New Kid on the Hallway

Oh, look: start a job, stop posting

It's basically been two weeks since I started my job (and two weeks since I last posted! bar the 9/11 comment). So far, I'm loving the job - the people are great, the work is interesting, the physical setting is fairly nice. The learning curve is fairly steep, and this last week was more exhausting than I'd expected. I think the pace will ease up as I get a better handle on how everything works (and also work out what a can/can't do on a 9-5 schedule).

I am also LOVING not having to commute 45 mins.-1 hour to work, they way I commuted to school for the last three years. Sure, it was fun to spend that time singing along to my iPod at the top of my lungs, but I'll take a 12-minute ride on the bus from the end of my street to across the street from work any day. I also kind of like going to work with the rest of the working world, and coming home with the rest of the working world - it helps emphasize that division between work and home. Which I also love.

Mind you, I don't think it's coincidence that last week, I twice dreamed that I was driving a car I couldn't control, careering around corners going way too fast, running into people and buildings. But I'll get over that. 

A bad historian but a good medievalist

I have spent a little bit of time this morning pondering why I find all the 9/11 commemoration distasteful (for me, personally; I am not trying to tell anyone else that they are not entitled to commemorate, or remember, or grieve, in whatever way they find most helpful. Especially not those people who actually were in NYC or the Pentagon during the attacks - while I was smack in the middle of cornfields in the middle of the country. There was probably nowhere LESS likely to be subject to a terrorist attack than where I lived, so I cannot claim any insight at all into the experience, nor into what helps someone survive and process such an experience).

Maybe one mini-anecdoate is revealing: out in the middle of those cornfields, the local radio station started playing Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA almost non-stop, which absolutely INFURIATED me. Did they not understand the lyrics to the song? Did they not understand that the song is a CRITIQUE of the United States? At the very least, it is not a straightforward anthem of celebration. But that is how many around me seemed to understand it.

This was my experience of 9/11: a tragedy, and lots of genuine heroism, hijacked by a knee-jerk reversion to unthinking jingoism. 

I know that is not what it means to a huge number of people, perhaps everyone else besides me. But because I didn't experience any of the events of 9/11 firsthand, the actual day is overshadowed by the things I dislike that came out of it, that I have experienced closer to firsthand: jingoism, Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, anti-Islamic sentiment, and security theater.

So I have to admit that I am not especially interested in today's commemorations. The good parts of such calls to memory - the reasons why they can be valuable - are not mine to claim or comment on; the bad parts of such calls to memory are not things I want to consider.

* * * * *

About being a bad historian: I also find no impulse whatsoever to archive anything surrounding this event. It seems forced, artificial; let what survives, survive. Let what doesn't, not. This, to me, puts events in their proper perspective. I feel no need to record things for future historians. They can play the hands they're dealt, surviving-sources-wise, as we historians all have. 

But then, if I remain a historian at all, I am a medievalist. I studied things that happened 500-600 years ago. I remain very skeptical that a mere ten years has given us any perspective on this event at all. (I read a comment somewhere that the space devoted to 9/11 in textbooks has been shrinking. Maybe that's actually correct; maybe it doesn't deserve as much space as it had previously been given.) I would rather leave assessments to future, more distant viewers of this particular past. 

 

Written in semi-response to Tenured Radical and Dr. Crazy.

Post-academic life

Recovering academic problem: It has been slightly disconcerting to realize how unnerving it was NOT to go back to school this year.

I've done the 9-5 job thing a couple of times now, if only for relatively short periods of time, and so far, I've really liked it; I liked that home was home, not the place where I lived AND worked, I actually really liked heading to and from work when most other people in the world are also heading to and from work for a change, and weekends and evenings take on an entirely new meaning when you can leave work AT WORK.*

But I hadn't realized until this year that I have never once not "gone back to school" at the start of the school year. I started pre-school at 4, and have been going back to school, in one capacity or another, ever since. (There were about 2 fall semesters in there when I was off teaching at the start of the school year, but I was still a student/prof those semesters, so I figure, they count.)

It's a surprisingly disorienting feeling. For one thing, I keep thinking that because I haven't started school, no one else has, either (at my law school, I mean, not at other schools; it's like I keep thinking school hasn't started yet, but it's going, to, really), and so keep getting surprised at references to classes etc. on FB and so on. For another, I've just felt completely adrift - unable to accomplish anything (mostly because I haven't really had much of anything I have to do, just some vague general goals). It has felt very much like limbo.

Of course, that all ends when I start my new 9-5 (or whatever) job TOMORROW. Which means that just like going back to school, I get to spend today stressing about what the hell I should wear on the first day.

 

 

*I realize this isn't always the case in law, of course. I had an amusing conversation with a prof once who had become an academic because she found work-life balance impossible as a lawyer; I said I found work-life balance in academia impossible because you never got away from your work, and at least with a non-academic job you left your work at work at the end of the day. She said, Not if you never go home. Which is true, but honestly, I'm not likely to get one of those kinds of jobs - not winning the pie-eating contest means you don't have to eat more pie. Moreover, it doesn't quite make sense to me that the only option other than working at a firm that wants 80-hour weeks from you is...to go into academia? Anyway. Here's hoping for a humane government job sinecure!