Re: Ask the Mineshaft: A Problem No One Here is Going To Identify With

1

To continue my position as the mean, mean commenter on these advice colums posts:

Hang up. Tell her, once, that her advice and commentary on your dissertation is upsetting and counterproductive, and that you will hang up if she keeps talking about it. If she keeps talking about it, hang up.

Don't get mad at her, or fight about about it, and I'm not saying cut off contact generally, just hang up when she gets into the dissertation.

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I'm with LB. Usually, I think she's just being cruel for the sake of being cruel, and that's why I vote with her. Here, I think her advice might be genuinely helpful.

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Your mother has a false fact in her head about the percentage of ABDs who finish. She's off by at least a factor of 10. Find out what the number is in your program and reassure her. Then hang up.

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4

LB is being premature, in my view. It's important to get these points across to your mother:

(i) dissertations in your department typically take 2-3 years;

(ii) you're ahead of the game;

(iii) being nagged will only slow you down;

(iv) if you haven't done it, you don't know what it's like.

If you can't convey these in conversation, write them down, or send her a link. Does she have any academic friends who could help you out by explaining things to her? (You say you'd "like to convey..." which suggests that you have trouble talking about these things with her, which is totally understandable.) Only if three reasonable attempts to convey this to her fail should you resort to hanging up.

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4: Sure -- I'm assuming that someone writing to an advice columnist (or interfering gaggle of internet busybodies) is doing so because of a firm conviction, based on a long relationship with the mother in question, that 3, or 30, or 300 attempts to explain the situation reasonably won't work.

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oh, the missed opportunity! Clearly the answer that fit into that pregnant pause was: `No mom, that just 95% of those whose mothers are nagging them about it. Otherwise, about 5%. Just for your information.'

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Sometimes there's strategic advantage in making attempts that are doomed to failure.

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8

Wow. I read this letter and thought, "Did I email Tia in my sleep?" Just yesterday I got a call from my mother saying, "Your father told me you said you were putting off your orals! You've decided to drop out of school, haven't you? Why didn't you tell me? This is so you can hang around New York with your boyfriend, isn't it?"

I'd never heard anything more ridiculous in my life. My parents are hard-working but not-very-educated people who think about things like "due dates" and "getting that degree." I decided to put off my orals three months since I've been working ahead on my diss and the orals will make more sense as I see where the project is heading. It's a shape thing, not a time thing.

It's humiliating that, after all this time of knowing how fiercely independent I am, my mother still thinks all decisions made by me are the result of my emotional dependency on others. Sickening.

RTCPL, I hold up my fist of solidarity with you.

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7: Negotiating with terrorists only emboldens them.

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10

I've also tried several times to explain my dissertation topic to her (she actually took notes one time!) because she doesn't like a) not understanding it b) not being able to explain it to other relatives who ask her about it.

The problem is my topic is pretty abstruse, so it's hard to explain to a layperson. Also, since I work in the humanities, not the sciences, the laypeople don't realize they're laypeople, i.e. if I explain to my mother or uncles what I'm working on and they don't get it, *I* get accused of having something wrong with my topic.

Or of being high-falutin'.

If you sniff the loads of condescension I get from my family, you're right. They value science. (And that's why there is a sense that what I'm doing "is not real work," hence all the nagging).

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11

You have to admit, LB, that there's nothing explicit in the letter about any attempts to defuse the situation. The writing has just started, so this isn't a long-standing pattern of behavior.

Part of this comes from having a friend whose mother hangs up on her when the conversation goes in certain directions. It's incredibly annoying. Taking the fairly drastic and relationship-altering step of hanging up the phone is a last resort, and it will be less relationship-altering if attempts at other solutions are made first.

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12

By way of advice, the only thing I've found that works with my mom is reminding her of her totally irrational obsession with my intelligence. This is a last resort, since it leads to plenty of irritating side effects. (Whenever I tell her I think I did something poorly, she responds, "But AWB! You are the smartest person I know! I bet you're the smartest person in New York!" She derives this from my having been the smartest person in my elementary school.) All I could do on the phone yesterday was say, "You know how you're always so proud of me for making careful decisions and working so hard? I'm still that person. If anyone can finish a dissertation, it's me." Sometimes I'm not so confident, but it's best if my mother is.

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IME with my mom, getting mad works better than hanging up the phone, because hanging up doesn't clearly convey to the mom what about the situation is bothering the daughter. The mom is left befuddled that she's been hung up on, whereas if you get mad, but there's content to your mad, then your objection to her behavior is demonstrated with actual emotional force.

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I m with LB on this, all the way.

Never Explain: Never Apologise (well, in this case) and after one warning, hang up.

My Doctor thesis (which, note, I was doing part time alongside my professional training on the job, so there could be no qualms in the "get a job, already" department) was tracked minutely by my father for the first few months. It was hell on wheels and nearly ruined our relationship. In the end I pointed out that he had a choice: Never to mention the thesis until I was done or not to see me until I was done.

It caused a scene at the time but solved the problem.

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And 10: I have the same problem with my topic. It's just folksy-sounding enough that my parents want to know the details, but the details are so complex and abstract that they end up accusing me of intellectual elitism. They also preferred it when I was a scientist. For some reason, the word "metalloproteinase" bothers them less than "epistemology."

