Dan Mullin at The Unemployed Philosopher has a great postacademic podcast and this week, it features lovable furry old me. Want to know my thoughts on marriage, identity, debt, arrested development, having kids, and more when it comes to quitting grad school? Tune in! And check out Dan’s other eps while you’re at it.
“Stupid choices I made in my twenties might impact my life forever. That’s a drag.” – Me
A year ago today I had The Talk with my advisor and walked away from graduate school. It was a terrifying and relieving experience, and I haven’t regretted it for a day. I never would have guessed that a year later I’d have a job, a blog, and a love for french braiding. This journey has been amazing.
Quitting grad school is just like this, every day. Except on days when it’s -10 degress in Iowa. Which is most days, lately.
I and a couple other post-academic grad school quittas are setting up a fabulous, free, catch-all website for people quitting grad school or leaving academia, and we need your help. If you quit grad school — if you’re here because you’re thinking about quitting grad school – please contribute to the site or the book. It’s the nicest, easiest, non-academic-iest writing you’ll do and you will help out so many people dying to hear stories from others who’ve walked this road. Head on over and consider sending me a short idea for an essay (as long or as short as you like!) for the site or e-book. We’re hoping to have all of the submissions gathered by Feb. 1st, so get on that already!
The last month has been big for graduate education reform and post-ac in general. This Chronicle piece summarizes it pretty nicely. Some new reports have told us what we already knew. We’re planning some exciting stuff. MLA is just around the corner. It’s all happening.
But all this has left me wondering if the post-ac community — the small world of which I am a small part — is really part of this reform conversation. It seems like we should be, right? It seems like all of these schools and students and programs who are desperately concerned about employment prospects for graduate students would be interested in talking more to people who have actually left. And I guess #Alt-Academy is sort of doing that, but I have already written about my problems with the concept of alt-ac as the only option discussed as legit for humanities grads. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m glad “alt-ac” is around, and I’d love to hear if it has helped any grad school quittas as they look for assistance when they decide to leave. I like what Bethany Nowviskie, a founder of #Alt-Academy, says about the ethos of alt-ac:
The #alt-ac track is not exactly filled with a Romantic brand of lunatic-as-solitary-genius. We are not the individualists our faculty mentors trained us to be. If this generation is possessed of a vision and an energy, it’s for the most pragmatic and collective kinds of reform. Strong and unconventional ideals underlie the #alt-ac project, but we… like to get things done, collaboratively, and in the real world… we’re inclined to feel the pain, to document it all, and to share outcomes and services freely in order provide a leg up to the people coming behind us… for us, “service” was never a dirty word.
But I’m uncomfortable with how, for lack of a better word, academic it is. Alt-Academy says that alt-ac is “really about an alternative academia, a new imagination for the systems in which we operate.” Which just sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me. I mean, I get it: I appreciate the refashioning of academic identity to broaden it and make room for the many folks who love working for institutions in a different capacity. But I see it mostly for grad students who plan to stay, selling them the notion that staying is wise and there are options that they can learn to love as much as they loved the fantasy of being a professor. This feels markedly different from the conversations in the post-ac blogging world, which are about breaking with the academy. Our pain is disjuncture from the identity that I think alt-ac is trying to maintain and expand. Our topics and methods feel similar, but our projects feel different.
Why alt-ac and not post-ac? Does one encompass the other? How much overlap is there in our Venn diagram?
I just don’t know if I or we are really a part of that, even though it seems like “we” (?) ought to be. Within the last few years, post-academic blogs have flourished (in that there’s, ya know, many of them where there used to be few). In fact, it seems that every few years, there’s a new crop of websites, blogs, or books devoted to post-academic life written by grad school/academic quittas that are subsequently abandoned (seem to have a shelf-life of 1-2 years — see postacademic.org for a great example). Even within post-academic blogs that are still active, posts focusing on quitting, job hunting, skill development, and the transition out of academia seem to peak for about a year or two and then fade away as life goes on. I’m sure that will happen here, to my blog. Life goes on. Maybe post-ac is different from alt-ac, or from the reform movement, because eventually it leaves these concerns behind, instead of rehashing the same concerns and points all over again, or trying to make academic conversations out of our daily lives and occupations.
