I’ve turned in my letter of resignation. Funny, it doesn’t really feel any different.

I have had a series of interviews individually with each member of my department, as well as with other people around campus who I felt had an interest in my development as a member of the university community. That was a wee bit tiring.

I am letting the news hit the grapevine—whenever someone asks about my book, or when I come up for tenure, or anything like that, I tell the truth, happily and with a smile on my face, no matter how well I know them or don’t. My book is going great—I’m cannibalizing my favorite parts for articles, stepping off the tenure track, and switching to university administration. I am openly chatting about who they might hire to replace me—the spousal candidate? explore a new and exciting field?

I am now a non-voting but talking member of the tenure-related faculty in my department (I kinda suspect this is technically illegal and unenforceable, but I really don’t care—I’m happy to voluntarily abstain. We don’t actually vote very often anyhow, just talk). I am not planning on talking any less (and I talk a lot in faculty meetings), but I am trying to switch my tone from making strong statements to asking questions and highlighting things that need to be considered. I am a bit confused about when I should be saying “we” and when “you”, but I think I’m handling it okay.

I am still going to meetings because I am using, with the support of my chair and assistant chair, my position as a faculty member without a big research expectation to assist the department in getting a lot of things done: working on the desperately needed website redesign; working on a student advising handbook; working with our diversity efforts; etc. I have the time to do this work at the necessary level of detail, and the knowledge to represent the faculty perspective and see how these individual projects fit into the overall structure of the department. After this year, I will be on a terminal contract, but will continue to do this sort of service, which will also give me some necessary experience to be applying for university administration jobs.

Also, I care about the department, and I want to see these things done right, dammit. I want to leave the department with something to show for my time here, even if it wasn’t the product I anticipated when I arrived in 2004.

I have complained before about geneaology, but this NYT article on Michelle Obama’s roots strikes me as a really lovely piece showing off the best of what family history can be.

Even if the “ooh, white ancestor!” tone is really fucking annoying to anyone who knows the least bit about American history and blackness in the western hemisphere.

I’m late, of course, but for intelligent comments about Polanski, visit Victorianitas, among others.

However, in a random google inspired by Polanski, I came across this webpage from lawyers specifically positioning themselves as defenders of young men accused of statutory rape. In the Texas A&M region, home to some fifty thousand college students.

Now, I recognize that these lawyers are trying to win defense clients, and I assume especially trying to appeal to parents who may be paying the bills. But I think some of the underlying assumptions are really interesting to see laid out in marketing copy.

Aggressive defense for college students
…They look for the motive behind the accusation — an upset parent, pregnancy, or guilt — and strive to have the charges dropped….

Bedrock assumption that it’s not really rape.

Protecting clients from the assumption of guilt
…They[the public] often assume the alleged “rapist” knew what he or she was doing and do not take into consideration outside influences, like drugs or alcohol or even consent.

Having a hard time seeing how that doesn’t include the suggestion “well, you can’t blame him for things he did while drunk.”

Even in many anti-pseudonymity screeds, there seems be a general acceptance that putting one’s real name and picture online is a position of privilege that perhaps women and people of color might be excused from as vulnerable populations (I’m somewhat cynically reflecting these ideas, not endorsing them, here).

But I wonder if there is something else going on, that is not at all about vulnerability or fear, particularly as regards people of color (and I apologize if these are old ideas—I’ve don’t remember seeing them emphasized in the several discussions of pseudonymity that I’ve read):

For the Chinese-American who has always had a family name and a school name; for the Latino who easily flips between Spanish and English conversations at the same party; for the black female professor who only straightens her hair during the semester—an internet name may simply be a natural extension of the kind of code-switching they’ve been doing all their life. For them, there is nothing fake or unreal about adopting a particular persona.

By contrast, someone who has never had to practice constant contextual adaptation at such a level of self may feel less comfortable with the act of going by another name; they may feel that setting up a persona is an act of deceit, or a loss of part of self. For instance at Prof Hacker, Brian Croxall begins his endorsement of using real names with:

I try to be myself….What being myself online has meant to me has been achieved through using one username across most of the Internet and one avatar.

That’s what it means to him. For me being myself has rarely involved any sort of consistency in my daily life, regardless of the internet. I admit that I’m an extreme case. But the internet didn’t make me that way. I remember desperately wanting contact lenses in high school because while I was already “the smart kid”, I really did not want to be “the geek with glasses.” I love this bit from Rana because it so clearly shows how using a real name is disconnected from being oneself. Half the reason to begin using a variant online name was to signify female more clearly—in other words, to be more myself.

A single avatar? Let’s consider gendered norms for appearance. I was once given a (wholly ridiculous) dress code of “business elegant” for an academic celebration. For men, the range of clothes they might wear in that context was fairly tight—the main decision was whether to wear a full suit or just a jacket and pants. Women, trying to decide what clothes such a context required, showed up in everything from a casual skirt and tanktop to a long evening gown. On another day, they might have made a different choice. Many women also have a much greater range of hairstyles to experiment with, or have had at some point in their life. Women get makeovers. Thus, women rarely present an identical “avatar” in all contexts in real life. Why should they do so online?

