Quadrupled addendum.

One of my other pet peeves when I discuss the woes and misfortunes of my professional trajectory is people who focus on the lack of positivity in my thinking.

Like, when I was recently describing how over the past 15 years I'd repeatedly encountered promising professional situations only to have the rug pulled out from under me at late stages, just multiple, multiple times, my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) responded by mildly affirming or at least not disagreeing with what I'd just said, but more importantly by saying that the narrative that you tell yourself is important.

(Uh, yes, it's the narrative that's the problem here...  Conversely when I was having that same conversation with my one [art school] colleague who wears [women's] clothes, he was just like, yep, it's a pattern, since he's known me for a long time and has seen this happen time and time again.)

The same thing happened years ago, too, with this one collegiate scholarship donor in (finance) who I kept in touch with a very little bit by email, when I broached developing systemic economic issues and how ominous they were for class mobility etc., and he more or less was like, "I'm concerned, who are you hanging out with? You need a new set of friends!"

(Yeah, I'm getting fed a bad take on the world from my set of friends -- guess I didn't notice!)

When I encounter stuff like that, I almost want to act like my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair), like he does sometimes with his socratic response.

Like, he told me that once someone in (Britain) mentioned to him that many young people were lazy, so he responded by being nice and being all like, "Hmm, that could be true!", and then he asked how many young people they knew, where they were and what they were doing, what about statistics that he read about about home ownership and income, perhaps all those people were lazy, and then, finally, well, there must be a lot of good jobs around, if all these lazy people aren't going after them.

Essentially, his strategy was to affably work with their premise and draw it out to the point of ridiculousness, and by doing that to show them up. "Really, they think an entire generation is lazy?", he was like, "What nonsense."

Quite a dick-ish move, I do think, but it must have had its own satisfactions.

Addendum addendum addendum.

One of my pet peeves is how where I'm at professionally comes up, people talk about my skills.

I recently caught up with my one (straight) friend who's into (BDSM), and he was saying, "Oh, you're so enthusiastic, you'd be such a great teacher!"\

(Yes -- now show me a job.)

Like, when I was disentangling from the collapsing eldercare sector, another friend commented that I had skills in that area as a "healer."

(Okay, that's one way of putting it -- now show me a healthy part of that sector that's worth getting involved in, now that I spent years in it to establish myself and work my way up, only to see it fall apart around me.)

Or, on a recent visit to my hometown, a librarian that I'm friendly with there was asking me what I was doing, and when I said waiting tables, she was saying something about how I should be doing something better, and she caught herself and was like, "Oh, I mean I'm sure you're a a great waiter, but you're so talented, it just seems like there's something better out there."

(Okay, fine, but don't talk hypothetically, now, instead go and actually show me.)

It's just the same shit over and over and over again, where people focus on the individual in their discussions and can't grapple with systemic economic degradation.

My one lawyer friend from (Missouri) says that people who give comments like that are trying to be helpful, but it's really just tiring.

For a while, my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) would engage people like that socratically in a kind of dick-ish way -- "Oh, interesting, so there are opportunities there? Oh wait, why did you think there are opportunities there? Oh, so you mean that anyone with that skill could get a job like that, how many people do you think have that skill, and how many jobs are there like that? Oh, so this advice on careers really isn't based on anything?" -- which really is dick-ish, but I think that was his way of dealing with that, too.

As he has said, when engaging your personal employment situation, people never make initial stray comments about the system, like, "Oh, isn't it a shame that they don't pay nurses more!"

Instead, it's all about you, and your skills, and what you could be doing.

Addendum addendum.

I would really love to know some of the salaries of the retiring generation of tenured profs at prestige universities, who research and teach the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for a number of years and have made myself into an expert in.

Though they drown it in words and it can be hard to tease out, there are very, very basic intellectual mistakes in a lot of their scholarship, where if you fairly and pithily summarize what they're doing to outsiders, it just makes them look like idiots.

And, I mean, if they're at 6 figures, you're giving them a million dollars each over the course of a decade, for that shit.

"Hashtag cartel."

