have to get used to sleeping a completely different way. Wee.

Afterward, the spousal unit and I went to vote. That killed over an hour, but I really like the idea of early voting. I hope it causes more people to get out there and vote. The whole time I was at the office, though, I kept whispering to myself, "don't screw it up, America, don't screw it up." These two events, of course, led to me getting nothing done.

Thursday came, and I realize I had essay proposals to review. My students are picking a specific example of someone/thing that goes against normative gender roles and analyzing it. Needless to say, a large part of the assignment is figuring out what they can write about. So far, they want to write big important issue papers. One student wants to write about (paraphrase here) how guys see other guys. So my responses to them took all day, in between bouts of grading.

Friday, was that a day for writing? Of course not. While going to bed the night before, the spousal unit found some water patches in the hallway. This was kind of mysterious, as there were no leaks on the ceiling. They were still there the next morning, so I called maintenance. Our cool maintenance guy looked them over, realized they were next to a vent in our supply/utility closet, and checked out our water heater. Prognosis? It was "about to explode." So maintenance spent all day tearing out the old water heater and installing a new one. I of course couldn't actually write with all this going on, so I got my grading caught up, dealt with "why am I failing" student e-mails (as the result of the aforementioned grading), and ran to a produce stand to get some orchard-fresh apples.

That night, we had the Halloween party. I went as a Mad Scientist. Spousal Unit went as a witch, but a friend asked her "are you some Renaissance Fair person?" A good time was had (and I'll post photos of costumes and our carved pumpkin later). Of course, this meant a late night, so I slept in way too late on Saturday. Spousal unit was on the desktop from the time we woke up until 6, and I just can't do any serious writing on my laptop, as much as I love it.

No real work done so far today. Part of this comes from dealing with students, but there's also the case of I've been away from it for about a week now, and I need to re-immerse myself, saturation, the dunk tank method. Of course, it's almost lunch time...and I still have to write to my publisher-to-be and explain why I'm not done...and there's more student contact to come...and my computer's version of Doom is calling me...

Star Trek and deadlines

One of the best things about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, other than the very awesome Kirk scream, is its applicability to real life.


Bear with me here.

The Genesis Device (all such sci-fi devices are unique, destructive, and therefor must be capitalized) is about to go off. The Enterprise's warp core is not working. Someone's giving the countdown of doom. Kirk keeps asking for distance from the explosion and time until detonation. If they can't travel fast enough, they are all dead...and with the warp core down, they will certainly be obliterated in the explosion.

Kirk looks worried. But it is not him with whom I identify. Sulu is at the helm, and in a resigned voice, asks no one in particular: "We're not going to make it, are we?"

Star Trek is infamous for putting the ship in mortal peril. They always seem to escape. Sulu knows this. Yet his voice gives away a hint of awareness that their luck might have finally just run out.

It is now October 22. I am supposed to have the book done by the end of the month. And boy, is this thing fighting me. I am having to go do mortal combat with the damn thing every day. I've cut my football back to almost nothing. I've eliminated most of my television viewing...and for that matter, culture enjoyment of all sorts. But the book is working against me at every turn.

Nine days. I know how Sulu felt.


Of course, they did make it, so maybe I will. But they had Spock, who was willing to sacrifice himself in order to save the crew. The good of the many sometimes outweighs the good of the few.

Where's my Spock? Who will take my classes, the dilithium crystals of my life, and fix them so I can heroically escape death by missed deadline?

so, how's it going?

I have just finished stitching together a draft of the completely new chapter of my book. It has 100% of the structure/organization, 85% of the sources (and I know where to find the others), and 70% of the actual language. I should be able to get it more or less complete by the end of the week, if all goes well.

Then I just have to stitch it together with the rest, stitch in the conclusion and expand it, and reword the entire thing. And I have 17 days to do it. Piece of cake!

I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to anyone whom I might've insulted, ignored, or generally treated in a questionable manner during this process. I think I've been handling the stress and workload pretty well, but one thing I learned in the dissertation is that perspective and judgment are the first things to go.

Kind of like in a whiskey drunk.

blogging activity

Yes, I haven't been around much...been working...but I have not abandoned this. Later this week, I have to type up an entry I handwrote while at the Detroit airport. Then I get to tell you about my new car (pimpmobile). I still have to give the results of my MySpace and Facebook experiment. And there are, of course, more horror stories from work.

However, if you haven't noticed, there is a summary of my Twitter feed on the right. I started Twittering a while back...the short space fits my current workload. If you Twitter, please let me know so I can follow you.

Also, I have a blog chronicling thoughts, ideas, and rants-in-progress about my book and other scholarship. You might've heard me mention it before, but it was previously invite-only. I'm changing that. I'm also moving the academic blog to another site which allows backups (which, inexplicably, Blogger does not). So if you have any interest in seeing what I've been up to in terms of scholarship...or in telling me how I'm wrong...please check out Thought Emporium, my new home for scholarship.

