Exam I

I gave the first exam in all of my exam-oriented classes today. Overall, I'm pretty happy with them. I do recall only too well the days of being a student, faced with dozens of vocabulary words and many more concepts or people to recall, that taking exams is difficult. In many ways, I relied on my existing vocabulary, skills in logic and reason inherited from my time as a debater, and my relatively good memory, to get me by without studying.

Because I hate to study. I really enjoy learning. I love it, in fact. But (other than listening to someone who obviously doesn't know what they're talking about) nothing bores me more than studying. Partially, my gifts work against me. I learn the general idea of things quickly, and use outside knowledge to supplement it, so that if I've got a list of terms (or worse, formulas) to memorize, I feel like I know it all long before I actually do. And because I always like to be learning, once I feel like I've got the gist, I want to start learning the next thing. It is the dominant problem in my life: I have learned many things, but mastered few (or none).

And so, looking out at the ever-unreadable faces of my students as they took the exam, I did have sympathy for them. I have sympathy for the fact that many of them have no interest in Sociology, sympathy for the ones without my natural gifts, and sympathy for the ones who are too bored to memorize - be they gifted or no. I have sympathy particularly for those who grew up without a surrounding culture that prepared them for college, for using grammatically correct English, and for the expectations of college professors.

Despite all of this sympathy, however, I must evaluate their learning. And in doing so, I must force them to memorize some things, particularly the vocabulary associated with the social sciences. In the future, I hope that I will be able to devise methods for engaging in the process of evaluation but encouraging the use of sociological vocabulary and concepts, but for now, I hand them a sheet with many congruent circles and a pencil.

Getting Settled

I'm feeling a bit more comfortable in the office now, but less so in the classroom. I've had trouble keeping up the level of creativity I usually like to employ in lecturing; it's devolved to basically lecturing the whole time, and then showing a video clip here or there. It could just be the material, but I still don't like the trend. Hopefully now that I've been able to streamline my process for class prepping (thanks to the slides provided by the publisher) I'll be able to spend less time retyping words from the book, and more time coming up with interesting ways to get the students involved.

Also, that should hopefully give me time to do some work on my research. I've got a couple of grants that need writing, and ideas that need cultivating. One of the things that I have been thinking of lately, that could maybe get developed into an idea, is the idea that new media and the "connected" lifestyle lead to fractured senses of self. I never really found this idea compelling, though I will admit that I do subscribe to the idea that the self is a construct that is created in interaction with other people. However, I think that the new media, rather than fracturing the self, create a continuity that reifies the self as the set of artifacts that exist in (primarily) the digital world.

It is a truism that, once on the internet, data never truly goes away. Similarly, a self, constructed online, is not as ephemeral as the conversational and gestural interaction of two people. Text conversation and message board posts exist as conversation histories and archived discussions. Video communication is easily recorded and shared with the world (surreptitiously or otherwise). Even the less tangible, interaction-in-the-moment reality of face-to-face conversation is often captured as digital video or photographs using cameras and phones, later posted online using Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube.

Not only are the traces of interaction thus solidified from emphemeral, momentary phenomena, but they are also distributed across individuals. Just as we might back up data by spreading it across several storage solutions (i.e. DVD-ROM, hard disks, online storage, flash drives, and hard copy printed on paper), our selves, created in interaction and recorded by these media, spread across multiple people. Each recipient of an email, each person who downloads a photograph from Flickr, and each viewer or downloader of a video from YouTube retains a record of the self presented in that medium. In any of these cases, the construction of the self is out of the hands of the individual, and exists as a collection of the material evidence of the self - the photographs, the video, the recorded speech, and the text communication.

In this context, the self is not fractured, splintered and ephemeral. Rather, the individual is chained by the digital record of their past behavior to a reified, solidified self that is visible to the entire world, accesible to all, and free of context and true interpersonal contact. Individuals can not rely on geographic and temporal separation between selves to exist.