I resist photographic avatars because I think they cannot help but lie to their audience. I don’t want to pick one moment, one attitude, to attach to everything I post online, when I may be writing happy, angry, pensive. My affinity for rivers and my love of a curve through the landscape, expressed in my current avatar, are far more fundamental to being myself than any fleeting facial expression.

Told neighbor/friend I was switching to administration and not going up for tenure. She said, “You know, I never really felt this professorial life was you.”

However, she also previously failed to notice I had chopped eight inches off my hair, so I am trying to take that with a grain of salt.

I decided to experiment with the “add a custom photo banner” feature in Blackboard 9 (not a new feature, that’s just the version we are using. We just upgraded to it. I used to be functional with Blackboard. Now I don’t know how to do anything. EdTech are holding workshops but offer no FAQ or anything. Neglected to update their own default note on how to make the coursepage available to students. To hell with workshops, I’m just going to telephone every time I have a question, workshops are a fucking inefficient means of communicating information. Almost as bad as video. Okay, anyhow….).

No notes on size of photo or anything, so I just uploaded any old photo, assuming either it would let me crop it, or would automatically crop it to banner shape and size.

No. It did seem to crop it, in that the photo seemed to be vertical instead of the original horizontal, but it loaded the entire thing, zoomed larger, so that any user was forced to scroll down past a whole lot of blue sky, past a couple screens worth of photo, to get actual information.

Why, Blackboard, why? Is this hard? How hard can it be to automatically crop a photo?

Historiann has a post about food (so does someone else, but I read it on the phone and now can’t find it).

I remember being a sophomore in high school, or thereabout, and while I was pretending to be on an athletic team, we did a week in Tahoe to train/have fun. I went to an all-girls Catholic high school, complete with uniforms. One night the coach cooked tacos.

The taco meat was ground beef, drained and browned. Period. To be put in tacos (those horrible pre-crisped shell things!) and garnished with salsa, lettuce, sour cream, etc. I was not impressed.

I learned to make tacos by the age of 9 or 10. Twenty years later, it was still one of the few dishes I knew. But in my family, this is how we make taco meat:

• brown and drain the ground beef (I have now switched to fake ground beef, no draining required, much easier and quicker)
• add a regular size can of kidney beans (preferably dark red)
• add a small can of tomato sauce
• stir in a spice packet and some extra oregano (my mother says she doesn’t use spice packets, but that’s sure how she taught me as a kid)
• let it all simmer together for a bit, creating a nice thick flavorful filling that can even stand alone if you are tragically out of salsa and have let the sour cream go bad
• guaranteed to have leftovers to put on nachos, etc

Lumpia is another one of my childhood recipes. I learned years later that I make peasant’s lumpia, with lots of potatoes. I still think chili with no beans has a weird texture.
I don’t think I realized until I hit grad school that poor people add beans to meat to make it stretch further.

My mom and her partner have a semi-regular cat- and house-sitting gig in Hawaii. All through grad school, market, job, I turned down multiple opportunities for free lodging in Hawaii with a car because I didn’t feel I had the time or money to go. Even before deciding to resign, I said “no more.”

You know what? I’ll deal with running errands on the weekends (which I hate). I’ll deal with having to be at work every morning by 8am (I was fine with 9-5 when it was the archives, and that was 6 days a week). I’ll even deal with having to wear nylons occasionally.

Anything, to get out from under the crushing load of guilt that I SHOULD ALWAYS BE WORKING.

The ideas with real value are the ones that can survive heterogeneous behavior and compliance over time.
…
Seeing beauty in the sustainable, mediocre idea is the administrative aesthetic. There’s something a little bit sad in that, but there it is.

How much professors work may be an issue, but it can’t explain the rise in college costs. Professors’ salaries have barely risen faster than inflation for the last 30 years while college costs have risen much faster than inflation. Professors’ workloads have actually increased at most institutions over the same time period, and sabbaticals were always part of the faculty system, so that is not increasing costs. In fact, the proportion of full-time faculty at most colleges has decreased as the schools have hired cheaper part-time faculty to teach many classes. So, if you are looking for the greater-than-inflation increases in cost it makes no sense to look at faculty labor costs (see the AAUP website for all the stats.)

Love that approach. Eliminate the philosophical issue as irrelevant to stick to pure, provable facts. (typos corrected, and hat tip to More or Less Bunk for the main article, on professors getting paid too much).

Once we grew up a bit and learned each other, my sister and I started getting along pretty well. But there are some things that still speak to how much we don’t think alike.

She wants me to be healthier. So she talked up reading this book about a vegan, oil-free diet—”just 145 pages! It’ll take you no time at all! You can skip all the recipes at the end.” Apparently thinking I would be converted! and see the light! after reading the book. The book told me very little about healthy eating that I didn’t already know, and what was new to me was not presented with enough evidence for me to believe it. (One woman cured her own breast cancer with this diet! really?) The part I needed to read, to prove that a healthy diet was feasible for me, was the recipes. And the section on setting up your kitchen.

