Getting them at “hello”

It’s always better on holiday, so much better on holiday, even if you spent it working and listening to crappy songs like the one I quote at the beginning of this sentence. But here we go again. Another academic year, another meeting of the College, another Faculty Council, another departmental meeting, another convocation, another welcome mixer for our new slave la—incoming grad students. I’m not even teaching this fall, but already I’m pooped. In fact, I’d be taking a nap now instead of blogging only because I am hungry and waiting for the potatoes in my frittata to soften before I add the eggs.

My surprising—even to me—fatigue these days reminds me of nothing so much as my first faculty orientation at my first job post degree five years ago, at Notwilliams: that week (yes, they stretched it out to a week), I literally fell asleep on the couch every evening before nightfall, and I wound up never really unpacking during my entire year there. It was that week that it dawned on me how introverted I really am, how brutally draining I find interacting with people, especially new people. When I tell people I’m an introvert, they usually express surprise. After all, I’m so gregarious, with a smile for everyone and my expressive alto voice. So I’ve been told. Moreover, many of my colleagues across campus can’t believe that not all of us are extroverts: why, after all, would we choose a line of work that required us to schmooze for research and service, while performing for the teaching portion of our duties? Meanwhile, the colleagues whom I consider friends tend to be introverts as well. Perhaps we’re more prevalent in the humanities? I don’t know, but sometimes I worry that introversion may be a professional liability. Worse, it may be harming others, however imperceptibly.

My first year of grad school, two youngish professors unfailingly greeted me—and I mean unfailingly, every single time we crossed paths. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that modest gesture went a long way toward helping me feel that I belonged, that grad school was perhaps not a catastrophic mistake. Both were youngish male professors with whom I would never take a class. Now they are middle-aged professors with fancy appointments and international reputations. Yet they’re still happy to chat at the MLA cash bar. I have no doubt their confidence and gregariousness have benefited their careers, helping them to make contacts and to solicit unlikely collaborations and leads. Plus you must just produce more and better work when you’re not exhausted from being around people all day.

As I said, I’m not teaching this fall, but, in a sort of weird tribute to the Raymond Luxury-Yacht Distinguished Professor of Poetry and the Throatwarbler Mangrove Chair of Critical Thought in my grad department, I’ve renewed my commitment to helping new grad students and new colleagues feel less adrift. JPU may not be that place where everybody knows your name, but it’s nice that someone does, right? So far, not so good. For now, I think a pot of coffee would go well with that frittata. I’d feel like such a loser if I fell asleep before nightfall.

The smell of privilege in the morning: a self-loathing post, complete with colon-ized title

I have a confession: occasionally I read mommy blogs. Very occasionally. I stumbled upon them way back when I was paying off Sallie Mae and googling about for tips on how to save money by hoarding toilet paper and tampons, and not because my biological clock is ticking. I have no maternal instinct: just ask my students. On the blogs, I am unmoved by the copious photographs of blond, blue-skinned, pink-eyed children doing things I can’t bring myself to find cute. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t hate children. Far from it: I just fear them and am tremendously relieved someone else is bringing up Our Future, so that I don’t have to.

Anyway, I found the ancient meme below on one of these mommy blogs. I won’t identify it for reasons that the following paragraphs will make obvious. I endure this blogger’s errant apostrophes, inability to distinguish between “then” and “than,” and comma splices because her life makes me anxious, and I can’t get enough anxiety of my own these days.

Her archive goes back to late 2006, when she was making a New Year’s resolution to pay off $15,000 from her credit cards. After a Hawaiian cruise and a trip to Disneyland, among other vacations, she now estimates that her family’s consumer debt, excluding the mortgage, is nearing $100,000. Now her husband is looking to get his piece of Cash-for-Clunkers action (and the concomitant car note). While she scores a bargain on a skin-conditioning gadget she saw on an infomercial and downloads spyware by completing online surveys that pay her almost five dollars, he doesn’t know how much they owe, and he accuses her of being a tightwad. And her tweenage daughters want highlights. Too weary to cook, she takes the brood to Olive Garden and yields to their demands, LOLing it all off to the approval of her readers. I suppose her blog is a species of recession porn.

