using the world wide web to share news about my wonderful daughter, all the while brainstorming little acts of subversion

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

You see the link to the left...

So follow it. An excerpt:

It has gotten so that women's magazines are actually doing you a disservice when they try to profile of women outside the celebrity-sartorial complex, because their worldviews are simply no longer equipped to account for people with priorities other than the achievement of that ineffable quality Kimora Lee Simmons calls "fabulosity." Take their bestowal of "It Girl" status on such wildly inappropriate subjects as Lara Logan (see June Vogue, page 204), or their focus on only the most photogenic cancer survivors/assault victims/environmental activists. It almost makes us wish for the return of the supermodel. At least in the 80s and 90s, beauty was a job left to the beautiful people.


ROFL.

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Red high heels and a bad attitude to match

We got back from Chicago this evening. We finally made it there after three years of nearly no travel to the big nearby cities. Strapped finances and a grad student's "stipend" (not to mention, work load) will do that, you know.

I was looking forward to this trip, but it started badly; by "started," I mean, by the time we had overshot the hotel on Michigan Avenue about five times before realizing that Rush Street was, in fact, two-way and not one-way. That wasn't the poor start, though: I walked into the mad house lobby, dressed in shorts, tennis shoes, and a t-shirt, no make-up, snapping at my husband while carrying a cranky one year-old in my arms and realized, any of these hundreds of people milling about could be my future boss.

As soon as we got into our room, I changed into professional attire. I put on make-up. I went 26 floors down and checked in to the conference. I saw one of my former OU professors, an Iowa alum and now the director of Tennessee's j-school, and chatted with him for a moment. I got back on the elevator, where the head of search committee for a job I want to apply for jumped on for two floors before I could say anything, and then went back to my room and changed.

I executed a total of eight costume changes in barely 48 hours. I brought four pairs of high heels, although the very first pair gave me a murderous blister in fifteen minutes and nearly wiped out the rest from contention. But this mentality- this freakish paranoia about those that I'm around, and what they will think of me, and just exactly how I'm presenting myself- should tell you worlds about my experience in grad school, and particularly, at Iowa. There's a little voice on my shoulder- she has a name and a face and a distinctive voice and she has had disturbing control, literally and figuratively, over my life the past three years- who has filled my head with horror story after horror story of the missteps, either intentional or otherwise, of grad students and junior faculty.

About Friday morning, I realized what was happening: this was the point of which Foucault speaks when the prisoner, after being so minutely surveilled and disciplined, begins to self-police. The turrets and armed guards are no longer neccesary. I had fully internalized this fear and insecurity. I had become, as I have suspected for months, a docile body.

And so a melancholic mood set it. The closer it got to my poster session at 3:30, the less I wanted to go. I paced, I changed clothes, I drank cups of coffee, but at one point, I pretty much said to myself, "Screw it."

There is a Kinko's Fedex on the second floor of the hotel. I took my carefully printed-out power point slides, chose three bright colors- fuschia, yellow, and some shade of blue- and copied my presentation. It was distinctly like the Valentine's Day in eleventh grade, when I got to school and saw that many of my girlfriends had, like me, dressed up to counter the depression of singleness/being in a lackluster relationship. This was my way of dealing with my insecurity and the sense that I had prepared the equivalent of a middle-school science fair volcano in a world of cold fusion nuclear physicists. Rather than standing in front of my bland white pages, I decided to be irreverent. If not rigorous, my paper would be colorful.

I went upstairs and changed. I slapped another layer of bandaids onto my poor heels that have been pampered and blessedly unburdened by high heels for the past 20 months. And then, after putting on my sharpest outfit, I slipped on my patent leather, shiny red high heels- a surefire remedy for the blues.

I went downstairs, again. I pinned up my presentation. When the discussant came, she told me how terrific my paper was...and things began to turn around. I remembered what I love about what I do. I remember why I do it. And it wasn't because of what other people thought, or the comparison, it was about the theory and the potential for what I study. It was about the ideas that we talk about, like changing the world, speaking truth to power, and equality.

In spite of the politics of academia- and they cannot be underestimated- the intellectual engagement in which I participated the next few hours was invigorating. This is what I love. I'm still ambivalent, though, if I want to be an academic for the rest of my life. But, for that moment, I just didn't care. That fuschia paper and those high heels meant something- I was not going to be one of the hordes of quantoids wearing poorly-fitting clothes, highwaters and drab haircuts, working on soul-less statistics with glossy posters and no passion.

