When I moved out of my mom's place in August of '02 I planned on never coming back. I was off to graduate school with scholarships and high hopes. I quit my job of 5 years. I threw whatever possessions wouldn't fit into my new apartment into my closet. I bought new furniture and new clothes. I packed up a van and headed three hours up the 401. I was going to be a professor.
Read my journals for the details of my break up with academia. No, you shouldn't have assigned reading any more than I should these days. The explanation must come out here, now.
I threw myself into academia. I was going to be the best Master's student anyone saw--I wanted to get up my momentum before writing my PhD thesis in a few years. I became a good student and a good teaching assistant. I was committed, serious, people knew I knew my shit and I meant business. I delivered oral presentations complete with rhetorical footnotes and hypertext (that is to say I like parenthetical insertions and subordinate clauses) to the amazement, bafflement, and general annoyance of my peers. I made friends, I had a community, a social life. I was on my way.
But I still didn't know what it was I wanted to do. I certainly wanted to have the kind life I saw my elderly professors at the University of Toronto leading. That was what inspired my course of action in the first place. But I didn't know what I'd do for a thesis.
Now that wouldn't have been much of a problem if it was 1961. I could have done any old thing having to do with French critical theory, or just stuck done a study of some manuscripts locked away somewhere. Then the school that fostered my thesis would hire me into a tenure-track position and I'd be free to do whatever I wanted until it was time to stay home and collect my pension while writing screeds to newspaper editors in between visits to my office, which would of course continue to be mine until I died and left my children to clean out my musty effects, where I'd sit and contemplate the decline of the contemporary university and write letters to the dean demanding higher standards and a return to the classics, whatever I may have decided them to be at the time.
But I was to begin study at the PhD level in September of 2003. You don't get interviewed for a teaching job--yes, they interview professors now as if they're labourers--unless you've published while still in graduate school. You won't get hired unless you've published a couple of times. And you won't be hired into a tenure-track position, not for your first couple of jobs. No, you'll be a contract teacher, overworked and underpaid, with a temporary office down the hall from colleagues who may or may not bother to learn your name, depending on how your particular critical allegiances line up against theirs. You will go where the work is, and it won't be anywhere you've ever wanted to be.
I knew all this by the end of September, but I also knew I could succeed. If anyone could do it, I could. Then my undergrad alma mater, U of T, likely having caught the scent of boredom in my application, a scent I'd yet to detect in my own work, sent me a letter of rejection. Then, in about an hour, I got over it, because I realized that even if I could succeed, even if it was me who was able to do it, I didn't want to do it.
As of June 20, with my coursework complete (no thesis these days--you don't want to burn out before defending your PhD thesis, which, being a gung ho MA student, you're bent on doing come hell or high water and damn the torpedoes) I became, for the first time, unemployed. I would likely have to move back to my mother's and put most of my belongings into storage, and that, in short is precisely what happened.
Only it wasn't "moving back", really. While I was away (for good), my mother's boyfriend moved in to the house. They've been together since before I was shaving, and I encouraged the move; "it'll be good for you to have the company with J. [my younger brother, a musician] away from home so often," I said, the good eldest son. So the house I returned to had an office where my brother's bedroom had been, my brother occupying what used to be my bedroom, and a sofabed in the basement. That's where I slept for 10 weeks.
I was miserable. I couldn't close a door when I wanted privacy. I had no room to go to when I wanted to be alone. I needed to ask to use my bed. (No one ever refused me the right to sleep, but still.) I went from living alone in a three room apartment to being a vagabond with a mailing address.
But I found work, and I've been living in my own apartment now for 5 weeks. I didn't want to come back here until I'd done something with my writing, but here I am, writing again in a journal instead of a notebook. Things have not gone according to plan. So I change the plan. I'm learning to make small plans. My victories are tiny these days. I achieve them like clipping fingernails. Here's my new plan. Write here when I need to. Reply when I feel like it. Work on what moves me, what makes me feel worthwhile. Some days that means practicing major scales, other days it means writing a short story, and I guess now it might mean writing here.
