Bad.

The grant is a revision. Of the original review panel exactly 1 person remains on the roster. And he has to recuse himself due to conflict. Good? or Bad?

Leap Year

As seen on Rev Dr. Mom's. I spent this leap day listening to two very important people give talks and trying to be pleasant and sociable in face of discovering that my grant was unscored. I'm not good with precise memories in that way, but if I look back 4 years....

~February 29, 2004--year before I graduated with my PhD. Probably I was working on my prospectus and teaching. I was living in the midwest so it would have been cold and wet. Spring around the corner

~February 29, 2000--I would have been just finishing up my masters. Living in a major metropolitian city. Doing an applied librarianship post and driving all over town. It was the first time in my masters training when I thought I could perhaps stomach doing this job longer than it took to finish my training. A key professor took me out to breakfast later that year and talked me into a research career instead of a practical careeer though.

~February 29, 1996--In the second year of high school boarding school. On the rocks with my BF at the time. Trying to figure out what I want to do with my life - everyone else seemed to know. It was a tough year.

~February 29, 1992-- 8th grade. Spent in Texas. My family moved a lot.

~February 29, 1988--4th grade, Spent in Louisiana. Which even though it may have really crummy regular public schools actually has fantastic special ed. I had a very good educational experience there.

~February 29, 1984--kindergarten. Kansas. Mrs. Eplee was my teacher. I walked to school. Snow angels. I had slick boots and the alley used to ice over and we'd "skate" down. It was lots of fun.

Freaking Out

So I was under the impression that my major grant was not going to be reviewed until mid-end March. I was just clicking around on Major National Funding Agency's website and discovered that it is actually going to be reviewed tomorrow. At 1pm ET.

The grant is a revision. Of the original review panel exactly 1 person remains on the roster. And he has to recuse himself due to conflict. Good? or Bad?

And my 3rd year review is next week. Do I call the grant officer and see if I can get my scores early? So that they are in for my review? Or is that not done? (It would be a real coup if I have a fundable score on a grant this size by year 3. But it would certainly cast a pall on things if it gets ANOTHER low score). Do I ask, but only tell if it's positive?

I'm very good at faking coolness about these sorts of abstract decisions that are out of my hands. I'm even good at actually feeling cool about it when it is 3-6 months away and I don't know who is on the review panel. So not cool now. Feeling total stomach butterflies.

Grumpiness

I am totally in a grumpy mood today. Here's why:

• It snowed. Again.
• My TAs apparently can't run a review session. Evidence - 2 different students emailed to complain about the quality. One was awful close to a flame. I've had lots of questions emailed about a topic which was simple and basic that apparently got explained in a weird way. They didn't know definitions of basic terms. They knew they were unprepared in advance and didn't tell me.
• On an unrelated topic I have a grading issue to solve because of their lack of communication with a student. On the one hand I should back them up. On the other hand they didn't really communicate well with the student.
• My paper, which has been submitted to our flagship journal for two months, has to have the review coordinated by someone other than the editor in my area because of a conflict of interest. This person has not yet assigned it to an associated editor or reviewers because "she couldn't think of who to assign it to since it isn't her area"....
  
• My photo class was changed from a day about composition to attending a photo lecture the instructor wanted to attend
• I had to ask three times to get back a cord the instructor borrowed from me.
• I'm stressed about packing etc and can't seem to carve out time or get motivated to start the project.
  
• I have no food in the house because I'm moving. But I still have to eat for 3 weeks.

Edited to Add: I made homemade pizza tonight and managed to burn it.... Since that is the only thing that will satisfy my current craving I ordered in pizza and am $20 poorer and just now eating 3 hours after dinner time.

How much do we give up?

The conversation about how difficult it can be to be in academia is making the rounds.

What Now talks about the identity she has as a tenured professor and how she isn't ready to give that up. From there I ended up at Squadratomagico and Highly Magnified, Thoroughly Educated (who actually began the conversation) talking about how being a professor actually can cause you to lose various identities because the work becomes all consuming. So I started thinking about what have I given up to be where I am.

I'm a single woman. Have I given up romantic relationships to be here? Perhaps... But I am not sure they were healthy relationships to start with. Certainly, my desire to date someone who shares my faith and my own quirks interfere at least as much as my job does.

I live far (1500+miles) from my family and see them only a few times a year. Have I given up ties to my family to be here? Yes, I think so - I would certainly visit my new nephew more often if I could drive rather than fly. But maybe not because I can fly fairly inexpensively. And in some ways my career allows me more flexibility to be with family - I was there when my grand mother died and when my aunt was in a coma precisely BECAUSE I work an academic job and could take significant time off as long as it didn't interfere with teaching duties.

What about hobbies? outside interests? I think that I have those. If I worked in a less demanding job I might have more. But I also would probably like my job less.

And then I found this post by propter doc that echoes my own sense more closely I think.

Ranier Marie Rilke writes:

I know your profession is hard and full of contradiction of yourself....I can only ask you to consider whether all professions are not like that, full of demands, full of enmity against the individual, saturated as it were with the hatred of those who have found themselves mute and sullen in a humdrum duty. The situation in which you now have to live is no more heavily laden with conventions, prejudices,and mistakes than all the other situations, and if there are some that feign a greater freedom, still there is none that is itself broad and spacious and in contact with the big things of which real living consists. Only the individual who is solitary is like a thing placed under profound laws and when he goes out into the morning that is just beginning or looks out into the evenings that is full of happening and if feels what is going on there then all status* drops from him as from a dead man though he stands in the midst of sheer life.

I don't see that the trade-offs I'm making are unbearable. And I'm not sure that they would be any different if I worked at any other job that I loved (because any job that I loved would challenge me and that challenge would play out in ways that mean less free time and more job focus). Being a medical doctor or a pastor or a translator or a foreign aid worker are all jobs I would consider seriously or have considered in the past. They all make specific demands and place requirements of one sort another on a person that can be inconvenient. In the meantime, I know these inconveniences. Distance. Mentally consuming. Status driven*. And I think I like the devil I know better than the devil I don't know.

*Maybe the thing I fear the most is becoming hungry for the status academia confers. But that's another post.

Wit & What's left

I just finished a day long seminar on suicide and bereavement counseling through my church. I found the day in the class emotionally taxing. The discussion of adolescent depression and suicide risks and what it is like to be a family member coping with such a situation was very moving. The grief books were presented much more distantly. I know many of the people in class well enough to know that they are dealing more directly with the issues of death and grief than one might hope for in a class of this nature. As we talked very distantly and impersonally about the stages and processes of grief I couldn't help but wonder whether hearing the material was difficult. Whether they were checking in on themselves and where they were with their own grief. You could watch some of the emotions play on people's faces and know that this was a moment of great difficulty and also great comfort. I wonder how the class would have gone differently if we had talked about how the books made us feel instead of talking about the book.

And I came home and what did I find in my mailbox from netflix, but a movie called Wit. Wit is about a single, childless professor diagnosed with ovarian cancer and treated in a teaching hospital. It follows her from initial diagnosis to death and is very moving. On another day I might have cryed my way through it. But the parts that were most difficult to watch were the ones where someone is doing a simple kindness in the cold medical setting. When the nurse puts lotion on the professor's hands. When a former professor comes to visit. If you work in any clinical setting and haven't seen this, you should. A reminder of the humanity of us all. A reminder that we each face our own mortality at some point. I hope I can have the grace that this character has when my time comes. I wonder how her treatment would have gone if people had talked to her and about her as a person rather than about her cancer and to each other.