Like any single, childless woman who doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about, I left a comment suggesting that she discuss this problem with her husband three years ago, but yesterday—or even now—will do. Plus he needs to help out around the house; surely he can do better than Olive Garden. Her other commenters, who tend to soothe her sorrows by telling her that “Life is hard, honey, so what’s a little Coach bag to cheer you up?” swarmed on my alter alter ego. And she deleted my alter alter ego’s comment. Whatever. Good luck, lady. Meanwhile, I can’t stop looking. I’m fascinated. Thank goodness she blogs even less frequently than I do. So, as I said, I found this meme on her blog.

Celebrate the moments of your life with "coffee." (photo: Amazon.com)

I guess I’ve now arrived at the self-congratulatory part where I tot up how many I’ve “accomplished.” That would be 68. But it is a dreary list, isn’t it? One that screams first-world privilege and middle-American aspirations to kulcha. Visions of those ridiculous tourist trams in Paris that call attention to the camera- and fannypack-bedecked, pastrylike-fleshed Ugly Americans on board flash into memory.

Even if I were cosmopolitan enough to appreciate instant potable coffee-like substances, exactly none of these experiences would figure among the moments of my life that I would celebrate. Those occurred wherever I called home, or in other unglamorous locales, in the company of people I miss. To make myself feel better, I’ve made corrections to the list, which had made “caviar” a proper noun, used “drank” and “swam” as past participles, and referred to something called “karoke.” Pedantry: that’s privilege, too.

1. Started your own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band (and boy howdy we sucked)
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sung a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables (In fact, I’m breakfasting—and lunching and dining—on my own misshapen tomatoes! Alas, I was also talked into splitting a CSA share this year.)
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train (I’m inordinately fond of trains, at any time of day.)
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitch hiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill (but only because my company didn’t “do” personal days)
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a marathon (a half-marathon, which doesn’t count)
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice (though I’ve been to Venice several times to visit a friend who used to live there)
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset (Both, many times, but I took a picture of the latter that became a postcard in the Outer Banks.)
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught yourself a new language (and forgot most of what I learned within the year)
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant (If McDonald’s and Taco Bell count, I’ve always tried to buy food at the nearest place for panhandlers who claim hunger and not, say, a need for $20 bus fare.)
44. Visited Africa (So. There are three items pertaining to Paris and just one for a whole continent?)
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had your portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain (in Paris, no less, to complete the cliché)
    
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie (whose director died suddenly of a heart attack while going for a walk in NYC last week: RIP)
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class (Dude, I am a martial arts class.)
59. Visited Russia (Yet I’ve been to the Ukraine and Latvia.)
60. Served at a soup kitchen (If I’m in town, I serve an absurdly early Thanksgiving dinner to “those in need” at the local civic center.)
61. Sold Girl Scout cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason (from a student, no less!)
64. Donated blood, platelets, or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check (Grad school, you impoverishing bastard!)
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy (My favorite childhood toys were acquired well into adulthood.)
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job (I was also told that “regrettably” I don’t have the temperament for retail. Duh.)
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London (London is like a third home. Do I need to do this?)
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car (always used, always)
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had your picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating (If fishing counts, then I’ve been a mass murderer and preparer.)
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swum in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a lawsuit
98. Owned a cellphone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Read an entire book in one day (Just one? Candy asses!)

A consumer’s report

There’s a commercial for a big-box office supply store that, to a soundtrack of “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” depicts a middle-aged dude gliding gleefully through the store’s aisles riding a shopping cart, followed by a pair of miserable children dragging their feet in funereal gloom. It’s back-to-school time! For obvious reasons, that commercial always filled me with irritation, especially since it would start airing in July. I’m on leave in the fall, so these days I’m not as bothered by the commercial, which I actually haven’t seen this year, mostly because I haven’t had occasion to turn on the TV.

I know I’m preaching to the choir when I assert that education and consumerism don’t mix. Just ask Trina Thompson. Or don’t. Thompson, who graduated from Monroe College this past May, filed suit last week against the unaccredited, for-profit college, seeking a $70,000 refund of her tuition, plus $2000 for mental distress, because she still hasn’t found a job, despite her 2.7 GPA, attendance in class, IT major, and almost three months of unemployment. What did she expect her alma mater to do about her joblessness? Says she: “They’re supposed to say, ‘I got this student, her attendance is good, her GPA is all right—can you interview this person?’ They’re not doing that.” Readers of the New York Daily News online are unsympathetic. As am I.

