why did you let me through the doors in the first place
if you were just gonna turn around and force me out?

why did you let me in this ivory tower
filled with hippie feel-good activist academics
debating about feminist organizing in high theory discourse
while barely-paid migrant workers prepare lunches
for seminars, conferences, forums
and get deported the next day

an award winning tenured professor once told me
the only way i will succeed at graduate school
is if i read 300 pages of theory per week per class
and if i’m not capable
my writing must be of low quality
my intellect must be incredibly juvenile

nothing could be wrong with the way things are
because to change the rules would
undermine what it means to receive a graduate school education
and would leave me unprepared to
compete for future jobs and faculty positions

let me ask you
exactly which graduate student’s education are you concerned about
here?

not single mothers who need extra time to look after their families
not pregnant women who need a little more maternity leave

not low-income folks who need to take 2nd or 3rd jobs
to pay bills their funding doesn’t cover
not racialized international students who don’t have access to most
scholarships

not the people with disabilities
who don’t have access to comply with the way things are
made to feel something is wrong with them
instead of with the rules themselves

not those who survive sexual violence
and need extra time to grieve rage or deal

not anyone with familial, historical ties
to places and races always under siege
living under governments set on killing their people

who must spend free time at sit-ins or rallies
where emotions and exhaustions run too high
drumbeats and chants ring too loud
to read a detached article due for class the next day

not Indigenous students who are expected
to read speak and engage with
languages, theories, and knowledges
that erase appropriate and colonize
their lands, cultures, and selves
with the same ease as the colonizers

not people of colour subjected to
subtle and blatant racism
making it impossible to participate
the same way as their white peers

not anyone who needs to spend every moment of their leisure time
finding other ways of learning
through art, community activism, collective therapy
(or a mashup of all three)

your ideal graduate student is
someone who doesn’t have to experience community organizing
because you’ve already assigned them five chapters to read about it

your ideal graduate student is
someone who can’t talk about positionality or privilege
without referencing some article

your ideal graduate student is
rich enough
white enough
straight enough
able-bodied and -minded enough
to be given luxury of enjoying sitting in a corner reading 900 pages a
week
(with their fair trade starbucks coffee in hand and their lulu lemon track
pants on ass)

your ideal graduate student
IS NOT ME

so WHY did you let me through these doors in the first place
if you were just gonna turn around and shove me out?

to fill some quota for affirmative action?
to appear like a progressive program without putting in the effort
of actually being one?

don’t pretend you’re not secretly wishing you could
impersonate my lawyer to kidnap me
and deport me in a heartbeat
if i did so much as look at you funny
talk back
write an angry poem
and undermine your authority

by rolling my eyes at your hypocrisy

feminism in academia – OWN UP TO YOURSELF
do not pretend to be the godsend intellectually paving the revolution

recognize that the ones let through these doors by some strategic mis-
take
are the ones making you look good
while we burn out and burn up by your hands

what is it about your knowledge and education
that prevents you from imagining
all the different reasons someone may be in graduate school
or feel the need to study gender, race, sexuality, and class?

some of us are not here to one day
soullessly recite the entire cannon of queer theory development
with our hearts and minds closed

some of us do not wish to compete to be the
newest biggest baddest radical faculty-hire

some of us need to engage with feminist theory
so we can ground it in our community activist work
our creative works
our personal relationships
for our families, communities and histories
for our own fucking deserved peace of minds

maybe we need to know how to make sense of oppression
because we’re so heartbroken

we don’t want to end up being locked away in psychiatric institutions
or in a hospital overdosed on pills, getting our stomachs pumped
because we don’t know WHY all this shit is constantly driving us CRAZY

what i want to know is why the fuck YOU were let through these doors
and made to think you could decide all the rules FOR US?

you tell me my intellect is lacking

i’m not worthy of being here
if i’m not capable of doing exactly what you say
exactly your way

but i choose to follow the kind of wisdom your 300 pages per week per
class
could never teach you

it’s gotten me this fucking far

Its glint off sheets of ice tells the story
of Death’s brightness, her bitter cold.

