Spring Break: 2009 Edition

Ah, spring break. The time of warm beaches, scantily-clad coeds, relaxation, and fun.

Only not. 

I'm pretty sure spring break was invented for two reasons.
-- To give grad students time to catch up on grading/reading/research/eating/etc.
-- To be a form of punishment for grad students, to break their spirits even further so they become willing slaves of the university.

Assuming that I'm NOT actually getting sick on my first day of spring break (and I feel like I should be repeating a mantra here), I plan to fully accept my punishment and make the best of it. In fact, my to-do list is comprised mostly of things I've been wanting to make time for all semester. My portfolio website has been down for months and needs a full redesign, there's an artist-in-residency application deadline that I'd really like to make, I have several art projects on the back burner, and I've been dying to get back into electronic music improvisation and rebuild my performance interface. Of course, at the same time, I've got a lot of grading to do, reading for classes, and house/apartment hunting to do. Hooray. The good with the bad, I suppose. I was really hoping to get away for a few days, head down to the family cabin and just...be gone for a while. Our recently revealed financial issues are making that impossible, unfortunately, but hopefully I'll get so much accomplished I won't even mind. 

On top of all of this, Mr. Dead and I are working hard to undo the nasty things stress has done to our bodies and brains since we moved here. We're getting back to the way we were eating when we first moved here (which was good, actually), and we've started getting regular physical activity again. We're even getting back into yoga again, in hopes that it'll help with the whole relaxation/de-stress thing. I'm using spring break to really solidify the new/old routine and willpower, so hopefully it won't crash and burn as soon as school starts back up. 

So, high hopes, right? 

I am not getting sick. I am not getting sick. I am not getting sick. 

Really. I mean it.

Grad Students Should Be Poor Anyway, Right?

I was having a good day, too.

The terrible Economy has finally taken out its deeply repressed mommy problems on my little family. Sure, we’d gotten smacked around a little in the past; it took my husband six months to find a job that didn’t involve espresso after I moved us to this forsaken little hole. Eventually, it seemed that Economy got bored with us and finally allowed Mr. Dead to find a job that he really loved. He came home smelling like printer ink and curry instead of old milk and mocha, and all was well. Unfortunately, the position was always a bit tenuous. He was the third employee out of three at a very tiny, privately owned business. With Economy looming over the owner and making him all twitchy, Mr. Dead was counting the days until he’d have to sell his soul to the caffeinated masses…again.

I think Economy saw how happy and comfortable we were, overheard the conversations about moving to a better apartment and buying more audio equipment, and decided that he had to intervene. Two days ago, Mr. Dead was informed that the little business he works for just isn’t pulling in enough money to cover his wages and still pay the electric bill for the shop. Economy sat back and cackled while the poor owner, who loves Mr. Dead to death and feels terrible about all this, apologized profusely and promised future employment should things change for the better.

Economy, I’d like to kick you in the crotch right now. It’s hard enough to make a living as a grad student without you getting our spouses laid off. What are you going to do next, take away my fellowship? My teaching assignment? You, sir, are a class A dickface.

This is yet another reason that I regret coming to this university. We’re in a city that was named the #1 place to live in America in the recent past. That means that the city is completely packed with very experienced workers and their families who moved here for the wonderful community, so there are no jobs and no housing. It’s impossible for a fresh-out-of-college like Mr. Dead to compete in this kind of job market. Yeah, jobs are tight everywhere right now, but this town is particularly bad, and it’s going to kill Mr. Dead if he has to go back to working retail. He’s an artist, and it just destroys his creative spirit to be in that kind of environment.

I really wish my university would be a little more open with their jobs. There are grad student-only jobs that they have to beg and plead with people to fill, and so many of them are things Mr. Dead would love to do. There should really be some sort of spousal hire system that applies to grad students too, not just professors.

Back later. I have to go tape Mr. Dead’s resume to the forehead of every HR person on this campus.

/spit Economy

Interlude: Why I Teach

I just had the best conversation ever with a former student. This girl is an international student form China who was in my Music 101 class last semester. We had several opportunities for students to share their musical talents over the course of the semester and she jumped on every chance, eager to share Chinese traditional music with the class. She played the hulusi, a type of free reed instrument with a beautifully smooth tone. She was a very enthusiastic student, and did very well in the class.

I ran into her today on my way out of one of the many campus coffee shops. She stopped me and we exchanged a few pleasantries, but she seemed like she was bursting to tell me something. She finally told me that she and some of her friends had gotten together and formed a Chinese music ensemble, and had already performed three times! She said she really missed music class, and was going to try taking instrument lessons next semester. She said she loved music so much and really wanted a way to keep up with it outside of class. I gave her profuse congratulations on taking the initiative to form the ensemble and getting performances together so quickly, told her who she could talk to about music lessons, and told her that I'd love to come to a performance sometime. I'm thinking about composing a piece for their ensemble so they could play on one of the big university concerts. That would be awesome.