* * *
I was really amused to stumble across a series of posts on Postacademic.org from two years ago (2010), after MLA President Sidonie Smith made some proposed reforms for the dissertation. Caroline Roberts wrote:
“It’s great that Smith is taking such a sincere and proactive stance challenging one of the sacred cows of the Ph.D., the dissertation, so it’ll be interesting to see how her words translate into actions. While I hate playing the naysayer–OK, maybe I don’t hate it so much!–conceptual solutions can only go so far in a profession that is, in many ways, defined by looking backwards and not forwards.” The Latest from the MLA: Acknowledging the Problem is the First Step
And then:
“Before we go into greater detail about our admiring skepticism as to how plausible the possibility of change is, we do have to give Pres Smith credit for her foresight in attempting to take on the most ingrained and daunting of academic hazing rituals, the dissertation writing process. Beyond any issues folks have at a personal level maintaining their own sanity, balancing their finances, and figuring out their day-to-day lives through grad school, Pres Smith identifies the consequences the dissertation process has on the profession as a whole, stunting the development of young scholars at the start of their careers who may be investing too much into the diss manuscript as the end-all, be-all first book.” The Latest from the MLA: Is the Diss Extinct?
A few months later, Caroline @ Postacademic commented on grad students who had been writing to Salon for career advice. The columnist encouraged the students to stick it out, and this conversation happened in the Postacademic comments among Worst Professor Ever, Caroline, and Eliza (the three most active and “high profile” post-ac bloggers at that time):
WorstProfEver said: And so it begins — have you seen the PhD on this weeks’ PostSecret? I predict more people will need your Sense & Sangria!
Eliza said: “That dream will turn into a nightmare, though, if all you have to show for your PhD is a massive debt load.” Well put! Now if only more unhappy academics would ask the post-PhD community for advice rather than well-meaning, if clueless, advice columnists who are well and truly out of the higher ed loop.
Caroline Roberts said: WoPro, I did see the Post Secret! And that postcard will be appearing on Post Academic sometime in the near future. Eliza, I totally agree. While I have no doubt that these advice columnists have good intentions, I wish the people asking the questions about academic job dissatisfaction turned to the post-PhD community more often!
WorstProfEver said: Agree! But it’s been really hard to find people who are willing to talk about the issue honestly even though I’ve been looking pretty hard. I think we are the post-PhD community!
I think it’s interesting that there are all these conversations happening within institutions like #Alt-academy, which is institutionally housed, funded, and run by senior researchers, but there’s so little overlap between the alt-ac world and the post-ac world. I don’t think any alt-academy people are readers of post-ac blogs (Bethany Nowviskie popped up on my last post, but I don’t think she’s a regular!). I don’t think any of us have contributed to #Alt-academy, even though ostensibly many of us “count” (certainly me), and some stuff there is terrifically helpful and relevant. Is our how to leave academia project redudant with #Alt-academy? It doesn’t feel that way, but I’m curious if people who are in the process of quitting are finding the answers they seek over there.
Two years ago, WorstProfEver said that “we are the post-PhD community,” meaning the bloggers, the quittas. I wonder if that’s still true. What do y’all think?
Hello, hello! I hope you had wonderful holidays. I completely and utterly enjoyed my first post-academic Christmas, the first time in my life I did not have stacks of papers to either write or grade while also doing the shopping and card-sending. It was blissful and rejuvenating.
I’m back in the office the day after Christmas — so this is also the first Christmas in my life where I had responsibilities that instantly resumed at the close of holidays! But I’m not complaining: there are only 6 other people in my office, and once I answered a few student emails, I have been able to do whatever I want, which has included teaching my office neighbors to crochet, watering other people’s plants and hermit crabs, and working on our post-academic project.