We can make do with so little, just the hint
of warmth, the slanted light.

The way we stand there, soaking in it,
mittened fingers reaching.

And how carefully we gather what we can
to offer later, in darkness, one body to another.

by molly fisk

via Mitch on fb

My life feels like it has been one long trajectory along The Breakfast Club plot line — except that I’m outside of the outsiders, beyond the recluse. High school was definitely like this. Even my undergraduate life was like this. I was never a traditional student. I worked full-time while attending school and had to often quit classes when work required me to be more focused on it than school. It took me a lot longer to get my undergraduate degree than most people because of this, making me even more different than those I went to school with.

During my Master’s degree, I again worked full-time, but I was working at a University. My supervisors, wonderful people that they are, allowed me to take time off to go to classes when the classes weren’t offered online. But I didn’t teach, as many other grad students did, and I didn’t engage with the students outside of class. I was much too busy to do that.

My doctoral degree has been different. For the first time in my life, education has been the main focus. It came first. I was being paid to make it come first. I got to teach classes. I got to be a part of a department. But maybe because of my past, I never quite fit in. There are definite cliques in the program of which I’m not a part. I rarely see anyone from my department, nor do I socialize much at all. I see photos of them getting together, the connections they’ve all made, and the ways they’ve become integral parts of one another’s lives. I’ve heard that one of the most important parts of getting your doctorate is the relationships you make while doing it — because those people have persevered with you throughout, that they will be lifelong friends. I didn’t or haven’t made those kinds of connections. I doubt many of the people I’ve gone to school with here will have much to do with me after I leave (they don’t now, so it’s safe to assume they won’t after).

I’m not a lonely person – just the opposite. I’m quite happy being alone. And I have a hard time being comfortable around others, so I tend to turn to my family because they are safe and will forgive my foibles. But every once in a while, especially when I see photos posted on Facebook or Twitter, I wonder what I’ve missed out on and if, when I go into the next stage of my life, it will be any different.

Or will I still be watching from outside the library as the brain, the beauty, the jock, the rebel, and the recluse find ways to connect and integrate themselves with one another?

So this is aging: the bare sun, skinned,
palely bucking the dark wind,
slides through the glass, crawls on the carpet,
climbs the footboard, lies crosswise on the blanket,
a spoiled dog waiting to be fed.

Not now, dear warmth. The kindling’s in the shed,
too far to fetch. Those two great logs that close
together to make fire, repose
apart, an old couple reminiscing
on conflagrations they’re now missing:
how every sunny Saturday afternoon,
Hey, diddle-diddle, the dish ran away with the spoon.

Not yet, dear spoon. Some hotter day, dear dish.
No tidbits now. Instead, let’s make a wish,
and boil fresh water for the small teapot
to keep it piping hot.

— John M. Ridland

(via my friend, Jean Albus)

And I know so many colleagues and professors (both local and national whom I respect greatly) have written about this on blogs and talked about it in person. I know everyone gets it and has been there to some extent at some point in their academic careers. But when you’re in the middle of that whirling vortex of self-doubt, it can be the loneliest place in the world.

I don’t feel smart. I don’t feel intelligent. I don’t feel like I belong. I don’t feel like anything I’m doing really matters.

That’s when it’s bad.

Lately, I’ve been worried about not being an expert, not being well-versed enough in my study to be a person someone may want to engage with to discuss this. And all of this points to who I have been thinking of as my audience.

Was it my colleagues, fellow doctoral students and candidates who are working on amazing projects of their own? No.

Was it my family, who supports me and often tells me that even they, who, for the most part, are not academics, are interested in reading my dissertation because they think the topic is interesting? No.

Was it my committee, who wants to see me succeed and develop into a productive, mentoring professor in my own right? No.

Who was that audience I’ve been thinking about?

Anonymous.

No, no. Not ANONYMOUS. I’m not sure many of them would be interested in my research.

