Sitting in my Own Shittiness

Today, I made a terrible mistake. I inadvertently sent an extremely negative evaluation of my teaching group to the entire Writing department at my university. In case you're not an academic, here's the scoop. Worst-case scenario: I lose my job because this thing comes back to bite me in the ass (how, exactly, it does that would have to be pretty contrived since my only real "sin" here is replying to all when it should have been to only one; the unfortunate part is, of course, that the content of the email was a negative evaluation). Best-case scenario: the Writing department sees this as a wake-up call and reassesses the teaching mentor system so that it's not ultimately useless.

Either way, I'm sitting in my own shittiness right now, without a clue as to what tomorrow brings. My stomach is in knots. I feel like a douchebag. The truth is, I stand behind everything I wrote in the evaluation (included below). I just wonder if, now that's it's said, I can ever live it down... or if I even want to. Okay, so -- two sides. One side of me feels like shit that I would ever have said anything negative about anyone at that place, that I'm not, like most of the other TAs I know, just toeing the line, getting paid, learning. Why must I always play the antagonist? Which brings us to the second side, which feels like, since nobody else is saying it, I'm going to. Granted, I didn't mean to do it in such a formal and public way, but it's done, and now I have to ride it, whichever way it turns.

It's kind of exhilarating, actually. If I come out of this on the other side, and it all turned out well (best-case scenario), ummm....

I mean, I only say this because, while I would be devastated if I lost my assistantship and had to leave school because of it, I would survive. I would work my ass off at Starbucks or find a part-time teaching job somewhere if I could. I love graduate school, but it's not all that I am or all that I have going for me in my life. Truth be told, I've been feeling like a fresh start somewhere would be nice. Even if I lost my job tomorrow, I'd still have a plane ticket to Colorado for Christmas, a trip to Kentucky planned, and a bunch of people in my life who would put me up for any amount of time until I got back on my feet again, and I've been missing them like crazy lately. Would I miss academia? Sometimes, yes. But usually, no. The people here aren't very nice at all, and everyone is under the impression that they have to separate their work life from their "real" life, which baffles me, since we work all hours of the day and night... I talk to people's facades all day; it's exhausting, and it quickens my disenchantment with all of it. I could afford an extended break from academia, in fact.

I better stop now before I talk myself into something rash(er than the fucking email I sent out today without checking the "to" line).

***

[In response to question about mentor group:] Mentor group never helps me with anything. It’s a waste of time. Most of us catch up on other work while we’re in there because none of us are invested in the end-of-semester “project” you want us to do (because it, too, is unhelpful). The whole thing is a time suck that prevents me from focusing on what I came here to do. Maybe TA group should only be for those people who have never taught before? Also, why do we spend so much time ripping on English/Literature students and what they do if you keep hiring English/Literature students? That’s unhelpful, and it makes Lit students feel bastardized (maybe that’s the point; see my comment about her bad attitude below).

[In response to question about teaching evaluations:] How is it helpful to be told what I already know? I understand that you’re required to visit my class, but so far, it’s not been beneficial to me at all. I self-monitor, and we also have peer evaluations.

[In response to question about the mentor herself:] What an attitude problem! She’s constantly telling us that she told us to do something when, in fact, she didn’t. Then she gets hostile with us when we don’t do what she didn’t tell us to do. Very bizarre behavior; I don’t take her seriously because of it. Oh, and she kept saying that we were “the worst class she’s ever taught,” but… TA group isn’t a class.

[In response to question about the future of the TA mentoring program:] Like I’ve said for three semesters, I think TA group needs to either a) go away entirely or b) be evaluated in an entirely different way (because these forms never get anything accomplished). I think that TAs should be responsible enough to arrange meetings with their faculty mentor if things come up; otherwise, leave us alone and let us do the job we came here to do.

Full Disclosure

I should be going to bed right now. My right eye is twitching from the copious amount of reading I've done in the last two weeks. It's actually sort of impressive, so allow me to toot my own horn:

1. Jennifer Barker's The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience
2. Vivian Sobchack's Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture
3. Lisa Gitelman's Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture
4. Thomas Augst's A Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America
5. Mary Ann Doane's "The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space"
6. Kaja Silverman's "Body Talk"
7. Teresa de Lauretis' "Oedipus Interruptus", "Desire in Narrative", and "Strategies of Coherence"

All told, that's around 950 pages of history and philosophy spread across 5 full days and 4 half days (full days are days when I don't have class or other engagements and half days are when I devote at least 6 hours). When I say "full days," I do not mean that I wake up and am reading within fifteen minutes, that I only lay the book down to sprint to the bathroom, wolf down some cold pizza, and speed-shower. I mean that I read until I hit a saturation point, then I watch an episode of 30Rock or check Facebook and Gmail while I cook myself some food. Then I start reading again, then I take a break to go to the gym or work out at home. I read like a normal human being would read: while she's also living a life and finding time to enjoy what's going on around her. I also took the entire Friday after Thanksgiving off to give thanks to myself (ergo, my laundry didn't get done this week. We all make sacrifices, Lemon).

