Nerd Graffitti

In the ladies' room at work:

It says, "Moriarty was real." If you get that reference, you are a fabulous nerd. If you do not, look up the last episode of the second series of the updated Sherlock Holmes.

Of course, I now wonder what possessed a young, nerdy woman to proclaim this on a toilet paper dispenser, presumably while taking care of business. Did she suddenly think, while sitting there, that the world must know this? Or that other subversives relieving themselves in this spot must be reassured? Did she hope to start a revolution of peeing Holmes fans? 'Tis a mystery worthy of the master himself.

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The end of the week exhaustion has set in. This had faded from my memory in the past year. Now, I remember. After a good week of work, up to 12 hour days, from Monday through Thursday, Friday finds you drained. This would be a good feeling except, you know, there it still more to do. With some effort, the stamina will return.

Heigh-Ho

Kermit the Frog, here:

A younger Kermie here:

With his original gang of muppets:

Just some gratuitous muppetry from my last visit to the Smithsonian. They are doing a better job with their pop culture collection.

Meanwhile, I am going to have to build my stamina back up for teaching. Yesterday was the first day and I was so exhausted I went to sleep at 9 pm. My grandparents -- heck, my great-grandparents -- didn't even do that. I only stayed up until 9 in order to finish a novel, and I almost had to use toothpicks to hold my eyes open even for that. Ah well, champagne problems, right?

Enough Paranoia! Let's Learn All the Things!

I've met my paranoia quota for the week, I think. Time to think of other things less paranoid.

In this new job, I can now assign books other than the textbook. Indeed, I've been encouraged to assign many books and required to assign not just research papers, but research papers with ten or more sources. I wanted to weep with joy!

In this new job, too, they have altered their core requirements in such a way that only some majors have to take the U.S. history survey, but all students must take the world civilization survey. I could probably wing the whole U.S. history survey if necessary, I've taught it so many times. World Civ? Well, I taught a 20th century world civilization survey at the last school, but the closest I've ever been to the whole survey was a westen civ survey course that I took as a history minor back in 1987. (I made an A! The T.A. said wonderful things about my work in comments! Yes, I'm pathetic enough that I still take a milligram of pride in that!)

Having to teach a course that I've never really taken and in which I have not expertise is always a challenge. First of all, it is a lot of work. Not only do you have to learn all the things, but you have to figure out how you are going to arrange all of the things in a coherent narrative. You also have to let go of the need to teach all of the things. "You cannot teach all of the things!" I have to tell myself over and over. "You control which things are most important. Teach those things." Plus, you have to decide which books you will assign in a field in which you have no expertise and therefore know about none of the books. Then, you have to design an assignment that forces them to learn about historical writing.

Actually, you don't have to go as far with that last as I do, creating a series of scaffolding assignments designed to make the students think about their topic, distinguish between primary and secondary sources in history, use all of the databases and catalogs, choose appropriate sources, outline a coherent essay, and then write the damn thing. You just have to make them write so many pages by the end of the semester. I fear that I might be making more work for myself than I should. Still, I've done this in the past when I had only one class of 12 students (and a full-time job), and it worked very well. I didn't do it so much at my last job because I had far too many students. Now that I have a third of the students, I'll do it here. We'll know if it is overwhelming by October.

I digress.

I've been spending quite a bit of time identifying books and preparing the class and simply re-learning and learning the whole history of the world over the past two month; and, you know what? I love it! Not that every aspect interests me. There are stretches of centuries that put me to sleep, I have to say. I'm also a little appalled at myself that my greatest interest tends toward Europe (does that say bad things about me) and toward the medieval and early modern eras. Still, I can always find at least one thing fascinating about even the parts that put me to sleep.

The best part of preparing this class, too, has been that freshman feeling of arriving at school and seeing the whole world of knowledge spread out before me. There seemed to be so many things to learn -- there still does, even as I have become more specialized -- but the quest to learn them seemed exciting, not overwhelming.  I reencounter Gilgamesh or the Book of the Dead or Plato, but with much more sophistication this time around, and I remember them from the first time around and remember the feeling that I had finally entered a real world of ideas and history and mysteries that could be known with enough reading. I never felt that in grade school. In grade school, that real world seemed as far away as France or England or Italy, which were so far out of my reach that they  might as well have been Narnia or Middle Earth. Then, I was there.

I like remembering that feeling. In fact, not just remembering and reexperiencing, but actually experiencing. I also like that the global focus of the class expands the feeling. Now Sun Tzu joins Gilgamesh. Obviously, my focus right now seems to focus on ideas and the ways that the thinkers of societies described the ways that those societies ordered their world, understood relations between within societies, and described their place in the universe -- all with a mind that they did not necessarily live up to their ideals when they weren't flagrantly violating them. Eventually, I hope that I can develop something beyond this, adding in more about social relations and women. Especially about women. Meanwhile, I've recovered the thing that excited me about such a massive approach to the history of all of the things and the desire to learn all of the things.

I hope I can impress that upon the freshman. Do they even realize that they are at the start of a 4-6 year period in which their main job (although clearly not their only job) is to simply learn about anything and everything? Do they realize that this may be the last time in their whole lives that so much is open to them? Maybe. Probably not. I'm not sure that even I was as aware as I like to think I was, especially since I was constantly worried about money and paying for this experience and the future beyond college that I both wanted to get to as soon as I could but also feared because I fully expected  it to be an eternity of boring office jobs that were only tolerable insofar as they paid enough to have my own apartment and buy lots of books. As they say, youth is wasted on the young.

In any case, right now, before the stress sets in and I become overwhelmed, take leave of my senses, and wonder why I could not just be happy in boring office jobs that are only tolerable insofar as they paid enough to buy lots of books, I love that I have a job that means I can go back to that place where I want to learn all the things. I intend to use that feeling to overcome the bullshit that tends to erode the joy of learning and writing that drew most academics to the profession in the first place. I've already had a whiff of that bullshit. Now I know what to do to hold my nose when I smell it again: bury myself in learning all of the things, where the fun is.

