The exam is finished. I turned it in with a little bit of time to spare, but honestly, I don't feel good about it. I just...couldn't start. I had a week to write this thing, and it took three days to really get started. Two of the questions were fine and the third was...ok. Not a triumph, but I chose it strategically--my chair wanted to know that I knew about a related area, and while I don't know it as well as the area I work in, I decided to answer the question about it instead of the questions I knew a little better.
Recently, I've spent more and more time questioning whether academia is actually somewhere I want to work. It's funny. I've wanted to be a professor since I was twelve years old, but suddenly, I'm not at all sure. If I had all the money in the world, would I still do this? Probably not. So why the hell am I doing it now? It's not like I'm going to get rich doing it, after all.
I love archaeology, I like the puzzle and the thinking and the work. But I don't love the academic process. I don't want to have to publish on someone else's schedule, I don't want to constantly beg funding bodies for money, I don't want to deal with the increasingly anti-social-science bias in the academy and the country as a whole. (I suppose the last one is less of an issue if I actually permanently leave the country, but it's still there) I actually like the teaching element, and the research, but I want to do it on my own schedule.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Friday, February 09, 2007
We don't need to STEEEENKIN' exam!
I was supposed to begin this exam at 6pm on Wednesday. This fit nicely into my grand plan to finish by 6pm on the evil V-day, gather up some friends with no romantic plans, and drink to celebrate being one third of the way through. The questions were submitted to the department admin a week in advance, along with an email (to which she responded) specifying date and time, on which she would email the questions. As 6 approached, I huddled in front of my computer obsessively clicking 'get mail', panicking. Would my reasonable, if overly broad in scale, questions have been modified to form hideous franken-questions, requiring not 5-8 pages but a complete War-and-Peace-sized novel to answer them? Would they have been shifted slightly to emphasize the things I'm less secure in my knowledge of, like the prehistory of the Levant or herding techniques in use in the Anatolian Neolithic? Or would they appear as drafted (or even, heavens, even smaller and more rational in scale, dealing with more relevant topics), meaning that I could just sit down and write the damned things without having to dive back into frantic last minute reading?
5:59. Click.
Nothing.
6:01. Click.
Nothing.
6:05. Click.
Nothing.
At this point I begin to be concerned. Our Admin is known for her thoroughness, for her complete inability to not do the job perfectly. The woman sends work related email at 8pm on a Friday night (admittedly, it's never urgent, so why she doesn't wait until business hours on Monday I'm not sure), she would never send something this important late. Perhaps I'd better call her.
Dial, ring, voicemail. Leave a message. Perhaps she's been abducted by aliens?
6:10. Click.
Nothing.
This can't be happening. She must have sent the email, maybe it's just taking time to get through the system. Type nonsense email to self and send it off, half hoping that it won't arrive so I'll have an explanation.
6:20. Click.
1 new email! From me. Email is indeed working, apparently. Maybe it's a problem on her end?
6:30. Click.
Nothing.
Send off an email to both the admin and the exam chair mentioning the fact that I haven't received the exam, so that whenever it does turn up, I will get that extra time allowed.
7:00. Click.
Nothing. (and it was amazing how, having flooded my inbox with forwards and chatty commentary all day long, my friends chose this point to stop emailing) At this point I begin to believe that I will never get these questions, that the whole thing is a big hoax, that I have in fact already washed out of grad school and this is their way of telling me. "Oh, you thought we were going to test you for candidacy? HA!! The test was the last two and a half years, and you FAILED! No exam for you, pack up and move along, you big fat failing failure."
As I cannot face this idea any longer (plus, the mental image of my chair saying the phrase 'failing failure' in his incredibly repressed British way makes me giggle, which is becoming more and more tinged with hysteria), I decide it must be a problem with her email system, and spend the next few hours trying to figure out how to convince my email program to check extra special hard. I fail to make any difference, and finally go to bed at about 4, still trying to figure out why this email out of all my emails would be the one to go missing.
After a fun-filled and only 30% coherent conversation with the very nice UPS man, I was sitting on the couch staring vacantly at the clock saying 9:15 and desperately trying to gather up the energy to go back to bed when the phone rang. It was our admin. She forgot to email my exam, very sorry, how was today as a start date?