Just a tremendous waste of resources...  They didn't know how to learn what they needed to learn, at that level, and over the years any nudges in that direction got deflected or dampened and they just stagnated there, in their idiocy.

. . .

(I usually don't talk like that -- "idiots," "idiocy" -- but the situation in the field that I'm in is really just tremendously egregious...  A colleague who recently gave me some advice on research project design made a side comment that it seems to him like a "backwater," which is a generous way of putting it.)

Addendum.

Part of me wishes a little that I could teach the language that I've been researching intensively now for a number of years and have made myself into a historic top-flight expert in, but as soon as you start filling in details to that daydream, it starts to fall apart...

First, teaching a class is a lot of work.

Second, how would that even work with your dayjob -- they couldn't ask people to pick up your work for an entire semester, while, conversely, does it really make sense to add that teaching into your schedule and displace research hours, all for not that much money and no guarantee that you'll teach the class again, which is the point where you have ready-made lesson plans and it becomes more time-efficient to teach and it increases your effective hourly wage?

Third, who would you even be teaching? Usurious tuition hangs over everything, and the advanced students don't know enough to appreciate you, and even if they would long-term, there's no jobs or decent chances at jobs waiting for them, so it would be cruel to encourage them in that, even if they say they're not hoping in that direction. And, it would be fun for people who just want to learn, but, I mean, if they're just doing it for fun, the undergrads can have fun getting stoned and watching Teletubbies, too.

Fourth, even if this was part of an advanced program, many of them have predatorily-priced master's degrees, which would just pervert the learning experience by compounding you into highly unethical behavior set into stone through the enrollment framework.

If there was a school where tuition was fair or it was advanced degrees for learning's sake, then fine, it might be worthwhile, but why go out of your way, otherwise?

It's like the employment system and profiteering have severely reduced the space where I would want to put myself forward as a teacher. I honestly would rather just put on an informal open class for whoever wants to come for free. I mean, I actually wouldn't do that since it would take away from my research and writing hours, I'd rather not teach at all, but, my not sharing my expertise somehow also seems like a tremendous waste, too -- it just seems somehow like it should be put into practice more, teaching-wise!

A life regret.

A refrain of mine this past year or so has been that if I had known how many academics behave, I simply never would have ever considered getting a Ph.D. and trying to enter that field of employment.

This came up again a few weeks ago, when my mother asked me if I missed not teaching at the one art school that I taught at.

My response: no, because there's no tenured positions, and it's horrible administration, and maybe that could have been something workable and decent if they unionized, but people didn't in a timely manner, and so that effectively was all over when the one department chair saw that I was an effective teacher and a good researcher and decided to go after me, to take out someone who makes him look bad.

(Incidentally, half a year ago I related that story to someone random I met who's in admin and who does STEM, and they just shrugged and were like, "It's all insecurity," and I was like, "Yes," but then I continued on and said something about him ginning up pretenses to remove my classes and seriously mess with my minimal livelihood at a time when I was already very economically insecure, which all in all is just very sick and unwell human-to-human behavior...  It's really just striking how that half of the behavior gets glossed over in professional discussions among people at that level, that's how normalized that bad behavior and abuse of power is, handwave and an "oh that's just that insecurity some people have," like that's just a prerogative of the tenured that some people can choose to employ, to seek out victims for any and all reasons, no matter how atrocious the circumstances.)

So, after summarizing (again) that situation for my mother, I said my refrain about how I never would have gotten a Ph.D., if I had known how people at that level behaved.

"Why would you know that?", she was like.

And, in a way, she's right.

You see glimpses of that behavior in all workplaces, where there's cranks and drama and you have to please people in power, so any random external encounter with that in the academy, you think it's the same, but it's not, and you just don't perceive how much more pervasive and how much more empowered that behavior is there, where it becomes something almost qualitatively different... If you're external or you're just starting out, you're not "in it" and you don't know enough and haven't done enough to be a threat, and it really doesn't become clear until you gradually ascend levels and become more alike in education and professional status with those actors, just how many of them there are that behave that way.

