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.

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.

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?