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.