It’s that faceless, voiceless, apparition that I’ve built in my head. It’s an audience that is all-seeing, all-knowing. And that audience is the one that is going to rise up and strike me down the moment I utter, or type, a single word. It is that audience that is going to tell me that I’m a failure, that I’m stupid, that I’m not fit. It’s that audience that is going to call me out and shame me for trying to break out of the bonds that have held me for far too long.

That’s a dark place to dwell because it’s all in my head, all in the nooks and crannies of my cranium that have, for a lifetime, said “You’re not good enough.”

Then, when I think that I can’t go on because NOTHING is still happening and I’m beating myself up far worse than anyone has or could, along comes a wise person to help me out of my hole that I’ve dug for myself. The sage doesn’t have to do anything. This person will just say the right thing at the right time, and the clouds clear, and I can see the road again.

And I can write.

One. word. at. a. time.

A few hours later, I was on the phone with my brother discussing what I had written today. “I worked on my case narrative. But,” I said, “I realize that I’m not curing cancer so I’m starting to wonder why this is all important.”

Then he reminded me of something. This week is National Suicide Prevention Week in the U.S. And, he reminded me, people who send in postcards to PostSecret are often looking for someone to hear them — to understand their pain — so that they don’t commit suicide. And if I’m looking at those postcards (and I was looking at them today, all 251 of my data set), I see how many of them are about suicide. What does that say about how we communicate secrets and fears and hopes and love and anguish and pain and joy? And, he asked me, isn’t this what you do look at?

I study the human condition, I said. It’s a rhetorical perspective of it, but that’s what I do. And, he reminded me, we can do a lot of damage to our bodies with our minds, so even if you’re not curing cancer, you are giving us an insight into how and why we make the kinds of choices we do — and those are every bit as important as curing cancer.

While I won’t ever cure cancer, nor will I ever administer professional assistance to those who harbor suicidal thoughts, maybe my work is important. Even if it’s in some small way, it can be important. It can shed light on choices we make — even if it’s the language and imagery that is chosen to convey a message. Maybe. Just maybe, it can be important.

I’ve been “online” since the mid-1980s when I began to actively use the GOPHER system during my (very long) undergraduate career. I had an instructor (a Humanities professor, no less) who required us to use GOPHER email to discuss ideas and concepts. It turned into a social activity in which many of us, sitting in the same room with a bank of computers, would chat via the system rather than to that person sitting next to us.

When, in the early 1990s, I ventured into other online social activities (Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe) it felt different. No longer was I chatting with people I had met in person, but with people from (typically) around the US. I didn’t know them by anything other than what they posted. I became somewhat more guarded. I chatted a lot, but I never posted images of myself. I didn’t feel safe doing that, and somehow my photographic likeness was akin to sharing something very personal about myself. I would discuss personal issues, but I didn’t post photos of myself. Even when I got my first blog, around 1997, I think, I didn’t post images of myself. This was a little too personal for me.

In the early 2000s, I did post my first image of myself. I remember shaking and worrying. Why? I’m not sure, except that it meant, for certain, a type of judgment that comes from our visceral selves would be employed by those viewing the image. I wanted to be judged for what and how I contributed to a community rather than what or how I appeared to others in a visual format.

During my Master’s degree program, I did research on the self-representation of women in online environments. This was, in so many ways, a way for me to understand why and how women portray themselves visually to specific audiences. It also was a way for me to understand why I may have been reticent to portray myself visually online.

Now that I’m working on my PhD, I’m interested in both the visual and textual representations of online inhabitants — and how their ethos and identity are constructed in very short bursts of engagement: the PostSecret postcard. What does this tell us about that composer? Why is it important? How does it shape engagement? When is sharing too much? Or is it ever?

So what does all of this have to do with constructing a domain and beginning writing on that domain? Everything. This is a personal space, and yet it isn’t. It’s so very public. Many people have talked to me because of this domain. Many people have stayed in my life over the years because of it. It connects me in various ways to others that I wouldn’t normally have a way to connect with. And it shares a personal side of me that I wouldn’t normally project in a public space. Maybe because it’s mine. It’s a safe space for me. I can turn off comments if I want. I can make posts private if I choose (which I rarely do).