That, and take up kickboxing.



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Note: "All the things" shamelessly stolen from Hyperbole and a Half  and her explanation, "This is why I'll never be an adult." That is one of my favorite stories. I even bought the t-shirt.

Maybe I Misunderstand the Extent of this Story

Do you know about this development as described in this article in Slate.com? Google will now allow your gmail e-mails to show up in searches. What's more, like the Book of Face, they don't give a rat's ass is you like it or not. Searching and gmail are their toys and they will do what they want with them. You just have to suck it up.

Maybe I misunderstand the extent of this story, or some of the finer details about Google's implementations; but this sounds to me as if your gmail e-mail becomes public whenever you log on. The ability for Google to return your emails in a search, seems analogous to the Post Office opening your mail and posting bits on a bulletin board. That is probably a naive analogy, given that nothing at all is private once you log onto the internet. Nonetheless, don't you have a password because you expect a modicum of control over the eyes on your e-mails? That expectation is naive, too.

I have a gmail account, which I opened to use as a work account between jobs and will use as professional account for non-school business because I seem to change institutional affiliations frequently and who knows what might happen in the future. Things that become portable, like professional memberships, go with that account. I also have an ancient Yahoo account for personal business. So, even under my own name, I try to keep the personal and the professional separate. The problem comes with other people, regardless of age, who don't understand the need and even resent the necessity of having some distinctions between the two. I have also used the Yahoo account to contact people about "off the record" work things, but now I wonder if Yahoo will end up in the same place as gmail in search engines.

Perhaps a bit more disturbing is that the school uses gmail as its own e-mail -- what would you call it? server? service?  In any case, you essentially use gmail to log into your work e-mail. Of course, I have long since learned that your employer claims a right to all e-mails generated on that account, I have been careful of the ways that I use it and what I say on it. Nevertheless, this adds another layer to your employer's ability to crawl through your communication.

[ETA] Also, it seems as if there are some legal privacy questions here, too, such as communications between students and professors. Exchanges about grades in particular would fall under FERPA, so the school probably should have some sort of security or exemption from e-mails appearing in searches.

Entering the internet seems to have become more and more like entering a panopticon. At the same time, speech on the internet seems to have become less and less free (see the ruling that a Book of Face "like" is not protected speech). Paranoia to the point of opting out as much as you can is probably healthy when you have to be vigilant over even the smallest interaction online.

Oh, and even receipts? Really? I suppose the Google people all know how to protect their own online accounts, but would they seriously want some of their online purchases appearing in a search engine? That could be pretty embarrassing!

Possession by the Book of Face

The Book of Face, for which I have my reasons in using (mostly in keeping my parents satisfied that I'm alive and keeping in touch with my brothers about my nephews -- our level of familial intimacy suits the Book), has this section for "People You Might Know." The list is a creepy reminder that the Book likes to crawl through your information and that it's keeping track of who knows who, much like some sort of HUAC or J. Edgar Hoover file on communists in the State Department.

Still, there is something almost optimistic about the list, as if you would WANT to be "friends" with people who are "friends" with your "friends," and you could all "like" each other's photos and trade mass-produced, illiterate quips and electronically group-hug one another into a frenzy.

Unfortunately, I know some of the people's faces who pop up in that section. That is, I know them in real life -- or did. So, yeah, X is a person I DO know, and for that reason I have no intention of being their "friend," on the Book of Face or anywhere else. I can't get rid of their faces, either. There they are, evil little devils popping up on the screen, as if my internet is possessed.  Perhaps the Book of Face is, unto itself, a possession of my computer, invited in by the incantation of opening an account?

I also lose just a tiny,  Book of Face bit of respect for my actual friends who are "friends" with these characters. They KNOW how nasty and vicious at least one of these people are. Indeed, I think that person is on the Book just to gather information to use against someone at some time (a bit like J. Edgar Hoover, really). Why would they open up their posting lives to them -- or even any part of their lives,  including "hello"? Of course, I'm not being just to my actual friends because "friends" is often a diplomatic or networking sort of relationship rather than a real one. 

Still, I wonder what people who study these sorts of things find about the ways people use the Book, the reasons they choose to interact or display information on the Book. I also wonder how much thought most people put into this online interaction. What are the nuances of "like" -- or lack thereof -- in an environment that has "like" as the only option to demonstrate solidarity or agreement or sympathy or horror or any other range of response? How has the concept of friendship altered? I have friends and I have Book "friends" and sometimes the two overlap -- those are the people I actually like, rather than "like."

I can't say that I actually enjoy being on the Book. Again, I mostly post trip pictures or speaking engagements to keep people satisfied that I'm living a more fabulous life than I actually am, and I "like" people's accomplishments and their pictures of dogs and babies. Occasionally, my Tex-Ass friends and I engage in some exasperation about the regressive state of the state. Otherwise, it is a venue in which to be supremely polite.

Many people don't know how to be polite, have you noticed? Not that I'm an prime example myself. Social phobia and an upbringing in which lack-of-manners was a rebellion against an earlier generation and all. Still, I begin to consider reading Emily Post, and I feel like my grandmother more and more as time goes on. I have a big, heavy purse filled with about anything you could need for the day. My casual dress tends toward a dowdy mix of slightly out-dated fashion and elements of the early 1960s (minus the yards of polyester). I inflict my vacation photos on everyone around me; and I'm prissy as hell about people's manners in a way that I never was before.

Oh heavens! Maybe I'm the one being possessed?

Attitude Adjustment

I was chewed out by an upper-level administrator last week. Why? Well, to cut out the long background, I asked for some clarification about the parameters of my job.

My job sort of straddles two jobs, one slightly higher in the institutional hierarchy than the other. Everyone thus far had been behaving as if the two jobs were essentially the same, and all information I had been given about the jobs indicated as such. So, I had no questions. As it turns out, there are fundamental differences in the two positions that go unnoticed -- indeed, unmentioned -- until the administration has to make cuts in support. Well, the cuts came, and I was a little surprised to find those difference. (Again, remembering that I was not aware of any significant differences since I had been given no indication that there were differences. Naive? Yes.) I wasn't indignant -- at least not until I understood what was going on -- just surprised since, as I said, we had been proceeding as if the two jobs were the same.