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16

If they're into the sciences, they may have false views about how long it takes to write up a dissertation and to finish grad school. And if they're not academics, they may have really false views. (I remember explaining to a new bar acquaintanc that I was going to be done with grad school in a few months, and they said, "So you're about to start writing your dissertation?" I laughed loud and long. Fortunately it was not a situation where I might have got action.) I'm with Tia and FL, and on the side that says hanging up is a nuclear option.

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Not with that kind of attitude it wasn't.

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AWB, so long as you have funding extending grad school so you can hang around with your boyfriend is a reasonable thing to do anyway. Not to asperse your job prospects, but many new humanities PhDs wind up working at jobs that make them say, "Gee, I wish I was still in New York hanging around with my boyfriend." Though one should also worry about being in grad school so long one looks like a slacker when one does look for work (in my field, publishing articles in good journals seems to be a good way to take care of that).

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19

18: My problem is that I may finish too soon. Although I got serious about academia only the last year of my M.A., I came in with a field, finished coursework with a dissertation plan, have wonderful relationships with my committee and the uni administration, and I'm sitting pretty in a research fellowship that gives me plenty of time. In fact, I'm so caught up in working on my diss that I will finish before I get a chance to build up publications and whatnot. I'm trying to tell Maman that I need to slow down and agonize more about things. Besides, if I go on the market next year, I'll be a 27-year-old job candidate. I'd rather go out at 28 having read that much more.

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20

Couldn't you finish and just not submit, and use the extra time to publish?

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21

Mom is getting a bad rap. Getting harrassed about finishing is a standard part of grad school. Sure, Mom is misinformed about completion rates, but the attrition rate in humanities departments is typically 65 to 75 percent. (Certainly the odds are worse than 50/50.) But soon Mom won't be the only one nagging. If ready is going to be angered by Mom after writing just a single paragraph, then it's obvious s/he's already looking for ways to ban people from asking about how the writeup is going. I predict that, if given license by the Unfoggetariat to nuke Mom's nagging, ready's attitude will rapidly expand to cover anxiety-driven banning of friends, colleagues, advisors and prospective employers from asking about when the dissertation will be done. Better to learn how to talk honestly about where you are, when you'll be done (and whether that's typical, if needed) than tell people to stop asking.

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22

Nagging from others just isn't the same as nagging from one's parents.

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23

Ain't that the truth.

Nagging from others can be ignored, completely.

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24

IME with my mom, getting mad works better than hanging up the phone, because hanging up doesn't clearly convey to the mom what about the situation is bothering the daughter.

If you start with "I won't talk about my dissertation with you any more. If you bring it up, I'll hang up," and then hang up on the word 'dissertation' each time it's spoken, it should be pretty clear what's going on.

If you think that hanging up is too hostile, an alternative tactic, which seems more unpleasant to me but should work just about as well, goes as follows: (1) Explanation that harassment about the diss. is counterproductive and unpleasant, and you won't participate any more; (2) The next time she brings up the dissertation, remain silent. Stay silent until she runs to a halt. Ask "Are you finished talking about my dissertation?", if the answer is no, repeat until the answer is yes. When the answer is yes,(3) Start talking about something else.

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And absolutely to 23 and 24. I wouldn't recommend treating anyone but a parent like this -- there are just very few workable tactics for enforcing civility from one's parents, given the relationship and power differential.

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(2) will be easier to accomplish if you put the phone down and return to it periodically to see if she's still talking.

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27

Speaker phone, absolutely.

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24: She'll understand what the problem relates to, but not what the problem is.

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29

Agreed with 20 (and 22): If you still have that fellowship, wouldn't the department be happy to let you spend a year changing commas to semicolons and back while building up the resume?

Argle, I'm interested about the attrition rate in humanities departments—I believe that too, but I wonder about the attrition rate for ABDs. And I bet that the attrition rate is different for ABDs with potential funding problems.

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30

I started reading this thread prepared to tell ready how to fight the power, and to throw in a few notes of sympathy. My mother, who is in other respects a wonderful person, plumbed depths of "unsupportive" and "aggressively uninterested" that would put the president to shame; remind me to tell you sometime how she greeted the news of my first tenure track job—it involved her breaking down in tears.

But tough though it is, it is a row we must hoe, this explaining of our career to our nonacademic family members and friends. And I get exasperated too! And I even have some good advice, but dammit, I'm late for a committee meeting! (See what awaits you once you have a job....)

By the time I get back, you'll all have either pre-empted or flamed me, I'm sure.

Boy, that was useless OATGSOI. Or else a big ol' tease.

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31

Maybe the answer is to deflect questions of when by engaging people in what the dissertation is about. If ready can describe it in a particularly mind-numbing way, perhaps the interrogations will stop.

My old roommate and I used to do this. While hanging out at a diner, the waitresses and other patrons would often ask what we were working on. Their curiosity was nice, but when when we named our majors, computer science and English, we got attacked with irritating questions about how to solve blue-screen-of-death problems and whether A Tale of Two Cities is the best Dickens novel. So we started describing our work more narrowly. He started responding "cryptology" and I said, "eighteenth-century rhetoric." Suddenly we're treated with the same deference as if we'd said, "biochemistry" or "tort law."

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32

Gah. This is all so familiar. I hit a point during mine where even the question "so, how's the dissertation coming?" from my mother could send me into a total tailspin of anxiety. I finally figured out that she was really just looking for a way to feel involved in my life -- the particulars of which she had no way to identify with -- and so the best way for me to handle it was to say "fine" or "great" (depending on whether things kinda sucked or were in fact okay) and then immediately change the subject to something we could actually talk about, like what dumb thing some family member had recently done.