(Please consider contributing!)
So I’ve been reading through archives of other post-ac blogs — mostly defunct ones — mining them for the best content so we can try and include all relevant info and not have to reinvent the wheel when we set up the website. We’re curates in a number of ways, and it’s occurred to me more than once that this feels like an historical project (in that we’re assembling a bit of history and crafting a narrative, not that we’re making history). I’m reminded of a few archival projects I did as a grad student in American Studies — one on the Hoover Presidential Library, and one on the KMA Kitchen Homemaker Radio Show — in that I’m gathering, gathering, gathering info from archives with no organization beyond chronology and at some point patterns start to emerge and the story matures in a way that’s meaningful and more importantly, writeable! (Except this time, I’m doing it for fun, with friends, and no deadline, and more than 1 person will read it).
I’ve been putting together a timeline that I think traces the roots and chronology of the modern “post-academic movement.” This is a placeholder/umbrella term I’m using to indicate the counter-academic movement within and without institutions broadly: critiques of academia from within (institutional critiques, etc), including concerns about labor structure, grad student exploitation/experience/professionalization, and the contingent faculty movements that have sprung up; and the proliferation of post-academic, ex-academic, and anti-academic blogs and advice books outside the academy. Not that these are equivalent in terms of impact, but more that they’re concurrent. I’m connecting dots here. This is a draft, it’s totally incomplete, and reflects my own background in composition theory and American Studies. Please, suggest additions, ask questions, question the premise, etc.
1967:
1960s-90s
1987
1993
1993-2003
1997
1999
2000
2000s
2001
2003
2004
2005
2009
2010
2011
2012
This post also appears at HowToLeaveAcademia.com
Based on the responses to my previous entry, and some others as well, Currer Bell, JC, Jet and I are going to try and create a website and e-book resource for those leaving academia.
We envision the website as a hub where people can get basic info and resources, and lots of reassurance. We hope the e-book will focus more on the contemplative/emotional aspects of leaving. “A book to read in the tub,” as one commenter said.
If you’re interested in helping out or contributing, let one of us know. You can comment here or email me at lauren.nervosa@gmail.com. If you do graphic design, can help us make a website not look sucky, have a specific topic or insight you’d like to share for other quittas, or are thinking you’d like to contribute a more thoughtful and polished essay to an e-book, please be in touch. Thanks!
Inside Higher Ed sums up the latest NSF report on employment of new PhDs, showing a nearly 10% drop in employment over the last 6 years, in every single fucking field, with the Humanities at the lowest at nearly 57%. Time to completion has barely budged at an average of 9 years. The Chronicle interpreted the rise in doctorates granted as a good thing but lamented that job prospects “weren’t so rosy” in what has to be the understatement of the decade. Not to be outdone, in a shocking, ambitious, “stark appraisal” that shook the academic world to its core, MLA president Michael Berube wowed a rapt crowd of clueless and overpaid grad college Deans at this year’s Council of Graduate Schools with this frank and forthright assessment of humanities in particular:
Friends, we are fucked. We are overproducing graduates at astonishing rates. We nurture and promote a narrow range of skills and expertise that will not serve our graduates in the future. Yet we are dependent on a constant stream of new grads because we must exploit them as an army of adjuncts and TAs thanks to draconian budget bullshit. Grad students are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore, but have no one to turn to for help. And we continually mistake the vigor of academic employment with the cultural relevance of art and the humanities. My radical suggestion is this…
Oh no wait. My bad. This is what actually happened: Berube made a bunch of inconclusive statements and repeated stuff that has been said for the last 10 years. His “stark appraisal” was less informed and less radical than JC’s most off-the-cuff musings about life after grad school. However, Chronicle of Higher Ed readers surprised everyone by quickly crowdsourcing a dynamic set of solutions in the comments page. Oh no, wait AGAIN, my bad! Chronicle readers responded in typical fractious, heated, ostentatiously out of touch form by repeating the same points in the same arguments that have been made for the last 10 years!
