Bah

Humbug! I just found out that the state and the (allegedly anti-waste) governor have signed off on the remodel. Granted, I'm grumpy that I'll have to clean out my office and move into some godforsaken basement halfway across campus from the mail room, but the thing that really gets me is that we can get 23 MILLION DOLLARS to spruce up the building at the same time that we are firing opting not to renew the contracts of certain talented and experienced instructors, cutting the number of classes offered in our department, toying with the idea of increasing class sizes (the current limit is 25, which is already too big for a 50 minute language class), and reducing available summer grants and research budgets for grad students, all because we don't have enough money. 23 million for a bathroom on every floor and fancy white boards in every classroom, and I'll bet you my left arm that this money would have done a whole lot more good in the world if, I don't know, it had been given to one of the state-run public health or elementary education programs that were cut recently. 23 million for central air conditioning, and the cost of a single ride bus ticket is up to $3 during rush hour. Also irritating is the cheery tone in the email announcing the good news:

This is the culmination of more than a decade of effort by
faculty, staff, and students in collaboration with the college to bring
the importance of language and culture and the needs of the building to the
attention of the University and the state government.

Right. They're definitely renovating our building because now they recognize the importance of language and culture. Yep, that's it. /end rant

In other, less terrible news: the bathroom project is nearing completion. Pictures coming soon. Also, the sun is out, the windows are open, and those sirens up at the school were just a training exercise.

Professional hazard

That post on procrastination that I promised you? This is it. Right now, I'm putting off grading 23 quizzes, writing two grant proposals, and reading for class. I expect the reading to be lovely, since it's Real Literature and not theory, but I'm saving it for last as a motivator to get the other stuff done. It's not working that well....

You know as well as I do that there are always lots of good reasons to procrastinate. You're using my blog to procrastinate right now, aren't you? And I'm sure you have good reasons for that. When I started graduate school, I foolishly believed that I would be better at getting things done, organizing my time, etc. because it seemed like there was no way to do everything that was being asked of me otherwise. Little did I know that assignments in grad school are a lot like playing chicken. It's taken me three years, but I am now approaching the steely resolve of Kevin Bacon in Footloose. I'm not going to be the one to steer my tractor off the road. In case you have no idea what I mean:



The biggest reason for this is that the culture of the academy does not in any way, shape, or form cultivate advanced planning. In fact, I would argue that it actively discourages such silliness. A real-life example: I wanted to plan what courses I would take over the four semesters I spent getting my M.A. so I could file some paper work with the graduate school as instructed in the graduate student handbook, but curriculum was changed and course offerings for the next semester weren't decided on until the week before registration opened. I once took the initiative and read ahead in a class, only to have the professor change the syllabus by eliminating half of the reading I'd already done.

This is even worse when it comes to funding decisions - competitions for grants and fellowships are announced anywhere from one to three weeks before the deadline, but decisions take much longer. This is annoying when you're waiting to find out whether you'll have $2,000 or $5,000 to get you through the summer. It is excruciating when you're waiting to find out whether you need to book a ticket to Europe for a research institute or if you can agree to attend a wedding or if you can reasonably plan an anniversary vacation.

The stress and anxiety of the summer funding cycle have given me a lot of trouble these past few years, so I'm really enjoying the poetic justice of the situation in my department right now. See, our building is slated for interior renovation, which it sort of does need (though not nearly as desperately as some administrators would have you believe). This renovation depends on funding the university may or may not receive from the governor, funding we will find out about sooner or later. Meanwhile, though, they've scheduled the move out of our offices and into "swing spaces" (or dungeons) for the last week of spring semester, and today they sent an email reminding us that:

We still don't know one way or the other about whether the renovation will be going forward, but in any case, spring break would be a good time to organize & purge your offices.

Let me clarify this for you: we might not be moving at all, but we'd like you to use your vacation to get ready anyways. You know, as a favor to us.

Someone needs to learn about motivating employees. The only way I'm going to do this over break (or maybe at all) is if I have a bunch of other stuff I want to do even less.

If only...

Right now, I'm in hour 2 of my third try at rescuing my laptop. I'm writing this on my much older but apparently much better desktop while I wait for a scan to finish up. Grump.
Maybe it's because of the isolation of my job, but I think my inner voice is getting louder. Yes, that sounds insane. I mean, at least it's still inner...eventually, after enough silent hours hunched at my desk, and to the great annoyance of my inferiors more junior colleagues, it will become an outer monologue, and then I'll know I've really arrived as an academic.
Anyways, during this horrible, terrible, stupid quest to extend the life of my laptop until I have time to research what I should buy to replace it, I've spend a lot of time with my inner voice. And it's telling me I could not have chosen a less useful more different path than what I should have spent the last decade studying. I should have been learning computer science. I should have studied html for my foreign language (a real option at Mac) instead of German or Russian or Turkish.
Grump.
Update: it's two days later, and I think my laptop is clean again. Clean enough to use, at least - I'm writing this on it. Score ten points for humanities! I need all the small victories I can get.

Top 10 reasons I haven't posted lately

1. I am an academic (there, I said it), which also makes me a professional procrastinator. More on this in a later post.
   
2. The longer I wait, the greater the pressure from the three people who read this to post something mind-bogglingly funny/enlightened/inspiring/newsworthy.
3. There are a lot of other blogs out there, and sometimes it's more interesting to read them than to write on mine. Just admit it, that's why you don't have a blog.
   