Still, I know now that, had I to do it all over again, I would not attend Monroe College in a field whose jobs are notorious for being outsourced overseas. While I’m at it, here are some arguably back-to-school items I’m on the fence about buying.

1. These,

The better to see you with, and because decent vision is, like, an occupational necessity, I get my eyes checked religiously, although my prescription hadn’t changed in ten years. Until this year! So, having read all kinds of online encomia (and diatribes) on Zenni Optical, I sent my canary into the pit. On July 1, I ordered these glasses for $8 per pair, plus $4.95 shipping. For $28.95, therefore, they arrived via USPS on July 11, each pair nestled amid the folds of a lint-free cloth in one of these hard plastic cases:

These were the best-fitting glasses I’d ever worn, and I’ve often had trouble choosing which pair to wear. But when I took them out to photograph them for this post, I discovered that my favorite pair (front—duh) had cracked. After spending enough time on Zenni’s 800-line to proofread a chapter of my MS (and I write verbosely, as you can probably guess), I finally spoke to a customer-service rep who supposedly arranged to send me a pair of replacement frames. Now if only I knew how to change out the lenses.

2. These,

I know white people like these. Is that so wrong? They are Moleskines, but one is not like the other. The one on the left contains my frightening stray thoughts: lesson ideas, budgets, conference notes, recipes, reminiscences about conversations, absolutely terrifying dreams. No, I didn’t say I was organized. But the Moleskine on the left was, until I reached the last page, the latest in a pile of Moleskines that contain dissertation notes, info on job searches, meditations on breakups, and plans for world domination. They were such a pleasure to write in that I filled up two of these a year, on average.

The one on the right, as I say, only looks like the old Moleskines. The new one is slightly less shiny. Where the older Moleskines feel like vegan calfskin, the latest feels like plastic. Worse, it smells like plastic. Bitter plastic, if you know what I mean: on bad days the odor makes me swoon. Even worse, the paper feels not like the smooth, slightly thick stock of the old Moleskines, but distinctly like the Mead filler paper people are buying for their kids right about now. (Actually, do kids still use filler paper? I see it in stores, but to hear the creepy morons in my school’s Center for Teaching Awesomeness tell it, elementary school students are Tweeting their notes these days.) No, I don’t like. I started this Moleskine in January. I think I’m ten pages in, maybe fewer.

3. and, as much as I enjoy being a girl, maybe This:

HP Mini clutch by Vivienne Tam

Would you believe I have still not replaced my computer? My moribund iBook is being held together with the e-quivalent of rubber bands and duct tape.

Yep, this post was made with a Mac. MacGyver, that is. And yes, I’ve been dying to write that.

Ceci n’est pas un post.

(Cricket[s]: get it? [Source: BBC])

Apologies for my silence. My computer has advanced considerably on the slow march to its demise, and, as I contemplate its replacement, I’m sneaking in this one on a borrowed computer. Shhh.

Writing like an undergrad

On my way to the office this morning (cos I’m trying to avoid getting sucked into and enraged by the Sotomayor hearings, though I wound up listening to them at the office and getting enraged, anyhow: Jeff Sessions, your disingenuousness makes you sound so dumb that it vindicates the Senate Judiciary Committee that blocked your appointment to the federal bench in 1986; and Ricky Gervais, citing the judicial equivalent of Rate My Professors as “evidence” of Sotomayor’s “mood[iness]” totally ruined your “Lindsey Graham” act), I overheard a pair of students whose conversation made me wistful.

Here it was Tuesday morning, and already they were planning their weekend. What initiative! But here’s what made me wistful: he turned down her invitation for Thursday night, because he has a fifteen-page paper due Friday morning (summer school, you see), so “Thursday night’s gonna be busy.” Their voices trailed away, but I did hear him say that he hadn’t started the paper yet.