And then I'd run off and fume to my pals about how my mother was harrassing me AGAIN about the dissertation, and they'd commisserate back about the same thing.

Alas, it's part of the process, I fear. But if a firm but polite changing of subject does not work, I'd agree that a gradual ratcheting up of your tone (first to a polite "it's going well, but it's really stressful to talk about, so could we not?", and from there to a "I've asked you not to bring it up; I don't like feeling monitored; please stop asking," to outright hanging up) might be in order.

But here's my favorite Mom-doesn't-get-the-academic-life story -- favorite because it contains my best response ever -- which may or may not translate here: Mom called me at home one Monday morning about 10.30, as I was getting ready to leave for the office. I made the mistake of answering the phone.

"Oh ho," she said. "Nice job you have where you get to be at home at 10.30 on a Monday morning!"

"You know what, Mom," I responded, with a slightly tight smile in my voice, "you're absolutely right. The best thing about my job is that I get to choose which 80 hours out of the week I work."

Long silence. She never gave me a hard time about my schedule again.

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33

32: KF's mom == pwned.

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34

OATGSOI

Why do you describe your comment as a combination of oats and genetically modified soy?

31, the cryptologist is lucky s/he didn't get asked a lot of questions about how to lift the Curse of the Mummy.

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If someone calls you at a particular time and place and then makes a snotty crack about how you're able to answer the phone at that time and place, hanging up is acceptable. As is placing them under the Curse of the Mummy.

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36

Your mother clearly wants to feel involved and helpful in your life, and nagging you about your dissertation is one way she fulfills that need.

I would take the immediate hang-up policy as the last option. Here's what you should do:

First, explain to your mother the problem. Then, give your mother some things to do that you would find genuinely helpful. The easiest way to resolve the issue is to provide an alternative outlet for your mother's need to be involved in your life that you ALSO find helpful. That way, you both win, and no one feels shut out or rejected.

This approach involves more work on your part than simply hanging up, but it will also improve your relationship.

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37

LB is basically right in that, after saying "please don't do this," the only way to pretty much make sure someone doesn't do it is to refuse to speak to them when they do. Do be sure, though, to tell her that the reason you want her to stop isn't b/c you don't appreciate her concern, yadda yadda, but because the process is stressful enough and you think that having her worry about it at you is only going to make it harder, not easier, to work.

Having said that, I offer some perspective. When I failed my quals, my mom said, "oh well, it's no big deal since they'll just let you take it again." Then the night before the retake she called me at 2 am crying about how she was behind on the rent and was afraid she'd end up in a homeless shelter.

I can't believe I'm pulling the "at least your mom cares" thing, but, well, at least she cares.

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38

Best true story from that diner:

I was sitting at a booth by myself, drinking coffee and reading Boswell's Life of Johnson. Cattycorner from me, a table of four loud trucker-ladies see me and start making fun of my serious face. One of them yells, "Hey, MISS! MISS! What're you readin'? It's biggern the goddamn Bible!"

"Yes, it is, isn't it? It's a biography of Samuel Johnson."

"Oh. I loved him in Pulp Fiction."

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39

Nagging from others just isn't the same as nagging from one's parents.

All the more reason to learn how to deal with it. It'll make managing others (e.g., advisors) easier.

I'm interested about the attrition rate in humanities departments—I believe that too, but I wonder about the attrition rate for ABDs. And I bet that the attrition rate is different for ABDs with potential funding problems.

Sure, but the point was just that Mom is not wrong to think that an awful lot of people don't finish grad school.

Being happy to indulge in aggressive avoidance behavior in response to some ill-informed parental nagging after a week of dissertating seems likely to encourage the emergence of other pathological grad-student behaviors as the going gets increasingly tough. slolernr is right.

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40

In the first apartment I lived in after college, a roommate asked me what I was reading, in awe that I could finish a book that fat. "It's The Magic Mountain," I told him. "Is that about the Disney ride?" he asked.

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I'm betting that the responses in this thread are breaking down neatly into people who are still in a submissive posture (this isn't quite right. Maybe, 'people whose relationships with their parents do not include the power to say "You're being a jerk -- stop it,' and make it stick) toward their parents (me, SCMT, Austro, b-wo) and people who aren't.

My advice is based on my relationship with my own mother. After a lifetime of being reasonable and persuasive to zero effect, I've come to a point where I've decided that there's simply no point to it. For any conflicts where I'm willing to lose (which is most of them, we have a reasonable relationship), I don't fight, or argue; I do whatever she wants. If I really need to win, I don't engage.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

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42

By "people who aren't," do you mean, "people with kids of their own"? Because I already get the "stop bugging me, Mom" response when I ask PK what he did in kindergarten that morning.

:'(

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43

Aw, Bitch. The bf's younger kid does this. If anyone asks him a question that has an easy answer like "How was school?" or "Did you have a nice birthday?" he refuses to respond. Recently, while at MoMA, a docent asked him, "What does a chair have to have to be a chair?" and he responded "A beak!" He's five. At a restaurant in Nova Scotia, a waitress offered him a choice of water or milk, and he said, "But I want something tropical!" Maybe the answer is to ask PK some bizarre question about school. My bf solves this by asking what prank a particularly bad kid played in class that day. Then he gets the whole story.