If you're another PhD student, or if you've already been through this always already new and fresh hell called graduate school, then you know that it is totally not okay for me to be spilling this kind of intimately personal information about the number of pages I read a day and my penchant for 20-minute sitcom study breaks. If you're not one of "us," then the unspoken rule to keep these kinds of details silent might feel as stupid and nonsensical to you as it does to me, and I apparently belong here. So I'll continue as though you're not one of "us" (hey, me neither!).

In a typical week this semester, I set aside all day Sat-Mon to reading and I tend to get 150-200 pages a day during those days. I'm a pretty slow reader; I read aloud a lot, and when I'm reading silently, I "read aloud" to myself in my head, so it's at the same speed either way (though, if you know me, you know how fast I can talk, so...). I've tried to improve my speed, but I have no retention unless I take it slowly, and even then, I find myself rereading quite a bit, stopping for long periods to take notes or explore an idea that the reading has triggered, etc. I average about 20 pages an hour of theory/philosophy, though the speed tends to increase as I move through the book because those first chapters, I'm still trying to figure out how the writer is saying what she's saying. It's only after I get into the writer's grove (if she has one, some don't) that I'm able to pick up the pace. Reading history goes a little faster, more like 25-30 pages/hour; these history books I'm reading blend close reading, philosophy, and history (of the book), so they're strange. One minute, I'm speed reading, and the next, I've had to slow way down to catch the flow of a particularly quirky close reading, especially if it's of a text I've not read before (or watched, as is often the case when I'm reading film theory).

On Wednesdays, I wake up at 9 (because, as you can see from the time stamp on this entry, I go to sleep in the wee hours of the mornings after an intense Tuesday out and about in the world). I hit the gym for some awesome step aerobics, come home and shower and feed myself, go to TA group, and I don't get back to my tiny apartment, fed, and settled in to read until mid-afternoon, and because I've been out and about, the unwind time is unpredictable and has sometimes lasted late into the evening Wednesdays, then, are sometimes a bust, but I can usually squeeze in around 100 pages on those days if I'm focused, which, you know, who knows? Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester were insanity. Starting at around week 10, I've been getting up at 7 on those mornings and getting to Starbucks by around 8 so that I can read for 4 hours before class, office hours, and another class, which lasts from 12:30-10pm. I get home around 10:30, which means I've been up and going at 100-mph for 15.5 hours, likely on as few as 3 hours of sleep (and, sadly, because of the crazy stomach/body issues I've had lately, on as few as 800 calories a day, and most of those have been lattes).

The above account doesn't consider the films I viewed for class or for writing a paper (around 8 hours over the course of two weeks), or the paper I wrote (5p, which I ended up spending around 10 hours on, scattered throughout the last week). Or the 8 gym visits (1.5 hours each), 7 decent night's sleep (6+ hours), 7 shitty night's sleep (3-5 hours), office hours (6 total) and TA groups (7.5 hours)... the list goes on and on. I justify my time to both of us. Yet with all this, I still feel like I'm just not giving it enough. Like I'm just not going to pull this off. Yet it's all I do, 6 days a week. On the 7th day, I'd love to say that the goddess rests, but instead, she launders her clothing, cleans her apartment, goes to the gym, and catches up on watching TV for the week (House, Lie to Me).

Truth is, I feel, for the first time since I've been here, that I've really started to figure out this lifestyle: I now know how to do a PhD program, and maybe not get straight A's, but to do the work the best I can and try to save my sanity in the process. I mean, my life is not exactly what I'd call regimented except the schedule the university would have me keep, such as to be at one class at xxx, to have x office hours per week, to attend TA groups. Those things, I show up to at a certain time, but when I'm not doing that, I'm reading, sleeping, exercising, laundering, grocering, showering, typing, or traveling between the places where I do such things: my tiny apartment, Starbucks, the laundromat, the gym, Meijer, and the bus. I sleep at strange hours, go to Starbucks at odd times and for long stretches (6 hours one day last week; got a lot read). I put my earbuds in and listen to this amazing audio track from the CD called Focus on ADHD: Attention and Concentration for Study (which, in case I didn't say so, is amazing); it's an hour long, so I read until the track is finished, then I get up, go to the bathroom, get another latte or americano, and hit play again. It relieves my mind from worrying about when I need to leave to get to class on time, but it also assures me that I'm reading a lot in one sitting, instead of getting up and down every 15 minutes, which is what I'm tempted to do if I'm at home. Enough propaganda; buy the track and see for yourself if you're not more productive when you listen to it. Works with your brain waves, man.