Workplace Weirdness

I don’t think I’ve felt entirely comfortable in my office at work since 2019. I don’t know what it is (or maybe I do and it’s a five-letter word, of which the last four are the name of the author of  Metamorphoses), but work doesn’t feel like it used to; my office doesn’t feel like it used to. It’s as if I’ve been a few steps removed from the physicality of that space and, whenever I am there, it’s as if I am watching everything through a looking glass. Things are recognizable but ever so slightly off — the colors are off, the people are off. It’s as I don’t belong there anymore.

***

Over the past few years, we have been fortunate enough to hire several people in my area. We prioritize assistant professors when it comes to teaching assignments: great care is taken to ensure they teach a range of courses and in a way that doesn’t deter them from developing their research programs, and  they always get first dibs. Overall, this attention to assistant professors is one of the best things about my department, and people who were taken care of on the tenure track do tend to pay it forward. Personally, I am always happy to share my materials with new instructors.

However, there’s a bit of an issue that arose in the last few years. There’s a two-course graduate sequence that I often used to teach. I designed both courses as they are critical for my research group. The first of the courses is broader in scope and relevant for a number of groups. In the last few years, two new instructors have been teaching the first course in the series; in fact, it’s been years since I taught it last. The unfortunate thing is that students no longer come out of this course knowing what they need to know in order to follow the second course in the series, which I’m still the only one teaching. This puts significant strain on my teaching in the second course as I need to spend what seems to be 40-45% of my time teaching stuff that should’ve been covered in the first course but wasn’t. It’s frustrating for me and  frustrating for students, and this semester I have had to make pretty significant changes on the fly since it turned out they literally covered only half of the material in the first course. Again, these two courses are critical for my research, and I used to be able to count on students getting a lot from them, but now they get very little out of the first one and, as a result, they don’t get nearly as much as they should from the second one.

These changes are negatively affecting my research group. I am not sure how to address them other than  by doing informal teaching during group meetings or by confronting current instructors about material coverage, but I am loath to do the latter as the instructors are junior faculty.

I probably will just suck it up and do what I can, teaching this unholy amalgamation of two courses within one, and seeing if an ad hoc special topics offering can help me bridge the gap between what is and what my students need it to be.

***

There is a longtime friend of the blog who is facing a serious health challenge, so please everyone send them good vibes and wishes for a swift recovery!

How’s everyone doing, blogosphere? 

Academic Miscellany

There is this university-level committee I am on, and every meeting is a trip to the Twilight Zone because the meetings are where I get to meet Bizarro Xykademiqz—someone who superficially seems like they would be similar to me, but are actually the exact opposite. Seriously now, there’s a person (a woman, in case it matters) on this committee with whom I disagree 100% on everything. It’s so weird. There hasn’t been a single thing we’ve seen eye-to-eye on. Not one! We are both opinionated people, which is why this issue comes up, but it’s still a little shocking. The other folks are spread out in between while this person and I hold two opposing views. It’s very strange for both of us to be in academia (granted, in very, VERY different disciplines) yet have virtually nothing in common, at least when it comes to viewing the work of this particular committee. (I might also be having tiny panic attacks at the thought of having to interact with this person outside of the committee.)

***

This year, I’ve started advising undergrads in an interdisciplinary program. Recently, a student came to me with a course plan that is so unbelievably packed and so high-level, that I was shocked and was a bit at a loss as to what to advise.  I didn’t want to tell the student outright that their load was too great, because some people are quite capable and the student does have a 4.0 GPA so far. What surprised me was the fact that they are dead-set on getting into graduate school, which is fine, but they don’t really know what subfield they are interested in and aren’t even trying to figure out what they want. They just seem to want to somehow tunnel through undergrad courses and get to graduate courses as quickly as possible (the course plan is chock full of graduate courses), but it’s not because they are interested in the topics. Rather, it’s as if they’re being chased by demons (read: likely parental expectations, internalized or not) and the only way to escape the demons is by enrolling in upper-level grad courses as soon as possible and take as many of them as possible. I told the student that maybe they should take a breath and enjoy their undergraduate experience, focus on making friends, maybe take some more courses for breadth, but the student seemed laser-focused on this breakneck pace that will have them complete grad-level coursework before they earn their bachelor’s degree. I did tell them that, too. I honestly didn’t know why they wanted my advice. I don’t know this student well, and maybe they’re a savant so this workload is nothing for them, but again it doesn’t seem like it. They appear to be moving fast for moving fast sakes and aren’t driven by curiosity or specific interest. Several times, they asked if they could skip this course to get to that course; I asked why, but they never had an explanation. It felt like curricular whack-a-mole, with the student focused on getting to hit all these high-level courses, without giving themselves the time to process the material. If I’d known the kid better, I would’ve been more insistent that they stop and smell the flowers or, if not flowers, then perhaps beer and sweat at some campus party. There’s such a thing as taking your undergraduate studies a little too seriously.