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Yeah, I've learned to ask those kinds of questions. That and, when he does mention something (usually as a total non-sequiter), to stop doing whatever-it-is and listen.

Damn kids.

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45

Speaking of disserations, I'm seeing V For Vendetta on IMAX tonight.

Oh, wait, that has nothing to do with disserations.

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46

That having kids teaches you about being a parent should come as no surprise. But LB has kids, B.

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47

DisserTations. Damn. misspelled it twice the same way.

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46 -- I too have a kid and yet count myself among LB's former category.

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And note that I haven't even offered Ready any advice, because mine would be something along the lines of "become affectless when dealing with your mother" which would not really be that helpful for her.

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affectless

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51

Okay, I want now to make a baa-ish case that the burden really is on us, as academics, to explain what we do, even to people who are trying in aggressively bad faith to misunderstand and mischaracterize it for their own purposes.

Why?

1. We live in a culture to which our work really is alien. America is about getting-and-spending, baby. Those of us who try, however vainly, to cultivate a truly professional (i.e. noncommercial) system of values for our work are in a small and dwindling minority.

2. We work in a business many of whose members have repeatedly acted as if deliberately to devalue their output. See yesterday's discussion of jerks and jargon.

3. If we who are teachers and students of what, for lack of a better word, we'll call civilization, can't explain its value, then who can?

This is all by the way if what's really going on is entirely about Mom and you. Which I know, in my case, during my graduate school, was almost the case—i.e., it was some large percent, let's say eighty, about Mom and me. But it was twenty percent about the aggrieved status of academic work in our culture today.

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I'm seeing V For Vendetta on IMAX tonight.

Please don't tell us if it sucks. I've finally got a movie to be excited about, again. And seeing it at an IMAX sounds amazing.

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53

Is there in IMAX near you, Tim? I think it's being released to IMAX theaters nationally. Check it out.

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51: Yes, absolutely, in that it's our responsibility to be open about our work and able to explain its possible relevance to the "world." But aren't there some people who don't deserve our sincerity? I'm thinking of an acquaintance who loves to ask me loudly about my work in social settings so she can give me loud, uninformed advice. I am eager (perhaps overly so) to explain my work to anyone who really wants to know about it, and I'm even happy to convince students and non-academics that my work is important, but I refuse to use my work as a set-piece for bourgeois discourse with assholes who consider a Ph.D. to be a nice, expensive accessory.

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54: you mean it's isn't just like all those other three-letter acronyms, like BMW or RIM?

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56

I refuse to use my work as a set-piece for bourgeois discourse with assholes who consider a Ph.D. to be a nice, expensive accessory

I have a hard time distinguishing these people from my family and many otherwise entertaining social acquaintances. The academic problem here seems to me a subset of the larger social problem presented by the rise of the right-wing media. The evident acceptability, even high status, of loud ignorami on the air gives license to ordinarily decent people to air their own ignorance and prejudice. How do you fight this? I'm afraid that only sweet reason will do.

God, I sound like a Democrat. Shoot me.

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I'm afraid that only sweet reason will do.

Not so! Hand grenades work.

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58

My Dad took over 20 years to finish his Ph D. I believe this will make me immune from parental nagging. As for non-parents, I don't think they nag me enough.

I agree with the make a small scene/get angry and explain advice more than the just hang up strategy.

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59

You could just hang up on them.

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60

As for non-parents, I don't think they nag me enough

Have you finished your dissertation yet, eb?

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59 to 57

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I'm sorry, the connection seems to be bad and there's a storm and I'm about to go into a tunnel, did you say dissipation, slol?

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63

The proper response is counterattack. Like: How dare you ask me about my dissertation when you can't even explain what OATGSOI stands for?

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re 11 --- being in the Humanities myself and abstruse at every opportunity--just ask my poor epic students last semester!-- but I digress--- I want to know what ready's egregiously out there topic is. So? Can ready tell us? please, ready? I must admit I have not read the rest of the thread-- if it is in there could someone let me know? I have to get back to writing another baffling lecture now. Right now. Will check back!

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yikes! I just read 51... I was kidding about my cultivation of abstraction... somewhat... I am actively trying to find the happy medium of intelligibility with intriguing, unexpected (and therefore) valuable insight.

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56: My dissertation happens to be an argument undermining the long-standing American journalistic mythos of "common sense." Unfortunately, however, I fear that neither the Dickensian "If you see something, say something" ethos of the left nor the metaphysical idealism of the right is innocent of using the totally problematic common-sense commonplace as an excuse for not developing more rigorous rhetoric.

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I'm betting that the responses in this thread are breaking down neatly into people who are still in a submissive posture (this isn't quite right. Maybe, 'people whose relationships with their parents do not include the power to say "You're being a jerk -- stop it,' and make it stick) toward their parents (me, SCMT, Austro, b-wo) and people who aren't.

Or perhaps some people have parents who respond fairly well to reasonable compromises. I don't think "submission" and the zero-sum power struggle the word implies is a useful way to consider the issue.

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an argument undermining the long-standing American journalistic mythos of "common sense."

Ooh, I'm so gonna read that.

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66: That wasn't meant to be a wordy bitch-slap, just a call for the media on the left to stop being cowed by accusations of out-of-touchness by the right and to start ponying up mo' better arguments.

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I don't think "submission" and the zero-sum power struggle the word implies is a useful way to consider the issue.

Clearly, you've never met my mother.

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How dare you ask me about my dissertation when you can't even explain what OATGSOI stands for?

