: TIME KEEPS ON SLIPPIN

Apologies for the lack of updates. Life has been full of changes.
Firstly, I've gotten a new roommate. We don't hang out as much as I would like, but it's been working really well aside form that. Secondly, for various reasons, my parents are splitting up. We're supposed to talk about it when I get home in December, but I'm pretty sure my father is moving to Canada. I was deeply affected upon finding out, but after thinking about it, I've accepted that it may be for the best. My parents are unhappy together, and I don't think they should stay married for the sake of my normative conception of what family life should be like. Still yet, after my father told me the news, which was on the day before the semester started, I showed up to my first graduate class drunk. Starting my grad career off with a (slurring) bang.
Bringing to my third significant change: On the day of my high school reunion, my graduate school career began.
I regrettably didn't go to my high school ten-year reunion. They say the first ten-year reunion is all very superficial. Everyone sizes each other up, trying to figure out who has been successful and who has not. The second ten-year reunion is less so, people have dropped their guards and gained a greater understanding of what matters in life (children, spouses, contentment, etc).
So I probably should have gone to the first ten-year reunion. In another ten years, when everyone at the reunion is sharing pictures of their children, I'll be little more than an unmarried, childless, musty-smelling lonely professor teaching political economy at some unknown institution in Florida. At least at this reunion, I am a graduate student at a pretty good school. Sure, most people realize graduate students are poor, involved in lowly, unimportant topics, and have very little earning potential in the future, but my life relative to others isn't going to get any better than this. It is only going to get worse. Thus, I regret not going and enjoying the glory that was all mine.
Graduate school has been unbelievably awesome. Whatever doubts I had about choosing UC Berkeley over MIT have now all faded away. The weather and campus are wonderful, my cohort is a social and fun bunch, and classes are exciting and stimulating. I feel very comfortable here, both in my intellectual ability and with my past. As an undergraduate, I often felt intimidated by graduate students, and had a sense that I didn't quite belong here, arriving in academia only by accident. There was a slight sense of shame in my poor high school record, criminal history, and slight ineloquence. But now I feel very comfortable just being myself, and feel just as qualified to be in the program as everyone else. More importantly, I've rediscovered my love for academia in general and political economy in particular.
The downside is that I have no time (which works well cause I also have no money). I literally have to count minutes everyday, and I'm often falling behind in work. Effectively, I get assigned a few books to read every week, have to work on math problem sets, and turn in essays every now and then. In the end, I'm only afforded perhaps ten hours of social time a week, three of which goes to perhaps various lunches with friends, and the remaining hours to one night out in the city, usually spent dancing and drinking. On top of that, I've committed myself to maintaining certain hobbies, such as doing photography, learning about trees, doing a little non-school related reading, and checking out new films at the
PFA with Dave (
kyobu). Life has become very, very busy.
Which is what is peculiar to me when I read William Deresiewicz's old post about academia and love taboos. Deresiewicz
wrote some time ago that there has been a strange and false construction of the professor as an old crank who engages in romantic taboos.
Look at recent movies about academics, and a remarkably consistent pattern emerges. In The Squid and the Whale (2005), Jeff Daniels plays an English professor and failed writer who sleeps with his students, neglects his wife, and bullies his children. In One True Thing (1998), William Hurt plays an English professor and failed writer who sleeps with his students, neglects his wife, and bullies his children. In Wonder Boys (2000), Michael Douglas plays an English professor and failed writer who sleeps with his students, has just been left by his third wife, and can’t commit to the child he’s conceived in an adulterous affair with his chancellor.
Dan Drezner and
Phoebe Maltz replied with a log of their real days as academics, showing a schedule that was uneventful and less than sexy. They seem to suggest that love simply wasn't an option to aloof academics, let alone strange and forbidden relationships with students.
I only half agree with them. If the stereotype of the academic is a bitter, neurotic drunkard, cruel to those he or she can be to, then I can think of more than a few examples of professors and graduate students who fit that mold. To the matter of love, taboo relationships seem to be possible everywhere. For example, at Berkeley, undergraduates across the board seem to highly revere graduate students, often forming infatuations. I myself became infatuated with a few female graduate student instructors while taking classes as an undergrad. I think part of it is due to being in awe of someone who knows so much about a subject you care about, and perhaps part of it is due to
Stockholm Syndrome (you scoff, but wrongly!). But while this might seem like a gold mine for taboo graduate-undergraduate relationships, even if one wanted to, you just can't find the time. Unless some 22 year old wants to go on a study date, where we sit together in silence, separated from each other by two open books, love taboo I'm not having. And hey, I'm the first in line to be failed writer bullying my children and having taboo relationships, if time would only allow.
So there it is. Things have been very busy, but wonderfully so. I have some backed up blog thoughts I'll be putting up soon, I promise. As you may have noticed, my old site,
Techno Is Worse Than War, has been taken down, so it's hard for me to host music. However, a friend of mine, Cynthia, showed me
Box.net, which is where I plan to resume hosting music. I have a post coming up with albums from a Livejournal friend of mine. Until then, check out
your favorite rappers on The Weakest Link (proof that hip hop makes you dumb), and this awesome online
repository of documentary films.