So I asked for some clarification on my position. If there are real differences in the two jobs, if those differences are related to their slightly different positions on the hierarchy, and if we are going to operate by the rules of the job that are slightly lower on the hierarchy, then I should have some clarification of those differences since they don't appear in the faculty handbook or anywhere else that I can find. Really, I wasn't challenging these rules, I just wanted to know what they are.

For that I was taken to task for my "tone" (always the "tone" when you speak with conviction), told that another administrator agreed with this one (ah, the patented gaslighting technique), and told that I should be damn well happy I have this job because I wasn't really qualified for it and because the administrator chewing me out didn't really want to hire me anyway. All with nifty scare quotes and "look here, little missy" phrasing, Not that specific phrase, but you can see by the content what I mean.

Welcome to the school!*

I talked to some other faculty with whom I am friends. They told me that, first, to be glad that this exchange took place via e-mail because these sorts of highly reactive, defensive, angry attacks usually take place at top volume and in your face. Second, they said that this initiates me into an exclusive club that includes all the faculty. They also told me that, the next time I see this administrator, the administrator will be all collegial and friendly and asking about my summer and such, as if nothing happened. Any interaction could be with Admin. Jekyll or Admin. Hyde. You never know, but expect Hyde if you ask a question that could in any way be construed as, well, questioning anything. I'd heard about this before, and thought it abusive. Now I had an e-mail full of it, and still think it is irrationally alienating.

My point here, despite appearances, is not to bitch about the exchange, but rather to talk myself through my own reaction.

Normally, when someone attacks like this -- and make no mistake, the administrator was lashing out -- I usually have three reactions. First, I feel my head turn into a funnel, with all possible reactions crowding through my head toward the tiny opening that is my mouth (or finger tips) where they become clogged. The first one to make its way out is often not the most constructive or thoughtful, and sometimes the most embarrassing. Mercifully, I do have something in my head that shuts off the profanity at this point.

The second and third reactions, the ones that ultimately exit the funnel and guide the rest, are fight and flight. I've tried to train myself away from "fight," or at least the type of "fight" that I learned, because the fighting becomes destructive and devolves into annihilation. Any real grievance or frustration or conflict that appears in the fight ever gets addressed much less solved. No one steps back to say "what is really going on here?" Everyone leaves angry, filled with hate, and exhausted, marking time until the next fight erupts.

Yet, even if your "fight" is more constructive, standing up for yourself or your work or your program, not yelling, not insulting, not annihilating, some personalities -- especially if they are insecure and defensive -- can only conceive of the conflict as a fight. You can't get anywhere with them because, no matter how calm and rational you remain, they just keep yelling louder and louder. At best, you might be able to calm them down to listen to you, but you have to do all the work to show them that you are trying to make an argument for or against something, not attack and destroy them personally. Even when the interaction goes that way, you end up exhausted and wondering if the exchange was worth the effort. Rumor has it that this is what I can expect from this quarter in the future.

Flight has become my favored mode of reaction in the face of attack. I tend to concede the ground because I have given up trying to interact with anyone who attacks. It would be a guerrilla strategy, retreating when the enemy advances, except I don't come around and strike when the enemy least expects an attack. That's because I don't like thinking in terms of "enemy." Conflict makes me nervous, but loud, angry, aggressive conflict shuts me down and I look for a more peaceful place to be. Flight can save your life or your mental health, and is a necessary tactic; but sometimes, you can't fly, or flying is an overreaction.

[This paragraph disappeared from the post when it when up earlier] Knowing all of this about myself, knowing the way I respond to an attack, I found myself a bit amazed that my reaction had changed as I read this particular attack from the administrator. Instead of feeling all of the possible responses rush through a funnel, I instead saw them amass before me, like game pieces: fight, flight, turn off, cry, scream, restate my position, and so on. Each potential reaction sat before me to use, discard, or hold in reserve. I could evaluate the ways that they might effectively protect me and advance my agenda, which was to learn the exact parameters of my job and the expectations that I could have for support in the future.

More importantly, underneath this surprisingly new response was a surprisingly new feeling of confidence. Normally, the sort of things that appeared in the body of the e-mail that questioned my fitness for the job, would have me turned in on myself, confirming all of my worst fears of myself as an impostor. This time, I thought, "oh, jeez, this is just bullshit." Bullshit and kind of pathetic.

With this sort of new found confidence, I picked up the flight piece in front of me. "Now, where are you going to go?" I asked myself. "And do you want to go there? Furthermore, what are you going to do when something similar arises there?" The poison of some of my work places led me to some of my conclusions about fight and flight; but not all work places are entirely toxic. Some just have one or two problems. Those problems are bigger the higher up and the more incompetent they rise, but they are always there and at all levels and in all jobs. "You have to figure out some strategies and tactics to deal with this sort of thing," I told myself. "It makes you sick to your stomach, but that's the only way you are going to stop running and learn new ways to fight that don't seem so much like fighting."

Then, I had to be honest with myself. I leapt into this job without looking too carefully. I would have leapt anyway, trust me; but in order to make the leap and not feel too anxious about it for the past year in which I've been in limbo between the two jobs, I've had to let myself believe that the job was perfect. Always, always a mistake -- and a rookie one, at that.

In taking this job, I gave up some pretty important comforts. I gave them up because this job offered a different set of comforts for the next few years and much bigger comforts in the long run that were completely unavailable at my last job. Still, the change is a gamble (as are most, right?); and for the past year I had experienced the loss of the comforts of the last job without yet being able to trust that the new job would actually provide the promised comforts. Then, before I even have an office or my name on the schedule, I'm asked to volunteer to take on extra classes (answer: emphatic but polite "no thank you") and found myself disqualified from forms of financial support with the anticipation of being disqualified from more, although I still do the same amount of work. That felt like sitting at the top of a steep incline with vertigo setting in and all of my nightmares lining the path down.

