The inaugural issue of Digital Medievalist is up online. One of the articles in it is “Towards the Electronic Esposizioni,” which I co-wrote with the inimitable Guyda Armstrong. It was great fun to write, and we like to think it is readable by the General Audience. Comments, as always, welcome and appreciated.
the mind’s eye is
No, there’s more nuance to it. And, lucky you, I feel like spilling it all over my blog.
This is me at one of my more negative moments. The other end of the spectrum can be just as intense. But right at the moment, things are pretty bleak over at words’ end.
I’ve been thinking about feminism. It’s hard not to these days, really. Jill is this awesome, shiny, curly-lock’ed powerhouse of a blogging theorist and head of her department, and writes on feminist topics to do with both politics and with her work. The misbehaving posse are eloquent and on point without coming across as gratuitously bitter, by which I personally am inspired. Hanna is kicking all kinds of arse as a Debian developer and advocate for women in computing.
Humanities computing is by no means a boys’ club. I don’t have any actual statistics, and it’s likely that men do outnumber women in the field, just like most (any?) other academic fields. But I’ve never felt shut out because I’m female; and certainly there is no lack of role models to follow.
Ethan and I talk about gender, its physiology and its politics, quite a lot. In him I have found the kind of feminist I hope every man – and woman – would be. He is well read and astute in general, and his interest in evolutionary biology has led to some very interesting conversations about how gender differences have evolved, how they’re expressed in other animals, how different human societies deal with them.
(As an aside, have you ever read Shanshan Du’s Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs? It’s a great read. The Lahu have their problems, but they’ve got the gender stuff worked out.)
OK, so do we all agree here that men and women are different? Because we are, right? In many, many respects. A tiny change in physiology (and it really is tiny, all things considered) results, in most of us, in different attitudes, different… orientations. In most of us. Lately gender identity has come to the political forefront, and we’ve discovered that it’s not quite so black-and-white.
I am most decidedly female. Perhaps a little more outspoken than some, perhaps a bit harsh at times, but a woman. I watch myself behave in ways that have been pegged as stereotypically female, and find that this is where I want to be.
So, here’s where I want to be: I want to be secondary.
Seriously. I want to be someone’s assistant. I make a good administrator. I am happier making sure that things run smoothly than I am writing papers. This bothers me on a fundamental level.
It’s possible that these are years of being a student speaking: I’m tired of being a student. Even now, on a leave of absence and with a “real job,” I’m a student and will need to write a dissertation by something like May of 2007. I’m sick of writing papers, because I don’t feel like expressing new opinions. Doing research is absolutely equivalent in my head to proving myself – to professors, to colleagues, to myself. I hate it. I hate the insecurity, and I hate even more my conclusion that this insecurity is not the result of The Man puttin’ me down. Nobody’s been putting me down. Nobody but me.
There’s a conflict here: most of me doesn’t feel put down when I think of a life as a mother and keeper of the homestead, possibly working part-time making food for people or pulling espresso shots (both being alternate-reality dreams of mine, that I will quite possibly pursue when I retire… or sooner). Most of me has been actively developing this aversion to putting myself on the line, proving myself to anyone. A large part of me wants to only ever do for money what I already know how to do, and doesn’t want to learn anything new.
For money. That’s a crucial thing. I don’t think I could stop reading, ever. Learning new things, fiddling with XSLT, finding cool ways to keep my occasional students of Italian excited about the language, all these things are great. As long as I choose to do them.
Classic, huh?
The feminist in me is all up in arms because of this. I’m capable of More Than That. (What in the seven hells does that mean?)
Goddamnit, I love humanities computing. I love my current job. I love gradually getting a wider and wider perspective on the wonder of human communication via language. The parallels between us and people who lived hundreds, thousands of years ago are often unexpected and always great fun to discover. So why am I periodically so torn up, why do I want to hide and never tell anyone who professionally matters to me what I’m thinking? Why am I terrified of this?
The cards are stacked in my favor, here. Ever since I decided not to pursue the Italian Studies PhD any longer I’ve been happy in academe. It’s been home. The papers I’ve given have mostly failed to suck; my boss has recently called me a dynamo to a third party; my doctoral committee have been very supportive of this unorthodox track of a PhD in humanities computing. Gosh darn it, that oughta count for something.
