academic loitering

It's time to dispense with the niceties and discuss something central to this whole blog setting--the title.

Maybe I squirreled away an explanation in one of these posts. I do recall when I set this fucker up back in April 2009 I had a description/explanation in the biography section of the blogger. Well, fuck that.

I'm into cussing now as you can tell. So be it. My 'Rated R' for rant is coming through, and while I come off as rather coarse and angry others tell me that it's because I am self-centered.

True, oh so true.

But what happens when one becomes too self involved. Like the Narcissus of Greek mythology one finds itself transfixed before one's image or that which one takes for one's image. I do recall my first month back on the college campus. I had just finished a stint in a job with benefits at a pharmaceutical publishing house. It required very little creativity, just that I show up, know the tags and how to use them. Plus, I employed some very basic editorial skills, some of which had to be tossed out the window because, well, 'gender' was a tag, and I couldn't continue to explain to my co-workers the distinction between gender and sex. The pharmacists and nurses that used our 'rag' understood perhaps more intimately the two as they dealt with the many permutations of sexual dysfunction and chromosome syndromes in their occupations. To have me try to cut through that curtain of utter seriousness with some academic exercise was like a fart during Mass.

But I do remember something, something akin to that Narcissus moment during that first month of graduate school. I recall telling myself, like I normally do, that I was where I wanted to be and that my future was brighter than a pulsar. I got wrapped up in that idea. I got wrapped up in that feeling. I got wrapped up in that moment. And so I continued to do very little to actually realize a future. No, I did my studies to the best of my abilities, and then I disavowed myself of the identity of the academic and went back to being a pot-headed Star Trekkie researching marijuana cultivation and practicing it on a very limited but mildly successful level.

I should have stuck with my after-hours occupation. Nope, I finished out my first year and was completely entranced with the notion of going for more school. 'More' was my mantra after I finished college. I felt like I hadn't learned enough, but I was of the mind that I had to be in a learning situation in order to satisfy that need. And so that is why I continued on at the doctoral level in a very serious program with very serious people, ones who didn't drop their daylight clothing of academe and become self-involved shitheads such as myself. Living among the academics in a house with academics I had very little respite from their life, and so quickly this component of my free time died out. I began to read all the time. That was a way to appear looking smart while I let my mind wander. It was just another performative cop-out to convince myself that I was being academic.

But I wasn't, not really. It didn't seep into my core. I wasn't 'being' an academic. I played one, and convincingly enough I used my facility for language and vocabulary to trick a lot of people into thinking I was smart. Being able to use the words correctly and to think critically is one thing, but without an identity and personal mission under the umbrella of academics in which to pursue it they are just words and just thinking. That's where I hit the wall.

During my comprehensive exams I began to cry because I was being forced to tell a group of elder scholars who 'I' was, and I had no hat in telling that publicly. So I whimpered through a few words and let my advisor finish my sentence for me. That's where that ended, and so with it ended my career.

I continued to mime academics as I worked through aspects of my dissertation. Looking back on it now, and reading some of the stuff I get a sense that I was a different person, possessed perhaps by the discourses in which I was ensconced. I puttered through that for a few years, took an undeserving and underpaying job in some academic backwater, and burned out. What I have to show for it are a few lost years and no degree to demonstrate I was busy doing something.

A gulf exists between doing the time and earning the degree. A gaping, yawning chasm exists between ABD and PhD. And I'm on the "chopped-liver" end of that ravine. I own up to it. When I'm donning a respirator and fiddling around on a coal tar decanter next to a sign that reads, "Warning Benzene Cancer Hazard," I know certainly that I dug this grave for myself by doing what I do best, loiter about.

Yes, I spent from 1995 to around 2008 loitering in universities, thinking big and producing small. I set my sights big in 1995 pursuing pre-medicine, planned to drop out the next year, was coaxed into returning, studied communication, swapped degrees a half a dozen times, and ended up running out of time in 1998, so I settled back into smoking massive amounts of weed and acing my communication courses. That would be the poster child for 'cop-out' and 'loitering' if there ever were one.

Oddly enough all that smoking led me to a career where no smoking is tolerated. I have to take drug tests. I don't mind my career path. I could consider it an Academic Walkabout in the Aussie sense of the term. I just was meandering along, and paid no mind to the real work of becoming the thing that the process was supposed to make you. Nope, like a duck's feather none of that academic water stuck for long. Nope, it collected in little puddles here and there, and when I went about it slid right back off. And the best kind of repellent for all this academic water is being the Narcissus. When you're so deeply invested in your own ego development for private enjoyment you miss out on a world of others and the activities and ideas that make you a sensible member in that world. Nope, to add some rhetorical flourish to my title, I'm an 'artist.' And this is not to say that academics aren't egoists. They've just invested their ego into something a little more sensible to their respective communities. They do the necessary extra-curriculars to make it into their field. I did none of that, none. I just retreated to a book in order to satisfy the policeman in my head. And what came of it is my job at a steel mill, repairing structures, breathing in dirty air, and exposing myself to physical and environmental hazards. It's good work really. I harbor zero, zero contempt for the people with whom I work.

Oddly enough the structure of my current profession benefits those that disavow their jobs at the end of the day. In the academic world you wear your work like a musk exuded from some long-atrophied and atavistic anal glad. Your academic work spreads it all over you, and others recognize not only who but what you are. If cornered to speak about a core academic concern, I had nothing. It ended there. I was a sham, a charlatan, a phony, a fake. I was not what I pretended to be, simply a pretender going about my day, paying no mind to the extra work outside of the research and writing that it took to become one of them. Nope, I found me in all that mess. And here I am, still standing by the surface of the pool, gazing contentedly at my own reflection.

It's all a defense mechanism perhaps. Being shunned and ignored for years, I found that I could hug myself, and that was enough. I created a little universe that housed me, and I guarded so many from entering it. And that's my life in a nutshell--self-absorbed and completely meaningless socially. Even my jokes are an insult to that profession. When the world gives me a hint or simply says no, I move on, hoping to find something that naturally appeals to me in some way that I don't encounter its stubborn and intractable qualities.

Good luck dude.