I am still very careful, however, in choosing what I post (which is why posts are so infrequent). I am a private, somewhat shy person. I don’t want to rant online, then regret what I’ve said later. I’d rather err on the side of caution and tread carefully. There are people on the other side of this message. People who may be sensitive or not, caring or not, insightful or not, but people who may expand my ideas and concepts of the world and help me grow in different ways than I thought possible. This is my way of becoming (and being) a public persona.

At the University of Minnesota, we have very distinct campuses — even within the Twin Cities itself. I’ve been fortunate enough to teach at both the Minneapolis and the Saint Paul campuses. I say this because there are differences between them. When I teach on the Minneapolis campus, I’m surrounded by people who are experiencing college in much the same way I did — immersion in letters and sciences with jobs and/or careers in more urban settings.

At the Saint Paul campus, much to my delight, I find a different set of students. These are often students who come from the more rural areas of Minnesota, who have family farms or who are more non-traditional. In the courses I teach on the Saint Paul campus, I often learn about things I’ve never known.

This semester I’m teaching a scientific and technical presentations course. In my classes, I give a lot of leeway for students to pursue their own interests in what they present, write about, and share. I think it adds to a more dynamic and interesting course. What it also does is teach me more about the students, more about different topics, and more about diversity. And as an educator, I find the process of learning while also teaching to be stimulating.

In the first part of the semester I’ve learned about how happiness has been shown to be a medical miracle, how Minnesota has a blossoming hazelnut industry, how to develop a large-scale dent corn production farm, and how to tie-dye according to the type of fiber and dye.

Then there are those presentations that always stick with you. My first year here, while teaching on the Saint Paul campus, I had a group of students make a wonderful video on how to milk a cow. One semester, I had an entire class engage in volunteer projects that they chronicled in blogs, videos, and photographs — that left us all feeling very inspired and excited about the work being done in the class. And just this week, I learned that origami is much more than beautifully folded cranes and other animals, but is the same process used in such things as making stents for medical procedures.

And then there are the ones that stick in your head just because they seem to come out of nowhere. This week one of the groups in our class was doing a demonstration on how to create a squirrel trap. Why, you may ask, would they be interested in this? Not only did they tell us why squirrel meat is more efficient than cow meat (it uses less joules per pound), but that it can be quite delicious (they gave a brochure to expound on the benefits of squirrel meat). But the part that made it most memorable was the “dispatching” of the squirrel. It was quite vivid — not in images or graphs, but in the language and body language used. We were told how to use different tools to take care of the job — and some of them were more personal than others (think hedge clippers here). And while this may seem a bit graphic, it was done in such a professional manner that it worked seamlessly and impressively.

This is why I like my job. Not because I’m regaled with graphic ways to dispatch of rodents, but because the students think outside the box to bring in information that they find interesting and offer it to the rest of the class in innovative ways (that don’t necessarily have to include technology innovations). I have yet to meet a student who wasn’t smart, funny, and engaged. Give them enough space, and they will give back tenfold.

As I write this, I’m into hour 15 of being without my beloved 17″ Macbook Pro. Her logic board failed yesterday, and I had to take her to the Genius Bar where I was told that while I had taken very good care of her over the last four years (and seriously, the Genius did say this several times), she would now be taken away from me for 5-7 days.

Gulp.

Let me set this up: I’m in the middle of writing my dissertation. I’m teaching one f2f course and 3 online courses. I’m doing a video research assistantship. I need Photoshop for my photography – the thing I do to relieve my stress from the previously mentioned work.

Five to seven days seems like an eternity.

But, those of you who know me, may say, “Dawn, you have an iPad and a Transformer Prime, both with keyboards. Won’t those suffice for 5-7 days?”

That’s the million dollar question. What I am noticing is that I turn to the Android tablet more because the websites I need to access are rendered better on the Chrome browser (as well as the native browser, and my newly added OverSkreen (which is a cool browser that gives that “window” effect by allowing it to overlay an app that is already in play).