4. January, the month when it's too cold to take my fingers out of my sleeves to type, and nothing worth reporting seems to be happening anyways.
5. Winter break, that special time when there are no important projects I should be doing instead of blogging. Right now, I'm avoiding a mid-size ethnographic project proposal, two grant applications, and approximately 150 pages of reading, half of which is written in Fraktur, a special gothic-style script designed expressly to cause headaches, and all of which is written in very dry, very tedious, very academic German.
   
6. Bathroom remodeling.
7. Trying to think of ways to blog about how silly certain aspects of my professional life are without getting fired/ruining any chance of future employment in my field.
   
8. The great Laptop Virus Catastrophe of 2010 (I kept thinking I'd just wait until I had it fixed to blog).
9. Toying with the idea of moving my blog to Wordpress, putting ads on my blog, making it a Real Project.
   
10. Watching seventeen iterations of this epic battle every day that I am home and should be doing productive things:

George attacks from Lindsay Lawton on Vimeo.

A Little Ray of Sunshine

I see that it's been over a month since I posted. The thing is, I wanted to post, meant to post, kept telling those well-meaning people who encouraged me to post that I would definitely post again soon, maybe tomorrow, or sometime next week. But I also wanted to keep this blog from becoming Lindsay's House of Whining, so I decided to wait until I had something positive to report, foolishly thinking that Something Positive was right around the corner, that it would jump out and surprise me when I least expected it, except I was sort of expecting it because expectation is a necessary component of hope, and also dizziness and light-headedness are side effects of the drugs I'm on for my headaches, so chances are that if it really surprised me I would probably trip over it and hurt myself somehow.

Aaaaanyways, point is that I've had a hard time lately coming up with Good Stuff to write about here. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of good things in my life, which I truly, deeply appreciate on a daily basis, and I could go on and on here about my wonderful husband or the great new sweatpants I got at Target last week. It's just that I've had a hard time focusing on them (or anything, really) since the headaches started, and then the weather turned bad and school got hard and Rob got the flu and I got the flu and the weather stayed bad and the house still wasn't finished. Which leads me to the reason I'm finally posting, even though my head still hurts a lot and I'm having a hard time with the side effects and school is still hard and it continues to be the coldest, soggiest October I've ever witnessed: the house is finished!

Well, basically. There are some little things that still need to be taken care of before we can completely sever our relationship with the contractors, but I'll take good news where I can get it. The roof isn't leaking and there are storm windows to keep out the rain and we don't have to lunge to get up to the porches because we have stairs again. In case you aren't sufficiently impressed, here is the before picture:

Not bad, huh?

The Headache

I've had a headache for several days now. This is the Headache to End All Headaches. It has its peaks and valleys, but it hasn't gone away completely no matter how much advil I take. And despite the heightened awareness of all the horrible and unfair and outrageous things going on in the world that comes with being back in school and taking certain classes, this headache is ruining my life. Cue melodramatic whimper. (Ok, it would make you grumpy too. This is the time to bail if you'd rather not have to witness more grumping.)
The thing is, I've never had a headache like this, and I've had headaches all my life, including migraines for most of college. There is this stabbing, sharp pain when that comes out of nowhere and brings the rest of my life to a standstill: what I was saying, what I was doing, which bus stop I get off at, where I put that glass of water. It is breathtaking. And really disruptive.
And so I put aside the fact that I really don't like being called a hypochondriac and I went to the health clinic and waited in a room full of people in face masks who may or may not have swine flu to meet with a nurse, describe my symptoms and medical history, wait in an exam room, describe my symptoms again, do a neuro exam, clarify my symptoms, answer the same questions several times (do they do this to see if you're making up symptoms, or because they didn't listen to you the first time? ugh.), listen to the RNP assigned to me say that it's stress, then that something must be making an artery in my brain spasm, then that it's probably stress and "we don't always know that we're stressed," then that she honestly doesn't know, then after consulting with a physician that it's an "atypical migraine" and that there's no way to know what triggers it or how to prevent it, but there are some pills she'd like me to take that might cause dizziness, nausea, and fatigue and to call her next week.
And then a nurse came in and said my test results were in and I have mono. What's that? My name's not Shannon? Woops, wrong room!
When politicians talk about fixing the health care system, I wonder if they know the kinds of feelings that come from episodes like these. I'm in kind of a lot of pain, and instead of help or even reassurance, I get charged $20 for some glorified tylenol and to be told that it's either nothing, something they won't/can't treat until it messes up my vision, coordination, or speech (mess it up more, I assume, than the drugs they gave me), or something they don't understand any better than I do.
If anyone knows a good primary care physician in the Twin Cities, now would be a good time to mention it.

Welcome back!

I'm back at school now. It's been busy, obviously, as you can tell by the recent lack of posting. Welcome week at the University of Minnesota can be summed up like this: we're all going to get H1N1, and oh, right, due to the economic downturn we have to all do our part and pay higher fees. I am not exaggerating when I say that I get an email about H1N1 every single day. The advice? If you feel sick, stay home and drink lots of fluids. If you live in a residence hall, though, you should go back to wherever you came from. Oh, and if you're going back where you came from, please don't use public transportation to get there. Because the first thing most students will do if they come down with the swine flu is to walk back to Coon Rapids.
In other news, work on our house is going forward. We have said goodbye to our old siding, our storm windows, our chimneys, and one back door. And our yard. And what I now understand as the luxury of opening windows without letting bugs or the noise or dust in. The upside is that this project is a great excuse to put off cleaning/filing/organizing anything and everything.
All the same, it's nice to be back in a routine that's a bit more challenging than messing around in the garden all day. The dogs are adjusting fine, but the garden is having a hard time understanding that I just can't be there picking tomatoes and beans and canning all the time. We're going to have a long talk this weekend and see if we can't work it out.