There's a certain small meanness of being low on the totem pole and part of the out crowd, of being in a position of vulnerability, of being more or less powerless and frustrated and maybe more bitter than one would like to admit.
And I saw the janusian two-faced-ness of yet another, who exists in a world of networking and schmoozing of pleasant shallowness only to backbite out of earshot as I attempt to defend the quirkiness of my fellow peons as the bile in my gut churns with the acid of the coffee and I need to be polite to this person because it keeps the world spinning, even if I mean it as little as they do.
I feel like that kid in O'Connor's short story 'Temple of the Holy Ghost' making fun of the priest at her church and the stupid neighbor boys and the ditzy schoolgirls and coming to the realization that for whatever freakiness and ugly we have in us there is something beautiful and of God in each of us too, even though in all honesty it's damn near impossible to see sometimes if I speak truthfully.
So I think about him, and how I do the same thing, with different people, every day and while I could justify it, how different is it, even if they kind of give me the creeps or they say stupid and ignorant things, and who am I to denigrate, hypocritical in frowning upon it in others, having been on the receiving end all too often, and so many of the things I've said and thought that were just wrong, wrong, wrong, and how is that made right, because apologizing to someone by saying "I wasn't very nice to you and you wouldn't have ever known if I never said anything" just creates more drama, and I guess the next best thing is going and sinning no more I guess? Is that even possible? Or like all other unrealistic ideals made undoable in perfection due to our inherent suckness, something to aspire to?
Showing posts with label academia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label academia. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Friday, September 16, 2011
antisocialite
A cup of black tea scented mango and an almost-finished paper, the comfortable introverted companionship, the acquaintance made of Kandinsky in the name of attempting to making academic absurdity bearable. I can't help but try even with the work hard now/slack later ethos that's characterized my entire academic life. I barely have the ambition to be an artist or a writer, let alone pursue degrees and that kind of trajectory. Instead, I mess around, feed my brain, hang out with the souls I enjoy when I get the chance to.
The thought of sitting in a classroom of unbearableness after a long week led to a long-deferred and much-needed lunch hour excursion of food consumption, hanging out at the cemetery, and exploring the old Chinatown and due to my lack of photographic posting, I've decided to tag along with Randal's 30 day challenge thing. So here's the self-portrait, face obscured by signage and reflection to protect the guilty.
It's good for one's soul to be out in the fall air, walking and feeling momentarily free. We were made to walk and stand, not sit crouched at desks and sedentary. Hopefully I'll get to hang out under the bridge downtown but that doesn't look like it's in the plans tonight as I finish what I can before the place closes, thankful for weekends and the precious crystalline interludes of revelation like the first time I heard this album and it blew my mind.
The thought of sitting in a classroom of unbearableness after a long week led to a long-deferred and much-needed lunch hour excursion of food consumption, hanging out at the cemetery, and exploring the old Chinatown and due to my lack of photographic posting, I've decided to tag along with Randal's 30 day challenge thing. So here's the self-portrait, face obscured by signage and reflection to protect the guilty.
It's good for one's soul to be out in the fall air, walking and feeling momentarily free. We were made to walk and stand, not sit crouched at desks and sedentary. Hopefully I'll get to hang out under the bridge downtown but that doesn't look like it's in the plans tonight as I finish what I can before the place closes, thankful for weekends and the precious crystalline interludes of revelation like the first time I heard this album and it blew my mind.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
paper scraps and paper chase
Being Peonage of the Towering Slab of Ivory, I hear a lot of people talk about their degrees, the degrees they want, the degrees that someone else has or doesn't, and there is some degree of cultural capital in certain circles where you're validated by how many letters are after your name or where you went to school, what you studied, and how far you went, where you got published, what conference you presented at, who you know.
And then there is the vicious cycle of a cramped job market, where everyone has the same credentials but possibly more experience or better connections, where you don't get called back because you don't have some piece of paper, or if you have too many pieces. I only got my gig of relative underemployment due to not graduating in time and learning the hard way after not getting called back for looking too overqualified or for having the right credentials but not the 20 years of experience that belonged to others. In Proverbs, it's said to be wise is to ask God for neither poverty nor riches and that's what I did, and that's what I got. While the interpersonals can get complicated, it's truly everywhere.
My peers defer adulthood and keep taking out more loans, to find out that they've screwed themselves over because that golden ticket never did materialize. Most of my fellow grad-schoolers pursued other dreams instead or held out for that Really Good Job because they considered themselves too good to do what I do. I've got free tuition and really good health insurance and a couple good coworker homies, which makes up for the lack of pay most of the time, but to think that one is entitled based on having such and such a degree or two, when there's little work ethic and even less decency towards others, starts seeming absurd.