Tell me, dear reader, of your tiny victories.
Read my journals for the details of my break up with academia. No, you shouldn't have assigned reading any more than I should these days. The explanation must come out here, now.
I threw myself into academia. I was going to be the best Master's student anyone saw--I wanted to get up my momentum before writing my PhD thesis in a few years. I became a good student and a good teaching assistant. I was committed, serious, people knew I knew my shit and I meant business. I delivered oral presentations complete with rhetorical footnotes and hypertext (that is to say I like parenthetical insertions and subordinate clauses) to the amazement, bafflement, and general annoyance of my peers. I made friends, I had a community, a social life. I was on my way.
But I still didn't know what it was I wanted to do. I certainly wanted to have the kind life I saw my elderly professors at the University of Toronto leading. That was what inspired my course of action in the first place. But I didn't know what I'd do for a thesis.
Now that wouldn't have been much of a problem if it was 1961. I could have done any old thing having to do with French critical theory, or just stuck done a study of some manuscripts locked away somewhere. Then the school that fostered my thesis would hire me into a tenure-track position and I'd be free to do whatever I wanted until it was time to stay home and collect my pension while writing screeds to newspaper editors in between visits to my office, which would of course continue to be mine until I died and left my children to clean out my musty effects, where I'd sit and contemplate the decline of the contemporary university and write letters to the dean demanding higher standards and a return to the classics, whatever I may have decided them to be at the time.
But I was to begin study at the PhD level in September of 2003. You don't get interviewed for a teaching job--yes, they interview professors now as if they're labourers--unless you've published while still in graduate school. You won't get hired unless you've published a couple of times. And you won't be hired into a tenure-track position, not for your first couple of jobs. No, you'll be a contract teacher, overworked and underpaid, with a temporary office down the hall from colleagues who may or may not bother to learn your name, depending on how your particular critical allegiances line up against theirs. You will go where the work is, and it won't be anywhere you've ever wanted to be.
I knew all this by the end of September, but I also knew I could succeed. If anyone could do it, I could. Then my undergrad alma mater, U of T, likely having caught the scent of boredom in my application, a scent I'd yet to detect in my own work, sent me a letter of rejection. Then, in about an hour, I got over it, because I realized that even if I could succeed, even if it was me who was able to do it, I didn't want to do it.
As of June 20, with my coursework complete (no thesis these days--you don't want to burn out before defending your PhD thesis, which, being a gung ho MA student, you're bent on doing come hell or high water and damn the torpedoes) I became, for the first time, unemployed. I would likely have to move back to my mother's and put most of my belongings into storage, and that, in short is precisely what happened.
Only it wasn't "moving back", really. While I was away (for good), my mother's boyfriend moved in to the house. They've been together since before I was shaving, and I encouraged the move; "it'll be good for you to have the company with J. [my younger brother, a musician] away from home so often," I said, the good eldest son. So the house I returned to had an office where my brother's bedroom had been, my brother occupying what used to be my bedroom, and a sofabed in the basement. That's where I slept for 10 weeks.
I was miserable. I couldn't close a door when I wanted privacy. I had no room to go to when I wanted to be alone. I needed to ask to use my bed. (No one ever refused me the right to sleep, but still.) I went from living alone in a three room apartment to being a vagabond with a mailing address.
But I found work, and I've been living in my own apartment now for 5 weeks. I didn't want to come back here until I'd done something with my writing, but here I am, writing again in a journal instead of a notebook. Things have not gone according to plan. So I change the plan. I'm learning to make small plans. My victories are tiny these days. I achieve them like clipping fingernails. Here's my new plan. Write here when I need to. Reply when I feel like it. Work on what moves me, what makes me feel worthwhile. Some days that means practicing major scales, other days it means writing a short story, and I guess now it might mean writing here.
Tell me, dear reader, of your tiny victories.
VIEW 5 of 5 COMMENTS
*I'm happy you're back! Don't worry - your current condition is called life. It is always changing.
I am really excited that you're back. Where are you working?