I’m going to finish this two-year gig, and immediately after that I’ll finish the PhD, and these things aren’t true because I’m feeling the need to prove something. They’re true because I want to do this.
But I’m terrified, and am tired of being so scared, and every time it comes back it’s stronger and harder to deal with. A large, visceral part of me is screaming every time I realize that I’ve put myself out there and seem to have no energy to see it through. The fact that this happens more often when my hormones are all out of whack is only important to a point, since (a) this isn’t an absolute correlation, and (b) the hormone jumps don’t make any of this shit less real.
Energy always comes in the end, from someplace or another. But right now, I just want to hide.
Academe is a lonely place, but for better or worse it’s home. I’ve only got one life. How do I know the wisest way to spend it that will also make me consistently happy?
[Re-reading this, it occurs to me: among other things, what I actually want is acknowledgment on the part of Society At Large of the importance and relevance of my work to itself. Fat chance.]
[meta]
I keep feeling I should be blogging more, but you know, when it comes to impact on the outside world, blogging is just about the least useful activity I pursue regularly these days. It’s been important lately to feel useful.
Too bad that this feeling seems to be inseparable from a need to be appreciated. Luckily, I do not lack positive feedback. But I’m not crazy about the necessity of expending energy on my self-esteem. Shouldn’t that be all set, at my age?
(rhetorical question.)
Okay, all right, I get it!
Dear body:
Thanks for the reminder, although you could’ve been gentler about it. Lessons learned (I hope):
– stopping exercising for three days makes me more randomly hungry, not less, and also unhappy;
– when feeling like the world is crashing down for no particular reason, eat protein; preferably in the form of red meat, fish or soybeans;
– in the past stress stemming from procrastination followed by being overwhelmed with work was a good motivator to do said work. That is no longer a viable option, as it is Not Worth It;
– maybe new moon does affect me negatively after all… or maybe this is a coincidence;
– I’ve got to find coping mechanisms to deal with guilt. It is the single most unproductive feeling I experience on a regular basis: it gets nothing accomplished and absolutely drains me of energy.
Now can I have my serotonin back please?
Sincerely,
-V.
(This isn’t intentionally cryptic, Reader. The suck of yesterday and today may have been caused by a combination of individually insignificant factors, but the problems I talk about above are quite generally applicable to my life. At least, to the unhappy moments in it. Which, now that I think on it, don’t occur often at all. But man, when they do, it’s bad…)
unbearable whiteness and caloric intake
Snow! Oh my, the snow. I would like a small, lightweight digital camera that makes it trivial to transfer images from its card to my laptop, so that I might share the vistas with you. (This is a wish E. and I have had for a while, but other expenditures have taken priority. It’ll happen, though.) Meanwhile, our street looks something like this. (Image of Providence courtesy wunderground.com.) Not terrible, but considering this is how much snow we’ve gotten in the past twenty hours, pretty impressive. They don’t seem to be plowing the residential streets much: there’s no point until later today, when the snow and the wind stops. The wind is sending whirling clouds of minute dancing snowflakes flying all around, such that it’s hard to tell whether any new snow is coming down at all. Total accumulation, as per Wunderground, is 18 to 28 inches in Providence. Damn, do I ever wish I had cross-country skis!
Went clothes-shopping yesterday. We don’t do this often, and it was all kinds of fun – even though we did go all the way to Boston despite the blizzard warning. We managed to get back home before the worst of it hit, mission accomplished and even some food shopping done. The Garment District is an impossibly good second-hand store; next time either of us is jonesing for a change of wardrobe we know exactly where to go.
In other news, I have successfully bicycled several times already, thanks to the bike trainer we took off Molly’s hands. It makes me feel so good. I’ve finally found a gym-like contraption that I enjoy using, and can use without regard for the weather outside. I’ve long been complaining about feeling weak and blah, and have been gaining weight I shouldn’t be gaining – nothing tragic, just enough to make me feel sluggish and want to hibernate. Since today’s pace of life hardly permits one to hole up for the winter and suck on a paw, I’ve decided to set a specific weight-loss and exercise-gain goal for the next two months. Really, the wedding is just an excuse, a convenient chronological target in that it isn’t negotiable.
