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?