Thoughts Upon Returning From An Academic Conference

– You forget how much you miss being around COLLEAGUES. People with whom you don’t have to preface or explain; people who know the basic foundations of your scholarly ideas; people who can give you serious reading suggestions and also suggestions on your own methodologies and arguments; people with whom you can laugh uproariously at a joke about Bourdieu or Janaceck. Friends are indispensable, but you take colleagues for granted when you’re in grad school because they’re just always around. Once you go off on your own into the job market, you don’t really have colleagues anymore. No one to ask if your analysis of this symphonic movement is too facile.

– It is fun growing up with your colleagues. You’re in grad school together, shitting your pants and staying up all night drinking tequila and wondering if you might go insane. Then you grow up and many of you get jobs and you get smarter and calmer and also you develop totally new anxieties, and you can keep talking about those things. I got so much pedagogical advice and tips for carving out writing time and tips for talking to editors. Some of my grad school colleagues are almost up for tenure!! Soon we will all be dead

– The next time I go to this conference (our big annual one) I am going to bring a stopwatch and meticulously time every person who asks a question during the Q&A after each paper. I will then submit my data to the conference’s governing board, where I assume it will be met with stunned shock. To whit: There is this thing everyone complains about, which is where someone gives a paper, and then there’s a Q&A which is supposed to be a time for audience members to ask questions of the speaker, giving them a chance to bring out more material they couldn’t include in the paper, or engage on ambiguities or mistakes in logic evidenced by the paper, etc. Instead, what usually happens is that one person stands up and then talks for 5-8 minutes about their own work, or some totally tangential issue that isn’t interesting to the speaker or anyone else, or they deliver some weird mini lecture of historical anecdotes about somebody briefly mentioned in the paper just to demonstrate how much they know about something. It is very, very obnoxious, and extremely rude. It disrespects the speaker, who worked hard on their ideas only to have them totally ignored by some pontificating windbag. It disrespects the long line of other people waiting to ask questions, who are never acknowledged or even noticed by said pontificator. And of course, it disrespects the audience, who didn’t come to this panel to hear some random dipshit spout off for a thousand hours, and who have now been prevented from learning more about the topic they ostensibly came to the panel to explore. The point of my stopwatch exercise will be to prove, definitively, something that all women and people of color already know, which is that essentially the only audience members who behave this way are white dudes. Time after time after time, a paper ends, and some white dude immediately LEAPS to the microphone, unselfconsciously thrilled to finally get to share his thoughts with the room. He talks and talks and talks, interrupting the speaker who may be trying to interject or redirect. He talks until the audience starts shifting uncomfortably and rolling their eyes at one another. He finally peters out, and then laughs indulgently and says “I guess there wasn’t really a question in there!” at which point everyone smiles wanly and the panel moderator says “that’s all the time we have for questions,” and then all the other people who had hoped to ask a question have to go sit back down. This dude never realizes he is “this dude,” which is why we have the phenomenon of everyone complaining about this phenomenon but no one ever owning up to being the cause of the phenomenon. I have just about had it. It is just a beautiful, easily-observable manifestation of privilege and entitlement. The white dude feels completely entitled to take up the time of everyone else in the room with his own half-baked ideas and thoughts. Whereas regular people like myself might come up with a question while listening to a paper, and then perhaps think about it for awhile, even perhaps jotting down some notes, in an effort to then ask the question in the clearest and most succinct way possible, so as to not waste the speaker’s/audience’s time, on the one hand, but also so as to keep from looking like a complete asshole, on the other. The classic white dude cares nothing for the former concern, and the latter would never even occur to him. It is so fucking deflating to listen to some awesome paper and have all these thoughts, and to see 10 people jump up to go to the microphone afterward, and to be excited, like, yeah, what are we gonna talk about, after this great paper? I can’t wait to hear what everyone is thinking! Maybe someone will give some killer reading recommendations! But then the first dude who makes it to the microphone just talks for 10 minutes about himself. And then it’s over.

– related: I think panel moderators need to be way bigger hardasses. Only once have I seen one shut down a nattering dude and it was awesome. They should all do it. These dudes need to be schooled in collegiality and conference etiquette by some badass old scholar chairing a panel who’s not afraid to hand them their hats. “THANK YOU BUT WE NEED TO MOVE ON”

– If I were a thoughtful white dude I’d be FURIOUS at these classic white dudes. I’d punch them in the teeth with my strong man hand. God if only

– anyway, staying in your own hotel room at the conference hotel is amazing beyond all possible measurements of that word. I felt like Marie Antoinette. It was an almost unimaginable luxury. My private space to retreat to when need be, wherein I could kick off my shoes and watch an episode of “Check it Out!” without fear of having to small talk with a roommate. The feeling of coming back to the room exhausted at midnight after an entire day and night of hob-nobbing and hard scholarship and then being able to take off all my clothes and lie silently in the gigantic bathtub for as long as I wanted and then go to bed…it was heavenly. I was hardly ever even in the room, but all day long I would think about the room, and anticipate the moment when I would return to the room at the end of the long night, and be able to process quietly all that had occurred.

– I am learning but I am still stupider than a lot of my similarly-aged colleagues. It is stressful but at the conference I’m able to measure how stupid I am now against how stupid I was at the last conference, and I’m always less stupid, so that’s good.

– I saw an editor I hate and it gave me a sick feeling

– I bought my dissertation chair a glass of wine, which was classy as hell and the first time she has not paid for our drinks. Now I am a grownup

– I brought 52 papers to grade and I graded half of them before realizing it was the wrong half–I graded the ones from the class that we’re skipping this week because of Veteran’s Day, instead of the ones from the class I’m actually going to. I feel like this: UGH.

– air travel in America continues to wildly suck

– I came home and my old man picked me up at the airport with an apple galette and we went home and made mac n’ cheese and watched episodes of Silicon Valley and it was the happiest I have ever been, or anyway it was up there