Is there no sin in it?

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to care about This American Life, but this particular show about how a 10-year-old from northern Michigan became the penpal of History’s Greatest Monster (1988-1991) is really impressive. She wanted a cool hat like the ones he wore in his news bits in the US, and ended up going to Panamá to meet him. Great show.

I now make my retirement into the “kind of people who like TAL.”

Lord knows I hate catcalling. There’s a guy up the street who does it every day, and is increasingly nasty, to the point that I dread needing something from the store he works in because he’s so hostile and awful. It all started with “Hello” and has now escalated to an absurd sucking/smooching/staring awful thing. I hate him, and was just thinking about it today as I, yet again, decided to put off going to the store for olive oil.

So, after making my gross fat-free beans and rice for dinner, I went out with Bave and had a lovely time that ended around 3am, when we got a cab back to Brooklyn. Splitting the difference between our places, I still had a few blocks to walk and decided to hit the all-night grocery store so I could make an omelet in the morning. It’s 3am and I don’t like running into people as I’m going home at 3am, and I see a guy clearly cross the street in the middle of the block to walk past me. Aw shit, I think, someone wants to chat. Any dude who needs to chat at 3am on an abandoned street should know that there’s a high likelihood that the chick is just going to walk on by. I think of all the times this has happened before, when I’ve ended up yelling, “IT’S 3AM. I GIVE NO ONE DIRECTIONS AT 3AM!” But I’m in a good mood from spending a good night out, so I’m not going to be weird about it.

He says, “Hey there, Superstar!” and walks on by.

I laughed. I got my olive oil, as one of three weirdos doing grocery shopping at 3am, and went home.

I just got an email from my landlord that saluted me with “Hi W/B!”

OMG, I thought. My landlord reads my blog. He’s admitting it to me. I should acknowledge that. But how did he find it? Isn’t that weird? That is weird. Should I… say something? “You know who I am?” Too weird.

So I just wrote a response about the content (favor needed, something mundane) and ignored the salutation. Weird. How weird. He knows who I am.

Then it hit me:

Welcome Back.

Pseudonymous blogging has the power to make one both paranoid and vain.

In other news, I’m entering psychoanalysis next week! How fun! OK, so it’s not the multiple-times-a-week stuff, but therapy, done by a psychoanalyst. Hopefully it will be slightly more awesome than my previous experience of therapy, which was me talking to a nearly-silent trainee, who had a camera on me the whole time, and would occasionally pop into my monologue to say, “You’re so strong!” Well, duh, my problem is that I have wicked-awesome coping strategies for short-term survival. Obviously, everything underneath my meticulously-groomed sanity is a fucking wreck. The analyst seems really smart and nice, and I have a good feeling about her. We shall see.

Just to get this out of the way, because I know my Prudence-hatred is overly-well documented, shorter Yoffe: “Even though I was technically in pretty good shape before, I indulged in a luxurious resource to make me feel more attractive, but I still hate myself, so it’s OK. Am I right, girls?” Along the way, she has some insightful thoughts about how humiliating it is to have a “35 inches, 28 inches, 37½ inches” figure at 40-something, and how “alarming” it is to weigh 127.4 pounds. She receives much gratification from being horndogged by a septuagenarian perv at the gym (”proof it was working”), but laments that “I never got in bathing-suit shape (unless the suit is the Speedo LZR Racer)—the blubber content of my stomach could be used to prove that humans once shared a common ancestor with cetaceans, and I still avoid three-way mirrors.” What the hell is “bathing-suit shape”? And how can any woman who is “alarmed” to reach 127.4 pounds claim that her “blubber” is inhuman? I keep reading her damn columns because I can’t figure out whether I think she’s mean (I can’t wear a swimsuit at 127.4 pounds; what are you thinking, Fatty?) or just sad. It’s one thing to take up the serious problem of anorexia and self-loathing that primarily affects women. It’s another to reinforce that self-loathing as a reasonable response to having a body that is, by any measure, of healthy proportions. I expect that kind of shit from Cosmo, which is why I don’t read Cosmo.