Jeezis, Weiner, that was an in-joke that was almost entirely just for you.

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67: A parent who responds well to reasonable compromises is a parent who has let their child become reasonably independent and isn't still trying to enforce submission (if they ever did). So I think the dichotomy is accurate.

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73

Clearly, you've never met my mother.

This is the point I've been trying to make: the good advice really depends on the relationship between you and your mother, which really means, on your mother, since we assume you are a creature of sweetness and light.

My mother would not respond well to direct confrontation or hanging-up or any other acts of aggression. (See above under "breaking down in tears".) So, maybe your mother is like mine, or maybe she's like LB's.

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74

DisserTations.

Mm, dissertatertots...

Tangent: Mark Masterson, did I take a class from you in at the University of Chicago in the spring on the Georgics? I can't seem to find your CV online, but it seems you're not a native Kiwi and are interested in epics of the right period...

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This would be spring of 2002.

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AWB: and, as long as we're clarifying intent, I really meant 68.

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77

Oh right, my bad. Clearly I was blinded by thinking, as I wrote my initial response, "arg, I feel like I'm identifying here with the mom when probably I shouldn't be." Mea culpa.

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78

"This is the point I've been trying to make"

In which comments?

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76: Aw! I'll announce here if I ever get the damn prospectus written. It makes a lovely lecture.

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80

It's odd that I'm the one saying this (this being what I'm about to say), being among the, if not the, furthest from being a parent. But many of the answers seem to go from the premise that if someone wrote in to this advice column and said, "I'm worried about my child's progress on their dissertation, what should I do?" there wouldn't be any answer, or at least none in the realm of telephonic communication. Is that really the case?

Joe D: On Monday, a friend of mine e-mailed me about seeing V4V in Imax on Saturday. I e-mailed back, "why not Thursday?" and he said it wasn't showing in Imax tonight, and I didn't check. I have now discovered that he is a dastardly cur.

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81

As someone struggling with a recaltrant dissertation, I'm so not going to participate on this thread. Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it: I don't wanna talk about it!

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82

Is that really the case?

Of course not: the answer is, 'Ask occasionally and don't nag; drop it if the kid asks you to.' This is only a problem if either the parent is behaving badly, or the child is extraordinarily oversensitive -- I've been answering on the assumption that the problem is the first, rather than the second.

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83

This is the point I've been trying to make

30, 51, and 56. Especially the last paragraph of 51. I concede I did not make it well, which is why I said "trying". It's very hard for people (a set that includes me) to talk clearly about their relations with parents, children. It's messy. I wanted to say, there are two distinct problems here: (a) the demand that one justify one's existence, which can actually be addressed reasonably and (b) the demand that one submit to parental judgment, which can't. The good response to (b) is going to depend on you, and the parent.

Is that any better put?

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84

Ack, 83 to 78.

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85

if someone wrote in to this advice column and said, "I'm worried about my child's progress on their dissertation, what should I do?" there wouldn't be any answer

Well, yeah. I mean, what if someone wrote in and said "I'm worried about my child's job performance"? It's weird. Dissertating students are adults. Mostly.

As long as I'm telling heinous parent stories, the first year I applied to grad school, I didn't get into Prestigious Public U, and my dad called the department chair to demand an explanation. Given that he was a taxpayer, and I, his daughter, am real real smart. Then he called me and said, "I called the department to ask why they didn't accept you"---"you did what?!?"--"and the department chair told me that if you had any questions about your application, you should call him yourself."

So of course I had to call. To apologize.

Needless to say, I didn't reapply the next year.

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86

74-- Well what do you know? There you are amid the files. I have all your grades right here in my "Chicago" folder on my computer. I have been lurking on Unfogged and very occasionally commenting for years now and your name did look familiar. Always did. You are studying philosophy now, right? Re the class--- I wish I had taught that class better, set it up differently. But I did learn from it. I hope you did.

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I am now completely completely convinced that Mark taught a class in the circumstances described and I took it.

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88

It should be noted that I composed 87 before having read 86.

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74/86 -- wait, now Ben Wolfson is the real name of the commenter who goes by "Ben Wolfson"? I'm so confused...

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It's a pseudonym of long standing and varied use.

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91

85: Hee. My mother did this to me when I started my M.A. program at my B.A. alma mater. I had told Mom I wanted to find an apartment by myself because I needed to get away from communal life. She called the Director of Grad Studies, called her "Mrs. V-" (not knowing, perhaps, that women get titles too?) and pleaded with her, "as a mother" to help find me a nice female roommate to live with. I was totally mortified when "Mrs. V-" told me about the call, but luckily she had an encroaching overprotective clueless mom of her own. We laughed, kind of.

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I *wish* my advisors asked me more about my dissertation process. One of them is quite involved, but the others are overworked and it's more me nagging them to respond to things (like my prospectus). The problem is pretty specific to me and my mother -- in lots of ways we're very close, but like anybody we have dysfunctional sides to our relationship and the nagging thing is one of them. Actually, it's a special skill of my mother's - how to make you want to slit your own throat in 0.5 seconds.

The lack of respect in it bothers me too. I can't imagine anyone nagging my brother if he'd done enough work already at his 9-5 job.

My topic is pretty de-anonymizing, so I'm not going to describe it here, but it's a historical look at a certain minor epistomological tradition. Since I'm guided by an intellectual problem/issue, I bring in material from some different fields and I can't tell people "well, I'm working on Dickens!" or "Soviet Yiddish tractor novels!" -- a simple single author or genre, which is what they want to hear.

