New Kid on the Hallway

A glimpse inside my head - look away, look away!

Damn, I hate bars.

In many respects this is a rational hate. I don't drink, I don't like to talk to people I don't know (or at least don't have any kind of connection to me), I don't smoke (though admittedly you can't smoke in most bars now anyway, so that's not so much of a problem - and besides, I don't actually generally mind being around smokers), and I don't like having to shout to engage in conversation. So, really, why the hell WOULD I like bars?

And yet, not liking bars makes me feel like a complete and utter loser. LOSER. Big L right on my forehead. Because everyone else there seems to be having a high old time, to be the life of the party, to have lots of people to talk to, and it's me, just me, who is the problem.

It's funny because tonight's abortive attempt at hanging out in bars with my classmates was making me feel old, and ugly, and boring, and old, and out of place, and old, and like a social misfit, and old. Did I mention old? But then I remembered that I have really NEVER liked bars, and have always felt out of place and stupid in them. So I think it's probably more that bars bring out my social anxieties, and right now, with this law school crowd of people at least, my social anxieties happen to center around being old, rather than that my age has anything to do with my social success.

I should think of age as making me wise, but instead, this society being what it is, it just makes me feel ugly. And dumb. And a loser hanger-on who has no friends because who would want to be friends with me?

(I should mention that in grad school I had lovely friends who are as much older than me as I am older than my classmates now. I feel bad for not being able to recognize then the weirdness they probably felt, although maybe I'm projecting that, and also I feel bad that I don't give some of my younger classmates the credit they deserve by refusing to believe that they now, like me back then, could actually consider someone 15 years older a true friend.)

What's especially dumb about this (my whole attitude tonight) is that 1) the youngest person in the group was clearly not thrilled to be at this bar, and bailed fairly soon after I did. So it's not at all about age. And I don't think of hir as a social loser - I just think of hir as someone who doesn't like bars. And 2) the people I'm with are actually NOT (for a change) all that much younger than I am - one is 25 and one is 26, so there's that, but one is 30 and the other two are of indeterminate ages I don't know for certain, but I believe well into their 30s. So it's not like I'm some kind of dinosaur in the nursery, and the problem here is clearly not about my age - it's about all the dumb social anxieties I carry about with me, and have since I was a teenager, and probably will until the grave.

(The other thing going on here, probably, is that I'm a dyed-in-the-wool introvert who has spent time around other people around the clock since Thursday morning - and I mean intensely interacting with people I don't know that well, nonstop - and having a minor crisis about my social ineptitude is a great mechanism for propelling me away from other people for a while. So this is all a bit mountain-out-of-a-molehill-ish. Kind of a shame, really, because I'd been doing so well up till now! I even met totally new people earlier today and we really hit it off and I enjoyed talking with them a lot. So to relapse in this way is a bit of a bummer, but I guess my minor social success this afternoon should remind me I'm not actually a hopeless social misfit, even though I feel like one sometimes.)

So yeah, that's how the evening's drawing to a close - with me feeling like a loser. What's funny is that loser is the word I keep coming back to, the one that really encapsulates how I see myself in these moments. What I don't know is what it is that a loser is actually losing, and what one is supposed to win and how, but the metaphor still works for me anyway. Is "loser" a universal thing? Is it everyone's word, or just mine? When you're feeling down about yourself, what is the label that you pin on yourself?

Even I have to draw the line somewhere

I am about as dedicated a cat lady as you can get. We used to have three of the little buggers, and if our remaining cat wasn't 18 and a crotchedy old lady who was terrorized by one of our former cats, and we hadn't made a promise to her that she could live out the rest of her days as undisputed queen of the apartment (and it is, I promise, undisputed) - well, I'm sure I'd have more than one cat right now.

I tell you this by way of preface. It's necessary for understanding the rest of the post. To wit:

My law school (like, doubtless, all the others) has these big composite pictures of each graduating class - a great big frame filled with all our lovely little head shots. These things are scattered all over the building, the oldest ones relegated to the basement (for instance, the class from the year that I was born had ONE woman graduate), and getting more and more recent as you ascend in the building. They're fun to look at (or depressing - see ONE woman graduate). I've looked up a few of my bosses/supervisors. I've admired the changing hair styles and fashion. Right near my locker, there's one guy at eye-level who was so TOTALLY channeling early-Friends Chandler Bing. I also like to look at what would have been "my" class if I'd gone to law school right after undergrad. I so know the hairstyles in that composite. 

Anyway, some people clearly get way into being "creative" with their pictures. There are the two guys whose pictures are next to each other, each pointing out of the shot at the other one. There's at least one guy wearing ye olde fashioned judge wig and holding a gavel. One guy's holding up a bunch of fanned-out money (stay classy, dude). You get the idea.