As I continued to my office, I sort of envied the young man who didn’t seem at all troubled at the prospect of writing fifteen pages in three days. Sure, they might suck, or be plagiarized, in 14-point Courier, with 2″ margins, but even so, that’s a hefty chunk of verbiage. Yet when I was an undergrad, back in the early 90s, I spent all-nighters during which papers came together as if by themselves, their progress accelerated and intensified by adrenaline and caffeine. This ease, this exhilaration, came to a halt in the middle of my third (and last) year of college: I started really scrutinizing every word, every nuance of syntax, each transition, even patterning motifs throughout the paper as it developed its argument. I didn’t know it at the time, but this abandonment of abandon meant that I was bound for grad school.

Every now and then, I still get to relish a bout of undergraduate writing. My last article proceeded that way, in fact. Since I had nothing better to do on a Friday night, I spent an all-nighter fleshing out the skeleton of my argument, transcribing the evidence I had on hand, paraphrasing evidence I was thinking of using but didn’t have on hand. Without even printing the thing out, I was able to see the argument whole, and to move paragraphs about accordingly.

Of course, I had been brooding over that article for almost a year, reading, reading, presenting part of it at a conference, reading before I ever cracked open my computer. It was as if I were just docilely fulfilling an assignment.

Indeed, I learned the power of the assignment just last spring, while I was in the throes of my third-year review, when a group of students who were supposed to be leading class came to my office for help only a week before they were to fulfill their duties. I expressed worry that they wouldn’t have time to prepare adequately, but they didn’t share my worry. In fact, they seemed practically mellow, even confident. Incredulous, I blurted out, “How do you do it? It takes me days to figure out what I want you to learn.” (Bear in mind that I am not in the habit of freaking out my students; as I said, my brain was addled by my review.) One of the students put her hand on mine and explained that, by giving them specific goals and guidelines, I had already done most of the hard work. I love my students.

After this revelation, you’d think I’d figured out that the panacea for writer’s block is just setting assignments for yourself. Not so fast.

Today I received an advance copy of the PoshBritU Companion to What Lucky Jane Generally Studies, a fat volume that contains the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. I feel queasy just looking at it. It counts for nothing on my annual reviews, except maybe service to the profession, and—as my senior colleagues are fond of saying—no one gets tenured on service. But I wrote it because a friend asked me to write it. After this ordeal, I’m not sure we can remain friends.

The piece is literally much like an undergraduate paper—a freshman paper of “throughout literary history”-type badness, except of course that it must concisely and clearly present a lot of logically organized information. PoshBritUP had given me a ten-page list of formatting guidelines, rules for citations, a 5000-word limit, and so on. In other words, it was an assignment on, oh let’s say, “Death in Anglophone Poetry.” The real topic is comparably universal, only not so commonly studied, and I am baffled to be considered one of a handful of experts on it.

Writing this thing was excruciating. With no limits on nationality or time period, I really was writing about death poems “throughout literary history.” I had to refresh my memory on every poem I knew about death, and to learn just as many that I had never seen before. And thanks to the British Empire, there are lots of Anglophone literatures belonging to cultures whose attitudes toward death vary wildly. With only 5000 words to work with, I would have to write in synecdoches. Deciding what not to write about was harrowing. It took me a month to decide on how to organize this beast. Because I’m much more comfortable writing in 7000 to 10,000-word stretches, I kept going over 5000 words.

But I did finish it. When I sent it to my (former?) buddy, I was tempted to sign off, riffing Sylvia Plath’s too-oft-quoted “Daddy” (hey! a poem about death!), Buddy, Buddy, you bastard, I’m through. But I refrained. Now I have this big shiny book that I can’t stand to look at. And you know what? It will probably be the most widely read thing I ever write.

Tomorrow I think I’ll work from home, while listening to the Sotomayor hearings. I’ll try to contain my rage.

Today’s binge

Date: July 7, 2009

Written: 3000 words

Deleted: 500 words

Consumed: 1 cup yogurt
32 oz. coffee with soy milk
1/2 cup stale trail mix
handful of chocolate-covered pretzels
hot green tea
1 cup leftover macaroni and cheese
an entire bag of microwave popcorn
tepid green tea

Phoned: Mom, who, upon hearing about my formidable accomplishments today, did not ask about my prospects for making her a grandma.

Done

Not quite ten hours ago, I returned from my twenty-third conference presentation. Moments thereafter I added the line to my CV. It will take me about a week to unpack my luggage, a small, non-hipster messenger-type carry-on.