ARGH.
Got it at noon today, meaning it will officially end at noon on the 15, but I'm hoping to finish writing the two and a half books required by the end of the day on Wednesday so I can get my 'my boyfriend is 6,000 miles away' drink on in the company of friends.
And it is kind of nice to know that even administrative goddesses make mistakes!
5:59. Click.
Nothing.
6:01. Click.
Nothing.
6:05. Click.
Nothing.
At this point I begin to be concerned. Our Admin is known for her thoroughness, for her complete inability to not do the job perfectly. The woman sends work related email at 8pm on a Friday night (admittedly, it's never urgent, so why she doesn't wait until business hours on Monday I'm not sure), she would never send something this important late. Perhaps I'd better call her.
Dial, ring, voicemail. Leave a message. Perhaps she's been abducted by aliens?
6:10. Click.
Nothing.
This can't be happening. She must have sent the email, maybe it's just taking time to get through the system. Type nonsense email to self and send it off, half hoping that it won't arrive so I'll have an explanation.
6:20. Click.
1 new email! From me. Email is indeed working, apparently. Maybe it's a problem on her end?
6:30. Click.
Nothing.
Send off an email to both the admin and the exam chair mentioning the fact that I haven't received the exam, so that whenever it does turn up, I will get that extra time allowed.
7:00. Click.
Nothing. (and it was amazing how, having flooded my inbox with forwards and chatty commentary all day long, my friends chose this point to stop emailing) At this point I begin to believe that I will never get these questions, that the whole thing is a big hoax, that I have in fact already washed out of grad school and this is their way of telling me. "Oh, you thought we were going to test you for candidacy? HA!! The test was the last two and a half years, and you FAILED! No exam for you, pack up and move along, you big fat failing failure."
As I cannot face this idea any longer (plus, the mental image of my chair saying the phrase 'failing failure' in his incredibly repressed British way makes me giggle, which is becoming more and more tinged with hysteria), I decide it must be a problem with her email system, and spend the next few hours trying to figure out how to convince my email program to check extra special hard. I fail to make any difference, and finally go to bed at about 4, still trying to figure out why this email out of all my emails would be the one to go missing.
After a fun-filled and only 30% coherent conversation with the very nice UPS man, I was sitting on the couch staring vacantly at the clock saying 9:15 and desperately trying to gather up the energy to go back to bed when the phone rang. It was our admin. She forgot to email my exam, very sorry, how was today as a start date?
ARGH.
Got it at noon today, meaning it will officially end at noon on the 15, but I'm hoping to finish writing the two and a half books required by the end of the day on Wednesday so I can get my 'my boyfriend is 6,000 miles away' drink on in the company of friends.
And it is kind of nice to know that even administrative goddesses make mistakes!
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Performance, Practice and Phenomenon
I'm toying with using bits from performance theory, practice theory and phenomenology in my dissertation. And it's been a little more trying than I'd have liked, so I'm going to get some thoughts down here.
I like the idea of phenomenology--exploring the sensory world of past cultures. And this is a little more grounded for my project than for others, since I'm talking about things that were in physical contact with the body. But at the same time, this problematically assumes that the physical experience hasn't changed, and I'm not entirely sure how helpful it's going to be in actually talking about anything new and different. Yes, the physical experience of wearing something that limited movement can impact the possible work one does, but can I actually tell how much/ how often an item was worn? If it only restricts movement when worn and was only worn for special occasions, that's not really a significant impact, is it.
Performance theory also has its pros and cons. Judith Butler talks about how people 'perform' their gender, but she's talking about an unconscious performance. I think it's a more subtle action than that, a performance that is both conscious and unconscious. When we interact with other people, we are always performing ourselves--the face I present to my best friend is not precisely the same as the one i present to the chair of my committee, or my mother, or my boyfriend. This isn't lying or acting, and these faces aren't hugely different from each other, but there are always little status signals or emphases on this personality aspect over that one that make a difference. This is especially visible (to me, having studied linguistics) in the register shifts that lead to different word choice and pronunciation depending on who's around you. And all of this is slightly unconscious, but it's also something that you're aware of. You know that you can't hug your boss like you would your mom, and so you carry your body differently, you feel its physical relationship to their body differently, which informs your movement and your thinking and your speech. This is both conscious and unconscious, and as you can tell, I'm having a lot of trouble articulating it! Looking into actual writing on acting, perhaps they discuss this explicitly.