There are three jobs I want to apply for in the Dallas-Forth Worth area this year for next: one at Texas Christian, one at U of North Texas, and another for alternative certification to teach high school English and Journalism in the Dallas School District. Each entails something completely different from me and would let me use my training in very different ways. Who knows if I'll be offered any of them. The jury's still out, though, on which path is the most meaningful.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Ha! Take that McCain!

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Interesting flood stats

Check it out- particularly, how fast the waters rose. Note also the ELEVEN foot difference between this year's flood and the last comparable flood, not to mention the nearly 5,000 residential parcels affected. And: only half of people in the 100-year flood plain had flood insurance. To me, that says there's something wrong with the national flood insurance mandates (or lack thereof).

http://www.corridorrecovery.org/stats.asp

Monday, August 4, 2008

Obligatory new Katie pictures, and my pickling project






At twelve months old, she can really work a purse.

Mental wanderings away from comps reading

As I sat back down at my computer to start reading and taking notes again, here was my train of thought: started listening to Ray LaMontagne again today, and one song in particular is, well, amazing (I'm censoring myself here). It reminded me, for some reason, of the PM Dawn song from the Boomerang soundtrack, and so I looked it up on iTunes. And that sent me to Boyz II Men and Down on Bended Knee (maybe someone is seeing the link between all these songs...). And soon, I was rifling through an iMix of 90s R&B and was straight back in high school.

Usually, I hate to think back to high school. It was traumatic, as any adolescence is and should be. But this play list just made me grin. I'm still smiling. Somehow, this list of R&B, which I do not listen to now, brought back all the good memories- if I had $87, I would have bought the iMix. Seriously- it was a little taste of late 1990s Del City High School. A sampling of the playlist:
-I'm Ready, Tevin Campbell
-Anniversary, Tony! Toni! Tone!
-Red Light Special, TLC (not a fan of this song in particular, but...)
-all sorts of Jodeci, Silk, Shai, Soul for Real (come on!), A Tribe Called Quest, Naughty By Nature (hello, 9th grade New Year's Eve Party), Blackstreet, Hi-Five...TLC's "Waterfalls" (that was Mrs. Brown's 10th grade English class where we analyzed song lyrics).

I almost bought Boyz II Men's second album- so many memories there. (Sigh). Maybe I've finally overcome my extreme aversion to high school.

On that note, they might be sending me back to high school in three weeks. Serious anxiety setting in about my exams. I'm to the "strategery" phase, trying to relate everything to my dissertation project. But I'll end on an anecdote about my very first grad school anxiety dream:

It was after, not before, I turned in my final paper to Dr. Gade's Mass Comm Theory class, which was my first completed grad school term paper (I will add this quickly: OU's J-school could learn a lesson from the Comm department there and let their grad students write complete papers rather than proposals every semester- I was completely unprepared for my classes out of the department that encourage submission to conferences).Dr. Gade, as Emily (aka "Gluten Free Gardner) will attest, gives PhDs a bad name. If there's someone with an artificially inflated ego from that piece of paper, it's him. Even when I'm a PhD, I will still call him Dr. Gade and not Peter. But anyways, I dreamt- again, after turning it in- that my professors sent me back to first grade after reading my paper. And, I was too tall to sit in the tables at the elementary school.

Back to reading now...

Sounding the all clear

Ironically, there's a tornado warning in a county nearby- but I heard back from the doctor this afternoon. It never fails that I can't get to the phone when he calls. I even had the phone next to me on the bed while I tried to snooze. The phone rang, and it sounded far away. I realized I had grabbed Eric's by accident and mine was in the living room.

So, long story short, it looks like my node was just being a node and fighting some infection. I get the impression that if had been "bad," the radiologists would have picked up on it last Monday as they stuck that little needle in my neck something like five times. I could watch it on the ultrasound screen as they tried to pierce the node and it kept compressing. I said something about that to the staff physician, and he said, "That's what happens when you biopsy a benign node." The whole time, this doctor was wondering why we were doing the procedure and we were making cracks about the bad weather coming with me to Iowa from Oklahoma.

And so, a big Whew...I would celebrate, or crack open that bottle of sparkling wine we didn't get to on our anniversary, but I'm gone to the mattresses mentally as the final days slip away before my exams. When this is all over in five or six weeks, then I'll tie one on.

A sincere, deep, heartfelt "thank you" for everyone's concern and prayers. I don't forget those sorts of things.