Call it superstition, but I do not list presentations on my CV until I have actually presented or moderated—I mean, suppose my plane had crashed on the way to Mighty Land Grant University? Yet I have no qualms listing “forthcoming” publications or even invited talks I haven’t yet given. Yeah, call it superstition, because it is not rational at all.

What is rational, however, is my decision to quit presenting at conferences, at least for now. I’ll still accept invitations to chair panels, and I will attend conferences to peddle my book once I shepherd the cursed thing into print. This decision saddens me, because I used to love presenting at conferences.

That love, such as it is, has been supplanted by a vicarious one. So far, I have never failed to be thrilled to meet my grad students as they return from their first conferences, aglow with excitement and ambition. Unshackled from TA duties and my oppressive nitpickery, they are free to parry questions, to hear their own voices in the conversation, to shine as scholars in their own right. (This last, by the way, is why I do not drag students with me to my conferences.) After two years of guiding grad students as they convert conference papers into publications, the thrill shows no sign of abating.

I remember vividly what it was like to experience that thrill firsthand. Eight years ago to the day next week, in fact, I presented my first paper. It was an absurdly specialized international conference. I knew not to run the proposal by my advisor, who—being an introvert who loathes conferences and is unimpressed by them on the curricula vitae of even very novice scholars—was indifferent when I delivered the post mortem.

Still jet lagged when I arrived overseas at this conference, I discovered that the other two members of the panel were senior scholars, whose publications have been the occasion of quite massive deforestation. Our panel was in the first set of sessions. Therefore, the audience was standing room only. Good thing, then, that I was so anxious about sharing my dissertation with people outside my grad department that I learned my paper by heart, so that I could do the police in different voices. I mades their flesh creep. Just kidding. But I did leave with a pocketful of business cards and a much more modest bunch of invitations to publish the paper. (For what it’s worth, I regret having accepted one of them, since, once the dissertation was all said and done, I no longer accept the argument of my first article.)

What was so empowering about that first paper, however, was neither my hammy delivery nor my mad research skillz. Rather, it was dealing with a hostile question.

Just as my copanelists were eminences, so were many members of the audience. One of them, who didn’t wear a nametag because she had arrived late, plus everyone else already knew her on sight, directed the first question to me. It was, basically, “So what?”—only more elegantly phrased and uttered in a quaint accent. She crossed her arms and seemed to scowl. The room fell silent. I smiled, reiterated, and elaborated. She grudgingly assented when I asked if I had answered her question. And then the conversation flew. It was collegial and informative. It was awesome.

I learned the identity of my interrogator over lunch with some senior scholars who had deigned to let me join them. One remarked that it was bad form to treat a student that way, and that he was particularly surprised that my interrogator, whose scholarship analyzes power, would behave in that manner. As it turns out, I knew her scholarship well. Let’s just say that I was immeasurably grateful that its author wasn’t wearing her nametag. Had she done so, I would have ended my career right there.

As it is, we’re all cordial and stuff now. Since we, like, live in different countries, it’s not like we’re BFFs, though we do meet up if we happen to be attending the same conference. I’ve seen my name share bibliographies and syllabi with hers.

Much more importantly, the “hostile” question was a fundamental, if obvious one: out of habit now, I try always to foreground, in both my research and my teaching, what is at stake. Like a religious fanatic, I want to tell you and tell you and tell you.

As I’ve become a faculty member, however, I find myself feeling less and less challenged, and learning less, from not only the papers I’m hearing, but also the responses to my own research. This is a shame, since preparing for and going to conferences takes such time and energy. What’s more, I really believe what I tell students on the rare occasions that I need to miss class to attend a conference: that, like all professors, I am a super-nerd, and that conferences are one of our ways of going to class.

The sorts of questions I get these days are along the lines of asking me for suggestions on what to read, in addition to invitations to publish in non-refereed essay collections that have not found publishers. (These are a special kind of purgatory.) The most common question, however, is “when and where can I get this book?”

That’s an excellent question. Actually, I wish you’d say, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Have you even thought of approaching the question through Q and R?” Then we can have a conversation. Thank you, all the same. But I think I’m done here.

Banned from the blog cocktail:

Bacardi products.