Practice theory is still a little confusing for me. It all comes from Bourdieu and his theory of practice, but it's gone so many places since then- basically, the way you always do something comes to shape the way you think. So the fact that you have to move around the table to get to the door influences the way you think about the door. Your practice is influencing your thought. But I feel like this works really well for spatial analyses, for architecture, and not necessarily so well for clothing. If the clothing you habitually wear is influencing your thought, isn't that more likely to be due to its physical contact than to its mental influence? Are the two separable?
I like the idea of phenomenology--exploring the sensory world of past cultures. And this is a little more grounded for my project than for others, since I'm talking about things that were in physical contact with the body. But at the same time, this problematically assumes that the physical experience hasn't changed, and I'm not entirely sure how helpful it's going to be in actually talking about anything new and different. Yes, the physical experience of wearing something that limited movement can impact the possible work one does, but can I actually tell how much/ how often an item was worn? If it only restricts movement when worn and was only worn for special occasions, that's not really a significant impact, is it.
Performance theory also has its pros and cons. Judith Butler talks about how people 'perform' their gender, but she's talking about an unconscious performance. I think it's a more subtle action than that, a performance that is both conscious and unconscious. When we interact with other people, we are always performing ourselves--the face I present to my best friend is not precisely the same as the one i present to the chair of my committee, or my mother, or my boyfriend. This isn't lying or acting, and these faces aren't hugely different from each other, but there are always little status signals or emphases on this personality aspect over that one that make a difference. This is especially visible (to me, having studied linguistics) in the register shifts that lead to different word choice and pronunciation depending on who's around you. And all of this is slightly unconscious, but it's also something that you're aware of. You know that you can't hug your boss like you would your mom, and so you carry your body differently, you feel its physical relationship to their body differently, which informs your movement and your thinking and your speech. This is both conscious and unconscious, and as you can tell, I'm having a lot of trouble articulating it! Looking into actual writing on acting, perhaps they discuss this explicitly.
Practice theory is still a little confusing for me. It all comes from Bourdieu and his theory of practice, but it's gone so many places since then- basically, the way you always do something comes to shape the way you think. So the fact that you have to move around the table to get to the door influences the way you think about the door. Your practice is influencing your thought. But I feel like this works really well for spatial analyses, for architecture, and not necessarily so well for clothing. If the clothing you habitually wear is influencing your thought, isn't that more likely to be due to its physical contact than to its mental influence? Are the two separable?
Saturday, February 03, 2007
On Wednesday, I begin the first of three exams to qualify me for dissertation writer status. Fingers crossed! I'm surprisingly not nervous. It's just 40 or so well cited pages in a week, i can do that with no problem (my high school self is crying to hear me say that. Ah, those innocent days when I could spend a week polishing a five page paper... I'm not entirely sure I can even write a five page paper these days, what could I possibly say with any supporting evidence in that amount of space?). This is the area exam, so I'll mostly be going over dates and artifacts and the like, with relatively little of my own thought. The topic exam, with all of the theories I'll be using and how I'm putting my own mark on them, is going to be much more difficult, but I will leave that panic for its own time. I'm still annoyed by the fact that no one seems to know how this works. My chair sent me to ask the department admin, who gave me an entirely different story than my second reader had given me. It's so easy to mess up the process. Especially given that one of my readers has had a family tragedy and is pretty much out of it for the next few months. We'll probably last minute subsitute someone else, which has its pluses and minuses. Since they won't know what I''m doing, they could not comment much, and leave it all to the others who do... or they could be horribly offended that I haven't included their favorite authors and give me grief. Here's hoping for the former!
I haven't managed to write much here recently, and this is unlikely to change with the exams and all, but I'm going to try and be a little more regular! (Not that anyone actually reads it, so no worries!)
I haven't managed to write much here recently, and this is unlikely to change with the exams and all, but I'm going to try and be a little more regular! (Not that anyone actually reads it, so no worries!)
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