It’s also why I don’t watch television. A Netflix account, an internet connection, and a decent library seem to fill my entertainment needs pretty well, so I’ve managed to avoid TV except while on vacation. My mom doesn’t get around very well anymore, so we tend to watch a lot while on trips together. I’m sure she thinks I must be the most humorless feminist harridan of all time, but watching TV is just such a huge culture shock if you don’t do it all the time. People in real life (at least my real life) simply don’t behave this way. Is there a single character on a fictional network program who isn’t rigidly neurotic about gender performance, to the point that entire plots revolve around men hating themselves for not being masculine enough and women hating themselves for not being feminine enough?

One of the weirdest things that has happened since I stopped watching TV was that I started being accused of not knowing how life really is. My father claims I’m ridiculous for not acknowledging that women are usually stupid and vain. My mother claims I’m hopelessly quixotic for imagining that I could date a man who isn’t a dick-swinging chauvinist. They’re both constantly telling me that I don’t understand how gay and bisexual people really are, because I keep referring to people who exist instead of stereotypes from sitcoms, which is their only contact with the queer community. And God forbid I try to argue that almost none of the people of color I know think it’s hilarious to ironically play out racist stereotypes to entertain their white friends. All of my evidence seems to come from this weird place I call “the world,” which is, it seems, a figment of my imagination. What happens on TV is the real thing.

It seems that right now, the most intense stereotype on TV is the masculine male. I’ve bitched about this before, but OMFG, can a man on a television program do anything other than remind us that he has a dick? When you can boil down pretty much any male dialogue to “I’m a man, so [bizarre and irrational desire],” it’s hard to think that the TV version of masculinity has much to offer the world other than conspicuous consumption and mindless hate-fucking, with the promise of sudden and terrifying violence if anyone gets in the way of either.

The only area of improvement I’ve seen, at all, is some tiny budging around femininity. Now expanded a teensy bit beyond the role of orgasming into a 6-oz. cup of fat-free yogurt, there are at least a few women on TV who seem to speak in voices within an audible frequency range, and may even say things that are smart, salacious, and funny, some of which don’t even mention shopping for shoes. What’s odd, though, is that, as women take on more recognizably masculine traits on TV, men seem to leave them behind somewhat. All their time is spent reminding the viewer that they do indeed have a penis and not a vagina. Five seconds later, they remind us again that they still have a penis. Thirty seconds later, they once again verify the lack of a vagina. And these are the reasons why they cannot—surprise!—do any of the traditionally masculine things that women are now doing, like being smart, stoical, determined, intelligent, funny, or even desirous of having sex. (TV men seem to use sex exclusively as a way to prove to other men that they, yes, really do have a penis.)

I know a lot of men in real life. (Some of my best friends, etc.) Some men are indeed assholes. Some are violent, cruel, sexist, or thoughtless. Most of my acquaintance are generally pretty nice, good listeners, funny and smart. They mean well. I highly doubt that even one of them, aside from a few freshman boys, would be willing to accept “I’m a man, so…” as the sole reason why they do the things they do, outside of a joke. Most people seem to believe they have free will. Why is it that TV viewers tolerate this absurdly stereotyped automaton of masculinity, especially when it never seems to be used to support a stereotypically masculine “virtue”?

Of course, my experience of TV is extremely limited. I sincerely hope someone will come by and tell me that there’s some great popular sitcom character who’s a guy who is neither stereotypically masculine (and isn’t anxious about it, either) nor stereotypically campy-gay. Is there something redeemable about gender performance on TV?

I’m back from my little trip with my mom. It was fine and mostly uneventful. We watched the Olympics a lot in hotel rooms, as it was raining and my mom’s knees were especially bad.

One afternoon, we went shopping, as I packed one too few shirts for the trip and needed something clean to wear on the way home. We were wandering past a tea shop in the mall and I was accosted by a thin, pink-lipsticked, spiky-haired lady who really wanted me to try their teas. I like teas, so I agreed to take a little tour of their shop. Mom went to sit down on a bench.

She must have invited me to try a dozen different teas. As I sipped each one, we followed a little pattern where I commented on the leaf blend and flavor, and then she told me that it would help me lose weight. This happened for every tea.

