Mein Doktorvater

I had a very meaningful interaction at the conference last weekend with my college senior thesis advisor, Prof. F.! I've always adored him, and I had a really good (if challenging) experience writing my senior thesis under his supervision. I wrote my second junior paper with him, in which he forced me to articulate my own theory of the proper method of interpreting a Greek tragedy; it was very painful, and the final product was not very good, to put it mildly. I then asked him to advise my senior thesis, which I wanted to write on Euripides' Bacchae. He told me no, he did not want to read a senior thesis on the Bacchae. Hahaha! I look forward to the day when I can say that sort of thing to my own hapless students. After some wandering in the desert, I ended up working on the Christus Patiens, the Byzantine passion play and cento written out of modified lines of Euripides. I cried many tears in my thesis carrel, and somehow wrote 120 pages in the final month. And lo, now I'm an academic.

Sadly, I also always felt like Prof. F. never really remembered me and didn't really care about what happened to me after I left for graduate school. We'd see each other briefly at conferences, but he never stopped to chat or ask me about my progress, etc. It's possible that he simply didn't recognize me (though I am constantly told that I look exactly the same as I did x years ago, which may or may not be a compliment).

Now that I have a job in the field, though, he stops to talk to me! And this year, at a reception, he told me, "I've never liked the term Doktorvater [the German term for a male doctoral supervisor; mine, though, is a Doktormutter]. It's too patriarchal, patronizing, and all of that. But I feel differently when I think about your thesis. See, at minimum, a supervisor is supposed to read an entire thesis and make sure there are no glaring errors. That's the minimum. At the maximum, the supervisor adopts the same quellen ["sources"] and treats the problem as a joint problem between professor and student. And that's what I feel like we did with the Christus Patiens. We were digging through the language, which I'd never read, digging through these French articles, wondering what it all meant...that was fun."

I was so moved! I still remember this college experience so vividly – hitting the library when I woke up, breaking for meals, packing up at 11:45 pm; wading through my own mental mush and the frustration of not seeing how the ideas would add up; finally turning in something that I thought might have accomplished something. In some ways, I still think that my senior thesis was the most original work I've ever done (mostly because no one else bothers to write on that text). I'd like to turn it into an article someday – and I'll remember to thank Prof. F. in the first footnote.

the nerdly pleasures

There are a lot of not-so-great things about being a junior academic. But there's still one thing I love: I get to spend time in beautiful libraries and read nerdy books! It's not so easy anymore; from 2001-2013, I was no more than a twenty-minute walk from a world class library. Not only did those libraries have incredible resources, they also had the will and motivation to make those resources as accessible as possible. I could order books delivered by hand to my mailbox; I could ask for articles in the stacks to be PDFed and emailed to me, so that I didn't need to search for them myself. Ah, the halcyon days of yore!

Learning to use the academic resources in New York has not been easy. Like so many other things in NYC, everything you want is available, in theory, but in practice, those things are difficult to access, prohibitively expensive, oversubscribed, or inconveniently far away. And so it is with the books. To get reader's privileges at the library at Columbia, I had to apply to a University Seminar and be accepted; but I'm not allowed to check out anything or use the online resources from off-site, so I have to be physically in the building (an hour and twenty minutes from home) in order to access the information. The New York Public Library is easier to get into, but most of the scholarly books are kept in New Jersey, so you have to order them a few days ahead of time, and even the books on site take over an hour to be delivered to you from the closed stacks by the library gnomes. You can't take those books home with you either.

I complain a lot about the schlep and the waiting, but once I get through them, it's so good. Here's Columbia, with its special non-circulating reading room devoted to Ancient/Medieval Studies:

 

 The view, when I need to rest my eyes

The NYPL, after sunset

 

And here's a book that I couldn't access anywhere - except at the NYPL. It's a 1912 dissertation written in Latin by a German scholar, and, as you can see, it's just crumbling into bits. No library in all of ILL was willing to ship it out (all copies are probably in similarly poor condition), so it's a good thing I could find a local copy!

New Year's Resolution: 2014

This year, I want to stop panicking, tamp down the anxiety, and do what I need to do. As this meme's popularity fades with 2013, I'm giving it one more boost into the new year:

Happy new year, everyone!

coping

I've been thinking a lot recently about a conversation I had with my department chair several weeks ago. It seemed fairly unremarkable at the time, but my chair started our discussion by saying, "I was thinking about all the issues facing us right now, and I started to feel overwhelmed, so I sat down and made a list of things that we do actually have control over, and I wanted to share them with you." Now I realize that he was teaching me about how to survive in this job: focus on what you can actually control.

Part of the issue with adjusting to my job is that the boundaries between what I can or can't control are not yet obvious to me. This is probably due to my inexperience. A crisis will arise, and I will respond as if there's something I can do about it; it won't become clear until later that the issue was out of my hands the entire time. This is frustrating, but educational, and I'll learn.