She has a pale yellow living room couch and is obsessive about keeping it nice. Result: I don’t sit on it. At all.

I think she organizes her books by size.

Nevertheless, she volunteered to take me in if I wound up jobless, and even said (after a pause), that I could bring the cats, who must be kept away from the yellow couch and who chewed up all her plants when they visited earlier. That’s love.

My sister doesn’t read this blog (I hope) or even know it exists (I think), but anyhow, Happy Birthday!

• You have to open up a new window to post them. Sometimes you can bring the original post back for review (sans links, photos, or blocked-out quotations), but not always. So quoting is a big-ass hassle. And if you want to keep the page open to follow the discussion and check back for new comments, the window title is not-so-helpful.
• If you prefer to use a Name/URL for ID, you have to select that option and re-enter it every single time. WordPress.com with Firefox on a Mac usually has mine pre-entered.
• The comments only show a time posted, not a date. You have no clue whether a thread is dead or not, or how many days elapsed between comments.
• The captchas seem to expire if they sit there too long. So if you write a long comment, look up some links, think about it, re-read the other comments to respond to them, then it is invariably rejected on the first try. Sometimes technology actually does help dumb us down.
• Depending on how the comments are set up and how many times you failed the captcha, you might have to hit Back 6-7 times to review the original post after commenting.
• If you post a URL beginning with http://, WordPress automatically turns it into a clickable link. Blogger does not.

This is pretty much why I went for WordPress instead of Blogger, because I much preferred commenting on it (I will admit that templates in Blogger seem much more customizable, and I am envious of the blogrolls with excerpts of recent posts).

By the way, people using Blogger? Especially those of you with the cool icons? If you want, you can put your avatar into Gravatar.com and then it should show up on WordPress.com blogs too (and possibly other places). People using other systems who have been forced to create an annoying Blogger profile just to comment in certain places might also want to add their avatar to the profile.

Does anyone know how to make Firefox do a site search? Because some blogs don’t have search boxes.

And while I’m whining—to a number of faculty whom I shall not address directly, because none of us really have the right to complain about how other people run their blogs (which doesn’t stop me): seriously, your blog is very little different from mine, a mix of personal and academic posts addressing little controversial material or touchy issues that tend to draw haters and trolls. How is that you can’t allow anonymous comments or the Name/URL option and everyone has to sign in to comment, but I’m totally fine leaving mine wide open? Is my readership really substantially lower than yours? (I rarely check it, but it seems pretty low.) Are there trolls out there I just never see? Does WordPress.com actually do a better job on spam? What am I missing?

It’s like the Confederate flag, and “heritage not hate.” Why get upset? These people are walking around with signs that say, “I’m ignorant of the basic facts of American history, and I’m proud of this.”

***

Understanding why people do dumb shit, isn’t the same as thinking they have the right to do dumb shit.

***

I can imagine some defense of the phrase “great white hope,” as a kind of generic tag. But any politicians whose spent a portion of their career talking to black people, who knows the racist history of the phrase, or has some inkling of what it means to have a first black president, would know that invoking the phrase is a bad idea.

***

This is history through the veil, again. It’s virtually impossible to be a black person and believe that Americans were somehow more humble in the past. Our very exist[ence] springs from an act of immodesty. I can’t even begin to imagine the Native American read on this one.

***

Also, the commenters there win the prize for “most worth reading of any site I visit.”

Sometimes I answer questions on tech forums for fun.* While browsing the Pages forum (Apple’s word processor), I came across someone asking if he could put music and lyrics into Pages, and then set something up so that he could basically tell Pages “Okay, I want this song in the key of A instead of B, transform all the chords to fit.”

Naturally, someone suggested a music notation program. The original poster replied:

I do have notation programs that can do all of that, but it’s usually a pain in the butt to set up. Pages is so easy to use.

You know why it’s easy to use? Because it has a defined purpose and limited set of features.

Right tool for the right job, people.

*This is a large factor behind my second identity. The last thing I want cluttering my professional google history is me answering a bunch of technical questions.

Rana knocks the anti-pseudonymity ball out of the park:

Finally, you write “I’d rather be able to connect what people say to who they are.” You know what? I find this to be a not-so-charmingly naive statement. “Who they are” is contingent on context and situation. What I write, here and elsewhere, is a far better measure of “who I am” than a formal title on a faculty website. In some contexts, “who I am” is a 39-year-old white woman who wears glasses. In others, “who I am” is “that blogger who writes about nature, photography and academia.” In others, I am “that yoga student who keeps drifting in and out of practice.” At times who I am is “pantheistic Unitarian Universalist who votes Green.”

If you Google my legal name, none of this information will come up. In fact, what will come up are references to about fifteen other people who share my name. On the other hand, if you Google my pseudonym, and read my blog – which I link to in all my comments on other people’s blogs – you will learn all these things.

In other words, my real name is a lousy tool for figuring out “who I am” – unless you are interested only in my degree and where I teach.

Context: First, Second. This one is from Third. My previous discussion, with links.