***

 How’s the spring semester going for you, blogosphere? 

Well, I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news

The good news is that my novel will be out in March. 

The bad news is that Academadness will therefore NOT be out in March. 😩 I’m pushing it back, yet again, this time to May. 

Learning how to write short fiction and then long fiction that people might wish to read apparently isn’t enough. It turns out I am now neck deep in figuring out how to promote and market myself. This might be my most brutal endeavor yet, and I’ve birthed multiple children and countless research papers and grant proposals. What are the best days of the week and times of day to post something on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram? Mind you, the answer is different for different platforms. Is Canva Pro worth the money? Why the heck is it law to have to specify a physical address at the end of a newsletter? Should I pay for a virtual mailbox? Or just get everyone to subscribe to my website and receive blog posts as newsletter? And don’t even start on getting reviews lined up before the book comes out! Is NetGalley worth it? Probably not, but what about doing it as part of a co-op? How about forgoing NetGalley and just sticking to  BookSirens or Booksprout? And how does Bookbub fit into all that? 

In other words: 

PullingHair

In all seriousness, I know all this would be necessary even if I had gone with a big press.  And my publisher, as small as it is, has been doing a bang-up job with every aspect of the process so far, so no complaints there. (Btw, if you’re a longtime blog reader and would like to read and review an ARC of the novel, send me an email or contact me through the blog contact form.)

In academic news, semester proceeds apace. This one isn’t too bad in terms of my teaching workload, but I need to ramp up my grant-writing efforts, which means papers have to go out ASAP. So that’s what I should be doing instead of being a dilettante publicist.

More on academic stuff soon, and in the meantime, some Twitter levity.  Or at least I thought it was levity, but upon inspection of my bookmarks, it turned out a high percentage were of the existential-dread variety. 😬 Oh, well. 

https://twitter.com/kycarrerolopez/status/1750272788001079559?s=20
https://twitter.com/clhubes/status/1745112014404374696?s=20

It’s 2024 Blog Delurking Week!

Delurk2024_1

The first week of January is traditionally International Blog Delurking Week, but it slipped my mind so we ‘re doing it a little late.

Without further ado…

*drumroll*

Delurkpalooza 2024!

Show thyself, dear blog reader! Whether you’re old or new, whether you commented before or not,  please stop by and tell us a little about yourself. Are you a student, faculty, or staff? Are you someone in a line of work outside academia? How did you find the blog? What do you most like to read about here on xykademiqz?

How was 2023 for you? What lifted your spirits? What are you looking forward to in 2024?

Come say ‘hi’ — we’d love to hear from you!

2023 in the Rearview Mirror, 2024 in a Crystal Ball

Happy 2024! May it bring you good health and contentment, and, if you’re in academia, also untold grant riches, high-profile publications, and a teaching schedule that makes you miss the most pointless meetings.

This has been my 2023:

Professional:

  • Taught seven million courses, or at least it feels like I did. I taught a large undergrad course in the spring, another large undergrad course in the summer, and two courses in the fall (one large undergrad and one upper-level grad in an adjacent field to mine) because of people on sabbatical etc., so overall I taught twice as many courses as I should have based on how many students and how much grant money I have (I am actually pretty flush right now). I want to be a good citizen and be helpful to the department, but I am also feeling a bit (OK, more than a bit) resentful that I had to do all this because I know a lot of my colleagues would never say yes. I understand the chair needs to staff courses and all, but I wish the chair would put more pressure on the people who would do a crappier job. I am tired of being penalized for good teaching by being given even more teaching. I want to not even be asked, like the disinterested teachers get to never be asked. I want to not always be put in the position to have to say no over and over, and defend myself from repeated requests until I am worn down.
  • Did a staggering amount of service, a large portion of which involved evaluating other people’s work in every way imaginable. I don’t want to write any more reports on anyone’s papers, grants, tenure dossiers, promotion-to-full dossiers, or any nomination for anything ever. I want to write optimistic poems about nature and the sun and about bees buzzing, and not have to write yet another takedown of someone’s grant or paper because their claim of novelty relies on not citing relevant prior work, pretending it doesn’t exist.
  • Fell very far behind on papers thanks to having been completely blocked by teaching and service this past semester. This is filling me with dread for the upcoming funding cycle. There’s still a year and change before the situation becomes dire, but as we all know, the time to start slinging those white papers is now.
  • Traveled internationally for work for the first time since before Covid; one of those trips was with middle kid, and it was honestly great. I am really glad I could do this with him. It would’ve been even greater had I not gotten sick on the way back.

