Grad School; Grad School Words

How Much Did I Love Grad School

I loved grad school so much. I loved it so much! Whenever I met someone who complained about it I knew that they (a) had never had a real job and (b) were possibly psychotic. Or also (c) just didn’t like school and had thus made kind of a bad life decision. I just read Tina Fey’s amazing memoir and in it she reveals that she has only ever had one day job, which was working reception at the YMCA. And the rest is history. I am obviously really proud of Tina Fey, who is a major hero in my life. But me, I have had many day jobs. I have worked for sadistic, horrible people. I have gotten motherfuckers coffee and then had them complain that the coffee I got was wrong somehow. I have been a secretary; I have been a receptionist; I have been a personal assistant; I have been a harried paralegal who had no idea what she was doing; I have done telemarketing. I drove an ice cream truck. I was a kind of half-assed bike messenger. I have made copies–oh the copies I have made. Oh the xerox machines I have sweated over, been in charge of fixing, hated. Oh the filing. The filing! The answering of phones and the getting yelled at and the teensy-weensy paychecks (“government sure do take a bite, don’t she?”).

I had a lot of fun during that time. I was also touring with bands and playing shows and generally being an artsy-fartsy wastrel with all my amazing genius friends. Staying up too late, drinking shitty beer, wearing tight clothing–all the things you’re supposed to do in your twenties. But at some point I thought, “this is crazy, I can’t keep living this way, I need a purpose in life,” so I went to grad school. And it was so much better than anything I could have imagined. The colleagues I was surrounded with, the professors who taught me, the crazy-ass shit I read, the brilliant fancy scholars I got to meet and be intimidated and in one case actively intentionally flustered by, the seminars with the excited yelling and the rustling of a thousand print-outs from jstor. The TA office with all my comrades, my fellows soldiers in this strange war against/with/for the undergrads (i.e. teaching). The coffee pot our professor kept buying us that we would then not clean and allow to mildew and mold so completely that it had to be thrown away, thus driving me into a rage about environmentalism and slovenliness but no one listens, NO ONE LISTENS (also I am not going to clean the coffeepot, because I am a hypocrite)!!!!! The long meetings with professors where you ask them something like “what’s the history of marriage” and 2 hours later they’re still talking and you have a huge armload of books and your mind is blown and now somehow you’re talking about Charlemagne. Learning stuff!!!! Learning how to analyze music and write about it in a way that is useful and accessible and not soul-crushingly boring (one hopes)! The constant interesting debate within oneself, about how to make scholarship useful to the world instead of insular and pointless. The simultaneous defensive bristling and sympathetic agreement whenever an outsider uses the term “ivory tower.” The constant re-evaluation of what ‘education’ means, and college, and university, and being a professor, and how much it is possible to accomplish within that milieu given the exigencies of certain terribly destructive Presidential Administrations and the mind-rotting effect of standardized testing. And oh the things I read and the arguments I had and the lectures I heard! The archival documents I was able to touch. The jokes about Beethoven I was able to finally get. My nice, nice, nice committee members and their unceasing loyalty and support and their uncomplaining willingness to answer eight hundred panicky emails a week (“WHAT ABOUT A.B. MARX OMG!!!!! DO I HAVE TO TALK ABOUT HIM”). The time I asked my professor if the first piece in the well-tempered clavier was in D minor and he was standing with a fancy visiting guest-scholar and they looked at each other and burst into not-unkind laughter, and then it took me like a week to understand why what I had said was so unbelievably stupid but by then it was too late and the visiting scholar was gone, never to return, but then later he let me publish an article in his journal and didn’t seem to remember that I was the grad student who didn’t even understand the whole concept of the well-tempered clavier. The time in seminar I was so hungover and then the professor suddenly asked me to “walk us through” Bourdieu’s field of cultural production and I said “Yeah, it’s like…who gets to pick who’s on what chart,” and there was a long silence, and then he said “……what page are you looking at?” and I said “…..I don’t know.”

And all this is to say that I don’t really care, at least right now, about what happens to me. If I never get a job, I don’t care. I know people who are so bitter, so hysterical about the job market. And the job market does suck. And it is depressing, to live in a culture and an era that doesn’t care–that truly doesn’t care–about education, knowledge, thinking, criticism, and even the sort of baseline “citizenship” that is weirdly still part of teaching at the college level, and that I have come to believe in almost more strongly than all that other stuff, and certainly more strongly than, like, how come Beethoven dedicated the Eroica to Napoleon or whatever. It is harrowing and awful, to be part of a profession that was once so prized and valued, and is now so denigrated and spit-upon, and to not understand why this should be so, because you have only the truest love of humanity and the products of humanity in your heart, and you only want to share that love with your nation’s youth and help them get excited about stuff and know how to think deeply about stuff, which is (to you) just so obviously a good thing on its own account, apart from whether or not it helps them get some marketing job. It is a sad time to be alive, for lots and lots of people. But even so, I don’t care. I’m sure if I never get a job, I’ll be devastated, but right now I still say it was worth it. For me, the journey was a huge part of the destination. Grad school was one of the best things I have ever done. My brain is completely different than it would have been without it (in a good way (I believe)). I see the world in a totally new way. I have spent six years reading and studying and writing about things I think are enormously interesting and even important (sort of). I have been entrusted with classrooms full of young people, and have sweat the sweat of a thousand men in trying to do a good job. I have cared about this job in a way that simply would not have been possible at any of my other jobs.

It was all so much better than getting motherfuckers the wrong coffee. It was so much better than driving the ice cream truck–I KNOW RIGHT, how is that possible. Well for one thing, in grad school nobody ever threw eggs at me or stiffed me $20 by running away with an entire box of choco-tacos. And I never came home from grad school reeking of diesel fumes. And I never had to say the phrase “choco-taco” in grad school.

Words and Phrases I Had To Say In Grad School

hegemonic
problematic
methodology
historiographical
hermeneutic
marxist
gender
beethoven
symphonic
aural
metaphysics
tristan chord
syphilis
guillotine
hexachord
flat six
benedictine
use value
cultural capital
race
“other”
viennese
abjection
postcolonial
subjectivity
subject position
heroic
anti-heroic
romantic-heroic
fascist
twelve-tone
octatonic (still don’t know what this is)
domestic
domestic sphere
mass culture
“stupid byron and his club foot”
narrative
narrativity
aporia (never sure I used it correctly)
sonata form
“Muuusic” (where you sarcastically stress the first syllable to indicate you are making fun of people who differentiate between “real music” and “pop music”)
ideology
gesamtkunstwerk
bildungsroman
proustian
foucauldian
derridian
beethovenian
hegelian
kantian
neapolitan
napoleonic
“rousseau-like”
aristotelian
platonic
wagnerian
clara schumannian (<--just kidding! joke about sexism) dissertating sturm und drang alterity radical alterity subaltern seminal followed immediately by a joke about how you just said seminal "what does this word mean" "what is everyone talking about" "were we supposed to read that" "when is the paper due" "you guys, seriously" "what's a passacaglia" *I did not read Hegel (I read a little Hegel (sort of (does complaining about having to read Hegel count as reading Hegel? (most people in my department would say 'yes' (except the nerds)))). EDIT: please leave other grad-school words I forgot to list in the comments! Already someone has suggested "unpack," which is indeed a great one. And on my jog just now I remembered "canonical." Can't believe I forgot that one! I bet it appears 200 times in my dissertation alone.