Humanities are dead!
Humanities are more important than ever!
I don’t care about a piddly job, I want to expand my miiiiiind!
If you couldn’t figure out the academic market sucks, you shouldn’t be allowed in grad school!
Finally, administrators are dicks! THE END!
Miia Ranta via Compfight andronicusmax via Compfight Joachim S. Müller via Compfigh hobvias sudoneighm via Compfigh Dennis Lapets via Compfight Alex Proimos via Compfight
Post-Ac Bloggers Everywhere Do a Massive Facepalm
I am continually staggered by the lack of conviction, the lack of recognition behind every academic discussion of the “grad school crisis.” I get annoyed real quick when the conversation gets derailed, time and time again, into the “humanities crisis.” The idea that the horrific working conditions for grad students and recent graduates is due to some broader trend of cultural denigration of the arts and literature baffles me. It seems like a denial technique, a way to deflect the painful reality that graduate programs do active damage to the lives — the livelihoods — of grad students, and turn it back to a textual analysis or critique. If kids these days just appreciated Shakespeare then everything would be ok. If administrators today would just pay us the millions of dollars we deserve for our cutting edge research then we, benevolent faculty, would handle everything perfectly.
I know a lot of faculty who stand in solidarity with grad students and adjuncts. And I know it’s no cakewalk for a lot of profs who are dramatically overworked and compensated at a rate that’s pretty pathetic. But I simply no longer have the patience to wait for the academy to solve this problem. The master’s tools (to borrow a phrase) will never dismantle the master’s house.
I don’t believe a “new” PhD “track” (anyone ever heard of the massive failure of the DA? Is there institutional memory at all??) will make PhDs more employable.
I don’t believe a new kind of “relevant” dissertation will make PhDs more employable.
I don’t believe that a bunch of academics and administrators sitting in a room will come up with the solution, and I certainly don’t expect them to ever agree on a right thing to do.
I do not believe that anyone in the academy has the first clue about what it’s like to look for work in the real world with graduate school as the only thing on your resume.
We cannot grad school our way out of the problem of grad school. We cannot dissertate through this. We cannot conference a solution. We cannot study group interest this away.
The simple fact is that faculty, departments, and schools will need to figure out ways to keep people coming into graduate school. Their solutions to this problem will be focused on maintaining the status quo, for some good reasons (we need teachers) and some shitty reasons (cheap ones!). I doubt that their interest will ever be purely on doing what’s right for grad students, because what’s right for grad students as human beings (IMO) does not match up with what’s right for the institution. Those continents don’t meet.
I think the only people who can really look out for grad students — past, present, and future — are other grad students, and really, are quitters, because we’re not as invested in the whole thing. (Berube noted in his presentation that most opposition to promoting alt-ac/post-ac careers comes from current grad students near the end of their programs). I hereby declare that the only people qualified to actually talk about alternative academic or post-academic or ex-academic careers are alt-ac, post-ac, and ex-acers. (It’s kind of like declaring bankruptcy.) Clearly the MLA president knows he’s not qualified to speak to this:
“If indeed our programs are designed to produce teachers and researchers, perhaps we need to remake them from the ground up if we are going to see them as producing teachers and researchers and something else.”
“Something else” indeed.
I made up these numbers.
So I call on my fellow bloggers to step it up. More and more folks are googling about grad school quitting. They have no one to turn to, for real. We’re it. So what are we going to do about it? I mean very literally, what more can we do? What do quitters need? What do prospective grads need? How can we help?