Me: I like the white tea in this, but I’m not too fond of berry flavors. It’s a lovely tea though.
Her: And it’s full of enzymes that will suppress your appetite and create a mindfulness about your body.
Me: Uh, OK.

Me: I really like the gunpowder in this, but is there a reason it’s mixed with rooibos? I’m not crazy about rooibos.
Her: You may not know this, but rooibos is the most important tea you can work into your diet. It’s stimulating without caffeine and is effective for weight loss.
Me: Do you sell plain gunpowder tea?

Me: This is a little too sweet for me. I prefer a more bitter tea with a fuller body.
Her: This is an afternoon or evening tea that will really help you with portion control at dinner.
Me: I don’t like it.

So this went on, like a dozen times. Let’s be generous and assume she wasn’t targeting me as someone who needs to eat less. I hate it when my mother gets paranoid about that stuff, and it’s true that this seemed to be the spiel they were all giving to customers. Obviously, this is a big part of their retail training. Make your clientele feel that they will be unhealthy without this tea. Tea is medicine.

It did not remind me at all of my own work in a tea shop, where I was trained to know how to prepare and serve many different kinds of teas, and to advise customers who wanted to impress clients or friends with a lovely tea selection. I was aware of health benefits, in case someone was particularly seeking antioxidants or caffeine-free options, but I was selling a beverage that is particularly interesting for its wide variety of flavors and national rituals. I recommend teas the way I recommend cheeses; I describe the flavor, and then talk about where it comes from, how it’s made, how it’s traditionally served, and how to store and care for it.

This tea shop reminded me much more of how I was trained to sell products and services at the glamorous spa in Soho where I worked when I first came to New York. In a meeting with a sales adviser, we were told that of course everyone comes to the spa to relax and have a lovely time, but that only Midwestern tourists can actually be sold on a service because it’s fun. You have to make a wealthy person feel they need the product or service, that they are unhealthy, low-class, or ugly without it. The instant someone walks in the door, ask them what they’re “struggling” with. Almost anyone over 25 can be shown the capillaries around their nose that have broken, or a small patch of blocked pores. A little dry patch or a slight reddish area can be made into a hands-clasping tragedy that needs to be fixed. Make them feel self-conscious about their cellulite and then say, “Hey, everyone struggles with that.” If she wasn’t struggling before, she’ll start now. The strategy I hated the most was that we were supposed to ask everyone who came in the shop what they used to clean their face. No matter what they said, unless it was our own in-house product or the most expensive one, we were supposed to make a tragic smirk and go, “Ohhhh, I see… You really need to be using [most expensive product within client's projected price range].” I thought it was evil and refused to do it.

But what’s crazy is, customers LOVED it. They adored being told they had to buy this or that, that they had to schedule some elaborate series of expensive procedures. The sales guy kept saying that the issue was not that we were trying to convince them to buy something they didn’t want. They wanted these things; that’s why they came in. They had the money to buy them, or they wouldn’t have come in. All they needed was an excuse to drop the cash, and there was no more effective way than to convince them that they looked unhealthy.

I still buy their in-house facial cleanser because I really like it and it’s not ruinously expensive. This means I have to go to one of their stores, though, which means some twenty-year-old sales girl is going to approach me and ask if there’s something she can do to help my extraordinarily ugly and unhealthy-looking skin. They find it really unnerving when I tell them I used to work there. I ask questions like, “Huh, I see you’re doing a line of foaming cleansers. Five years ago, we were trained to laugh at anyone who said they used a foaming cleanser. What changed?” They have no idea. I am obnoxious. I just want them to tell me about the product, not what’s so hideous about me that I need it.

So back at the tea shop, I finally decided that I did, in fact, need some tea. The sales lady asks me, condescendingly, how I make my tea, in exactly the same tone the spa taught me to ask how someone cleaned her face. She was standing in front of an array of cast iron teapots with animals on them to attract good fortune or thinness or whatever. I said I make Taylor’s of Harrogate Scottish Breakfast tea every afternoon in a ceramic teapot and serve it with warm milk and sometimes a little honey. I smiled to convey that I was happy with this ritual, and that I was not seeking a new one. She frowned, then did a big fake smile and lead me to the counter where she grudgingly pulled a canister of Irish Breakfast off a side shelf, let me smell it, made some comment about “people who drink black tea” seeming to enjoy it, and sold me a quarter pound of it, all the while asking, “But aren’t there health benefits you’re looking for? No health benefits? That you might want?”

