New Kid on the Hallway

Social angst in an intellectual setting

I find it incredibly difficult to talk to my professors outside of class, and for some reason it really bugs me that I can't figure out why.

Partly it's just me, I suspect, since I never went to see my profs in their office hours in college or even in grad school if I could help it. (Because I didn't usually have questions--even when I should have had questions--and why the hell would they want to talk to me?)

I think some of it is a generic non-trad thing: I have become way more sympathetic to the non-trad desire that your previous life and career actually mean something, that you get some kind of credit for having done other stuff before going back to school. I keep wanting to talk about the stuff I know things about, rather than what I'm actually in law school to learn. Because, you know, I know stuff! Some stuff, at least! Even if it has nothing to do with the matter at hand! The stuff I know, let me show you it! I think I usually avoid doing this (or doing it too egregiously), but I spend the conversation wanting to do it and reminding myself not to, which makes me uncomfortable.

Which isn't meant to say that non-trads (or anyone) should avoid talking about their previous life/experience. Just, you know, as it's relevant. Not just for the sake of showing that even if you're the biggest dunce in the world at Civ Pro, you've actually accomplished stuff in the past.

And some of it is that it's weird talking to profs from the perspective of having been a prof. Today I met with my seminar-of-the-crap-paper-draft prof, who at one point was explaining to me how profs, when they write papers, go to conferences to present them so they can get feedback and revise them before they send them out for publication. And I really wanted to say, Dude, I am QUITE clear on how that all works, thanks. But I didn't, of course, because he meant well and doesn't know that I know all that already, and why should he? I haven't said anything about my background, because how is it relevant to anything except making me feel better about myself because I have a spiffy, shiny degree that most students don't? Even though I sit there dying to tell my profs that yes, I have a Ph.D., because really, I would like them to think that I, too, am spiffy and shiny. (Ideally, they'd consider me spiffy and shiny because of my brilliance in law school, but hey, I'd take anything.)

(I wonder if this is what a retired doctor would feel like going to see another doctor, who doesn't know their patient used to be a doctor?)

Blogging about crankiness instead of writing my casenote

(Half of which is due at midnight tonight. I'm doing terribly with writing things expeditiously this semester.)

Anyway, I'm cranky partly because of said casenote, because I don't feel like I've had a break from law school assignments hanging over my head in WEEKS. (My own fault, but still, crankiness-inducing.)

And partly because of the annoying people at the local Whole Paycheck Foods, who are so very very entitled, all the more so because they are wealthy but enlightened--they buy organic! they voted for Obama! they're deeply concerned about their carbon footprints! Which are all admirable things, don't get me wrong, but I wish they'd be a little bit more concerned about their shopping footprints, and not park their carts in the middle of the aisle, completely blocking everyone's path, and maybe move more than a centimeter when someone says "Excuse me" to them. (This one woman did this to me TWICE today. I, of course, was there by myself, with hair in a ball cap, wearing a cheap sweatshirt and jeans, while SHE was there with her precious teenage daughters, all wearing expensive faux-workout gear and expensive haircuts. So I guess I was simply supposed to accommodate myself to her importance.)

And partly because something in my kitchen STINKS, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is. It might be the disposal, because we haven't been cooking much lately, so it doesn't get run very often, and the little dribs and drabs of stuff sit and get icky. (Anyone have any brilliant ideas for deodorizing a garbage disposal?) There were some suspicious marks on the floor (which is fairly dark, so stains don't show up easily, lest you despair of my housekeeping), but I've mopped it and the smell doesn't seem to have gone away. Hell, I'm burning vanilla-mint fragrance in an oil burner, and I can still smell whatever it is. I cleaned the cat box, so it can't be that. But I am a little worried, because Middle Cat occasionally has litter box malfunctions and we'll find a little turd sitting in the middle of the floor somewhere. I can't FIND one anywhere, but I kind of worry she may have turfed one under the stove or something... isn't this a charming piece of information??