And a number of folks aren't alone in their picture. Some people hold a baby (I had thought this was mostly women, but actually, now that I think about it, I think it's mostly men who do this). More common, however, is people getting their picture taken with their dogs - both men and women, though I think more men than women. There are quite a few happy Fidos grinning along with their graduating owner.

And then, there is the Cat Lady.

Because one of my predecessors in law school thought it was a good idea to bring her cat to school and get her class picture taken with her cat.

Now, maybe the cat was immensely gregarious and liked going to law school for the day. Maybe this woman had tons of friends in the class who'd been over to her place and met her cat and loved her cat. Maybe the cat had become an unofficial class mascot.

Or, just maybe, this was a Crazy Cat Lady.

Because dudes, I love my cats. I mean, I LOVE them. They are my furry children and they run my life. 

But there's no way in hell I'm getting my composite picture taken with my cat.*

 

*Just as well, since I got it taken in October. I went with the lawyer uniform - a black blazer and white blouse. I figure that way, my clothing will be boring as hell, but timeless, and therefore invisible. So hopefully no one will find anything TOO amusing to point out, as my class's picture makes its inevitable way down to the basement.

Histoires ou contes du temps passé

I know I've said a bunch of times that I don't miss academia, and I don't, but I figured out something tonight that I DO miss, and that's publishing.

It's not like I was remotely a publishing goddess. I have three real, good articles in my field. (I also have a bunch of book reviews, a co-authored thing that in the context of my field doesn't count for much, and a few commentary-type pieces. Oh, I have a bunch of conference papers that I like, not to mention 100+ pages of book that will never see the light of day, but those don't count, of course.) But I miss taking part in that kind of academic conversation.

Because it's funny - when I was writing this stuff, I never really thought of it as having anything to do with OTHER people. I wrote because that was what you do, you think about things and then you write about them, and you publish because that's the coin of the realm. But I never quite expected anyone else to READ this stuff, and was always flabbergasted to find out that anyone had done so.

The thing is, of course, that people have, because that's also what you do. They've pretty much only read one of my articles, because it's the best-placed, in a book with lots of big shots in this (not very big) subfield, published by a good press, and available in paperback. (One of the other articles is in a dense but widely-ranging collection, published in a crazy expensive hardback by a respected but very very niche European press. I don't think ANYONE's read that one.) But amusingly enough, people in this subfield HAVE read it, and have cited it, too. Someone's even assigned it in a course.

(What's especially amusing about this? I originally wrote this article in grad school. In a seminar I took in my THIRD YEAR of grad school. Or was it even my second? I know I finally finished the revisions on it in 1994. Mind you, the collection didn't come out until 2001, when I was in a tenure-track job, which worked out well for me. But the point is, when I wrote this thing, I was pretty damn green. And it's still a pretty good article. Not great, but good.)

(The second one is, meh, fine. I really like the third one. No one seems to have read that one yet, either. But oh well.)

What I find interesting is how much the accretion of time works to your advantage. When I first started going to conferences, I didn't know anyone outside of my grad program and felt tiny and insignificant and out of place. By the time I left academia, I wasn't any more significant, but I loved conferences - in part because I got to see a lot of friends, but in part because I had a niche, a professional crowd to run with. It's not like I set out to create that or worked very hard at it; it's more that after over 10 years of being in the field and attending the same conferences, you get to know people and they get to know you. I'm sure there are things I could have done to accelerate this process, but it happened on its own regardless. I wish that I'd REALIZED that would happen, when I was a terrified grad student; it would have made life much easier!

People citing my article is like that. The dumb thing has been out for a decade now (shoot me, I'm ancient!), and if you're someone writing on that subject (which is a small but constant number of people) (after all, we're talking the Middle Ages; there are only so many sources), you're probably going to run across it. Some people are going to feel the need to reference it (almost invariably not historians. It's not very history-y).

In fact, this basically supports my central belief about academia: that perhaps the most important quality for academic success is persistence.

All this commentary was inspired by vanity - I googled myself tonight, and found more citations to that article than existed the last time I googled myself (at least a year or more ago).

I also found a few people who had thanked me in their acknowledgments, which I hadn't known about. That, more than the scholarly citations, made me miss my past profession.

Which also suggests that it's not really the publishing per se that I miss - it's the human connections that went with it. And the feeling like I knew something, and was contributing SOMETHING to my chosen profession. It's going to be a looooong time before I can say that about law. I guess what looking at my academic career reminds me is that showing up is half the battle, and that 10 years from now
I'll be in a totally different place.

And that really, 10 years goes by pretty damn quickly. I have to remember that most of all.

Sometimes law school is fun

One of my profs, earlier this week:

"The material we're going over today is really, really important for your understanding of the law in this course. The only problem is, it's really, really BORING.

But I'm not above bribing you. It's like they say about kids, you're not supposed to bribe and you're not supposed to threaten, and I say, What else is there??

So I brought you cookies."

 

 

(Which were, of course, organic Paul Newman cookies, as befits the law school I attend.)