I walked away from that conversation grinning like a fool and feeling great about life. Moments like that are why I love teaching.

"Hokay, so, heres sum dataz!"

So often the wisdom of the world is expressed through targeted snarkiness.


((Click to enlarge - will take you to the Socks and Barney site))

The application to academia is obvious, I hope. This comic summarizes one of the biggest problems I have with academic writing. The way I see it, the point of research is to find out new information or make interesting observations about a topic, then share what you've learned with as many people as possible. Using restrictive language (big words, field-specific words, too many words) seems contrary to the whole idea. Why do academics need things explained to them in such painfully complicated terms? Perhaps they feel that their intelligence is being insulted when they read something that non-specialists can understand. I'm sure the writer feels much smarter after writing a completely incomprehensible 200 page masterpiece of excessive citation, as well.

I try to avoid this in my own writing whenever possible. Being early in my academic career, there are certain hoops I have to jump through to pass courses with decent grades. My personal writing, though, the academic writing that I do for my own private research, is very different from the forced BS that assignments are made of. Whenever someone in the field reads it, though, they immediately start criticizing. Their critiques are generally that I am not using the "accepted language of the field". I feel like thanking them at that point, because that's my goal - to explain things in terminology that everyone can comprehend. Though I keep getting slammed for it, I'm planning to stick with it. Part of being young and stupid is being overly-idealistic and thinking you can make a difference in things larger than yourself. At the very least, I figure people will eventually get bored with worrying about my writing style and either accept it or blacklist me from all future conferences. At this point, I'm not entirely sure which I'd prefer.

Honestly, until someone catches me opening my essays with "hokay, so, heres sum dataz," I don't particularly care.

Feeding the Scholar-Eating Lion

I heard a great story the other day that really made me laugh at the academic world. The story comes from India, and is a lesson for those who "live inside their head" too much. 

To summarize the beginning, there were four scholars who had been friends since childhood. Three were extraordinarily well educated in the all the arts and sciences, while the fourth had only common sense. The other three were reluctant to let the fourth travel with them, as they did not wish to share the earnings their great knowledge would bring with one so uneducated. They decide to allow him to stay, and they begin their travels. Along the road, they come across the bones of an animal. Here's where the real story starts:

The first of the educated men said, "Here is a chance to show our ignorant friend how much we know.  Here lie the bones of some dead creature.  Let us see if we can bring it back to life by using all that we have learned."  Then he added, "I know how to put a skeleton back together!" The second Brahman, not wanting to be outdone, said, "I can give it skin and cover it with flesh and give it blood."  As he did this, the third Brahman stated that he could breath life back into the body.

As he said this, the fourth Brahman spoke up.  "My friends," he said, "I concede that you have learned much more from books and schools than I have, but my common sense tells me that we should not bring a lion back to life.  I do not believe we are wise to do this.  If he comes back to life, he will want to eat us."

The first three Brahmans were angry with him.  "We let you travel with us even though you are not very knowledgeable like we are.  You know so very little, and yet you presume to kow more than we do?

"I only know what my common sense tells me," the fourth Brahman stated.  "However, if you intend to persist in bringing the dead lion back to life, please hold your efforts until I have climbed this tree."

After the fourth Brahman climbed the tree, the first three Brahmans completed their task of bringing the lion back to life.  As the breath of life filled his lungs, the lion let out with a great roar and ate up all three scholars who were on the ground. With a full stomache, the lion was not willing or able to climb the tree and eat the fourth Brahman.  So the man with no formal education had the sense to climb down the tree and go back to his former home."

Herein lie two great lessons for the academically-inclined: 

1) Knowledge and common sense should be taken in equal parts.

2) Your snobby academic pride will get you eaten by a lion.

There are a few people around here I would love to put in this sort of situation. Granted, the art of lion-building seem to have fallen by the wayside, but I'm sure this story could be suitably taken as a metaphor for the death of one's academic career. Hell, students often seem like lions around here, and I know a few people who just get eaten alive by them because they're too wrapped up in themselves. It seems like the longer one sits in a Ph.D program, the further their social skills deteriorate as well. Or perhaps it isn't their social skills in general, only those that apply to people within their own field. Either way, I beg all my fellow graduate students: as your head fills with knowledge, please be careful what you delete in making room for the new things. Don't let it be common sense and decency! 

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Thanks to mikelockett.com for the text of the story "The Lion Makers".

Important Dietary Info for Students

Breaking news for graduate students! Important information concerning a staple of the student diet has recently been uncovered. 

This just in: Roast Chicken flavored Ramen is way better than the regular Chicken flavor.

More at 11.