Yet, the new found confidence pulled me back. What this administrator said was bullshit, but the fact that s/he thinks it indicates danger. The only way to fight the danger is to be good at what I do, which I am, which is the reason that what the administrator said was bullshit. That's rather a nice vicious circle there, don't you think? Much better than the usual self-flagellation. The fact that this administrator behaves irrationally should not be my problem, but those sorts of people make it your problem, so I will learn strategies to deal with it.

Most of all, I have altered my expectations about this job. I went into my last two jobs fully believing that I would not be there forever, that I could be tempted by something better. Still, if I was there forever, that wouldn't be the worst thing (moreso with the last than the one before it) or even a bad thing. They were where I needed to be at that particular stage of my professional and intellectual development, and I could be content there until I wasn't. Meanwhile, I could figure out the direction that I wanted to go, whether it kept me in place or took me somewhere else.

I hadn't been thinking that way with this job. I had thought of it as a destination or an end when, in fact, it is just another of those places. This will do for right now. Maybe it will continue to do, until it doesn't. All of the support that I had expected that is now either gone or about to be gone, and that I will accept because I can't do anything else. I lived without it before under more pressing work conditions, so I can live without it now under less pressing. I work for the students when I teach, my colleagues when on committees, and myself (and the Big Guy) when I research. I will have more time to devote to each of these things (not that they won't become overwhelming by, say, October) and that I have access to pretty much any research resource I need outside of archive collection. Those were the main comforts for which I traded those other comforts of my last job.

Well, that and compressing the space of two large states down to one dining room table between me and the Gentleman Companion each evening.


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*Incidentally, this welcome was preceded by a request that I volunteer take on a heavier teaching load than contractually required.

About Those Stomach Pains

"Shit," I thought; and shit, I had reason to decide, it was, just all bound up. After all, I looked like I was in my tenth month of pregnancy with twins. So, I tried the usual high fiber and water and non-alcoholic cider and ginger ale, hoping to move things along. Instead, the pain that had expanded like a long balloon up the front of my lower right side grew worse. Much much worse. Sometime in the afternoon, I could have sworn someone had garroted my entire intestinal tract. Then, the heaving began. The retching came so hard that I thought I would turn myself inside out, except nothing happened but more pain. Gripping, stabbing, unrelenting pain. I did not know that a person could hurt so much without spurting blood.

"We are going to the er," said the Gentleman Caller. I beat him to the car, and I was crawling.

On the way there, the worst of the pain dissipated, but not all of it. That balloon in my side remained. When we got to the er, I hobbled, all bent over, checked-in and sat in the waiting room. On the t.v., the Queen said that she hoped people had laughed at her 007 antics: a royal longing to be a jester instead of a monarch. I wondered if she wanted to pinch Daniel Craig's butt or squeeze his biceps. That definitely would have made me laugh.

About an hour later, someone called me back to a little room with all sorts of equipment. I scanned the desk for evidence of needles. None. Relieved, I told my story to the nurse, stressing that the earlier stomach seizure had been, on a pain scale of 1 to 10, a 20. He sent me back to waiting room where I sat some more. A cute young woman swam faster than any marine mammal. What a wonderful sensation of feeling the power in your body to move so quickly, so gracefully!  She seemed to enjoy it herself. The pool, and the idea of immersion in water, seemed so inviting.

They called my name from another door. I hobbled over and the nurse offered a wheel chair. She pushed me over to a room that I recognized from two nights earlier. "Ahh, the sonogram," I said. This perplexed me because they had told me back on Saturday night or Sunday morning or whenever that was that the sonogram could not see into the intestines. "We did this before," I said, not wanting to take up time from another patient. People out in the waiting room were in worse condition than myself or had been there longer.

"Yes, the doctor wants a better look at your kidneys," the tech said.

"Kidneys?" I thought. "I already had this done." The tech on Saturday or whenever had shown me the kidney on the screen. This time, they wanted more views and of both.

As the tech pressed the sonogram thingy down to find my gall bladder, she hit the top of the pain balloon in my side. "Ow, right there!" I said, hoping to be helpful since the original X-ray-types of exploration had been in search of the source of just such pain. "That's where it hurts. Then it goes down like this." I demonstrated.

The tech wasn't interested in my pain. He was there to hunt for Red October in my kidneys. Little did I know, this signalled that the doctor had set his sights on the internal bacterial garden rather than the garroting of my guts or the pain balloon.

After the sonogram, they wheeled me back to the waiting room. All bent over and weak, feeling much less than my most fabulous self, made me remember playing Violet Venable in Suddenly, Last Summer. Had I had this type of experience before then, I might have been able to play her better. I tried to remember some of my lines from the play, but all that came was "turtles" and "Sebastian and Violet, Violet and Sebastian." Those came from the early part of the play, when she was standing up and being all southern-lady saccharine. The wheelchair appeared in the second part, when she loses her mind on stage while hoping to get the young girl lobotomized. I wished I had my Kindle to download the play and remember the lines.

Ah, yes, one shadow of a line from that act returns: "I want my daiquiri." I can remember "daiquiri." Sadly, I did not even feel well enough to want a daiquiri in the waiting room. Not even a pina colada.

On the t.v., two men jumped off of a platform and spun a zillion times before unfolding themselves into two arrows that slid into the water with hardly a splash. Then, they hopped into a jacuzzi. I wondered if that was their reward for diving. A man in the seats across from me, hooked up to some oxygen, explained to a younger man next to him that the divers could break their necks from the impact if they did not dive correctly. My head hurt.

They called my name from yet another door. I went in and saw that the nurse held a plastic bag with vials and needles.  I looked about for any sign of an IV. None. Just blood this time.

As when I was six, I tried to talk the nurse out of it. "They took it when I was here yesterday," I said. I did at least have the wit not say "why can't you use some of that?" "Is this absolutely necessary?" I almost begged. He said something about panels and screens, which had no meaning for me and I wasn't sure if we were talking blood or interior decorating. I fleetingly wondered if that was what we historians sound like to non-historians when we talk about something that is common knowledge in our lives, but completely escapes most other people.

