Anything but reading: The current state of things

I never watched it, but I've been told that School House Rock had a segment called "Three is a Magic Number," or something like that. In fact, I think a bunch of rock musicians re-made the SHR songs, and some grunge rock group (whose name will come to me in a dream tonight, I'm sure) sang this particular song.

Anyways, this week marks the end of my third year here at Iowa. Nothing ever turns out the way I expect, which is fine, I suppose. Iowa has certainly been no different. Three years ago, I was graduating from OU with a wonderful advisor. We hadn't bought our house here in IA yet, and gas wasn't so expensive. Two years ago, I had just had my thyroid surgery and Dad had bought my ticket to Peru (come to think of it, I had just had a big online slugfest with a psycho doc student from Columbia with whom I was supposed to spend the whole summer- talk about disciplinary misunderstandings). One year ago, I was sooo ready to have the baby.

And one month ago, I hated school. I hated it deeply. But these landmarks from the past three years mark the twists and turns our lives have taken since then. When I was graduating from OU, I had already met some of my current colleagues and fallen deeply in love with the idea of such deep comradery. Today, those are some of the same people that drove me to dislike school so much; they embody everything wrong with academia.

Two years ago, I had a kick-ass dissertation topic pinned down. As a trade-off, I ended up studying with a professor different than whom I had originally come to Iowa. That has had it's ups and downs. More importantly, as my advisor said, that dissertation topic would have guaranteed me a job at a prestigious institution- whatever that means. And, unlike my peers, my plans to travel to Peru were sidetracked by a cancer the surgery was supposed to prevent. Instead, it discovered it. The surgery, and I believe this whole-heartedly, is how I was able to get pregnant. I just don't think were working right before. As a result, I can say the third year in Iowa has not only been the best here, but it's been the best ever.

That brings me to what a realization I had a few weeks ago. My wonderful advisor at OU gave me a lot of great advice, namely, that I was coming to Iowa for an education and to leave all the personal drama behind. Like a prophet, she told me I wouldn't meet my best friends here and that I would confront problems as a woman that a man would never have to consider.

That's what's happened. It wasn't long before the group of people I came in with fell out of love with one another. Universities are full of dysfunctional people, and we're truly no different. Mix dysfunction with low self-esteem and you have a group of people with poor social skills and overwhelming tendencies for passive-aggressiveness. To say our social arrangement in the department has shifted would be an understatement. While I have met some wonderful people, they have not turned out to be who I expected. That's my poor judgment more than anything. You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas, right?

I find two things in tension here at Iowa: a sense of connection, and morbid individuality- no, self-centeredness. What I mean is, my cohort, those I came in with, are held in relation to one another. This has never been announced, and I honestly think it's a figment of someone's overactive imagination. But, unbeknownst to 6 or 7 of the 9 of us, we are all held to the same invisible standard. We are compared to one another in some of the most cruel and petty ways, without regard to context. We have all been lined up on a literal track that we did not know existed. We are constantly surveilled and evaluated. We are now, more than we have ever been, docile bodies.

The nasty twist is, the standards against which we are judged are elusive, unfixed, and set regardless of individual circumstance. To be less enigmatic: my peers who set some ridiculous standard have gone through the past three years unimpeded by anything other than stupid romantic problems with people they met on the internet. They have turned in trash, which someone else then turned into gold. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to work alone (this applies to many people here) as we deal with say, losing whole summers to cancer. No one else came back four weeks after having a baby and a c-section and jumped in as if nothing had changed. My friend's wife had a baby over Thanksgiving break our first year here. You would never have known it had we not seen his wife or received the emails after she delivered a beautiful baby boy.

But, as I so often do, I misdirected my simmering discontent over such bullshit to the whole enterprise of academia. To be fair, this shit is pervasive- it hangs like a shroud over the third floor of the journalism building. It took on a universal appearance due to the departmental politics at OU. The result: I lost faith in what I was doing. I saw no worth in getting my PhD...and teaching white, upper-middle-class white kids with senses of entitlement DID NOT help.

One Friday, I hit bottom and a few days later I realized what was wrong. I had lost sight of my advisor's advice. I had conflated the personal drama with the task at hand, and that was never to be an academic, a scholar, a professor. My goal in getting my PhD was to be a writer who had an education, to make a difference from a knowledgeable point of view.

And then I met with committee members who are in other departments. When I told them how I was feeling about this whole endeavor, they gave me encouragement that my department does not offer. Tellingly, neither of them come from families of professors...but besides that, they both gave me pep talks, reminded me that my dissertation was my own, it was my work and that I could do something kick-ass with it. More importantly, they reminded me what my degree could do, or rather, what I could do with my degree. And, they reminded me not to lose hope.

Make no mistake- I still plan on fucking some shit up (no excuses for language because that's what I'm going to do). As some feminists have written, I have to find ways to work within and against the system. I have some preliminary ideas on how to do just that, and sadly, it may not take us closer to home like we wanted, although nothing's certain. The weather will be warmer, though, and that's a start.