Yesterday I blogged about my hypothetical blog cocktail: a cucumber-and-vodka concoction by Kingsley Amis that I would probably never drink, and a mint- and citrus-enhanced version by Martha Stewart that I’m quite less unlikely to drink. The comments revealed a unanimous preference for gin, a preference I of course share.

I wanted to clarify, however, that while the only gin in my house is a more-or-less full bottle of Rear Admiral Joseph’s from Trader Joe’s, I never drink Bombay Sapphire, despite its charming bottle. (So maybe, for all my pretensions about literary aesthetics, my tastes are really leaden.) I’m also not keen on vodka, so I certainly never got sucked into the Grey Goose hype among people claiming discriminating palates of princess-and-the-pea precision. (Numerous taste tests have revealed that most people cannot pick “their” vodka out of a lineup.)

Both Bombay Sapphire and Grey Goose are owned by Bacardi, which has manufactured for them a heritage that they don’t possess: Bombay Sapphire, for instance, originated in 1987, when Victoria, Empress of India, who figures prominently on the label, had been dead for the better part of a century. The advertising folks at Bacardi are geniuses. I mean, it’s as if they walked straight out of Mad Men, only really from the early 60s. Here’s why:

This is from an ad campaign recently launched in Israel. And there’s much, much more where that came from. Well, actually that’s not true: the promotional site has been pulled down, presumably because of the outcry.

As one might imagine, the campaign is getting lots of coverage. I first read about it on Copyranter, which pictures the other “ugly girlfriends.” There’s also a typically long and pointless thread about it on Jezebel, and Michelle Koenig-Schwartz has done a set of parodies.

Still, I’ve got to wonder: Who drinks Bacardi Breezers? Are they the same people who used to drink Zima? Is this stuff being marketed to women? Really? And why did these women—whom I consider attractive—consent to be pictured thus? Did they consent? If so, whyyyyy?

So many questions. No wonder I need more coffee.

It’s 7 in the morning. Do you know where your Stoli is?

Today is the second anniversary of this blog. Its namesake is perhaps obvious: Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, arguably the ur campus novel. It is also a novel awash in booze. These two details are not a coincidence. They even coincide in a drink, the recipe for which I am sharing with you today.

As Britain’s poet laureate of liquor, Amis was also the author of On Drink, in which directions for the Lucky Jim are set down. I do not approve of his suggestion to use it as “an excellent love-philtre to press on shy young ladies, if there are any of these left.”

The Lucky Jim (serves six)

• 2/3 bottle of vodka
• shot of vermouth
• 2 cucumbers (leaving skin on one, slice thin)
• ice in a pitcher

Chill six glasses. Combine vodka and vermouth in pitcher. Stir. Slice the unsliced cucumber into 2″ chunks and squeeze through a citrus juicer. Strain and pour into the vodka-vermouth mixture. Stir. Pour into chilled glasses. Garnish with thinly sliced cucumber. Serve.

I have never made this drink, but I imagine it would look like this picture, which originally appeared in Martha Stewart Living and accompanied a recipe for lemongrass chicken. Martha adds mint to her cucumber-and-vodka cocktail. I’m not crazy about mint, but I suppose I could add it to the Lucky Jim by crushing some leaves along with the cucumber chunks. Et voilà: blog cocktail!

If your blog had an official cocktail, what would it be?

Sharper than a serpent’s tooth

Earlier this week, as I was contemplating how to celebrate my freedom from debt and whistling while I worked on my off-contract summer service, I was hit with an emergency: I had to shop for a Father’s Day card.

Ordinarily, I would have sent one from my copious greeting card stash, of which I am perhaps inordinately proud. It contains cards acquired at Pound Stretcher and Everything’s Less than a Pound! shops—as well as the typical museums, the British Library Bookshop, and Oxfam—in the UK, and of course shops big and little all over the US and Canada. Since I travel mostly to places with universities, the typical eclectic indie establishments staffed by hipsters wearing ironic nerd glasses whom (and which) I despise have sold me reams of “edgy” cards. The dazzling bounty of my card stash has recently dispatched cards from India, Israel, Italy, and Ireland, as well as countries that don’t begin with “I.” Despite their plenitude, I never bought indiscriminately: every card in the stash looks special. The stash occupies the largest drawer in my ostentatiously Gallic bombé lingerie chest, which goes with none of my other furniture and contains no lingerie. Have you just gotten divorced? Had your kitty put down? Lost your job? I am so sincerely sorry, but have I got a card for you!

