This whole month, both of my literature classes have turned into discussions of what defines the human and what we assume that humans deserve by being human. We’re reading a lot of 18th-century stuff on colonialism and slavery, so it keeps coming up, even if I fear that the conversation is getting wide of strictly [...]
Archive for the ‘Work’ category
Hiring season
The Ad First we secured the line. Then we wrote the job ad. Like most things decided by committee, it ended up a miscellany of priorities and desires—a cross between an eHarmony mash note and a letter to Santa Claus. Please, Santa, bring me the perfect colleague, someone who can teach competently in several incompatible [...]
Getting to sleep
I’ve been having trouble going to sleep for the past month, in part because it’s been that long that I’ve been waiting for a potentially life-changing phone call that, with every passing day, becomes less likely to change my life, and more likely to result in me doing precisely the same thing for another year, [...]
I’m late! I’m late!
No one who reads here wakes up before 9 anyway, right? Right. I am constantly behind the ball. Or–not “behind” the ball so much as “right at” the ball. I’ve taken on more classes than I’ve ever had before, while writing my thesis and applying for jobs. I probably spend as much of my time [...]
Religion is boring
This semester I keep running into religious boredom from my students. At Religious College, the students are totally entranced by the text we’re reading except when I try to say something about the religious context of the author, whom they far prefer to judge according to the standards of their own beliefs. At Secular College, [...]
What do artists do?
Today I came across this article on Slate discussing the method by which Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line was filmed and edited. I can’t say it surprised me, exactly, since The Thin Red Line is sort of a mess, I suppose. But it was a film that touched me very deeply in an extremely [...]
Am I not the boss of you?
I’m Gen X and started my work life in Thatcher’s Britain. I grew up with a fear of unemployment and I was extremely grateful for every job I had even if I sometimes hated them. I was conscious that I could be fired and I tried to do my job well. This is not noteworthy, [...]
The Excrementalist
Hello again! Two weeks ago, I biffed, because I am a moron. But I am back. And good Lord, do I need some advice. Let us say that one works in an office where one makes the shocking discovery that some colleague has been depositing his or her excrement in some place that is not [...]
Work/life balance
I was told today, during the first day of classes at Big Law School That Will Not Be Named for Googleproofing Reasons (Seriously Don’t Mention Its Name in Comments), to start to figure out work/life balance now, before I’m a real lawyer. This is actually something I’ve never really bothered with before, because I’ve had [...]
Bad Faith
I often get the sense that people are asking me questions they don’t want answers to. It’s a kind of social blindness I have, which is weird because my parents did this all the time. You’d think I’d be used to it, but somehow I never learned to tell when it’s best just to tell [...]