Meanwhile, I told the nurse, "I have tiny veins. See?" I showed him my pokes and bruises. They were not that dramatic, really, and certainly not to an er nurse. Still, I wanted him to know that they had to go after me as if they were exploratory drilling in order to find a useful vein.

"I'll use the same sized needle I use on a 2-year old," the nurse promised, little thinking that he was soon going to have one on his hands.

"How about one you use on an infant?" I suggested. For some reason I was shaking, and the shaking was not the shivering of the fever.

Now, in my defense over the following events, I had not had a full night's sleep in almost a week, and certainly had not had more than two or three in the previous 48 hours. I had spent the night before last in an er holding myself in the mental place where I could not feel the IV tube in my arm. In fact, I could still feel the ghost of a tube where it had been in my bicep. I had been pricked several times at both the wrist and elbow, including one failed prick that hit a nerve and revived the phantom of the pipe arm, and the puncture on my right elbow had a huge bruise. I have endured a lot of pricks in my life, but not from needles, so this was not something that I was used to; AND, I hadn't taken my happy pills for several days because of all of this. In other words, I was on my last nerve.

Still, after some effort, closing my eyes, steadying my hand on the desk, and taking several deep yoga breaths, I said, "o.k." Pinch, tense moment, convince my reptilian brain that this was only a few seconds, breathe, count the few seconds, breathe, imagine the blood in the tube, breathe, imagine the blood filling up the vials, then a wiggle of sharp pain and done. "See?" my grown-up rational self told my careening-toward-hysterics childish self. "Not so bad." Then, I opened my eyes.
For a split second, I honestly wondered if I had a weird condition in which all of the blood in my body had disappeared or become invisible. Sure, that is not in the least a rational thought, but it was my fraction of an escape from the reality because, before me on the desk, sat a perfectly clean tube and completely empty vials.

"I'll call someone better in to do you," he said. "Give me about ten minutes."

I went back to the waiting room.  All I could see in front of me was a wall that said, "I cannot take another needle in my arm. I am a wimp and a loser and all of those other people who have to undergo chemotherapy -- and write books while they do it -- and get marrow transplants and all sorts of other thing are superhuman heroes of infinite courage to me right now because, after only one night on an IV and a handful of sticks, I cannot face another needle."

Then, I cried. The people around me in the waiting room avoided looking at me. "Ah, jeez," I thought. "They probably think I just received some horrible news, like I have AIDs or cancer or a miscarriage -- which are real things to be upset about. They probably would never stop slapping me if they knew I was crying over a damn needle." I tried to control it, but then decided that I should just go hide somewhere, let it all out, get a grip, and find my way back to that place in my head where I could let them get blood. I had ten minutes. I could have done it. I almost did; but in a startling change of waiting room pace, they called my name after about five minutes. Even then, I might have been able to get myself through the blood draw. My last nerve was frayed, but I still had it. Frantically pulling myself together, I went back into the needle room.

Where that last, frayed nerve broke. Not only did this new nurse have the blood needles, she had an IV straw.

I'm not sure if it took a full second for that nerve to break, or if I immediately said, "fuck no." I do know that the nerve broke pretty quickly, which started the waterworks. I cried. Boy, did I cry. I cried big, weeping, wailing, "I can't stand it any more," three-year old, temper tantrum, baby tears. I think I actually shrunk down to the size of a first-grader. I certainly felt in every way like one.

I at least had the wit to realize that I was behaving like a child; but like a child, I got really pissed off when my hands were pulled from my face and I was told in a stern-mommy voice to look the nurse in the eyes and that I "needed to calm down." They used to always do that to me and even as a four-year old, I wanted to say, "I fucking KNOW I need to calm the fuck down. I'm damn well trying to calm the fuck down. Putting a goddamn time table on it only freaks me the fuck out more." Samuel L. Jackson was my babysitter.

I think my brother actually did say something to that effect when he was 13 and put in the hospital for a major surgery. He even accused the intern of wanting to perform the surgery so he could make a payment on his Mercedes. The stunned intern said, "but I drive a used Dodge." Then my brother taught all of the other kids on the children's floor some creative new uses of profanity.

I digress.

What I did say to the nurse in the er was, "why do I need an IV?" She said something about hooking me up to saline and antibiotics and pain killers. My exhaustion kept me from fully articulating some of the questions I had, like "why do you want to kill the pain before you have figured out where it is?" and "Why are you focusing on the kidney and not looking into the stomach pain?" and "Is there some connection that I don't see but that you can explain to me?" and, above all, "Why hasn't anyone looked at my stomach to see that it is so distended that I look like I'm about to deliver twins?" All that came out was "I don't understand."

"We need to treat the UTI," she said.

"It's being treated. I'm taking antibiotics," I said. "I came in for my stomach pain."

"It's not being treated well enough if you are here," she said.

"But what does the UTI have to do with the stomach pain? I didn't come in for the UTI, I came in for the stomach pain." I really wanted to know if there was a connection since everything I had read from Dr. Google had said that kidney pain appears in your lower back, and this was in my front and the pain really did feel as if it came from my intestines. What was going on in my body?

"Well, the doctor has to look at the sonogram to decide," the nurse said. "We need you hooked up to the IV so, if he finds something, we can treat it."

Well, yes, I understood the logic of all of that, but I wasn't letting another tube into my arm unless absolutely required. Call me the wimp that I am -- in fact, I will beat you to it by a mile -- but it is my body and I want to know why it has to be hooked up to a plastic bag if it doesn't actually have to be hooked up to a plastic bag -- especially if I don't like it. "Maybe" I might need the IV was not convincing me to face another hour of "bleep, bloop, bleep, bloop" in 2/4 time, as I tried not to feel the tube filling in my arm.