To this end, as of this morning I’m monitoring caloric intake, and also limiting it a bit. I’ve never done this systematically, and am curious as to what will happen. Hopefully in a week or two I’ll have enough data to be able to predict about how many calories I’ll need in a given day depending on the projected activities for that day. There’s some possibility that I won’t stick with it, but since I am loving this stationary-bicycling-and-iPod-listening thing, and also have a love who can nudge me when needed without making me feel bad about myself, optimism runs high. Plus, it’s two months. I’ve been wanting to change my health habits for a while now. If I stick with it for this long, perhaps maintaining in the longer term will be easier!
Doing things that make my body feel active and alive makes such a huge difference in how I feel on all levels. It’s time to live in the moment, I think.
Edit: Uni is closed tomorrow! W00t, I feel like… like… like I’m nine years old! SNOW DAY!
(Okay, I still get to work. But it’s at home, in PJs, with tea and hot chocolate and biking breaks.)
Surface, breathe, sync
My cousin from Australia is visiting the Boston area and staying with us. She’s a fun chyk, just graduated from Melbourne U’s law school (!), will be starting a job in March, and in the meantime is seeing the world. It’s good to meet her.
Last night I didn’t sleep much. When I did sleep, the dreams were mostly nightmares about: (a) wedding planning and food not quite going as planned; (b) stories of the Japanese ambassador and the entire associated wedding party being poisoned; and (c) the church grounds suddenly being as large as a large high school, and myself being lost and pursued.
Hm, time to chill out. Unfortunately, it’s also time to do wedding planning more quickly.
In two days, I participate in the Teaching in the Digital Age Faculty Showcase. Should be awesome.
The first draft of my very first semi-annual interim report to the NEH is complete. Seeing as it’s not due until the 31st, I’m rather proud of myself. Of course, we’ll see what my boss says; but it’s always much easier for me to revise than to write from scratch.
I feel numb.
Memememememe
Cribbed from, like, everywhere. My web browsing habits, presented in alphabetical order for your delectation, some rather obvious, some perhaps not. Of course, this is the most recent browsing history, and is thus tainted by things like gift shopping and travel planning. Still more or less representative.
a: amazon
c: coastway (my credit union)
d: dartmouth dante project (which I in no way recommend! it’s broken in so. many. ways.)
g: an all-too-appropriate .gif!
h: paradiso del perverse (R-rated; hilarious)
i: ifMUD
j: jews against circumcision, a truly odd one
l: my livejournal friends page
n: netflix
p: nifty pic of transparent concrete (2, 3)
q: nada
r: rand mcnally
t: telecharge, for all your nyc ticketing needs
x: xchat site (it’s an irc client for mac os x)
y: yarnivore’s blog post on anatomically correct knitting
z: zipcode.com
And you?
And some days…
you just want to put your head through the wall.
Good god, I have the thinnest skin of any human I know.
I have been interacting with some people about some work they wanted done. They thought I was their guy, I thought I was their guy, then we all separately started having our doubts, and in the end it didn’t pan out.
But it didn’t pan out in the worst way possible. In the way that makes me doubt that I’ll ever improve my diplomatic skills. In the way that makes me doubt whether I’m good enough at interpersonal politics to make it in academe. In the way that makes me angry because they contacted me and then failed to read the detailed explanation I was sending them at their own request. And, immediately after feeling angry, I feel stupid and inadequate and childish, and it’s all irrelevant anyway because although I won’t be doing this project (a good thing, if the past two weeks are any indication), I’m left with all this frustration at myself and others.
But mostly at myself.
It’s not all that bad, of course. If I am to believe my coworkers and immediate boss (and I have no reason to disbelieve them), my main job is going quite well. But, see, there nobody questions my competency, implicitly or explicitly. Nobody interrupts me every second sentence. Nobody ignores lengthy emails and asks me the questions answered in those emails. And, for the most part, I seem to be getting along with my team – and with my boss – just fine.