And, their lifetime jobs empower them to undertake anything they like so long as they provide a rationalization, and enough people just go along with those threadbare rationalizations, usually, just to please the other people with the lifetime jobs and "keep the peace," which is the exact opposite of the good-faith critical behavior that supposedly defines the profession.

(As my one art school colleague who wears [women's] clothes has said many times, "We all know that tenure's the problem, but we're not allowed to say it.")

One of the things that I can't quite figure out is why no-one fully clued me in to that world, from all the professionals there who seemed to have some level of positive feelings to me when I was starting out.

One might be a class issue -- people in academic employment tend to come from wealthier backgrounds and specifically academic backgrounds, so they probably just assume as a baseline, that everyone gets that these elites are small self-involved and often ridiculous cartels that you have to coddle and please out of all proportion to normal interaction, and that many of them are incompetent or low-functioning.

One might be a success issue -- even if people don't come from those backgrounds, the people who are in mentor-like positions to you figured it out, so they probably think that you already know it or that you can figure it out, too, so it doesn't need stating any more than it needed stating for them.

Another might be a "high on their own bullshit" issue -- there's this rhetoric of merit that adheres to people who get tenure, and probably a number of people believe that or prioritize that factor over others, not seeing how it's a very arbitrary club because their own membership in that club strokes their egos and causes them to be blind.

All this is on top of how positions have severely dwindled since the 2009 economic crisis, which puts these kind of dynamics into hyperdrive...  The more you have to go through endless cycles of postdocs and insecure positions, the more any such people out there are empowered again and again at every new workplace to weed out competition, more than ever...  In the past, maybe it was one or two people in your department that you had to tiptoe around as you sought to get tenure, now they're more and more shameless at rampaging and disposing their colleagues, especially since their jobs have become degraded and sh*ttier and it makes them feel better (like kicking the dog after a bad day at work, a colleague who studied ethics has observed).

To look at that externally, now, it's like a race to the bottom, where the fewer and fewer tenured people left are creating more and more stultifying environments, all while the rhetoric is getting amplified in the other direction, and they're more and more accomplished and better quality than ever.

Just what a perverse environment... I wish I had never gotten involved. And that's from someone whose recent research findings put them in the highest level of achievement, even if they're not really being recognized yet.

Mourning.

After the recent presidential election, the one (lesbian) sister of my one (former) (assisted living client) with (disabilities) observed that we were in a mourning period, and everyone was having a mourning response, lamenting all the futures that will not be, and sensing the many things that will come to pass.

I've increasingly realized that that's how I've been feeling about eldercare.

I had been discounting the likelihood that that sector would ever get fixed enough for me to return to it in the near- to medium-term, but still, a small part of me had hoped that somehow it would, and some late-stage plan of Harris's did address the wage issues that were going on, at least in part, and that could have been the start of something, maybe just maybe, where somehow something that made sense would have cropped up in a year or two or three and then I could have re-entered it in a worthwhile job that fit, maybe just maybe.

And now, it's like that door is slammed shut, and farewell to those years of my life making inroads into yet another professional future that turned out to be a mirage.

Recently, too, when I was back visiting the city that I used to live in, I stopped by the resthome where I used to work, and staffing problems have apparently begun to hit there, too...  Several people told me that the new people hired in just come and aren't that good and then leave, all very quickly, and no-one is staying.

Basically, I think it's a decently well-run place, and many older workers are there through inertia, but as those numbers have hemorrhaged, you're starting to get the wage compression thing hitting even "the good places," where people aren't just getting paid enough overall there and an entry-level job at Target is paying pretty similarly to those "professional" jobs that require pretty big time investments in certifications etc., so, you just don't have good dependable commonsense people entering the field, because why would they.

Sigh.

Just not good, and again, so many wasted years of my life, chasing something professional that crumbled right when I got there.

Local Wifi.

I'm pretty amused by the names of several local wifi routers where I live.

One is, "NSA Surveillance Van 239."

And, since it's a college town and there's a street called High Street near me, another one is, "High House."

. . .

(. . .)