What's Going On

photo by: The Boy

Here is a lazy description of what's been going on:

1) It's been snowing. A lot.

2) There are a couple of Italian, male visiting scholars in our Department. One of them is fulfilling expectations: he is outgoing, cheeky and flirtatious. The other one has tattoos and a moustache.

3) I have been having some animated and fairly interesting conversations with women this week. We've covered topics like whether and on what basis: the media frames women in their thirties who have not married or had any children as products of the ills of Western society (we decided, essentially, that it's a luxury not to have to make those choices and that women should not have to bear that symbolic weight alone if at all); it is necessary to pretend that our theses have wider (non-academic) purposes and audiences in order to feel motivated and special; there is relationship between achievement and birth order; Sex and the City had any merit whatsover in terms of the questions it raised or whether its starting position (that women like to buy expensive shoes and bags) automatically negated its value; we can accept that highly ambitious, "save the world" men will probably also have overbearing egos and insecurities etc. (etc. = cheat)

4) I nearly suffered a palsy when my supervisor smacked an email on my desk, mid-paragraph, and said, "I am not going to comment" as she walked off. I thought the worst: that the Faculty had agreed that I was in danger of never submitting my thesis and had decided to let me go or that a colourful, carelessly-worded email of mine to a family member had accidentally been sent to my supervisor. It was, in fact, an email from a College pal, who is also the head of men's rowing, to my supervisor saying that she had to tell me she was going to "fail" me unless I coxed for them.

5) I am not coxing this term. I may never cox again.

6) A Canadian student with a deep voice who I met through a mutual friend came into my Department today and spotted me at my desk. She submitted in December and told me that she has already sorted an ESRC one year postdoc in London and was today being interviewed at my Department for a three year postdoc after that. Wowsers. Four years sorted. Good night. I wound up my shame-screen up even though she was just being frank and even sympathetic.

7) One of the College porters is enraged about a media conspiracy to sell the snowfall and the financial crisis as more serious than they really are.

8) I am pretty content with how my work is going. Still a long way to go and I can see my face drop and my eyes age by the day. I am also waking up frowning and buzzing. But, apart from all that (ahem), it's peachy times. I do feel lucky to be writing my thesis, and I have decided that I picked a good topic to develop my academic writing style, to make it more discursive and engaging.

Pony and Wolf

garthimage

I am back in the saddle this week, the write-up saddle, that is. It's been quite slow to get the old pony (a mountain pony, as my friend says) cantering again after a week or so grazing apparently (dealing with intense family stuff).

I am in the middle of a paragraph and am clearly using this blog as escapism. But I am writing about 'ritual ordeal' which draws on the 'humiliation' literature that seems scarily relevant to my life as a DPhil student. The literature mainly comes from sociologists and psychologists interested in various phenomena, from socialization to genocide.

Scholars tend to agree that humiliation - an interaction between two or more people or countries which involves the use of scorn, ridicule, contempt and degrading treatment - is an effective mechanism to ensure the internalization or outward display of various behaviours, norms and values. Typical examples of institutions who use such mechanisms are professions (the military being the most obvious), prisons, schools and the family.

The family is an interesting one. One writer, Dr Donald C. Klein, makes the connection between the conditionality of parental acceptance and approval - a prosocial tool to shape the child into an adult - and the actute and continued sensitivity of humans (and therefore societies) to humiliation and then, in many cases, to any form of criticism.

He cites Mark Twain's The United States of Lyncherdom:

"Each man is afraid of his neighbor's disapproval- a thing which, to the general run of the human race, is more dreaded than wolves and death."

Steve Deger

Disapproval is something we fear, but at the same time with which we are familiar. Easy love and acceptance are then often perceived as ambiguous, reckless, uncomfortable, suspicious and/or stupid. At the end of his piece, Klein wonders whether there is another way of socializing children into adults.

In the middle of reading this literature, my supervisor informed me that she was going to be "very hard on me" until I submit my thesis. I am in a strange phase of life where negative stimulus still works very, very well to a certain point (and I am in many ways grateful for the push), but I tend to prefer and am trying to rely more and more on positive encouragement, and less cloudy, fearful motivations (from myself and others).

Nonetheless, it's tough to break old habits and, I've got to say, I am often and still not very far from the humiliation model. Let me know if you have any healthier alternatives for me...I will pass them on to Dr Klein as well!

Walk of Shame!

I decided to video myself giving a birthday messsage for a loved-one back in Oz yesterday and, completely against the spirit of the whole exercise, it led to two shame laps for me: the recording itself and then the play back.

In the recording my lips are slightly tighter than usual, my voice is rather shrill and my gestures noticeably more girly; twisting hair around finger, looking up as if to ask the camera to tell me what to say. While watching it, I started to do a mad robot dance on the spot to reflect my malfunction in front of the camera. In both instances I alleviated my discomfort by ducking my head into the chest of the Boy, as if by hiding it would mean that it didn't really happen.

Am I this lame?

I cheered myself up by spotting a blog entry by Merlin Mann:

I thought I was the only person in the universe who made an unconscious little noise when remembering something stupid I did or said.

It is dedicated to the sounds one makes when one feels embarrassed or relives embarrassing moments. So, my sounds would be those of a dalek or some baby bush animal. When I am by myself, I relive the pedestrian moment in my head and then say dryly and slowly until the last two words, with exaggerated mouth shapes: 'I can't believe you DID THAT!' If it's particularly atrocious, I may add a Napoleon Dynamite 'You idiot' on the end.

I have a beach of shameful moments that are replayed from time to time (brought on by stress and fatigue). They range from grossly inappropriate things I have said (like when I was 8, I asked someone whose parents had died in a car crash whether there was blood and guts on the bumper bar. I had heard that line in a movie, Bigfoot and the you-ruined-my-life Hendersons, and thought it would cheer them up), done (a Jerry Maguire Mission Statement-style research funding proposal that I realised only after, having discovered more about the funding body, would have caused much amusement and was duly rejected) and worn (my androgenous phase of my late teens/early twenties makes me quite uncomfortable). I have plenty of noises and mannerisms that accompany these images.

What about you? What's in your shame file? What do you tend to do when you're being sent on that lonely, well-lit march off The Weakest Link?