I thought about making a joke about insurance, but instead just smiled and said, “No, thank you. I actually just like tea.”

I’ll be gone for the next week, on vacation with my mom. Have a good weekend, everyone!

I now don’t have to hide info about the food wiki so much anymore, because you get your own password when you join now. I migrated to the 2.0 version, which gives access based on email addresses and individual passwords.

This means:

1. If you joined the wiki in the past, you now have to create a password. At least you won’t have to remember the old one anymore!

2. If you accessed the wiki with a fake email address, you will need to ask me for an invitation to join. Send me an email, or, if your email is on your comments here, you can just ask in comments (probably faster).

3. If you’ve never accessed the food wiki, and are, in fact, like, wha? you can very easily join now. See #2.

The wiki I created is here. It’s a recipe wiki where you can read, write, and talk about recipes. People often comment about using a recipe, and any alterations they made, and you can post pictures of your meal if you like.

When you write a recipe, please add tags, including “added by [your name]” and whatever categories you think it fits in. Try to use existing categories unless you really want to create a new one. (For some reason, there are “Pork,” “Seafood,” and “Vegetarian” recipes, but no “Chicken” or “Beef,” though chicken and beef recipes are welcome.) I will come by and tinker with the tags if it’s necessary, though that usually means just adding some you may not have thought to add.

The best new feature of 2.0 is that there are folders. On the right-hand column, you’ll see several folders with really broad categories for the recipes. Some of these overlap with tags, but the categories are much broader and therefore easier to browse. Also, the folders don’t overlap with each other. So although the “vegetarian” tag has, like, a whole huge ton of recipes in it, the folder “Vegetarian Main Courses” is just a handful of things, and most of the rest of the vegetarian stuff is in “Pasta” and “Side Dishes.” Feel free to add your recipe to a folder.

That all sounds more confusing than it is. It’s all pretty user-friendly.

Feel free to poke around, comment, add photos, and enjoy. (Play nice.)

UPDATE: I also changed everyone’s* access levels to “Writer.” You used to all be administrators. Think of the power that was within your grasp! I didn’t change it for any reason other than that they’ve made it rather easy to accidentally delete entire folders full of recipes, and although I’m just as likely to do it as anyone, I’d rather it was me than you. If you want Editor status, which allows you to make deletions, please let me know.

* Everyone except MRH, of course.

You’re having a rough senior year at college and are really struggling to get out those applications to grad school, taking GREs, and finishing off all the required classes that you managed to avoid for three years. Some bad things happen and you miss a bunch of classes, and the stress is eating you up. But you are determined to get back on top of your work so you’ll have a transcript you’ll be proud to send off to Dream Program. In most of your classes, the hard work pays off and you get the grades you wanted. But in one class, you end up with an unexpected D that could send your application to the bottom of Dream Program’s pile. How infuriating!

Your other profs congratulated you on doing what needed to be done, and they gave you advice that was useful. They supported your desire to go to grad school and praised the improvements you made to your work. What is wrong with Prof. X that she’s the only one who doesn’t have compassion for your situation? Didn’t she see how hard you were working to learn the material and produce the best scholarship you could do? Everyone else thinks you’re an A or B student. What’s wrong with her?

You decide to go to the department to challenge the grade. First, you go to the professors who gave you A’s and get them to tell you how good your writing was, what a great class member you were, and how hard you worked. Then you shoot off an email to Prof. X, telling her that all your other professors know how smart you are, and that she is obviously wrong. You accuse her of sabotaging your grad school application out of spite. You tell her that “writing is subjective, anyway” and that “literature is about whatever I think it’s about, anyway” and insinuate that she must have some personal vendetta against you to have given you a D. You try to get your other profs to back you up by flattering them and encouraging them to write letters in your support. You don’t have any particular evidence that your work for Prof. X was excellent, or that she in any way “hated” you. You just see that line of A’s and B’s and a single D and think “Prof. X is insane and must be humiliated.”