So, anyway, given that my choices for the moment are writing my casenote or scouring my apartment from top to bottom for the source of the stink, crankiness seems in order.

Now is NOT the time to get sick

But I'm tired, shivery, and my head feels full of snot. Wheee.

So this is going to have to count for a post today.

 

(From I Has a Hotdog.)

All the stupid little things that go into determining whether you like a class or not

You know, it's funny: I always leave campus on Tuesdays and Thursdays feeling like crap, whereas I leave on Mondays and Wednesdays feeling pretty good.

I just realized it's because on TTh, my last class of the day throws up a number of roadblocks on the path to feeling good about myself:

1. It goes till 5:45, and my internal clock slows down something terrible between about 4 and 7-8 p.m. I'm sleepy, I don't want to put any effort into anything, I just don't care; I want to go home and eat and sleep. (I don't get home till 6:30-ish, either.) On MW, I get out of class early enough to avoid the killer sleepies.
       
2. It's a biggish class, at least for how the professor runs it. He's probably one of the most Socratic profs I have, so there are people on call each day and he calls on them and grills them. (You sign up for the three days you'll be on call ahead of time.) Annoyingly, my three days have passed, and he only called on me on one of them (because there are enough people on call every day that he didn't need to get to me). Which would be fine except he does (in theory) grade on class participation (except the class is big enough that I suspect, speaking from personal experience, that this means a few people will get excellent grades and a few people will get terrible grades, and the rest of us will all mush around in the middle). Anyway, more importantly, if you're not on call, there aren't a ton of opportunities to speak up, which is what keeps me interested in a subject.
   
   Granted, I have another class that's around 80 people (this one is around 50) and I like it just fine, but this second prof speaks generally to the 80 people, he doesn't grill you socratically, and my problem is I don't find listening to a prof's conversation with one student very engaging or compelling. Of course, I may just like second prof better. But I really think there's a difference between listening to a prof have a conversation with one student, and listening to a prof talk to an entire class, in which he may well call on different individuals at any given time.
     
   So my point is, I don't feel engaged or involved in the class, and so at the end of it, I come away feeling dumb, and as if I've just wasted 75 minutes. (It's the flip side of how I used to walk out of class on days I'd spent the whole time lecturing, and feel like a failure as a teacher since I was the only one who talked the whole time. Now, I feel like a failure as a student because I haven't contributed anything.)
       
3. It's a required class, which means that many many people in my year have taken it, to get it out of the way. It has by far the highest concentration of 2Ls of any of my classes this semester. So on the one hand, I know who more of the people are in the class than in some of my other classes. On the other hand, that means I feel much more surrounded by cliques I'm not part of than in my other classes, too; in my other classes, no one clique has enough critical mass really to affect the social atmosphere of the class. I often walk out of this class feeling like I have no friends and no one wants to talk to me because they're all too busy chattering away to everyone else.
   
   (Doesn't that sound pathetic and self-pitying? Writing this, I realize that it's partly because 1) the people I do consider friends mostly aren't in this class, and 2) those in the class that I consider friends have other, closer friends who are in the class as well. And I'm sure there's quite a lot of me being anti-social that's going on here. But still, it means I come away from the class feeling unhappy.)
      
4. It probably doesn't help that I have a really sucky seat (end of the row where the seats are in horseshoe formation, so I only ever really get to see the prof in profile, and there's only one person next to me to talk to).

It's just funny if you compare this to the seminar I have on Wednesday afternoons (dubbed by one student as "Seminar in Gays and Abortion"), which has 8 students in it, so we all get to sit around in a circle and shoot the shit about things like what's wrong with Scalia's jurisprudence, I get to talk and therefore stay involved in the conversation, the prof is talking with all of us at once (not very hard with 8 of us), one of my actual friends is in the class, I like all the others, and it's too small/mixed to be dominated by any one law school clique. (I mean, it's not even big enough to be its own clique.) And, of course, it's also taught by second professor, who I like better.