What I’m also noticing is that I can’t be bothered with most social media because mobile apps just don’t give me the experience that my desktop apps do (and because of the lack of multitasking abilities (aside from the aforementioned OverSkreen) on the tablets, it is unwieldy to move back and forth quickly with copy and paste, deleting, unsubscribing, etc. These functions have come a long way from where they began, but holy cow these things are still very immature.

It’s forcing me to slow down, which drives me a bit crazy. I want to move quickly between browser tabs, classes, writing, data, etc. And don’t even get me started on data. My data is all in .jpg format (visual rhetoric IS fun, really!) and to look at it while writing about it is impossible, unless I print it all out (which would be 240 pages of printing (in color)).

Whine. Whine. Whine. First world problems. Yada-yada-yada.

I know this isn’t a big deal in the overall scheme of things, and I will manage over the next week. But what it has made me realize is how much I take for granted in the availability of my laptop. I love my tablets, and I find them to be excellent for short-term work management. But I haven’t found that I’m able to do everything I need to do, yet, with these magical little electronics — as much as I’d like to.

This is not meant to be a whining post. It’s more of a sharing of “what I’ve learned while in grad school” post, I hope.

Justification out of the way. Check.

I’ve always been a loner. Well, I don’t know if everyone would have seen that of me, but that’s how I’ve always felt. Sure, in high school I was in all of the right organizations and hung out with some really awesome people. But at the end of the day, I was happiest curled up with a book, losing myself in some other world (typically horror and/or fantasy). Maybe that came from moving around a lot as a child. I came to depend on my family for my social connections. I mean, they were always there; they typically got me (except for that time in my late teens when I shaved designs in my hair and my Dad definitely DID NOT GET ME). But overall, I had pretty cool parents and siblings I liked (despite the fighting).

That was a long time ago.

Insert domestic violence, geographic isolation, and aging through my teens, twenties, thirties, and forties here. These things affected my feelings of isolation even from the foundational support of my family. While somewhat pertinent to my state of mind, not at all interesting in this story. Check.

So I’m a loner. Add grad school in. Add in that I’m 1800 miles from the support foundation that I’ve relied on most of my life. Add in the lack of funds to travel home (unlike most of my fellow students who seem to be able to do this easily, or at least often). Add in the confusion about what “home” means anymore. Add in that I’m a 45-year-old woman without many relationships outside of family (I am lacking in the expertise to make this happen well). Check.

So my loneliness is not necessarily related to grad school, except that it is. I’m in dissertating mode, and I’ve become more of a hermit than I ever was. I have gone days without talking to a single person. I have gone weeks, especially during holidays and summer break, without seeing another person. And I don’t have my nieces and nephews (or even my parents and siblings) to call me up and ask me to come out for the day.

Add in the holidays. Since starting my PhD program, I hate the period from Thanksgiving (traditionally my family’s big holiday, but this seems to have waned) through New Year’s Day. There is Thanksgiving, my sister’s birthday, my birthday, my mom’s birthday, Solstmas (Solstice/Christmas/whatever), and New Year’s. Add in that my family is not really one for gift-giving, but we would go out for dinner on one’s birthday, so I don’t typically get anything on these days (and sometimes a phone call or card is even a miracle). (And really, I don’t care about gifts, I care more about knowing that someone took the time to think about me. And before you wonder if I give gifts, I do. When I’m able to go home, I go with gifts for everyone, and remember them all on their birthdays. It’s not because I’m better than them. I’m not. I just like to give gifts.)

And this has officially become a whining post. Argh. Check.

So I will end with one thought: pet-sitting has saved my life. Had it not been for the good fortune of meeting people who trust me with their homes and pets, I would have spent all of my holidays and birthday alone. Instead, I’ve spent this time (and during all of the previous years I’ve been here) with some really lovely furry critters who give me lots of unconditional love. And who make me smile. And who don’t mind that I’m a loner, because I do it with them.

Brought to you by the “This is all about me, belly-button gazing, lint pickers society of the Internet.”