Now consider how you would feel if you were Prof. X. You’re asking her for a major favor, one rarely granted to any student. It will create a lot of work for her to change your grade, because she would be forced to re-evaluate your work, or turn it over to a committee to have it re-evaluated, which would be humiliating to her judgment. What is the best way to convince Prof. X to do all this extra, possibly humiliating work on your behalf? Making her think you believe she’s stupid and doesn’t understand her own field of expertise is probably not the way to go. Brewing up some intradepartmental resentment over your case isn’t exactly productive, either. And all those professors you thought would bare their teeth for you? They’re not going to be pleased that you think their grades were just manifestations of their “liking” you, because, like, literature is subjective, man. You’re only going to make them wonder if they mistakenly praised your work, since you’re showing such a poor understanding of the field after taking their class.

I’ve gotten emails like this in the past from a student who was furious that he ended up with a C after failing one of his papers. I’d given him the opportunity to revise it, as he’d clearly just missed the day when I explained the assignment and decided to just write some old thing. The end of the semester came, and I asked him if he’d done the revision. He smacked his head, gave a wink, and said he felt “pretty confident” that he could do well without it. I explained that the paper was a third of his grade. He winked again. (WTF?) When he got a C, he went to his favorite prof and, not explaining any of the conditions under which he got that C, got her to say something that he then represented to me as “Every other professor in this department sees how brilliant I am, and the fact that you don’t proves you don’t understand your work as a teacher or as a scholar.” And this is from a guy who wants a favor?

This week, I was on the receiving end of the opposite situation, in which a student who’d busted her ass in my class and gotten an A, by the skin of her teeth, tried to use my grade as a prop in a battle against another prof who’d given her a D. She promised to fight this thing to the top of the system, and to use my (presumed) support to get it done. Sorry, lady, but whatever goodwill you might have gotten from me was lost the moment you suggested that grades in literature classes are all about whether a prof “likes” you or not. That’s an insult both to me, as the teacher who worked so hard to help you revise your work, and to you, as the student who took every opportunity to produce excellent scholarship. Your charms as an individual are really never enough to make the difference between a D and an A. Prof. X has her reasons; take it up with her.

If this student had contacted me individually first, I would have told her the following:

Getting a grade changed is nearly impossible, though it occasionally happens. If you feel the professor’s judgment was inhibited by prejudice of some kind, and you are absolutely positive that all your work met the criteria in the class syllabus, then you could ask for it to be re-evaluated by an independent committee. But you had better be damn sure that your work was stellar, because the likelihood is that the committee, whose job it is to support their colleague (with whom they spend years) rather than you (whom they don’t even know), will decide that D was too generous. Make sure you have evidence that the professor showed bias against you, and it’s possible you have a case. Even if you do, there is, sadly, a very high likelihood that they’ll side with the prof, and you need to be prepared for that.

If you are not sure you can make a case to an independent evaluating committee of people who don’t know or care about you, I’d recommend writing an extremely ingratiating and carefully-worded email to the professor. Say something like, “Dear Professor X, I hope you are enjoying the summer weather! I hate to bother you about this, but I was distressed to see I received a D in your class. I enjoyed the class a great deal and feel that I learned much that will be helpful to me in the future. My final paper was something I felt proud to turn in, and now I’m left wondering what went wrong. I’ve reviewed the document carefully and don’t see how it does not meet the standards for a passing writing assignment in your class, though there is obviously room for improvement. I know this is not standard practice, but, as I’m currently submitting my transcripts for Dream Program, I would be extremely grateful for the opportunity to revise whatever work from the class I can, according to any advice you could give me, for the chance to improve my transcript. Please let me know if there’s any way I can earn a higher grade at this late date. Respectfully yours, Me.”