My mother is very intelligent but she's also weirdly good at forgetting things she doesn't agree with or misremembering/re-imagining (in quite radical ways, sometimes!) things you might actually have done or said. So it can be very hard to communicate with her if it's not on her terms.

I recently successfully explained to my uncles that yes I really do do research -- you can call it that even if you aren't running experiments, but instead going into a library or archive and looking at documents. So progress is possible -- but it bothers me so much that hostility is the default attitude.

I *am* very sympathetic to the idea that we should be able to explain our work and its relevance to people outside of it. Family is different, and harder.

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93

Actually, it's a special skill of my mother's - how to make you want to slit your own throat in 0.5 seconds.

The lack of respect in it bothers me too. I can't imagine anyone nagging my brother if he'd done enough work already at his 9-5 job.[...] it's a historical look at a certain minor epistomological tradition.

Are you me? This is freaking me out. It's like the opposite of MPD.

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also, I didn't expect that so many people would have had a very very similar experience like this, because my mother is, in addition to being loving and wonderful in lots of ways, also really aggressive.

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Wolfson, are you taking drugs? Shouldn't you remember who taught the class?

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I did remember who taught the class, dork.

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97

AWB - i'm definitely not you...but let's talk in september when, may it please the gods, i have a chapter or two. :)

MPD?

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98

FL, there could be multiple people named Mark Masterson, right? And even multiple ones who are in the same field?

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93: I think only you can answer that question, AWB.

97: Multiple Personality Disorder, I think. Nowadays called Dissociative Identity Disorder.

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97: multiple-personality disorder.

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98-- there are not multiples of anything in Classics

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As someone struggling with a recaltrant dissertation, I'm so not going to participate on this thread. Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it: I don't wanna talk about it!

I'd love to talk to people about my dissertation. The catch is that it's literally impossible to describe in any detail to more than about a thousand people in the entire country, even other mathematicians. The upshot is that I have a canned one-sentence summary of what I do and... that's it. No-one dares ask me for anything more.

Actually, the more I think about it -- and the more I read this thread -- it's bloody brilliant, innit? Always leaves me wanting more!

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103

The comments here at unfogged were not written by "Ben Wolfson", but instead by another commenter of the same name.

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104

Ben, you gaywad, you seemed to manifest a surprising degree of uncertainty.

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105

The only thing I want to know is whether Mark can retroactively decrease Wolfson's grade based on the general grammar bitchiness he displays on Unfogged. If he can't, I'm going to have to throw myself in with the "academics are useless with regard to addressing our most profound problems" crowd.

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98-- upon further reflection--- there actually are multiples of some things in Classics--- lots of grey ear hair, to take an all too prominent example--- for me to say more than this would pehaps be impolitic.

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107

Labs, I defy you to recount the names of all your undergrad profs.

The only thing I want to know is whether Mark can retroactively decrease Wolfson's grade based on the general grammar bitchiness he displays on Unfogged.

Latin is what made me the grammar bitch I am today.

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108

The first time it's an epic, the second, a farce.

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109

Mark, could you make up some humiliating stories about the younger Ben and share them with the blog as if they really happened?

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110

Can't lower his grade now... I could scare up a lot of grey ear hair (and bushy eye-brows, and heck I will throw in some neck hair) and mail it to him, though. That help?

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111

Ben, you gaywad,

I thought the point of the prior thread was that technical jargon is to be avoided, especially in front of hoi polloi.

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112

Talking about Classics at the University of Chicago gives me the willies -- I'm terrible at languages, and had an awful time in the three quarters of Latin I had to take. (Look, it was what I'd taken in high school. I didn't want to start something else fresh.)

I literally once walked into a midterm exam, having cut enough prior classes that I didn't know there was going to be a test. The next quarter, it took me over a month to realize the professor was blind -- I finally noticed "Hey, that's a different edition of the Aeneid he's using. Where's the text? And what are all those bumps all over the pages?" Of course, I did feel freer not to show up for class after that point.

Really, it's a miracle I have a degree. Or a job.

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113

I think that if one of my former profs were reading my blog, I'd freak. I'd also freak if I found out that Ben Wolfson were one of my former students.

Y'all are better men than I am, apparently.

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114

Oh, like I'd do that here. Besides, it's the wrong test. Prediction: when encountering the name of one of my undergrad profs, I can identify the courses & semesters.

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On the other hand, the Classics Building had the second best coffee shop on campus, after the Div. School.

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116

I think I could name all my undergrad profs except for those who taught courses with another person. Probably because I never thought of those classes as Professor "so and so's class" but rather "Department Course Number." I definitely can't name all my TAs, which is too bad because it recently occurred to me that I took two classes in the department of a prominent blogger at the same time said blogger was still a grad student.

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FL--- You mean like those three and one/half weeks in May when he was contesting the power of gender-normative discourse, he cross-dressed, asked that I call him Benette? [I am so going to regret this moment of playfulness!]

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I'd vote for humiliating stories too, but isn't that whole "your name sounded vaguely familiar" thing kind of humiliating already? Obviously Ben wasn't one of the better students....

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107: A Wolfson Indiscretion Invitational

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You mean like those three and one/half weeks in May when he was contesting the power of gender-normative discourse, he cross-dressed, asked that I call him Benette?

Yes. Exactly like those.