It did drip in 2/4 time, by the way. I had plenty of time to count it on Saturday night. The other monitor, with the pulse and the blood  pressure, beeped in 4/4 time at a slightly different pace. Then they gave me morphine, whereupon I imagined myself in the final sequence of All That Jazz. I even think I performed it along the the Fosse sequence in Kiss Me, Kate, but all in my head.

Again, I digress.

So, I'm in the needle room, literally backed into a corner with my arms pulled closely to my chest, feeling about three feet tall and wholly aware that I lack any dignity and am deserving of no sympathy whatsoever.  The nurse is not on her last nerve, but I think she sees it from where she sits. We have a bit of a stand-off and all I can think is that I want someone to demonstrate to me some interest in the source of my pain or to go home, curl up in bed, and watch whatever the hell is on t.v. Maybe more of those Olympic thingys,  since the waiting room expedition has made me curious.

Finally, we reach an agreement amenable to us both. She won't stick me at all. We will wait for the results of the sonogram. Then, if anything involving the needles has to be done, we will negotiate from there. Otherwise, we will go home.

Back to the  waiting room. All of the crying has cured the headache that arrived with the first round of needle poking. One stick, sorta fine. By the fourth, with no success, my head seizes up. I am really a baby, aren't I?

On the t.v., men swing themselves around and about on bars. One Chinese guy flips himself up in the air between two bars, then lands back on the bars on his armpits. Repeatedly. Does his armpit hair catch and pull? Does he have armpit hair or shave it off? Some American guys twirl themselves about on a pommel horse. It looks like fun and seems to require a lot of strength in the upper body. I envy the ability to make your body move any way that you want it to move and with such sleek power. Sadly, I think the American men envied that, too, since they seemed to make a lot of disappointing mistakes. The English guy moved effortlessly, like some sort of huge toy top. He did well.

I hobbled over for some magazines. Did you know that Katie Holmes left Tom Cruise? Also, you can flatten your abs in just 10 days with these 10 amazing exercises.

Outside, the sun has gone down. I only know this because I pace past the door. There is no clock in the room. The narrow windows have the blinds drawn. Back in my seat, the older man in the oxygen tank has sat down next to me to be near his wife,  who is in a wheelchair at the end of the row on his other side. I am tempted to ask him for a hit.

"Do you think we can just go and  call for the results later?" the infinitely patient Gentleman Companion asks.

"Good idea." I hobble over to the front desk to ask. The receptionist sends me to the nurses' station. The nurse there tells me that we can leave if we want to, but the insurance company might not cover the visit because we would be leaving against medical advice. I hobble back to the waiting room and we wait.

Some eternity later, or maybe it was five minutes -- time had lost meaning in the waiting room, but at least some of the other people were making their way into the back at a pretty good pace -- the doctor was ready to see me.

"Your sonogram was fine," he said. "Nothing is wrong with your kidneys but the infection."

The snotty teenager in me wanted to say "No shit, Sherlock." The now calm and in control adult me said, "thank goodness." After all, it could have been cancer, right? The now calm and in control adult me also said, "what about my stomach?"

"A sonogram can't read inside of the intestines," he said.

"Yes, they told me that," I said. "How about the CT scan from before?" I thought that maybe, if he had looked at the scan knowing where my pain was right now, he might see something that they hadn't know to look for on Saturday. Then, again, after the first interview, no one had seemed interested in my stomach pain.

"It showed nothing," he said.

What I should have said was, "but I didn't have this pain on Saturday, and I do now." What I should have said was, "now that you have determined something that had already been determined, can we take a look at the thing that brought me in here today?" I could have even phrased it nicely. Instead, I told him I was fine, in no pain, and left, hunched over and hobbling to the car.

So, what was wrong? Some of you may have already figured it out. Certainly my ladybits doctor did when I went to see her two days later about the benign findings on the Amsterdam Red Light District sonogram. Certainly her nurse did the second I said, "stomach pain." As did a friend who inquired about my improvement.

Having had little experience with antibiotics, I did not know that they had side effects. When my back broke out in a mild rash the next day (before visiting the ladybits doctor), the Gentleman Companion suggested a reaction to the drugs. So, I consulted Dr. Google with "rash antibiotics." Among the results I found went something like this: "The side effects of antibiotics can be rash, nausea [bleh!], diarrhea [ick!], constipation [wait a minute!]..."

Constipation a side effect of antibiotics? Do tell.

Antibiotics are the good guys, but they aren't sentient beings.They get their mission to get the bad guys  and they do. They carpet bomb your insides, indiscriminately killing every bacterial microbe in your entire system,  like some macho ranger yelling "the only good bacteria is a dead bacteria" or "kill them all, let the microbe god sort them out!" Your stomach, however, needs some of the bacterial creatures to move things along. My own efforts to do this with fiber had only made matters worse by packing up my garbage can when there were no collectors to carry the garbage away. To switch metaphors, the antibiotic warfare against the bacteria garden had expanded into my intestines and now I needed some probiotic insurgents to push the antibiotic fighting out of my guts and contain it in my kidneys.

As fast as a hunched over old lady in gastric distress could move, I got myself to the grocery store and loaded up on Miso soup, sauerkraut (which only comes in the family size -- oof!), kefir, Activia, more Activia (I like Actvia), and Acidophilus. I was going to kick the shit out of this stomach pain. Literally.

Now, I can stand up straight. I can lie down without feeling the balloon press against vital organs. I don't break into shivering fits nor turn into a human furnace (and that's an odd feeling, having the heat radiate off of yourself in a cool shower). I'm not quite back to normal, but certainly I feel much much better. Seriously, never underestimate the joys of a healthy, functioning gastrointestinal system and urinary tract. Let's hear it for the clean-up crew!

So, yes, my whole wretched, humiliating, second visit to the er could have been cut short or avoided had I known that my gastrointestinal system had come to a grinding halt after an onslaught of antibiotics. What a farce!

Do you think the Queen would laugh?

A Trip to the ER

About the fatigue.

I'm always fatigued. I have theories about the fatigue that pinpoint its source in my head rather than my body, but sometimes the body is actually at fault.