No wonder, then, that I was numb from disbelief—no, horror—as I pawed through my stash, only to come up empty on Father’s Day cards. I already had my quirky yet secretly impersonal gift. The lack of a card to accompany it constituted a crisis.

Preprinted cards for Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, and parental birthdays are extremely problematic for me. Shopping for these is always a depressing ordeal. Like everyone else’s parents, my parents are not normal. Yet the cards that you can nip into the supermarket for describe parental characteristics completely alien to my upbringing.

The most common motif on Father’s Day cards is a tie. My dad is retired, but he never wore a tie to work, where he was reportedly (via an intern at the company whom I met coincidentally years later) an underachiever who somehow lucked into a salary sufficient to support an enormous brood in an expensive part of the country. I’ve never danced with him, and he has never held me aloft on his shoulders, as so many of those cards marked “From Daughter” suggest are common occurrences. My dad has never said a word of encouragement to my face, and he has the unfortunate gift of saying the most devastatingly wrong thing at the worst possible time. Still, he does share with other people’s fathers a penchant telling awful jokes. He neither plays nor watches sports—not even golf—though he has all sorts of mysterious trophies from before he met my mother. Ever since all we kids moved out, my parents have used a service for yard work. My dad isn’t handy. He doesn’t barbecue. He doesn’t read. He has no hobbies.

Shopping for a Mother’s Day card is even more trying. Throughout my formative years, my mother was perpetually pregnant. From what I can gather, she was always seeking the approval of my grandparents, on both sides, through abundant parturition. Though each of her children has undergone therapy, she doesn’t believe in it, but I am convinced that she suffered from decades of postpartum depression. Therefore, so did the rest of us. She went on sadistic rages whose fury could be sated only by humiliating others: to this day I shudder at wedge espadrilles because they were the fashion when my mother was fond of stuffing hers in my mouth for asking too many questions. (None of these questions was “Why are wedge espadrilles so ugly?”) She also regaled us with stories about her former beaux and my dad’s latest failings. Every other week, it seemed, she wanted a divorce; she kept the family together for the sake of the children, she said. For our sake, too, she turned away Child Protective Services, which apparently sent out a case worker based on odd things I was doing in kindergarten. (I have never done anything odd; this case worker must have been sent out in error.) She will be sixty this year, so she came of age at the height of the women’s movement, yet she has never worked outside the house. She is intelligent and has great aspirations. I think she would have been a lot less unhappy had she earned a living of her own.

I love my parents, but I have never liked them. We talk every weekend. Rather, they complain about each other while I listen. The complaints are variations of the ones I heard throughout my childhood. Now, as then, I never take sides. I grade papers or, if I’m feeling ambitious, request interlibrary loans online while “talking” to them. I don’t anticipate my Father’s Day call will be much different.

Over three decades, my parents have changed remarkably little. That troubles me. We are supposed to overcome our anger at people who have outgrown the behaviors that angered us: they are no longer the people who angered us. As far as I can tell, neither of my parents has outgrown their behaviors, but I’ve outgrown my anger, for the most part.

After all, they will not be around forever, and given the stress they have put each other through, they are not in the best health. Imagine if Homer Simpson had wed Amanda Wingfield, the faded, delusional Southern belle from Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, and you’d have a decent approximation of my parents. As a child, I fantasized about having been switched at birth and being reunited with my kind, clever real biological parents. I long ago abandoned that fantasy. I am every bit the child of the parents who brought me up. As I age, I discover myself embodying their worst qualities: the complacency of my father and the dissatisfaction of my mother make an unfortunate cocktail. Whatever. I’ll get over it.

All this occurred to me as I replenished my card stash. I had to veto the cards on offer at four hipster indie gift shops: they were either too allusive or too risqué. The Father’s Day cards I bought have, as they must, minimal text. They are not blank inside, because then I would have to supply the sentiment. A card meant to be “given” by an infant or a pet will do. The front must not be representational. Something abstract, or maybe a droll yet accessible cartoon: these are my safest bets, as they give me something to work with in a way that seems thoughtful, in an affectionate way.

Such was the case with the card I sent Wednesday—along with my quirky yet secretly impersonal gift—with love.