Now, I'm going back to work so I can get this damn book done, move onto a tenure track job, buy a house, start homebrewing beer again, have kids who will take care of me when I get (more) old and decrepit, and spend more time admiring my awesome spousal unit.

anxiety and the book

A while back, I started on another blog, one designed to help me get back into the swing of writing my book...or, if you prefer, converting my dissertation into a book manuscript. I read a lot of theory, figuring I needed to reflex my brain muscles, become as intellectually nimble as when I was a grad student and being nimble was my only real job. The blog became home to my thinking, my rants, my tangents discovered while diving into theory. I put up somewhere around 25-30 pages of material, and much of it still will find a way into my scholarship somehow.

Then I had a semester of classes for which to prepare. (damn, it might be proper grammar, but that sentence looks funky) Then I had much welcome and enjoyed house guests. I've made a few stabs at getting back into research mode after they left, but there are a few things that have made me rethink my approach.

First, a colleague here at UT who is a creative writer started revising his MFA book..."redlining," he calls it. Then one of my old roommates just published his book (which is both highly entertaining and gorgeously designed), and I'm insanely jealous. These things brought me to some kind of epiphany.

I think what I've realized is that, by submitting myself to a theory overload, I've been trying to put myself through a "DIY" version of doctoral school...and I don't really think I actually need that at this point of my career. I need to remember that the book itself, as the early draft stands now, has more than enough theory in it and behind it. And while I will be revamping the theory section (moving it around, refocusing, all that), it is not going to be a "gearhead" tome.

There's not a lot on the eighties as a decade, and out of what is out there, none of it is really current. My book will not be one of many. It will be an invitation back into the subject, a good reminder of why this decade should be studied, and as such, it has to be approachable. I have to keep it if not informal in tone, then at least accessible. There will be plenty of time to write the heavy theory follow-up article version of the theory chapter...no real need to do it now.

When I was working on the dissertation itself, I had one particular moment of clarity (there were others, but this is the one that's relevant). I was sitting in the library, having just worked my way through a stack of material on Reaganomics and SDI, and I looked at the pile of sociology books on my table. Suddenly, I realized that what I was trying to do was not write my project but become an expert on everything in the world.

This was unnecessary. It was not really helpful. It contributed to and exacerbated a lack of focus (whether real or perceived). On top of all this, I wasn't sure if the need to know everything in the world was either a desire to be the ultimate authority (and thus a signifier of a heavy work ethic) or of a desire to avoid actually finishing the damn project (and thus a signifier of either laziness or fear of the post-grad world).

In my attempt at total theory immersion, I realize I was doing the exact same thing over again.

So I've made a conscious decision. I've decided that, on a general scale, I'm smart enough to do this as-is. I will still do research and reading, but I'm not going to teach myself anything from scratch.

Second, I've decided that I have to have faith in the bones of the project as it currently exists. I might've been trying to start from scratch, to do the dissertation as I'd do it if I were just now becoming ABD. I need to have faith that all I really need to do is refocus and revise what I've done. While much of the language may change, what I have right now is, I need to remember, a worthwhile project that deserves to see the light of day, and sooner is better than later.

I'm moving on to writing. Screw this misplaced desire for total mastery of all knowledge. I'm not that kind of guy, I'm not that kind of academic, I'm not a theoretical gearhead. Time to start acting and writing like the kind of academic I am.

(note to my readers: If you are a theoretical gearhead, please don't be offended by anything I say here. I understand your scholarship. I need to see a lot of your kind of stuff. Deep in my heart, I wish I was you. But I am not. If I have a potential niche as an academic/scholar, it's essentially my ability to apply neat, unusual, skewed perspectives on subjects that manages to provide some kind of neat insight. This is just about playing to my strengths.)

why I blog

Why do I do this blogging thing that I do? Am I crazy? Have I run out of procrastination ideas? Do I do it for the throngs of admiring fans, and the underwear with which they pelt me? Is it the fame, the glory, the street-level recognition?

Well, yes, all of the above. I love being able to keep in touch with distant friends, and the blog is one way I can do that. But there's something more.

I do this for myself.

When I was struggling as an adjunct, when I hadn't written anything in a year after my dissertation, I needed to remember that I enjoyed writing. I needed a stress-free way to write, with nothing really riding on the results other than my writing chops. I needed to vent, to blow off steam, to catalog my feelings of misery at the time.

My situation eventually improved immeasurably, and I'm convince this space had a lot to do with that. Writing the blog helped me get into the swing of writing in general. Now, I'm producing finished pages at a rate which rivals tenure-track faculty with cushy teaching loads. Take that, you 2/2 pinheads!

Later, I realized that I ran across an awful lot of cool/helpful/weird web sites. Yes, folks, it's a marvelous world out there online. I first got into the internet all the way back in 1996 (the technology actually existed back then). If it wasn't for the "what's cool" websites, I probably would've never figured out what the world wide wub was actually good for. So, in an effort to catalog all of the cool stuff I saw online and give others the chance to be introduced to the web in the same way as was I, I started interwub postcards (that is, after several aborted blogs at the same spot).