Although I'll grant that first professor told one of the better law school stories I've heard. A student's cellphone rang, with a goofy ringtone, and we all laughed. First prof laughed too, didn't get mad, and told us the following story:

"So, I was representing the plaintiff in a tort suit, and I had this expert witness I had to put on the stand, so we could get the damages up as high as possible. I needed his testimony, but he was TERRIBLE on the stand. He was a little wizened old guy, a real mole man, and I knew the jury was going to hate him, just HATE him. But I had to use him because I needed his testimony.

"So I've got moleman up on the stand, and he's just as awful as I thought he was going to be, and I'm dying inside; the jury hates him, we're not going to get our damages, this jury's going to award $1, he's killing me!

"But then his cellphone rang. And it was his twelve-year-old daughter's pink cellphone, playing a Britney Spears pop song. And you know what happened? The jury laughed, just like you did. The moleman fumbles the phone out of his pocket--'I'm so sorry, I thought it was turned off! I don't even know how to use this thing, it's my daughter's phone!'--and the jury now knew that he had a daughter and she liked pink and Britney Spears, and it totally humanized him. 

"And they awarded us every penny."

So, yeah, funny stories. But still not my favorite class. Maybe if I keep in mind all these stupid little factors contributing to my dislike, I can get over it (or at least enjoy a little serenity now).

Update in three completely unrelated acts

I know most of you who read here have probably seen this on Twitter or Facebook already, but Eldest Cat had to leave us finally earlier this week. He was eighteen, and had been sick with hyperthyroidism for years; he had a heart murmur, his kidneys felt ominous, he walked crooked, he weighed less than half he did in his prime, and he continued to lose weight. The vet had given us medicines to try to halt the weight loss, and he lost four more ounces. He was clearly hungry - he wanted food all the time - but it didn't make a difference. Wednesday night, he cried for food much of the night, and he was so weak that he couldn't counter his crookedness anymore, so he kept falling over into things. He was no longer comfortable.

I'm glad we did it, and our vet was - as always - amazingly nice and supportive. He went very peacefully, without fear. But when they took him away, I had an awful moment of thinking, Wait! I take it back! I made a mistake!

I got Eldest Cat just before my college graduation; I'm not sure I know how to be a grown-up on my own without him. And when I hear (Formerly) Middle Cat's collar-bell jingle, I still can't help wondering, for a minute, which cat is that?

* * * * * * *

The last day of my internship was Friday. It was a good experience: I learned a lot, I liked the people I worked with, and the big boss told me a number of times that he was happy with my work, volunteering to be a reference for me, so I accomplished pretty much what I set out to accomplish (I wanted a good reference and a writing sample I could use, but everything I worked on turned out to be too confidential to use as a sample, so nothing I could do about that).

Something valuable I realized, I think, was that I do like working with people, more than I realized. I think I used to underestimate how social teaching really is; academia values research more highly, and research (in the humanities) is a relatively isolated endeavor, and so I always thought of academics (and myself) preferring to work independently. And it's true that historians don't have traditions of collaborative work the way that people in the sciences and social sciences do. But when I started my internship, I was one of the only interns there, and got given work to do and sent off to my cubicle to do it. And that work was interesting, but became much MORE interesting when there were other interns around and I started to be able to discuss it with them.

Anyway, it was a good experience. Certainly other summer opportunities would have given me different experiences, but overall, this was a good one.

But I am still looking forward to not getting up to my alarm tomorrow.