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Latin is what made me the grammar bitch I am today.

Wow. You're telling me that the angry god that plagued us with the Wolfson so that we might see the error of our ways is a Kiwi? And named Mark?

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121: Me. Fuck.

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123

I couldn't name most of my undergrad profs to save my life.

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124

when encountering the name of one of my undergrad profs, I can identify the courses & semesters.

It was only the mention of epics that got me to check out his email address containing his surname, and until then I didn't know he was in classics.

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I'll buy that, Ben, but what about the cross-dressing?

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I was contesting the power of gender-normative discourse, just as Mark said.

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It was so totally rush while we had Benette with us. The room was electrified every day. I almost forgot to write the midterm. Good times.

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That is a wizard cocksucker story.

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129

a rush--- making a mistake while Ben is so nearby. [!] Hey BPhD, imagine what is going through my mind, just imagine. And I do this elsewhere. Often. Ack! Ackum! Ackius! Ackissimum!

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But could Bennette carry water in a sieve?

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131

I almost forgot to write the midterm

Given that Benette put in her appearance for 3 1/2 weeks in May, wouldn't the midterm already have been over and done with, graded and returned to students? Or is Chicago on a different schedule than the one I'm familiar with?

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quarter system, sucka.

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I hate the quarter system.

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134

Ack! Ackum! Ackius! Ackissimum!

It occurred to me a few days ago that "mea culpa" is almost exactly like saying "my bad".

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130 yes... it was part of his oral report on Danaides. His report was first and it was so good that the rest of the class got F's on theirs--without me even bothering to hear them. The other students were fine with this and they were almost embarassingly grateful that they were allowed to remain in the class in the divine presence of Benette. Doubt no more, LB!

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the Danaides F#$%R^&U*ackissimum

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This is the best delurking ever.

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138

I don't know, remember that really obviously drunk woman who was around for a couple of days?

Also, can I start claiming that right-pointing angle bracket (>) is an interrogatory mark, since I frequently type it rather than "?" and then have to go back and correct myself>

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ONly if I can claim the DOuble CApital letter thing is deliberate--for emphasis or something.

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138: Judy was her name.

Past due, AWB, but I would totally read that too. Maybe we could even collaborate once I have tenure.

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141

My family is so different than the norm. When Mom was in town, she told me that my father and she expect me to come to my senses, go back to grad school, get the Ph.D. that was my destiny, and enter academia as God intended any time now.

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This is similar to my parents' view towards me not wanting an academic job or a job in an academic environment: they seem to figure I should be a professor (and they'd have preferred me to stay in science/math) or a librarian. I actually had to employ the "get mildly angry" strategy recently to stop having to hear yet again about the opportunities that will be opening up in libraries over the next few years. Both of them were librarians.

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Yeah, my parents both have Ph.D.s so they figure that's just what one does. Sounds like all of our parents want us to be like them and, if not, support but have trouble understanding our decisions.

I always thought I would make an awesome librarian.

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You still can. I hear that opportunities are going to be opening up soon as people retire.

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FTR: I am wholeheartedly against librarian Becks. I'm OK with PhD Becks, though.

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135: Is it really appropriate to refer to Benette as "he"?

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145: Not a Music Man fan?

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He's a fraud, and he doesn't know the territory.

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Ye Gods!

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Aisle 13, next to the noggins and the pickins and the firkins.

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My parents are much like Becks's and eb's; they (especially my mom) just sort of assume that academia is the natural choice for my career path. I'm pretty sure it isn't, but I don't have a really clear sense of what is, so our discussions on the subject have a certain lack of coherence.

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Come on, Tim. You only like PhD Becks because my mom likes PhD Becks.

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With that attitude, you're going to end up with an Iranian, young lady.

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I've thought about libraries, actually.

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I have an ABD friend who's doing a Library Science master's. It's a 1 1/2 year program, unfunded; she's finding it to be easy, but boring. She says that one of the upsides is that there are lots of corporate-sector job$, and that it seems to be easy and unstigmatized to move in and out of academic and corporate librarian jobs.

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Yeah, there are a lot more things you can do with the MLS than library things, so I'm actually not opposed to the training (I've heard the same thing about easy, but boring, but it's relatively quick too and a lot of the skills you get appeal to me) and I think that's part of what's kept the nagging door open.

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146 I thought about that... but just wound up being presumptuous. I should have let Benette decide what would have been proper. Clearly.

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140: I'll keep you updated, Matt. It sounds like I could use your expertise.

I'll put in a word for libraries, since I've been working in one this year and probably next. People who work in libraries are usually funnier, nicer, and more curious than faculty. They read more broadly, have cool repositories of information, and are sometimes good teachers. I'm not a great library person because I get extremely exasperated by patrons who are ignorant of proper research methods. I can handle people coming into my special collection and reading up on this or that and writing a project about it, but if they start asking my advice, I go into Emergency Lecture mode, in which I feel the need to fill some student in on 300 years of English royal history or on eighteenth-century popular print culture. I don't just say, "Here's a nice book by Ben Franklin"; I give a whole spiel on where to look and what to look for. I think there is such a thing as a librarian temperament, that gives information only when asked, but I don't have it.

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I was in a special collections library a few years ago when a guy came in, went up to the reference desk, and very loudly explained that he was looking for information about Ronald Ranald McDonald. The librarian patiently began to explain to him not just how to search from the library's computers - which started at the library's home page - but from any computer anywhere running any web browser.