Personal:

  • Finished a novel, queried, and ended up with a contract with a small genre publisher in August 2023. The book is now undergoing publisher’s edits and will be out sometime in the first half of 2024. It would be nice if I’d gotten an agent, but honestly I think this novel wasn’t the one to get me an agent anyway. I am taking publication with a reputable genre outlet as a win.
  • Wrote and published some short fiction, but much less than in earlier years. Part of it was being busy with work, but the other part was the process of querying the novel, which is pretty soul-sucking. I would say it is even more soul-sucking than writing grants, and we all know grants are a high bar for how much of your soul they can suck away. The whole year, between querying the novel and having so much teaching and service, I felt like my creative well was basically a colander, where I kept refilling it (see next bullet) but barely anything remained inside. But refill it I must.
  • Read like a literary speed demon (finished over 200 books on Kindle, with probably another two dozen assorted paperbacks and about as many ebook rereads). I have almost completely stopped watching shows and movies because they make me antsy and don’t hold my attention as well as they used to. These days, I watch a couple of shows once a week with hubs, the rest of the time I read to decompress. And I needed to decompress a lot this year.
  • Sent out a collection of short stories and flash fiction to a few small publishers (short-story collections aren’t big sellers, so I didn’t even try querying agents with it). I knew the collection would be tough to sell as it’s cross-genre, but I feel I did a good job organizing the stories around three interconnected themes. I got one serious bite and am currently working with that publisher on a revised table of contents that would be a little better aligned with their vibe and would include more stories.

In the coming year, I plan to:

  • Write ALL TEH PAPERZ
  • Write ALL TEH WHITE PAPERZ, and then a few grants
  • Recruit a bunch of new graduate students
  • Stop myself from giving so much of my emotional energy to my work because it has never and will never love me back
  • Draft the second novel in the spring. It’s been marinating in my mind for months, but I haven’t had the mental space to start on it thanks to workload in summer and fall. I have a five-book series loosely planned.
  • Put out Academadness in spring 2024
  • Promote debut novel that is coming out sometime in 2024
  • Finalize the edits and contract for short-story collection. Hopefully see it published.
  • Write some short fiction beyond flash. After publishing a ton of flash, I think I’m craving meatier fare in between novels.
  • It’s crazy that it’s quite possible I will have three very different books (a novel, a short-story collection, and a nonfiction collection of essays on academia) under three very different pen names, all coming out this year. If someone told me this at a party (“I’m having three books under three different pen names coming out this year”) I would think they’re making it up and are possibly a little nutty. Yet, here I am; not making it up, but definitely more than a little nutty.
  • It’s so strange to produce so much writing yet have virtually no one IRL know about any of it. My parents knew about Academaze; they don’t know about fiction. I have friends from childhood who  tell me about mountaineering or their toy-car collections, and I basically pretend not to have hobbies. I tried to tell one recently about writing, but it felt so weird and strange and dangerous that I quickly gave up on the idea. I am very, very boring IRL.

How’s your year been, blogosphere? Highlights from 2023? Plans for 2024? 

Adventures in Leadership

When you become senior enough, you get to (kind of) be temporarily in charge of other senior academics, generally as chair of a committee, or seventeen.

I don’t know if I am finally achieving new levels of maturity, but I’ve acquired some unexpected insights from chairing one important university committee. One such insight has to do with having always felt like I was too uncouth for academia. It turns out there is (probably) nothing wrong with me. I have witnessed people lauded for their tact and composure do stuff I never would, or stuff that, if I did, I would beat myself up over for half a decade. Yet, these other folks don’t seem to be plagued by guilt or shame. It truly is all about how one sees oneself.

Senior academics feel very strongly about things and believe they know best, which makes them challenging to lead. With some, the knowing best manifests as belligerence. With others, it presents as excessive proactiveness, doing something far too soon or doing something that turns out to be a bad idea, then backtracking and causing things to fall into disarray.

I’ve had the previous committee chair, now no longer chair but still on the committee, all but scold me over doing something that is not procedure, just something this person individually feels should be done a certain different way. I responded to the barely disguised written snark with a thank you, then took the issue to the whole committee, where we collectively decided how it would be handled in the future. I owe the former chair some deference, but not limitless deference. Former chair is still just a faculty member, just like myself.