Now, I am starting heavy revision/writing work on my book project. I am having to deal with a lot of research. I need somewhere to ramble, to spell out my thoughts, to litter with stream of consciousness thoughts on my work, somewhere to put all the stuff which may either end up in the finished project or just get me thinking in the right direction. So, what did I do?

You guessed it...I started another blog!

It's a closed blog, meaning that not just everyone can come and look. This only makes sense, as this is going to eventually end up in book form. But you, my dear readers, are my friends, and if anyone really has an interest in seeing the process of dissertation-to-book; is interested in the eighties, popular culture, or complexity theory; or just can't get enough of themikedubose, e-mail me, and I can add you to the blog roll.

If anyone wants to see what I'm up to, that's cool by me. But ultimately, even if I hear only crickets chirping (as I do on interwub postcards), this will have served it's purpose.

Plus, the web address is pretty cool!

summer writing update

So far this year, I've produced 75 pages of finished scholarship, which alone makes this one of my best years in terms of production. That includes three articles (one already accepted) and two book reviews (one published, one forthcoming). When you consider that I teach what's essentially a 5/4 (really a 4/4. but I'm responsible for 16 credit hours in the fall), this pretty much rocks.

I should be ecstatic, but instead, I'm stuck in "nose to the grindstone" mode. Why? I still have a book manuscript that I need to get done (get this) by the end of summer if possible...that's in a little over five weeks.

And strangely enough, I think I can actually pull this off. Have I finally hit my stride as an academic? Will this help me finally get the crankin' tenure-track job? Or am I completely delusional?

Bets on the last one.

synchronicity

I'm revising an article about the tv show House, M.D., and my knee starts to hurt. Went to the doctor yesterday, and he told me it's a ligament or tendon (can't remember which) swelling under the kneecap. The net result is that just as I'm working on a paper about a character with a screwed-up leg, I start to limp. Lovely.

I'm just glad I'm not writing about zombies.

victory! sweet victory!

About an hour ago, I finally submitted my New Orleans essay to a journal. I've been working on this sucker for roughly 20 months. I am pleased.

Now, if only the journal is equally pleased. The only real thing that worries me is there is a chance they might ask me to shave a good 1,000 words from it. Eeek.

on freaking brothers everyway like m.j.

I try to write every day, in the mornings mostly. Yesterday, I was wrestling with every single word, hitting them with suplexes, piledrivers, stunners, but they just wouldn't stay down for the count. This morning? Everything's going good, and I blasted out almost three pages in two hours...a fantastic rate.

Strangely enough, though, when things are going good, I always think of the Ice Cube song "It was a good day." Why not? Note the lyrical genius:

Today was like one of those fly dreams

Didn't even see a berry flashing those high beams

No helicopter looking for a murder

Two in the morning got the Fatburger

And that's how I feel. Writing went good, and, much like Ice Cube, "Today I didn't even have to use my A.K."

Peace, out...going to get coffee.

Post 400, by the way...sorry it wasn't more notable.

a strange serenity in face of the storm clouds

I am so horrifically overworked right now, I should be in absolute panic. I have a month to finish an article for a contracted book. I have another article I'm co-writing with a friend. I have two articles that need revision and resubmitting. I have two more articles in various stages of the process...one of which I have to then convert into a book chapter. And then I have the big book revision project.

Not to mention, of course, the joys of teaching 4 classes...one online comp I and three business writing sections.

However, I'm strangely at peace. I am actively researching and writing...with only minimal tv immersion/screw off periods. I think I can actually make all my deadlines. I have faith.

Not two weeks ago, I was in depressive/"the world is going to end" mode...in other words, I was acting like my brother. However, I got in succession potential good news on both the book and the job hunt...nothing I can discuss right now, but it's a real lift to have some actual validation, some recognition that your efforts are in fact appreciated. You can bet that if there's any progress I can discuss, you'll here it here.

Damn, I'm actually only one step away from breaking into the whole "ant can't pull a rubber tree plant" routine.

work update for the week ending 1/25/08

In terms of fiction, I have finished a short story...it's an interesting dialog with a man and wife, where the wife is discussing the pros and cons of marrying a ninja. I'm gonna sit and let it percolate for a few days, but I think it's good. Also started the novel and one other short story.

Scholarship: I have been contacted by an editor of a contracted anthology, and he has convinced me to write a chapter for him on Captain America prose novels. I have the source material, and I've finished one book, almost done with another. I think it will be an interesting article. I do, however, worry about being typecast as the comic guy...I guess I have to work out another way of selling this.

Also, I have been invited to speak at a graduate student conference's roundtable of life after graduation. Long time readers of this blog know I have a lot to say on the matter.

There's no real motion on the rest of the scholarship, although I still hope to get a section of the NO paper done this weekend.

Teaching: Kind of a weird week for this. With the holiday on Monday and my cold, I didn't conduct a class this week. The main thing I spend my time on is sorting through the 1,285,377 students who want to either drop or add.

(Incidentally, this will hopefully become a regular feature. I'm not sure how interesting it is, but if I hold myself accountable, I should hopefully get more work done.)