That is, do not appeal to your other professors in this email. Do not say how everyone else gives you A’s. Do not accuse her of “hating” you. Do not tell her she’s doing her job poorly and doesn’t understand how literature and writing work. Do not tell her she needs to recalculate your grade because she obviously made a mistake. Do not threaten to sue, “take this thing all the way to the TOP,” or commit violence. Do not tell her that grades are “subjective” and so she should just give you the grade you want. Do not discount the possibility that you may have actually done not-perfect work. Do not be angry and disrespectful. You’re asking for a favor. No one does favors for someone who tells them their entire career is bullshit.

These things seem pretty obvious to me, but undergrads pull this crap all the time. When I get a little free time (ha), I think I want to write a book for undergrads about how to get what you want from profs. I know strategies like the one I suggest don’t always work—my own policy is that once the semester’s over, it’s over, barring some extraordinary case—but it’s the only one that ever could work. It’s not about kissing anyone’s ass. Everyone hates an ass-kisser. It’s about demonstrating respect for someone’s profession when you’re asking them to use their professional judgment to assist you in a time of need.

My mom’s mother is quite ill. I am supposed to do something.

As a tot, I had a severe dislike of my maternal grandfather. There was something terrifying about him that was apparent to me even as an infant. He was physically encroaching and always spoke as if God was in the next room and wanted to make sure He heard. He was sanctimonious, anti-intellectual, and viciously racist. He’d been a severe alcoholic for most of his life, and had given his life to Jesus around the time I was in elementary school. That was also around the time that he became too obese to leave the house.

Struggling to make it into the living room, my grandfather would find his armchair and yell from that spot for people to wait on him. Later, he’d just yell from his bedroom at the back of the house, which my grandmother didn’t share with him for the last twenty years of his life. “Honey? HONEY!” he’d scream, demanding to be brought another snack or drink by my long-suffering grandmother. My brother and I pitied her terribly, and assumed that her life of listlessly doing crosswords and watching re-runs had been a product of living as a handmaiden to this creepy overgrown baby.

When he died, ten years ago, I wondered aloud how this would allow my grandmother to finally live her life. She could get out of the house, pursue her interests, and enjoy the world a bit more. Maybe she’d even visit us in the next state sometime. My mother cut me short, clearly mourning her father deeply. “I know you never liked my father much, but you should know that although he was an alcoholic, and a racist, and a totally self-absorbed person, my father loved me. My mother never did. She is a cold person, and I see much of her in you.”

We talked a lot about that over the following years, as my widowed grandmother slipped increasingly into a heavy regimen of anxiety medications that left her incapable of conversation. It became clear that my grandmother was severely agoraphobic, and, as much as she complained about my grandfather’s demands around the house, she couldn’t bring herself to leave the house anyway. My mother told me a lot about how neglected she felt by my mother—how, as a child, my mom was in the hospital for months at a time and her mother never once visited her. A great deal of her affection for her dad grew out of those months, when her father, drunk as shit, would still manage to get himself to the hospital and refused to leave her side.

My mom and all her siblings suffered terribly from neglect. My mom is the only one who seems capable of functioning in society, though she struggles to keep her violence and anger in check. She has not lived in the same state as her parents since she married at 19 because she needed to put some distance between herself and her parents, though she visits when she can. For the past ten years, her visits to her mother’s house mean cooking enough food for everyone, freezing it, and packing it in a cooler to drive down, because she knows there won’t be any groceries in the house other than a dozen boxes of laundry detergent and nearly a hundred open boxes of stale cereal.

I don’t hate my grandmother, but I have to admit that I’ve revised my image of her. I find her impossible to talk to on the phone, as she’s usually so drugged that she can’t remember whom she’s talking to or what the beginning of the sentence she’s ending was. She doesn’t care about my life or my work, and has nothing to talk about herself except for how she’s feeling from moment to moment. She doesn’t leave the house, read the news, care about books, or even do the crossword anymore. She watches re-runs and counts her pills. One of my uncles, who is obsessed with schedules and arithmetic, lives with her, calculating her prescriptions and maintaining her pill regimen.