Posted in Grad School Quittas, The Alt-Ac Life
Tagged academy, alt-ac, bloggers, bullshit, cgs, chronicle of higher ed, Education, employment, grad school crisis, Graduate school, humanities, humanities crisis, jobs, mla, post-ac
Every once in awhile someone makes me feel bad for critiquing graduate school so much. They remind me that I’ve benefited from grad school, or had some good experiences, or gained something from having been a grad student. All of that is true. Sometimes I cringe to think that any of my former professors or advisors could find this blog and they might be angry or upset that I write mostly negatively about my grad school experience. I’m 32 but I still want my teachers to like me. I’ve been mulling a response to these kinds of critiques and want to state a few caveats that apply when I’m critiquing or discussing grad school. I also want to draw an analogy between the kind of institutional critique I (and other post/ex-ac writers) make about grad school and the kind of critique I (and other birth activists) have made about institutionalized birth. In both instances, the personal becomes political, and people’s feelings tend to get hurt.
First, some caveats. Continue reading
Posted in Grad School Quittas
Tagged advising, alt-ac, birth, caveats, debate, disagreement, disagreements, explanations, grad school, Graduate school, institutions, personal is politcal, post-ac, Quitting
Thanks for all the kind comments on my last post. Things are looking up. Sometimes drugs really do help.
* This post was edited to make clear distinctions between my personal experiences and personal conversations about grad school and my professional work as an academic advisor. Under no circumstances would I ever tell an advisee what they should do with their lives, or say “You should not go to grad school.” That’s not my role. — lauren
Work is busy, busy, busy and I’ve been thinking about how I could reframe my sad mindset about having lost something I love, and instead focus on new opportunities to learn that are available to me now. One interest that keeps pushing its way to the forefront is working with honors or high-achieving students.
This is new to me: I spent the last 5 years teaching in developmental programs for at-risk students, at 4-year and community schools. Most of my PhD studies the second time around focused on literacy instruction for struggling college students. I’ve spent my teaching career really interested in that trailing end of the bell curve, and believe deeply that most students are capable of success with the right support.
But now I get to work with the opposite end of the bell curve: students who were high school rock stars, or kids who just started college and are feeling that rush of “Ahh! This is what I was waiting for! This is my place! I’m really good at this!” These are my double majors, my smart asses, my “can I minor in Spanish AND do a certificate in entrepreneurship AND a double major in psych and bio? How about study abroad?” kids. These are my kids in the sense that, they are who I was as a college student. Continue reading
My friend Greg lost his battle with cancer last night. I met him when I was a teenager in a program called Girls State; later I worked with him on staff there. He was a friend and a mentor in life, politics, and music. He took me to my first Phish show and gave me my first tapes and introduced me to the women’s fan group the Phunky Bitches. When I wrote this essay about Coventry, I imagined reading it to Greg over beers. Life and death intervened. Godspeed Greg. Feel good.
I bought single tickets for the East Coast leg of Phish tour, August shows in Boston and New Jersey then a 3 day festival in Vermont. It was supposed to be field work for my dissertation, I was supposed to be interviewing Phunky Bitches, women who were members of a women’s fan organization, trying to get them to talk about feminism, if they identified as feminists, what they thought about feminism. Insider anthropology: I was a PB and a fan, traded tapes, then CDs, through the listserve, chatted on the message boards.
When we heard it was going to be the last tour, the band was breaking up, we scrambled to find tickets for T to go too. The shows were long since sold out. Concert tickets, plane tickets, rental car, notebooks, tiny tape recorder, trying to pull it all together last minute. The ticket for the first night in Boston didn’t come when it was supposed to. The day before we were leaving we called the phone number on the ebay listing so many times the kids mom finally answered and made arrangements to have it delivered to Galaxy Girl’s house in Boston. If all went well, she would bring the ticket and meet us in the parking lot before the show.
We agreed to meet under a flag that said “And then?”
Improbable as it all seemed it worked: got off the plane, threw our backpacks in the trunk, drove to the venue, found the flag, yelled her name, she had the ticket. They opened with AC DC Bag. We jumped the wall from lawn seating into pavilion, ran into the friend who had taken me to my first concert in Grand Rapids five years earlier just as Birds of a Feather closed the first set.