Examples of this abound. Recently, several medical students were penalized for "misconduct" online . Some of the information the students presented was in violation of ethical codes, but in some cases, it amounted not to violation of the patients privacy, but of the boundaries between the students' selves. It is not unethical for the medical students to drink to excess on the weekends, but apparently it is unethical for them to reveal that they do so. However, in the digital world, they are unable to fracture their self based on context, and the self is reified and compressed into a single expression, that of the sum of the digital selves and the interpersonal selves, permanent and undeniable.

Payday

Or, at least, the day we turn in our time cards. It will be nice to have the bank account going into higher numbers again, instead of just slowly declining. We're still living fairly comfortably, but are (and have been for a long time) feeling that twinge of worry in our stomachs every time we spend money. Like so many other things during this time of transition, it is the unknown that is terrifying: the unknown of how much we'll have left over after paying the bills, the unknowns of having so little in the bank, the unknown of Amanda's paycheck. So, we wait, and eat noodles and rice.

My classes have been going fine, but I am clearly spending way too much time preparing them. It's become apparent during the last week or so that if I continue at the division of time I have right now, I'm never going to get any research/committee/grantwriting done, because I'm always prepping for the next class. So I think it's time to dial back my expectations for myself a bit, and use the materials that come with the book a bit more. Besides which, the students are probably hungry for some more lecture and decreased emphasis on the activities.

I'm hoping that this rebalancing will enable me to get some work done for myself in the next weeks, and have an article out for review soon, not to mention finishing the revision of my dissertation.

And on the 7th day...

It was the first day of week 2 today. My morning class, Advanced Criminology, went pretty well, but I do feel a bit like the students are unaccustomed to the seminar style. Some of them at least seem engaged, if not really advanced, while others seem utterly disinterested. A lot of drops as well, but I don't find that surprising, as I am making some fairly heavy demands of them. On the other hand, it's a shame that they're not willing to try to stick it out.

I got really nervous about coming into work today. I'm not sure if it's just that the enormity of trying to manage an entire semester has finally settled on me, or I'm going through the pain of relearning what it is like to have a daily schedule and appointments, or just the general worries that having a new job entails. In any case, I've got that I'm-going-to-get-yelled-at feeling, even though I haven't done anything wrong. It reminds me of when I was a kid, and I'd leave some incriminating piece of evidence for some small wrongdoing uncollected. Consciously, I'd be unaware of the mistake, but unconsciously, I'd have a feeling of heavy dread in my guts that would snap into the crystalline panic of realization just at the moment my parents told me they needed to have a talk.

I suppose in some ways, it's the same fear now: the fear of being found out, of being a fraud and getting exposed. The fear, in other words, that I don't belong here and can't hack the job. I suppose that is indeed the fear everyone has at a new job, and that by being proactive and diligent I'll eventually get comfortable and convince myself that I actually am who I am (to borrow a phrase). In any case, I hope it passes quickly.

On the Eve of My Trip

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for my defense. I'll spend that whole day driving, arrive sometime in the evening, and then defend early (for me) in the morning, at 0900. I only have to give a 15 minute talk, but then I can have questions for up to two hours and forty-five minutes. Hopefully, though, it will be much less than that, I'll be able to get it all done quite quickly, and I'll be able to have a good lunch with some friends from grad school by noon.

I've got plenty of confidence now, but I must admit I was a little bit rattled earlier today when I got an email from a committee member complaining that my results section was incomprehensible. Turns out, he/she just had to read a bit farther and it all became clear...wish we could have read ahead and then not sent me the email indicating that may dissertation was rubbish, rather than sending the email and then redacting it with an "oops-sorry I guess it's just fine" email. But, the fact that I was able to respond to his questions and criticisms did remind me that I have worked hard and thought through my work, and I should be able to defend it without any difficulty on Thursday.

In other news, I met my neighboring faculty today. They were very helpful and friendly, and it was nice to start forming some relationships around the department. I'll be looking forward to meeting more people soon.