Overall, as challenging as herding cats might be, it has made me feel better about myself as a grownup academic. Seeing others lose their cool, do (minor) imprudent things, and say stuff that is not perfect for the occasion feels vindicating. It also makes me resent all the more the person who, years ago, when I was first starting out as faculty, flat out told me I didn’t have the personality for administration; since the words played into my existing insecurities, I took them as the truth. I hope the person was simply wrong, the way people with big egos are wrong when they assume they know things well beyond the realm of  competence, and not that they tried to manipulate me. Because it turns out my poker face has gotten good over the years, my written-communication game is on point, and I have just the right amount of not giving a fuck on account of my gooey center no longer being beholden to academia that I might be ready for larger herds of academic cats. I might even enjoy the challenge.

Random Bits of Thanksgiving

Happy Turkey Day!

I cooked all day yesterday, I have to grade a midterm all day today, and then cook all day tomorrow because it’s spouse’s birthday and there’s a labor-intensive dish he wants. Then on Sunday I grade the midterm for another class.

***

I finally picked a notes app and entered all the stuff I need to do in a checklist and then cackled like a helpless psychotic witch because of how long the list is. Reader, I am overcommitted.

***

I got a bite on my short-story collection. It’s a cross-genre collection organized around a cool theme and I think it works well, but, alas, the cross-genre-ness of it is a problem, as I suspected it might be, because most publishers are genre-specific. So this publisher wants to nix some stories and do some other stuff, and while what they ask is reasonable, most of what I feel is exhaustion. Like, can you just take it, OK? I wish there were one thing I could do and it was done, and I wouldn’t have to go back and endlessly tinker. Obviously, I am not communicating any of this to the publisher, and I will do the right thing eventually,  and in any case the book is with a few other publishers so we will see what comes out of it all, but the wave of exhaustion is real. Like—one more thing? I can’t just get an unqualified win?

***

Man, I’m whiny. I don’t like feeling whiny.

***

I’ve been thinking about the field of modeling and simulation, and about recipes, and about cranberry sauce in particular because it’s Thanksgiving. The base of the cranberry sauce is simple: you need cranberries, water, and sugar. The sugar and the pectin from the burst cranberries thicken into a sauce; that’s the sauce essence. Now, you can add orange zest or cinnamon or replace water with orange juice or whatever, and these certainly might make for a more interesting-tasting sauce, but the sauce essence is the same and it is simple. The small list of critical ingredients necessary to achieve the essence of a dish is something that experienced cooks understand, which is why they are able to throw together delicious meals from whatever they have on hand. They understand the chemistry of cooking, how ingredients interact, and what effects their interactions have. (Incidentally, the show Lessons in Chemistry, starring Brie Larson, is pretty awesome.) They don’t waste time or money on procuring 2 milligrams of powdered bat wings as per some random recipe because they understand it’s a completely optional element to the dish.

There is usually a small number of reasons why some physical phenomenon takes place. Being able to identify them requires intuition and experience and usually a pen and paper, or a relatively simple computational model. Yet we increasingly see very sophisticated simulation tools used as blunt instruments, simulating everything but explaining nothing. It’s not the simulation tools’ fault. Some people are focused on getting every detail right, presumably chasing perfect agreement with observations, so they  throw everything at the problem and thereby obscure the (few!) critical insights that would have alone explained the phenomenon with ~80-90% accuracy.

We need to go easy on powdered bat wings.

Getting a Bite

It’s November, the time of NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo, and in years past I blogged daily during the month, but this November the idea of blogging even close to every day is so laughable, I might have peed myself a little just thinking about it.

In other words, there’s no way I can pull off every day, or even every other day. I will strive for twice a week, and we’ll see how it goes.

This semester is the worst of all the semesters, ever. I don’t know what the hell is going on (only I know; teaching overload and service overload). It’s just non-fucking-stop.

The workload is so bad I realized there would also be no way I could finalize Academadness by the late November deadline. I need the semester to simply be over. So I have pushed the release of Academadness to March. That’s the only way I will have a fighting chance to do a good job at putting the finishing touches on this collection.

In regular blogging news, plenty of academic stuff comes up and I want to write about it, but the time isn’t there, and then I forget.

Still, here’s one vignette from several weeks ago. We had an important external visitor in the department, a technical person. I didn’t have even half an hour to spare during the day to meet him, so another colleague in a similar predicament and I offered to take the visitor to dinner. I certainly planned to talk shop, and the colleague did, too.

Only last minute we found out that the visitor had brought his wife along and she would be joining us for dinner, and would we mind?

When I heard the news, I felt a surge of anger. It was so sudden and so powerful, that it got me thinking—why such a strong reaction for what is essentially a minor change in plans?

This is what I came up with.