We stayed with Galaxy Girl and Ivy that night and the next, crashed on the floor in her parents living room. More friends arrived. John and Dirtgirl, Todd and Lisa, Bekka, Stardog. Hippie nicknames familiar from long hours on the internet, Secret Bitch gift exchanges at Chirstmastime. After two nights in Boston, Todd and Lisa headed north for Vermont, for the final shows in Coventry. The rest of us had tickets for one more night in New Jersey. Someone’s truck needed to be fixed, we left later than planned but still plenty of time to get to Camden for the show.
New Jersey kicked our asses. Hours and hours and hours of traffic on the turnpike. A gas station attendant called us fucking retarded because we tried to pump our own gas. By the time we pulled into the parking lot the first set had started. We scattered in the venue, agreed to meet back at the cars immediately after the show, get the fuck out of New Jersey and head for Vermont. We danced in the aisles to Sneakin’ Sally. Boston and New Jersey had been sunny and warm, but it had been raining all week in Vermont. Please don’t drive all night, Trey warned before the encore, give us time to deal with the mud and the flooding.
Our car, T and Bekka and I, pulled out of the parking lot, headed north on the turnpike. No traffic. No cursing. Bekka called Stardog, trying to figure out where we would meet up, how far to drive.
Where are you?
Why are you still in the lot? I thought we agreed no one was staying in the lot. We’re driving.
You’re still looking for a veggie burrito? Get on the road. Find them and get on the road.
I drove into the darkness, past the lights of the New York skyline, over the George Washington bridge. I should have turned on the tape recorder, recorded Bekka talking about the first shows she saw with Ivy, about the two them trying to recover her stolen bag from the NYC police after a Madison Square Garden NYE show. I didn’t record a single word, just drove and talked, looking for a cheap motel, windows open to the night air.
At the motel we said the rest of our group was still on the road, paid for a room for them, held it under the name Suzy Greenburg, showered, slept.
On the road to Vermont the next day: traffic getting heavier, cell phone coverage spottier. One more stop to pick up Stardog’s friend; we’re an hour ahead again because they stopped to fix some problem with the bike rack. We pulled over to write down the hotel name and room number, but the connection was terrible. Did he say room 314? 214? 304? I knock on the door and when it opens a crack I say,
Are you Frogman? Stardog sent us to pick you up.
Frogman comes out with a backpack and a Frisbee. We throw the Frisbee in the parking lot. The radio warns us that it is still raining in Coventry.
The traffic gets heavier and heavier, VW buses, minivans with Grateful Dead bumper stickers, kids with dreadlocks leaning out of sun roofs, trying to see what’s ahead. It’s raining softly. We drive until all the cars just stop, miles away from the concert site, in a tiny town whose residents are pleasantly surprised to be in the midst of a hippie migration. We park the cars in the road. People set up awnings, play cards, sell posters and ganja brownies and veggie burritos and beer out of coolers on skateboards. I don’t interview anyone. We listen to the radio. It rains. Tyler and Bekka go to a party at the fire station for somebody’s birthday. We sleep a little in the car, assuming that come morning, traffic will begin inching forward again. The sun comes up. It’s a beautiful day. We wait, and listen to the radio, and make bets on what they will play to open the first set. We have been parked for 18 hours. We hear rumors that on the main highway traffic has been stopped for twice that long. We wonder if Todd and Lisa made it in.
My Coventry wristband, and my ticket from the first night in Boston, the last show I saw with Greg. T and I had lawn seats, but we jumped a wall into the overcrowded pavilion and, unbelievably, found ourselves standing next to Greg. Serendipity.
The official announcement comes over the radio. Mike’s voice is kind, but clear:
Go home. Please turn your cars around and go home. The mud is waist deep, no cars can get in or out of the venue.
People are sobbing, everyone is talking at once, I hear Ivy wail. No cars move. Then Ivy says, determined,
We will go.
She’s pulling her bike off the bike rack. I don’t have a bike but I think she’s right about this, I start saying it too,
We are going. Let’s go, everybody, we’re going. Get your backpacks, let’s go.