* * * * * * *

Wish me luck at the tailor tomorrow - I pick up my amazing suit, and am crossing my fingers that it looks decent. I bought it thinking, Of course, the tailor can take the jacket down a size, tra la! But it turns out that the tailor didn't want to take in the shoulders, which, it seems, is reasonable since it turns out this is the most complicated kind of tailoring you can do, requiring you basically to reconstruct the entire jacket. But which I didn't know at the time I bought the suit. It's just frustrating, because I can't buy a suit in a size that fits both halves of me, so I'm stuck either taking in the jacket or letting out the bottom - and many garments don't have enough extra fabric to let out, so that's no good, but if every jacket ends up too big in the shoulders and therefore gapping across the chest, that's no good either (there are always separates, of course, but they're harder to find). I mean, I'd pay for the darn shoulders to get taken in! But if the tailors don't want to do that... What I need is a size ying to my yang, so we could buy the same suit in two sizes, and I could take the smaller jacket and bigger bottom, and she could take the bigger jacket and smaller bottom. Sigh.

I also have to see how the pants look. To get pants to fit me properly in the waist, they tend to have too much fabric in the, um, rise. But since these are non-stretch pants (all hail the glory of Lycra), they can't be too fitted when I'm standing up, or they'll be too tight when I sit. Which perhaps really means I should just wear skirts all the time.

Ow

So, I have all sorts of things I wanted to say in response to the hair-dye comments, but this evening, I went out for my thrice-weekly walk-run thing (did I mention I'm doing this Couch-to-5K program? No? So, I'm doing this Couch-to-5K program, which starts you out with very little running and works up gradually, and I've got to the point where I'm running half the time, and am quite enjoying it, actually, although an arthritic snail would pass me with ease, but anyway...), and between being a little sleepy and not picking up my feet, and futzing with my iPod, I managed to trip on the delightfully uneven sidewalks and fall flat, COMPLETELY shredding my knees and semi-shredding my hands on what is clearly ancient and deteriorating concrete. So I'm not feeling very conversational now, and will have to get back to the hair comments tomorrow.

(I think almost worse than the massive gashes in my knees was ripping one of my fingernails in half, well below the quick - but I'll let you know after my knees have the night to stiffen up.)

(And can I say, I'm a little peeved no one even asked if I was okay? I passed at least two people, with blood dripping from my knees down to my socks, and no one said said a word to me. I guess they figured if I was up and moving I was fine, but still!)

Two things

1. Yay, thank you for all your comments on my last post! They were most cheering. (And the day did get better - I was kind of tired and whiny.)
      
2. Why, how, WHY are there WASPS flying in our window?? We live on the TENTH FLOOR, people. Of a cinderblock high-rise. We have no screens on our windows because, well, it's the 10th floor and they'd blow out. We have our windows open. It's a lovely fresh sunny morning (supposed to turn into a warm afternoon), and in the last 15 minutes THREE WASPS have invaded the apartment! (NLLDH has killed each of them for me, thank God.) What are they doing here?? There is nothing to eat or do whatever it is wasps do to things sitting up here in the sky. There isn't even any wood handy, as this building is made entirely of man-made materials. This is ENTIRELY unacceptable! Is it perhaps my payback for gloating to someone recently about how there aren't any mosquitoes out here???
   
   (Just so you know, I am so very, very, very deathly afraid of wasps.)

Because I'm cranky about finals, I'm going to complain about L.L. Bean

So, today I got a L.L. Bean women's clothing catalog in the mail. It featured their new "Contemporary Fit" line, which is clearly an attempt to be a little more trendy, maybe a little more youthful (though still in a preppy New England way, of course--I mean, there's a skirt with lobsters on it!). It's kind of moving in a J.Crew direction. And I thought some of the pieces were honestly kind of cute--like this and this.

And then I saw this notice:

"Sizing is different than our traditional sizing; see page 40 for more information."

So I saw page 40.

Apparently "Contemporary Fit" means smaller:

• The largest size is an XL, but while an XL in the traditional sizing is 18-20, an XL in Contemporary Fit is a 16.
• Not only that, but the Contemporary Fit size 16 is different from the traditional sizing: the waist is smaller, and the hips are smaller (but wait! the bust is bigger!).