First, I was only meeting with the visitor so we could talk shop. I wanted to talk shop. Shop talk was raison d’etre for the dinner. I had no interest in socializing. I am out-of-my-mind busy, and I am giving up my evening during which I might get a chance to unwind, for this meeting, which is now not what it was supposed to be, and which would instead become an exercise in small-talk inanity. Even at conferences, I honestly hate socializing with spouses; I am there to work, and whatever socializing is for work networking purposes. I am not there to make personal friends.

But there’s another dimension of this all. Most people in my field are men, and all the senior men have homemaker wives. Junior men aren’t quite like that and there are many more professional wives, but the older guard is very traditional. Every time a stay-at-home wife is brought along (and this one turned out to be one such wife), I am reminded of how  unnatural I must appear to her husband. I am some sort of ungodly amalgamation of him and her, a woman like her but not really a woman, because he clearly thinks a real woman stays at home; I do a job just like him, but I bet he does not consider me an equal,  because I am a woman like his wife, and he is definitely the boss of her. The dinner was a reminder of how out of place most people in my field must find me to be.

Anyway, the dinner was fine, albeit boring, but probably not warranting a flareup of fury. The wife was indeed as traditional and demure as they come; her husband, the visitor, was the lead of the household around whose career everyone else’s life had to fit. My department colleague tried really hard to talk a little bit of shop while keeping the wife engaged in the conversation, a feat of great bravery at which he ultimately failed. The conversation then veered into that most annoying of genres—where we have traveled for work and what sights we have we seen, something old-timers fucking love but I will never understand the fascination with—followed by talk of kids and even grandkids. Innocuous and pointless; I’d rather have been talking about work or else at home, relaxing.

How’s your November, blogosphere? As grouchy as mine? 

Sunday Night Levity

Whenever I start to leave needlessly elaborate comments on other people’s blogs, that’s a signal I should probably write my own post. The exhausting semester proceeds apace, with the pace being one that gives whiplash. Sunday evening is a time of dread as I face the calendar of upcoming obligations.

Last week, I had a group meeting till half an hour before my afternoon lecture. A normal person would assume I’d use that time to go to the bathroom, maybe glance at my notes, and just generally get in the headspace needed to prance with markers for seventy-five minutes (plus up to an hour after class). Alas, I had to squeeze in another online meeting into those thirty minutes. Yes, that was the only possible meeting time. As they say, FML. I felt so lucky and so grateful that the squeezed-in meeting ended ten minutes early and I could, in fact, go to the bathroom. This is not normal.

I wrote on Twitter (that would be my long-neglected xykademiqz/Sydney Phlox account) that, if I could get rid of service in exchange for more teaching, I totally would. In a heartbeat. Maybe I should pitch it, see if my chair would go for it. Probably not, but a girl can dream.

I take Saturdays off (yesterday I had all these relaxation plans, many of which were sidelined by me taking a three-hour nap in the afternoon, like an infant, and still going to bed at a regular hour, and watching more episodes of Invasion with hubs. Today (Sunday) was shopping, cooking, chores, and catching up on work, student question through the discussion portal, random shit I needed to send to colleagues (papers, data, slides), etc. I’m hopelessly behind on everything that actually matters (e.g., papers going out so our grants would get renewed and other “unimportant” stuff).

OK, I’m bumming myself out. Here’s some levity from the platform formerly known as Twitter, where one could previously find a humorous tweet followed by plenty of wit in the comments, but can now generally finds a humorous tweet followed by a trashfire of unrelated comments.

Without further ado, from my bookmarks:

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https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/how-rock-and-roll-stays-relevant-in-middle-age-and-beyond

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Picture of Belle in her yellow ballgown dancing with the Beast in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, with the caption above: “FACTS: Belle did NOT know the Beast could turn into a human, she was fully prepared to carry on as is”

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Busy Semester

This is officially the busiest semester I’ve ever had in my life. 😭

Teaching overload; insane service; the two afternoons I am not completely swamped with the former two,  I’m desperately trying to finish and submit some papers.

I am not twenty or even thirty anymore, and my body no longer tolerates lack of sleep. If I get less than 5 hours, I’m useless the following day; this wasn’t the case when I was young, but I suppose  all good things must come to an end.

Face time with students and colleagues is so much more draining now than it used to be. On days when I teach my classes, I need a good 30–60 min after the last class for the adrenaline high to dissipate before I am human enough to head home.

Bottom line, I really have to do all my work at work and I can’t skimp on sleep or downtime like I used to, because there will be hell to pay if I do. I have objectively more work now than I did before because I’m more senior, and while I am better and more efficient at my job, I also can’t work nonstop like I used to, nor do I want to, if I’m being honest.

How is your semester going, blogosphere?