He blew up at her: "Why are you showing me this?! I just want to search now, today!"

She calmly explained to him that she was simply demonstrating how to get to the library's catalog so that he'd be able to look things up in the future.

He was not happy: "There is no tomorrow. I have only one day a year to look things up. There's only today. I just want information on Ranald McDonald."

I have no idea how the librarian managed to remain calm through the whole thing. He was only slightly less unhinged when he made a copy request later in the day.

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My dad did an MLS after abandoning his dissertation. He hasn't yet gotten a library job, but that's partly for unrelated reasons. I work in a library for work-study, and I'll second AWB's observations about the people; my coworkers are a fun bunch, although library departments do vary and they may not all be equally pleasant.

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Neither of my parents have any kind of academic background. I'm the first member of my family to go to university so I don't have some of the problems other commentators have mentioned -- where the parents have a degree of 'inside' knowledge of degree outcomes or drop-out rates or whatever.

As a result they've always taken my word for it when I tell them how things are going, thankfully. Neither of them give a shit about whether the academic thing will give me an acceptable material standard of living or whatever.

On the other hand, both of my parents are well-read and intellectually engaged, they just lack any formal educational background. My dad in particular has that fierce working-class auto-didact thing going -- I suspect he'd kick ass in a philosophy seminar. As a result they are much keener to actually discuss the substance of my work and not bother too much about how I am doing in a formal sense.

That can be a good thing -- it's nice to be able to talk to them about my work and have them think it's i) interesting and ii) worthwhile -- but sometimes it'd be easier if they were less interested. It'd certainly mean I could be lazier about explaining my work.

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My dad is the first member of my patrilineage (for 3-4 generations, not really sure how far back) not to get a Ph. D. I am following in his footsteps, so far anyways. My brother done got his though.

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My dad has (as he never tires of telling me) supervised about 60 postgrads, and has many anecdotes and aphorisms to offer about how troubling it is that I haven't submitted yet (as if I didn't know).

But he entered academia at a time when an Oxbridge undergrad degree was enough, so never in fact wrote a dissertation himself. So if he offers too much advice, that's the big gun I can pull out (ATM).

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Joe D- I ended up talking my cur of a friend intoseeing the imax tonight, I thought I might have spotted you there but wasn't sure.

Dialogue was spotty and the big fight scene was awfully shot and unimaginative. On the other hand, thematically rousing, Evey's character is surprisingly interesting, and V's inherent theatricality was actually under-done other than his first appearance, wish they had made more of it.

I have a bunch of other points based on comparisons to the graphic novel, but they're mainly the typical complaints of someone who has read the original version of something before its fillm adaptation.

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But I did learn from it. I hope you did.

I learned where bees come from!

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While not denying the manifest truthiness of the bee hypothesis, if that is what Mark was teaching under the rubric of Classics at Chicago, no wonder he was exiled to New Zealand.

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It's in the Georgics.

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It is in there. The person to complain to is Virgil. And since he is Virgil he must be taught. As for exile, I am enduring a most sweet exile indeed, if that is what we even want to call it. This place (Wellington) is gorgeous and I am working with a bunch of very nice people in one of the best departments in the university. I have a nice new dog too.

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What do you think of the food? My one trip to NZ, I loved the place, thought the people were wonderful, the scenery was amazing, and everyone in the country should be locked out of any room with a stove in it. The ketchup substitute with the strong flavor of cloves? Ugh.

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...a dog who, through the oddest of coincidences, got stung by a bee a couple of days ago... he is all right now, but being a puppy and all he was really vexed at this moment of cruelty in a universe that I know appears to him to be benign 24/7.

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the food, ah yes.... I so cook 7 nights a week (I am the cook in the house and never more than now)... there is some good eating out though in Wellington. Really nice actually. But not a lot. It is not like eating out in SF or NYC. For homecooking, the markets have lots of good produce and such so I am able to do what I want (and what my partner demands--- so demanding--- I could write a book on that!). But outside of the major centers if you are thinking dinner, pack a lunch! I have found you can get a good breakfast though. This all is England's fault of course. The English countryside was full of bad eating when we visited there like 10 years ago.

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yes what is up with that clove in the ketchup and did you run across new potatoes in a can with mint [?!] added?

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I seem to recall too that your ran across some interesting men's underwear while in NZ (before you settled down with Mr. LB, of course).

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As I said: I thought the people were wonderful.

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This past year, Anthony Bourdain had a program about eating in New Zealand, on his "No Reservations" series on the Travel Channel. He started out by showing himself bombing while trying to discuss "food porn" at Savour, the New Zealand food lover's society/convention, and then toured. The delights, killing and eating a pig, beach barbecue, depended a lot on fresh ingredients like Mark says. He ate w/ the Maori once.

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As an Australian I am obliged to sneer about NZ, even though I know full well that it is very nice indeed. It's in the rules.

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it occurs to me, at some point after writing 171 that there isn't much good eating in many out of the way places in the US either. I recall a rather long sequence of scary nights with my very particular partner in Idaho, Montana, and Colorado as we searched in vain for a "pretty dinner" for him and we failed and had to have BLTs. Red state nastiness and possible gay bashers worried us not at all. Where oh where was the bernaise?! [If I could work in a reference to opera here it would be teh gay, if it is not already.] So fair is fair and I want be fair to my adopted homeland. BTW, any opera questions? The Doctor is in.

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