Most of all, I resent my grandmother for her abandonment of my mother. How much more functional would my mother have been, and how much happier would my own childhood have been, if she’d offered my mother even a little security, love, and affection? I didn’t get much myself until I was in college, when I remember mom having a breakdown and explaining that she didn’t want to raise me to hate her the way her own mother had. Our relationship is good now. But that also means I finally see how screwed up my mom’s childhood was.

My grandmother is not doing well, and is in the hospital again. My mom wants me to call her in the hospital. It would make her happy. I don’t want to. It’s obvious that my grandmother and I have a bad relationship now, and she’s on enough medication that she isn’t shy about telling me how much she disapproves of me and dislikes the person I’ve become. Even if I do try to pretend everything’s fine between us, she brings it up. I talked to my mother about it tonight. I think my mom feels responsible for what a shitty granddaughter I am, but has some terror that her mother will die and I will spend the rest of my life hating myself for not having contacted her. We had a bit of a fight, and finally, she agreed that she’d be happy if I wrote my grandmother a card.

Yes, a card is fine. I can do a card. We have a card relationship.

Every time I try to do anything to progress in my degree, I find myself becoming dissatisfied with my current plan, setting all the bars higher and adding more obstacles. It took me two and a half years after finishing my coursework to do my stupid oral exams because I kept changing the plan. In the fall of 2005, I had orals lists. They were nice and short and contained a lot of good books. But one thing led to another, and I kept reading and reading. It got harder to keep my original committee, and I ended up having to replace two out of three professors. I kept rewriting the lists. The original lists were fine. They were good lists and I could have said a lot of smart things about them. But as I read more and more, I realized how much more I wanted to read, how much more expansive my reach would have to be for me to feel satisfied. I got smarter, and made the task harder, and in the final weeks leading up to the exam, I was sitting in the center of my bed with my laptop open and two dozen books at a time spread out around me.

But that wasn’t enough, either. I really wanted to go in having written and distributed a document that would make it clear why I chose all these texts for my lists. It wouldn’t just explain the lists themselves as areas of necessary expertise; it would outline my entire dissertation, creating a sort of narrative encompassing two hundred years of philosophy, literature, and political writing in Britain and America from my very unique perspective. It would serve as a plan for my entire dissertation and even provide a glimpse into my future career. And I’d distribute it to my committee a few days before the exam so they’d know just what I was doing!

So I did all this, and wrote the damn document, which is about fourteen pages and completely lacking in citations, quotations, all that stuff good academic writing has. I did well on my exams, but the whole time, I was thinking, “Oh my God, why did I waste my time writing that stupid document when I could have been prepping for the exam?” My professors assured me that it wasn’t a waste; with a little editing, it could serve as a good prospectus. The hurdle passed, and now I’ve got to write the dissertation.

Already, I’ve started mounting new obstacles for myself. I hate the document and am sort of ashamed to turn it in as a prospectus. Rather than edit it, I’ve started on the introduction, which I’ve decided to write as a work of theory. OH MY GOD WHY AM I DOING THIS? It’s grueling to write this way. It allows me none of the crutches of explication and analysis that working directly with texts does. It’s very hard to know whether it sounds completely fucking insane or not, because it’s structured exactly like the kind of prose that can be crackpot bullshit. I feel pretty confident about everything I’m saying, but it’s all declarative sentences asserting stuff, without any of the elaborate genteel transitions my regular old grad studenty writing depends on. It might be awesome, or it might be a complete waste of time.

In my Tom Sawyer tradition, I am guessing it turns out to be a completely awesome waste of time—awesome in the sense that I do think I’ll end up with something I’m really proud of when it’s done, and a waste of time in that IT’S JUST A DISSERTATION. It’s not a book I’m trying to publish, and it’s not my fancy-princess début in the world of letters; it’s just another goddamn hurdle on my way to a degree that I’m making way too difficult for myself. And, like my aforementioned document, it’s not like it’s going to save me time years from now when I’m trying to edit it for a manuscript, because by then I’ll have decided to chuck the whole thing and start over on something even more uselessly ambitious.

If I ever reach a point when my present self isn’t so obsessed with imagining my future self that it trips up my future self by trying to work beyond its present ability, I will be a happy academic.