After the conference, I felt the kind of fatigue that comes from the body. At first, it isn't discernible from the usual fatigue of letting my mind work me like a speed bag, so I didn't pay attention. The pain in my lower abdomen started to take greater portions of my attention. I thought it was gas, but it wouldn't go away and walking made me think I had a water balloon bobbing about just where your appendix or ovary like to live.

"Why don't you call the doctor?" the Gentleman Companion asked.

"Because I'm a new patient and she probably can't get me in for something like six months," I said.

"Why not your lady part doctor?" he pressed.

"Because I don't think this is her area," I said.

"How about the critical care clinic?" Now he was frustrated.

"No, no," I said, wincing as I forced myself to stand up straight. "It isn't quite that bad."

You sort of had to be bleeding or screaming with pain or have a bone sticking out to go to the doctor when I was growing up. That, or the state required it. Heck, once when I was a really small kid and probably should have had stitches, my mom just slapped on a butterfly bandage and a mound of band aids because she didn't want to have to go through holding down a very strong squalling tottler while the doctor sewed up her chin yet again.

My brothers all but performed surgery on themselves. "Don't tell Mom!" they whispered, as blood spurted from a knife in the foot or a gash in the arm, acquired through some shenanigan involving homemade ramps, smoking pot on the roof, or "shit you don't want to know about." "Yeah, don't tell Mom. She'll take us to the doctor and we'll have to get a shot!" "Get the Bactine and the Band-aids. Shake that shit off!"

I digress.

For three days, I wandered around bent over, yoga breathing through the spasms, and telling myself that one good passing -- perhaps one that might fill up a hot air balloon -- would provide sweet relief, and all thoughts of doctors and clinics would seem silly. I might even write a funny children's story about it to amuse my nephews, who take after their grandfather in thinking that flatulence is the highest form of humor, and thereby seal my role as the Great Goddess Aunt in their imaginations.

Then, I woke up in the middle of the night shivering. My skin detected no cold, yet broke out in goosebumps while my muscles jittered and jangled themselves sore. No amount of yoga-breathing could  calm them down. Eventually, I fell back to sleep, but awoke the next morning drenched in sweat. At least the pain had subsided. So, I went about my business for the day, but couldn't take a step further by noon, and had to lay down on the sofa.

The shivering started again. An hour later, wondering if all of this muscle activity might give me some good tone and burn off a few calories, I told the Gentleman Companion that I was ready for the critical care clinic.

As an aside, they really should have cots of some sort in clinic and er waiting rooms, at least for the children. They should also have some sort of sensory stimulation in the examining rooms so you don't lay on your back counting the holes in the ceiling tiles and wondering if Charlotte Perkins Gilman will creep through them any minute as you await the next person to poke and prod you.

Anyway, they poked and prodded and since the pain had subsided, they really didn't have much to go on in the way of me screaming "yes, there, THERE!" They also found that I no longer passed urine but great flowering gardens of bacteria. The shivering -- which commenced yet again on the way to the clinic -- was the  result of fever. The fever was trying to kill the gardens. Neither  the fever nor oral antibiotics were going to deforest my urinary tract, and the gardens didn't explain the pain, which they thought might be something else, so I got a nice ambulance ride to the er downtown. Sadly, they did not turn on the siren. Not so sadly, I did not care. In fact, by the time we were in the ambulance, I was feeling really really really groovy and didn't give a damn about anything.

Of course, there is a price for not giving a damn, and in this case the price was a needle in my arm. I hate needles. It's irrational, I know. I know that the needle puncture feels like a fairy-sized pinch. I know that an IV is a flexible straw in your arm and not a metal tube. I have, in fact, had more than one very good blood draws that left no mark. IVs have a poorer track record. I've had one good one. The one before that, I did not know that the needle was not in my arm and lay freaking out for an hour, which did nothing to cure the migraine that necessitated the IV in the first place. Then, I've had one that left me with what the Gentleman Companion dubbed "pipe arm" because my arm both looked and felt as if it had a pipe sewn into the skin.

In this instance, the IV began a chain of events that left me crying like a four-year old in the er two days later. You see, have seem to have difficult veins. Dainty, even. Why couldn't my butt be dainty? I'd have more use for a dainty butt and wide veins than a wide butt and dainty veins. I'll even take a wide butt and wide veins, just stop sticking me over and over and over and over and over trying to find a vein that works! Later, in the er when they came in to take blood, the nurse kept sticking me and started to panic, out loud, half a foot from my face, about my "weird" veins and her inability to get blood out of them. (Although I know this is impossible and she would never have done this, I swear that she wiggled the needle about in my arm.)

To deal with this, I take deep yoga breaths, find a place in my head in which I can isolate the experience of the pain to the tiny fairy-bite that it is, and console my brain that none of the medical horrors that it imagines, spurred on by copious viewings of er and House, are happening. I try to think about the whole sticking and pain and blood-letting and fluid-giving as the scientific process that it is and observe it as a curious scholar. I can go to that place, and sustain it for some hours (especially if they do what they do to make me feel groovy), but I haven't had much practice so it can become mentally exhausting.

At the er, they fortunately put me in a room. Perhaps the privilege of an ambulance gave me preference. Later experience demonstrated to me that this is not always the fortune of patients. Two days later, back in the er, sitting in the waiting room, people gripping closed the peek-a-boo nighties and wheeling IV staff and monitors were escorted into the sometimes unavailable chairs to wait their turn. At least they got a t.v. and magazines. Still, I would rather the bed.

Also at the er, they sent me to get a CT scan of my innards and two ultra sounds, one on the outside and one on the inside. Yes, I got a transvaginal ultrasound. The device looks like something you might buy in Amsterdam's Red Light District, and they use a condom and lube. It wasn't that big of a deal; but, let me tell you, if the state were forcing me to undergo the procedure in order to get another perfectly legal procedure, I think I would have been so angry and tense that I would have used that muscle down there to break the damn device. Then I would have charged the technician the going rate for a sex show.

Again, I digress.