At the moment, there are some things I know I can control. I want to focus on them over the next several weeks:

• Research: this is my time to bang out some articles. Although my job still makes demands on my time, I do have the time and space to focus on my work. I need to make the most of it, because when this time is over, it won't be nearly as easy to spend an afternoon reading and writing. When I was sick of finishing my dissertation, I never imagined how precious I would consider my research time!
• Well-being: the main assaults on my mental health are job-related stress and anxiety about getting Dave and myself to the same geographic location on a permanent basis; these are both long-term issues that will take some time to address. But what I can do now is make the effort to cook and eat healthfully, be disciplined about getting enough rest, and exercise (e.g., running twice a week and meditation of some form). These don't directly address the stressors, but I hope they'll make me stronger and more flexible (mentally and physically) when I have to deal with them.
• Kindness: yeah, I'm pretty stressed out. But I have so much to be thankful for, and I can practice my thankfulness by being kind to others. I remember this little tiff I had with a woman in my choir back in 2005, when I was stressed out about applying for graduate schools. I was so sleepy during rehearsal, that I was reading a magazine when the sopranos were not actively rehearsing to stay awake. The woman behind me scolded me, which made me indignant. She emailed me later that night to apologize, saying that she had been out of line. I responded by explaining that I was sleep-deprived because I was going through a lot of stress, and she replied to say that she totally understood – her mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's the previous year, and she had had to put her in a nursing home, and bring her father home to live with her – and that I could call her anytime I needed someone to talk to. Umm, yeah you win, lady! I should have been more gracious towards her in her outburst. I've been trying to remember that lesson ever since: you never know what's going on in the lives of people around you, and a small gesture of kindness may go a long way in someone else's life.

Just typing out these plans have made me feel a little better. My hope is that at the end of the next few months, though I'm unsure about where things will stand on various issues with my program, I'll be able to say that I was disciplined about my research goals, worked to stay sound in mind and body, and was kind to others (esp. Dave!).

research library

I love research libraries. I love the library here so much that I have been known to write sappy, overly emotional emails in the wee hours of the morning to generic accounts about how much I love what you do and thank you for making my life so much better every single day.

But not everyone feels that way, especially when they're working in the library. I was amused by these handwritten labels on the knob of a non-functioning radiator in a library carrel:

Amused, yes, and saddened too – for what (former) PhD student doesn't recognize these states of being?

self-control?

I've had trouble focusing this week. I know what I'm supposed to be doing: taking the final chapter of my dissertation and turning it into a standalone article. The problem is that I'm still not entirely sure what that means. So I tackle small, discrete tasks in fits and starts, never developing momentum or becoming truly engaged with the writing.

Enter procrastination. Everyone has his or her personal weaknesses in this regard, and mine lie in the realm of internet news articles. Reading the news is ostensibly a virtuous habit – I'm becoming a better informed citizen, learning more about how the world works, and satisfying my curiosity about the many interesting things out there! What could possibly be wrong with that? Well, it becomes pretty obvious that something is wrong when I constantly click over from my word processor to my internet browser and refresh the New York Times homepage for the umpteenth time that afternoon, just in case a new article was published in the previous three minutes. I know I'm wasting time and avoiding real work, but I can't stop it.

While I was – what else? – procrastinating on the NPR website, I clicked on this article:
Apps Block Social Media Because Users Can't Stop Themselves.

Social media sites have gotten so difficult to ignore that millions of people are using apps to stop them from wasting time on the Internet. So if you lack self-control, no problem. Just download SelfControl — the app.

Although social media/email are not my prime weakness, this struck a chord with me. I often need the internet while I'm working, but certainly not every site. So I downloaded SelfControl and have been trying it out! (Love my modern lifestyle: instead of developing personal discipline, I download it for free!) One thing I noticed is that simply by adding sites to my blacklist and setting the timer, I was much less tempted to even try visiting those sites. But that doesn't last forever, and unfortunately, I find SelfControl to be rather buggy. I love that it's free, but I don't love that it lets me into half the sites I blacklist.

Further searching (procratinating?) led me to LeechBlock, a Firefox extension. Also free, but much more powerful. I can block certain sites during set hours of the day, or block those sites after I've used up an allotted amount of time on them, or combine those conditions! Since my working hours are irregular, I'm currently using it with the "Lockdown" option, which blocks listed sites for any amount of time I specify (usually 60 mins). That block of time allows me to snap out of the mindless-refresh-compulsion that comes over me when I don't know how to start writing.

The goal is not to become a productivity freak (though I do love me some Evernote). I am well aware that a fully-lived life needs relaxation, activities just for fun, rest, social time. My hope is that by cutting down on procrastination, I'll have more time for the things that really rejuvenate me!