Of course, they all have known me for years. Surely that helps. But, damnit, I have a thin skin because I care about my coworkers and my work and the humanities and humanity. Diplomatic skills be damned; although I like to think that I am improving those. What you get is unadulterated me, throwing all my knowledge and energy and passion at most things I touch.
Now, just to figure out a way to harness this passion and not be hurt by responses to it. Simple.
YAWP.
alien
For as long as I’ve been in the states – 14.5 years and counting – I’ve never been able to call myself an American. Well, it looks like that isn’t changing anytime soon.
I’m not disappointed that Kerry lost the election, per se. (Although I am horrified that Bush will get four more years to screw me personally and the rest of this country sideways, and the rest of the world too, for as long as it lets him.) I am numb, because more than half of this country’s active voters have clearly stated that their value systems are more or less polarly opposed to mine. This state of affairs is unlikely to change in my lifetime.
Ethan points out that, as far as places to live go, we’ve got it pretty good: Rhode Island has a long and mostly noble history of respectful dissent and relative freedom. We are surrounded by hard-working people who think and are mostly informed, and who see and understand the wide world beyond U.S. borders, which is more than I can say for the majority of this country. And still, I feel an alien.
This country has given me more opportunities than my home, that’s for sure. I am well educated, well fed and have certainly had my mind blown by art like nowhere else. Thanks for that. But while the house I live in is my home, and Ethan is my love, the country that surrounds us isn’t home, and I am not a patriot.
There you have it, I didn’t realize I needed to say that. I am not a patriot of this country any more than I am a patriot of any other. I’m deeply touched by the events here, but ultimately no more so than I am by events in Uzbekistan; except, of course, that the brutalities of the Uzbek government do not impact my life directly, while Bush’s religious-right moral agenda does.
The upshot is, I won’t change this country. I make a bad political activist, and in fact want all those sixty million people to feel and do whatever they feel like doing with their lives. If they want to teach creationism in Alabama schools, fine. Teach it. I think it’s a crock of shit, and I don’t want my children learning it exclusively at all as a truth, but they should be able to do it. That’s the point. Too bad that sort of thinking also leads to beatings of gays to death, but the answer isn’t trying to persuade those people to soften, it’s to get the hell away from them.
Easy for me to say, I don’t have a home here. Many do. There are gays in Georgia who just got a big old fuck-you from their home state, who don’t want to leave it. They, in fact, love it as patriots do. I can only wish them the best of luck, and strength for the long road ahead. I can’t fight the juggernaut that has always been here.
I want to move away. Not defect, not even entirely unpatriotically – hell, I might end up teaching English sometime, and the English I’d teach would certainly be American. But I want to move to a place filled with people whose core values more closely approximate mine. Preferably an entire sovereign entity like that.
I’ve resolved to keep a better eye on national politics, not only during election year but always. More, though, I’m interested in getting to know the national newspapers of the top contender countries for such a move. Take the time to find out what they’re really about, and limit my political activism here to donating money to organizations that will be better activists than I.
Home is where the heart is; my home is with Ethan and with my other friends and family, but my heart is not with America. It rejects me again and again; it’s not my home.
gloom: it’s not just for politics anymore.
Did I mention SAD? Because it’s still that ton of bricks.
You know those days when everything gets to you? It’s been two weeks.
Three hours at Firestone today, only to have my car not pass state inspection (a correctable mechanical problem, nothing to be ashamed of, emissions are fine) didn’t help at all. Why three hours? Because they misinformed me about when they opened, and then proceeded to lose my insurance card. Spent an hour looking for it and calling the ins. co. to have them fax over a copy, because damned if I was going to drive out of there without proof of insurance.
Whine, bitch, moan. But it’s getting to be a serious problem. I’ve been nearly unable to work. We’re working on getting bright lights, and I’ve called around to doctors who (says my health ins. co.) have experience with SAD listed on their profiles. Left messages for, I’d guess, well over a dozen of them. You know how many have called me back?
Two.
The fact that I’m blogging random personal desperation is itself a big huge red flag. This is no longer “ah, me.” Part of me wants to get under the covers and not come out. Another part wants to yell heeeeellllllp.
Ethan’s been brilliantly patient and helpful through all this, down to sitting down with me to do web design, but he can’t rewire me. I’ve got about zero magic dealing powers left.