They found nothing wrong but a few lady-bit things that are benign and, as the p.a. put it, "just what happens when you have a uterus." I seriously would like to send it to those Republicans who are so interested in uteri and let them deal with the thing, but that's a whole other digression. Meanwhile, I am otherwise healthy and strong except for that  whole bacterial garden taking over my insides. So, they launched biological warfare on the garden with three raids of antibiotics and sent me home where I drifted in an out of fever for about 12 more hours and pretty much found myself incapable of anything but lying on the sofa and watching whatever the hell that was on t.v.

This would be the end except the stomach pain started again.

More Conference Revelations

Ahh, this has been a short, busy summer plagued with fatigue. More on the fatigue later because, as with many things, it has its own story.

Conferences seem to benefit me not so much on the professional front as on the personal front. I've been exposed to many examples of the ways one should NOT behave if one cares at all about professionalism or even common courtesy. I've had revelations that I do not have to be the person that I used to be (and despise), and I don't have to slip into her patterns of behavior. I've found my own voice in a presentation and realize the ways that I should cultivate it. So this latest brought another round of epiphanies; or, if not epiphanies, reassurance and reunderstanding of decisions that I made long ago.

I met two people who either just recently or still work in places where I used to work. These places were so unfathomably toxic and I felt so shockingly isolated in both that they warped me in ways that I am still undoing 10-20 years later. Granted, the raw material that was me in those situations didn't help matters, but the situations were poisonous to the point that people outside of academia hardly believed my stories, then used them as examples that the academic world isn't the "real world." Worse yet, some within, who witnessed both, dismissed the situations as "just the way things are" or "just the way that person is." In both cases, the lightening rod person has significant amounts of power both over me and in the institution, so everyone -- even most of the people in a position of real power to do something -- tended to back off. So I washed happy pills down with cheap wine on our way to therapy when we weren't applying for every job on H-Net and plotting alternate career paths.

Well, obviously, I worked my way out of both situations; but when you find yourself alone, with people questioning the extent of the inanity (not "insanity" but "inanity") or accepting abuse as simply business as usual rather than something to be stopped, and with the consequences of your path out of the inanity making you question your own intelligence, you pass some biblical levels of judgement on yourself. You end up cycling through shame, depression, anger, forced optimism, fatigue, and back to shame again, even as you tell yourself, "that was then, this is now." You also become very aware how that decade of existence in snake pits has trained you to be entirely unfit as a professional or even a  social human being. You have no idea how to behave properly in any given professional situation because you are painfully aware that all of your learned responses are seriously fucked up; and you keep yourself isolated in order to protect yourself from further inane situations because you trust no one, really, and thus you don't learn new, proper ways to respond to inanity.

So, I worked my way out of both situations physically, but I'm still working my way out of what they did to my head. Sometimes, I think I'm getting better.

In any case, I met these two people, one who works at one of the toxic places and one who worked with the other toxic place and had quite a bit of inside dirt on how it has affected the person who last held my old job. Oddly, they seemed to want to know if the places were as bad when I was there as they are now. Of one, the only thing good I can say is that they seem to protect the underlings from much of the overling dysfunction and warfare better than when I was there. Some restructuring seems to permit this. Overall, however, that world is every bit as fucked up as it ever was, cranked up to 11. The same for the second place. Indeed, the second place seems to have added several more notches on its amplifier of "self-destruct."

This is dreadful. I feel so much sympathy for the rational people stuck in, if not wholly victimized by, both places. They would go elsewhere but, these days, there isn't any elsewhere. In fact, a sort of market of professional environments seems to be at play. When the job market is good, and faculty, staff and other employees have the option to go elsewhere if their current bosses are abusive or their current job fosters abuse, then their potential migration might force some changes in order to keep the best skilled people around. If skilled people have no options (and the overall economy lacking options heightens the anxiety and therefore the nastiness of any workplace), then they have to stay put while they wash happy pills down with cheap wine on their way to therapy when not applying for every job in existence.

Hearing these two people's stories, which were almost to a word my own from back when I worked in those places, did console me, much as I hope my affirmation to them that they are, in fact, working under endemically warped conditions with unquestionably disturbed people gave them a touch of relief that "it isn't just me." That's what I always wondered, at the time and since: "Is it me? Was I too weak or stupid or unprofessional or" fill in the insecurity "and caused or escalated the problem? Did I make a rational choice in leaving or in isolating myself?" I always beat myself up on the answers in an attempt to be honest, to use time to reassess my options and to learn from my pattern of behavior. In the end, I always felt that shame, depression, anger, forced optimism, fatigue, and back to shame.

Now, I think, if I behaved in any way that seemed irrational or ill-conceived, well irrationality and poorly conceived plans tend to be reasonable responses to irrational and dreadful situations. They made sense at the time. I took the road not travelled because I wanted to and because it was the only one that opened at that time. I have regrets about it; but the focus of the regrets seems to have shifted away from following the path in the first place. I isolated myself and became very bitter, angry, ambivalent and unfocused because, in an environment in which people know that someone violates ethics and laws and in which they have the job protection, numbers, and institutional power to stop that someone but do not -- well, why wouldn't someone isolate themselves, become bitter, angry, ambivalent about participating in a profession that lacked such character and start looking about for other things that might lead to a more fulfilling career or sense of empowerment?

So, as I hope I conveyed to those two people, the problem was not me. I had problems, sure, but the real problem was the place and the people in charge.  My life in escape has been long, winding, and perhaps could be interpreted as "flaky" to unkind eyes scanning my c.v.; but, it makes sense as more than my own character flaws. As I keep telling myself, "I'm scrappy." I may not look or sound it, but I do act it. I do find my way. That's a powerful feeling.

Then, I looked about me. I have a group of people (not the least of which is the Gentleman Companion) who set an example for proper professional behavior, for disagreement without abuse and destruction, for figuring out peaceful solutions to conflicts. I can trust these people, too. So, I don't have to isolate myself, and I can learn some constructive interpersonal skills that I lacked because I was trying to survive.

I have survived. I can do more than that now.