May Day

People persist in telling me that they are moving to an isolated space so their child can have the freedom of the countryside. Others are homeschooling to liberate their child from institutions.

I am not at all convinced that isolation in a nuclear family is the best of ideas. I know for a fact that to sacrifice a life you love so that you can have a child and put it in a garden, and then to take that sacrifice out on the child, is a very poor idea.

Every time I see someone about to be sequestered off like that I turn my head in tears. I would like to at least hug them good by and say how sorry I am. For May Day I would like children to be brought back into view. This is not generalized, of course -- I know of whom I am thinking.

*

1. Being told how expensive it was to have children and how my parents had given up their lives to have them and weren't happy -- and weren't always happy with who we were. I felt so responsible and so helpless, where could I go? How could I pay them back? I still carry this and its embellishments.

2. All the violence, physical and emotional, in and around my first assistant professor job -- and my parents' violent reaction about it -- and mostly the way I internalized it.

3. Reeducation was supposed to be about #1 but it was its own entity, as we know -- Reeducation.

I have to deal with items 1 and 2 now, especially item 1. Reeducation made this more difficult. Item 2 I have somehow dealt with, it seems -- I no longer feel the pain or feel responsible for it.

But I feel the pain of item 1 like a knife and it drives a great deal of what I do -- especially since it was reinflicted during item 2, and then widened and deepened significantly during item 3. I would like to restructure myself out of it entirely. I can do this, I believe, if I continue to channel the person I was before item 3, and then before item 2.

Axé.

The R Post

R stands for resentment, rage, and regret -- sentiments which, as we know, this blog exists to externalize and vaporize. It stands of course as well for Reeducation, whose basic principles were, as we know, that neither oneself nor one's perceptions were valid, and that anything one might have achieved heretofore was false. Self-respect was interdicted by this. After all this time I still notice myself doing things I did not do before Reeducation, and not doing things I did, and the change is not an improvement. I still have to remind myself that self-respect is not an unreasonable place to start the day.

I am vaporizing that R and some other Rs. Resentment is one. I resent the idea that I should have been able to overcome. Guilt over having been Reeducated. Guilt about some other things that happened. Shame that those things happened to me. Secretly I still think I should have been able to prevent them all. That last is the idea I should truly vaporize.

Rage. I would like to vaporize rage. Rage at: projection, manipulation, condescension, invasiveness, lecturing. Rage at guilt mongering, rage at sitting through dinners filled with drunken ramblings.

Regret. I regret Reeducation, I really do. It was far and away the most destructive thing I have ever experienced, and I am the one who brought it on and who did not stop it when I could have. Thinking about it even now the destructiveness takes my breath away entirely. I regret the years lost because of it and I resent the loss. And regret, it is said, is a burden one should learn to put down. But it seems to me that in the time and with the energy it would take to come up with a justification for having "no regrets" and a yoga for actually feeling it, I could write a whole book or hike the entire Pacific Crest Trail. It seems so much simpler to say yes, I regret that.

But self respect which Reeducation took is I think the antidote to these Rs, or at least to the first two.

Axé.

On Addicts

Back home they said the reason I had to deal with their addict behavior was that they were supporting me. It was my job. Dealing with them was how I was supporting myself.

When I started supporting myself by going to school, dealing with addict behavior was no longer required. It was in fact contraindicated since it would not be good for my performance at the job that was now supporting me.

It has been a long time but I still have as a primary reflex the idea that I must deal with addict behavior because it is a requirement for survival. I will still do it for a few hours, until I realize what is going on and disappear.

If the addict reappears and says they want me to deal with them, my first reflex is still to say to them well, my day rate (for eight hours) is now at $500 plus expenses. You can reimburse me for expenses later, but I take the day rate in advance.

They tend to be shocked at this but honestly, it was taught me when I was young. Dealing with addicts is a job and you should get paid.

Axé.

Post Historiann. Does my reaction to instructions on how to be a professor have to do with my experience only, or can it be theorized more broadly?

What always bothered me about the instructions on how to be an assistant professor I received from early childhood on was that they were all about life and death. Be really really careful and you could avoid being killed by the University.

Since then I have listened to many more instructions. I get the impression that via instructions people hope to project the illusion that there is a way, by being perfect enough or a good enough strategist, that they can control many things that are in fact out of their reach.

*

I react especially poorly to the standard "publish, don't worry about teaching or service" because I went into the whole thing because research was first. People always assumed that because I am a woman and so on, I had become a professor so as to do teaching and service at the college level and that I would not have understood that research was important.

They did not know that not only was research important, but that I had begun receiving instructions on how to be an assistant professor as soon as I was weaned. They were also never able to grasp the fact that I came from an urban area with a lot of community colleges and other teaching projects, such that, had I been a "teaching person," I had ample opportunity. Since they did not know these things, and since it would have been rude to talk back, they lectured on and I allowed it.

*

Having been terrorized about "publishing or perishing" since infancy, I finally figured out somewhere in late elementary school that it wasn't that not making tenure meant execution - it just meant losing a job.

Initially I thought assistant professors feared starvation as a result of that because they didn't know where else they might work. Then I realized that they had married promising to pursue a genteel profession. Going into industry would be disastrous because it would break that contract.

*

So I understand these things but I have it in the back of my mind still that I write to stave off execution or starvation. It seems irrational to me and so in the back of my mind I think - if those are the issues why do I not write formula fiction or go into industry?

I am nervous when I write because I know that it is far from the SHORTEST or SAFEST route to a paycheck. At the back of my mind I am thinking, shouldn't I really be doing something that will ensure my livelihood more reliably? (Why did I turn down that consulting job to do this given that the front door is rotting and I have no savings left against the next hurricane?)

Axé.

My Visceral Reactions

They are against being suffocated in the way I was as a child, or against the words and phrases that were used to suffocate me even if they are not now being used to that end.

Every day that I write something nonacademic instead of something academic it is a victory against my father who threatened I would die if I did not write something academic every day.

Every day that I do not write something academic that my father cannot understand or would not approve of is a day of further subjection to him, who threatened that I would die if I followed my actual interests and published my actual findings.

I chose stasis over the fear that words that contradicted his findings would kill my father, making me a murderer, or hurt my mother, making me a torturer.

This habit is not useful and it must be recognized for what it is.

Axé.

Muy Interesante

I am writing the dissertation I wanted to write and it is fascinating to see how easy it is. I have a great deal of material and I have been thinking about it in increasingly organized and subtle ways for years.

It is actually fun to be a professor if you can do your own work and choose your own materials and methodologies. I have almost never done this since I have always been told it was both unauthorized and very dangerous — probably fatal, in fact.

That was why work got harder and harder and I lost mental acuity. My dissertation is brilliant, though, and it is very easy to write. I like calling it my dissertation rather than my book, too — it is funnier and more fun.

It must be International Women's Day, for this to be happening.

Axé.

On the United States

This article and its comments thread are, I think, worth considering.

Axé.

Second Line

It is Carnival time, and you are listening to a famous Carnival tune! This is not my family's party, and it isn't a second line on the streets, but isn't it a great party, and aren't they great dancers?

I do not know really what to do with this blog except keep it as an archive. It is supposed to be the blog of the dark side of Professor Zero but much of my dark side seems to have withered away. Not all. But sometimes it truly seems as though the future stretched out far in front of me again, or as though I had fallen in love.

It was when I got involved with my X that the future seemed to shut down. Things seemed bright in the weeks before I got involved with him, and I was incautious. It was largely thanks to this blog that I escaped.

Axé.