We throw some things in a backpack hastily, trying to figure out what we might need, how much we can carry. Grab the tent, the tape recorder, all the clean socks. Somebody T met at the fire station last night offers to drive us so we pile in his truck. It’s clear that no one is turning around. People are walking, biking, riding skateboards, pulling coolers on wheels. Cars are left where they stopped yesterday or the day before, in the road or in driveways, on the shoulder of the highway. Eventually the dirt road to the venue is so full of hippie refugees that our ride has to pull over and let us out. We walk the last few miles, find a place to pitch the tent, get something to eat, head towards the stage for the first set.
I still haven’t done any interviews. My tiny tapes were all blank.
The first set opened with Walls of the Cave.
I know you heard the question, but you didn’t make a sound,
And when it fell you caught my heart before it hit the ground.
But if you ever need the names of those you couldn’t save,
You’ll find them on the walls of the cave.
We were a couple hundred yards from the stage, dancing on a muddy hill. I had a small bag with a notebook in it, plans to talk to women at set break, try and capture something on paper. But the stage beckoned. I started inching my way down the hill, sliding between little groups of people, moving toward the front.
A crowd of 20,000 people looks impenetrable, like there is nowhere to move, but when you’re in it, it turns out everyone is moving, dancing, shifting a little side to side as they pass a pipe, hug a friend, look for their bottle of water. I’ve honed my ability to see those gaps and move through them. The key is to be confident, and if people hesitate, to simply say, “Sorry, I’m just trying to get back to my spot,” like that opening in the front row is already mine, waiting for me to inhabit it.
They played for four hours that night. By the time the guys came back on stage for the encore, I had made my way down close to the rocks separating the audience from the band, huge boulders filling the gap between the waist high fence and the stage. I had called Hood as the first night encore: when I first started trading tapes, listening to whole shows in my car on the long drives between Iowa City and Grand Rapids, Hood was the song that hooked me. I collected shows just to hear new versions of it, rewound the tapes to listen to it over and over.
Trey talked quietly in the opening, joking with the audience, explaining that the stage set up had to be changed because of the flooding and so there was much more space than usual between the band and the audience. It was sad, and funny, and intimate, if there’s such a thing as intimacy between tens of thousands of strangers and 4 guys in a band on a stage in rural Vermont.
Hood unfolds through several stages: a light reggae opening—Harry (the crowd yells Hood!), Harry, (Hood!) Where do you go when the lights go out?—a soft, upbeat bridge dominated by piano that leads into a darker middle section (Thank you Mr. Minor!)—then the piano comes to the front of the sound again in a lengthy jam usually accompanied by glowstick wars in the crowd. Then the closing section, bright and upbeat: you can feel good, good about Hood.
Trey moved out onto the rocks during the jam, guitars and piano and drums build and crescendo, tumbling over one another. I have heard versions of Hood that were more technically perfect, the notes tighter, the sound more refined, but this Hood, this last Hood ached, wrapped us up in longing and bittersweet and beautiful imperfection and when the moment came for the lyrics to pick back up Trey motioned to the crowd. The voices swelled around and through me
You can feel good, good, good about Hood.
You can feel good, good, good about Hood.
20,000 voices, singing Hood, Trey standing on the rocks with his guitar silent, maybe 20 feet away from me.
We drank and smoked around the campfire, bought pancakes the next morning from two guys from Jersey with a griddle and a card table and an institutional sized box of Bisquick. The guy behind us in line, raised Jewish, tasted bacon for the first time.
It tastes like salty candy. Like chewy, salty, candy.
That night they opened with Mike’s Song, I pushed even farther forward, Tyler and the rest of the crew content to stay back. The music was a mess, songs stopped and restarted, everything out of tempo, out of key. Page wept audibly into the mike trying to get the words out to Velvet Sea
I took a moment from my day
Wrapped it up in things you say
Mailed it off to your address
You’ll get it pretty soon unlessThe packaging begins to break
And all the points I tried to make
Are tossed with thoughts into a bin
Time leaks out my life leaks in
They played Chalkdust Torture, I shouted Cant this wait till I’m old? Can’t I live while I’m young? the guy next to me nodding appreciatively. Everybody’s got a song. There were fireworks.