The First Day

Training all morning. I was really anxious going to bed last night (Sunday night, as it is now the early morning of Tuesday). It's been a long time since I was that wound up going to sleep. But the familiar voices of Stephen Merchant, Karl Pilkington, and Ricky Gervais were nice background noise, and I managed to breathe deeply, and find a sense of calm in knowing that whatever will come of this job, I will always have many other things to keep me happy, not the least of which are Amanda and music.

I had long forgotten, but there was a time when I went to bed with that kind of anxiety evey day. During High School it would come every Sunday, when I knew I would have to leave the freedom and safety of home for the jungle of school the next day. When I knew not what future ending academic catastrophe, or unlooked-for social blunder would humiliate me and provide me with the worst sort of fame. Or in grade school, when I had little understanding of the rules of the social world of children, and often did face embarassment or scorn or, at best, puzzled rejection. It is, without a doubt, a direct result of that long early bout with anxiety which has given me the inner resources I can now claim, not the least of which is the ability to talk myself out of worry as I fall asleep.

The New Guy

Like every diary I have ever kept before, this one started out a bit focused, and then degenerated into the scribblings of a madman with ADHD. As Stephen Merchant once said, "It's like something you'd find written by a psychopath. There would be like weird ravings, pictures of women with knives in their faces, and this sort of nonsense." But despite that, I've actually got something to say here, and a new plan for the diary.

First of all, tomorrow is the first real day of my new job as a professor. There isn't much to do, other than go in for the new faculty training/orientation, but even something as simple as sitting in an auditorium and listening to administrators prattle on about policy for three hours seems like a huge looming beacon of the realities of having a J.O.B. It is the proverbial tip of the iceberg, with semesters (God, years) of work and effort stretching out, hidden, behind it. It's like when you block out the Sun with your thumb, only in this case, the Sun is the future, streaming toward me, and the thumb is this meeting, which reflects the light (i.e. the existence) of the Sun, but which also blocks it from my direct view. In any case, terrifying and exciting at the same time.

Then, Wednesday, I embark on my drive to my alma mater, where I will defend my dissertation, obtain the title "Doctor" which I have worked so hard to garner, and party myself sick for a day or two before returning here, where my classes begin in earnest on Tuesday next. Needless to say, I will feel much better two weeks from now. However, even then, I fear that there will be a considerably longer adjustment period, in which I will have to adjust to working not at home, waking up during the morning hours, and acquitting myself properly in all the administrative (which I am mentally pronouncing ad MIN is tra tive) tasks of which I am still unaware. I hope that, come December, my completion of the semester, and my actual receipt of my degree, I will feel considerably more comfortable here than I do now. As it is, I am more than a little apprehensive.

Perhaps because of this apprehension, I hope to transform this journal into a record of my life during this opening chapter in my academic career, if as nothing more than a place to pour out my more unpleasant emotions so that I may sleep easy on nights like tonight.

The Nature of God

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

--Epicurius

More than the mechanics

The Thomas Crown Affair is one of my favorite movies. It's funny, because it's directed by John McTiernan, director of Die Hard and Predator. It's a great movie, but his commentary on it is so revealing that I think it is as good as any other movie to own.

Eggshells

Amanda is an egg. She is tiny, and fragile, and has many parts that could be easily broken. I feel like I must be defensive of her, and wrap her up and keep her warm, surround her with my protection. Her armour exists, but it is thin and shallow, and I must act as a buffer for it, or when I can't be a buffer, allow her to ablate her pain and rage into me. I can take it in, because I am a vast reservoir of cool and calm, and she can lean on me. I lean back too. I love her, like nights huddled together for warmth when there was little heat, like words that are too sweet to be overheard or remembered, like quiet nights out in the country with a girl, where there is so much space between you and anyone to stop you from feeling the fullest love you can feel. I love her in a way that I can barely describe, and I would miss her, if she went, in a way that I certainly could not know until it came, and I pray that it never does.