Now, for this post to make sense, I have to come clean, even though it doesn't thrill me to do so: I generally wear an XL. In numbered sizes, I wear a size 14-16 on top, and (in many stores) an 18 on the bottom (in some stores a 16 is fine; I've even had 18 be too small; and I remember one skirt in Target which was almost too big in a 14).

And yes, just writing these numbers down makes me want to issue all kinds of disclaimers about my big bones--which is such a cliche, but yes, I do have a big frame--but really, whether my dress size means I'm as big as a barn, or, say, simply trying to find something to clothe a 6' 4" frame, is irrelevant here: for whatever reason, I'm too big to wear these clothes.

Now, there are already quite a few stores that don't go up to a size 18 (*cough*J.Crew*cough*), or that offer size 18 online but not in the store (so I never get to try their stuff on ahead of time), and I can live with that (it's frustrating, but I figure, it's far worse for women who can't fit into any mainstream sizes, and I often can).

But it's pretty galling when a store that normally offers clothes in my size (L.L. Bean goes up to a 20 in Misses sizes, and 26 in Women's) decides to come out with a new! shiny! cute! cool! contemporary! line--but not for me. Because, apparently, I am too fat to wear new! shiny! cute! cool! contemporary! clothes.

(Well, cool by L.L. Bean standards, anyway.)

* * * * *

Coda: I sent L.L. Bean an e-mail letting them know about my disgust. Within an hour or so I had a response, thanking me for my comment, and letting me know they'd passed my comments along to the Corporate Office, which wouldn't be able to respond individually, but takes customer comments very seriously. Because L.L. Bean's reputation is the result of listening to customers over the years.

The customer service person then added:

"I would like to remind you that we still carry all our traditional item in a traditional sizes and fit [sic]."

Dude, apart from the grammatical errors? SO how to miss the point entirely.

* * * *

(And if anyone feels like making any "well, if you weren't so fat..." comments, you can just save the electrons. Thanks.)

Hmmmm

So, I was just reading someone's blog, and this person said they had to go prepare to teach for the next day.

For some reason, my brain read this as suggesting that I needed to go prepare to teach for the next day, and a nearly had a panic-induced heart attack.

A sign that I've moved on from my previous profession, or a sign of how deeply it's marked me, that even now I can freak out that I haven't got my (non-existent) work for it done?

(I have very-much-existent work for the classes I'm taking, but that's different--no one else is relying on it. And in fact, no one will even know if I get it done for tomorrow, because I have to miss class because I've been called for jury duty. Not, I know, that anyone in their right mind is going to put a law student on a jury, but I have to show up so I can be properly dismissed.)

Stream of consciousness

Gah, I cannot get myself to start working today. I think it's because I've managed to thoroughly freak myself out about the amount of work I need to get done by the end of the semester (if I want to do well in my classes, anyway!), and also to freak myself out about the fact that if I don't do well, I will NEVER GET A JOB (which I probably won't even if I do well, since the economy is so awful that no one anywhere in any field is ever getting a job ever again). So I'm feeling a little pressure. But since I MUST work on this stuff NOW, I'm not allowed to do anything else, which means I may NOT go to Target until after I've SPENT TIME OUTLINING (although I'm just going to get allergy meds which I'm out of; instead, I sit here sniffling). Oh, and I'm also freaking out that I have no clothes appropriate for my summer job, and I desperately need a pair of new black flats (as in my current pair is literally fraying at the seams), so clearly I must RIGHT NOW pore over the sales pages of all the major clothing stores, and spend much time trying to figure out if I can in fact wear the kelly green chino skirt on sale for $12, even though I have nothing to wear it with and try to avoid BRIGHT colors on my bottom half as a matter of principle, because the skirt is $12!!!, and to ignore the voice telling me that there's a REASON it's on sale for $12.

Aren't you glad you don't live in my head?

Screw it, I'm going to Target.