Self-perpetuation of those already entrenched, ageism of the you're too old or you're so young, the stress of maintaining image and lifestyle, of making a good impression and paying the mortgage while the domestic life disintegrates. Maybe this is why people like Jonathan Franzen novels and Desperate Housewives. At least someone's suburban misery is worse.
Suburban desperation has long been a cultural trope and one I've found ridiculous and overwrought, but I've never existed in the world of the super-suburbs, just the working-class one where the people in my life who went to college ended up being truck drivers or stay-at-home moms who used their brains to help us use ours, so I've never truly understood this, and living in the city means that I see less of it, so when I do, it stands out intensely.
And as education becomes more to do with becoming good little cogs with culturally appropriate opinions, and higher education a lucrative enterprise that's bought into with the expectation of economic payoff, of higher wages and greater prestige, more people have bought in and it's gotten more cramped, and I watch more and more people reduced tears and bitterness because the system they paid so much into is not producing the returns that were expected.
And then the people who do have the qualifications who got where they were more or less by accident of birth, of getting in while the getting was good back when there were times of relative economic prosperity, when degrees and diplomas meant more, look down on everyone else who is not so lucky.
These are things that I don't deal with as much, only observe. I hover in social limbo between suburbanites and those that have little to nothing. I can't say that I've dropped out of this system, but I've left the rat racing to others, but I see it all around me and sometimes I wish I was doing a little bit better so maybe I could travel somewhere outside the United States just once, or maybe not live upstairs from someone, and realize that there's still residue of these American dreams that have fueled all sorts of bad things. We've all got our struggles, and those of us who preferred learning for the sake of learning and art for the sake of art are the ones living paycheck to paycheck, but I still feel like I made the better trade.
And then there is the vicious cycle of a cramped job market, where everyone has the same credentials but possibly more experience or better connections, where you don't get called back because you don't have some piece of paper, or if you have too many pieces. I only got my gig of relative underemployment due to not graduating in time and learning the hard way after not getting called back for looking too overqualified or for having the right credentials but not the 20 years of experience that belonged to others. In Proverbs, it's said to be wise is to ask God for neither poverty nor riches and that's what I did, and that's what I got. While the interpersonals can get complicated, it's truly everywhere.
My peers defer adulthood and keep taking out more loans, to find out that they've screwed themselves over because that golden ticket never did materialize. Most of my fellow grad-schoolers pursued other dreams instead or held out for that Really Good Job because they considered themselves too good to do what I do. I've got free tuition and really good health insurance and a couple good coworker homies, which makes up for the lack of pay most of the time, but to think that one is entitled based on having such and such a degree or two, when there's little work ethic and even less decency towards others, starts seeming absurd.
Self-perpetuation of those already entrenched, ageism of the you're too old or you're so young, the stress of maintaining image and lifestyle, of making a good impression and paying the mortgage while the domestic life disintegrates. Maybe this is why people like Jonathan Franzen novels and Desperate Housewives. At least someone's suburban misery is worse.
Suburban desperation has long been a cultural trope and one I've found ridiculous and overwrought, but I've never existed in the world of the super-suburbs, just the working-class one where the people in my life who went to college ended up being truck drivers or stay-at-home moms who used their brains to help us use ours, so I've never truly understood this, and living in the city means that I see less of it, so when I do, it stands out intensely.
And as education becomes more to do with becoming good little cogs with culturally appropriate opinions, and higher education a lucrative enterprise that's bought into with the expectation of economic payoff, of higher wages and greater prestige, more people have bought in and it's gotten more cramped, and I watch more and more people reduced tears and bitterness because the system they paid so much into is not producing the returns that were expected.
And then the people who do have the qualifications who got where they were more or less by accident of birth, of getting in while the getting was good back when there were times of relative economic prosperity, when degrees and diplomas meant more, look down on everyone else who is not so lucky.
These are things that I don't deal with as much, only observe. I hover in social limbo between suburbanites and those that have little to nothing. I can't say that I've dropped out of this system, but I've left the rat racing to others, but I see it all around me and sometimes I wish I was doing a little bit better so maybe I could travel somewhere outside the United States just once, or maybe not live upstairs from someone, and realize that there's still residue of these American dreams that have fueled all sorts of bad things. We've all got our struggles, and those of us who preferred learning for the sake of learning and art for the sake of art are the ones living paycheck to paycheck, but I still feel like I made the better trade.
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