By the time Trey took the mike for the encore it was clear they were spent. We were spent. For the first time it felt like maybe it was okay that this was all coming to an end, maybe we needed a break more than we realized. Trey talked about coming full circle, closing the show with one of the first songs he wrote, living in an unheated cabin on Lake Willoughby. They played The Curtain With. The band cried. I cried. Somebody passed around a bottle of champagne. I didn’t write anything down, not even a set list.
School buses arrived the next day to shuttle people back to their cars. We drove to Lake Willoughby with Dirt Girl and John, hiked in through the woods to go skinny dipping. Cold clear water, hot sun, silence for the first time in days. We rinsed off the mud, tried to wring the smell of campfire out of our hair.
That fall, Bekka started her medical residency, Dirtgirl landed a job as an academic librarian, Galaxy girl went back to school, Ivy rode her bike down the East Coast, I emailed my committee and said it was over. The tiny tapes were all still blank. I unsubscribed from the listserve, vacated the message boards. I had no words for the way those days had left me both gutted and restored. I unpacked boxes in the new house, old versions of Hood blasting through the speakers.
Ivy? Kristen? Phunky Bitches past and present? I would love to hear from you. To know if you remember these crazy days differently, and to hear what you’ve been up to since. Comment away, please!
Posted in Grad School Quittas, Memoir, Music, Pop Culture
Tagged Coventry, fan communities, grad school, Graduate school, identity, memoir, phish, phunky bitches, travel, Writing
Hello from post-academic-working-busy-life land! I’m so intensely sorry to have neglected the blog. I have excuses but they are boring. I think I’m finally settling in to my job and will have more time and brainspace to write here.
A few months ago, I started a series of entries about student loans and how grad school culture supported my awful financial choices for a decade called “Let’s Talk About Debt.” In the third essay, I wrote that loans could — and probably should — be considered a prison sentence:
Really, let’s reframe student loans as a prison sentence. The higher your debt, the longer your sentence. And 5 years might seem like nothing at 22, but I’m telling you that ten years later, 5 years seems like a big chunk of your life, and that’s if and only if you are able to put a huge amount towards loans every year. Most people – like me and my family – can’t approximate that.
So you might say Fuck it, I’ll just make my minimum payments for 25 years or whatever and just count on having to pay it. OK, yeah, that makes sense (if you ignore things like the massive amount of interest you’ll pay); but really, think about what you could be doing with that $400 or $500 (or $1000) per month. You could… save for retirement. Get your kids the braces they need or help pay for your Mom’s nursing home costs. Go on a honeymoon in San Francisco instead of camping. Get your dog the surgery for his hip instead of putting him to sleep. Invest in the stock market, or buy a kickass car. Fix the car you already have. That kind of money, month after month? It can be a life or death, eat or go hungry difference.
I wanted to add a new wrinkle to this conversation after a chat I had with a coworker earlier this week. We were talking about being broke and going broke. This coworker is a close friend and fellow ex-academic who came to work in advising after completing an interdisciplinary PhD and trying (and failing) to find full-time teaching work in community colleges and the like. She’s brilliant and funny and employed and broke. (Sounds familiar, right??) She told me that under federal guidelines, our jobs as full-time employees of a public university qualify us for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. It’s kind of like Northern Exposure, where Joel gets med school paid for when he agrees to work in Alaska for a few years, but in this case, PSLF qualifies any full-time public employee to write off whatever remains of their student loans after 120 on-time loan payments.
Doing a little math, you can see that for anyone with a lot of student loan debt, this is a really, really good thing. For me, personally, depending on what my monthly loan payments end up being, this plan could save me anywhere from $60,000 – $90,000.
Let that sink in for a second.
And then imagine my thought process. Continue reading
