Me? I'm the Last Person You Ought to Respect!

In the comments to the previous post, Mike S. asked

how do you find the time to (a) read and (modestly) review sizable literary anthologies, (b) remain (somewhat) hard at work on that curious dissertation of yours, (c) sift through God knows how many highfalutin weblogs, (d) attend classes, and (e) lavish your wife with attention?

My initial response employed the truism that it always seems like the person to your immediate left has four of five more hours in the their day than you do in yours.  (That's right, Holbo, I'm looking at you.)  The more I thought about it the more I understood that I do have quite the work ethic, but here's the thing: I've cultivated it in such a way that it doesn't feel like a work ethic so much as a life. 

I spend probably 14 hours a day--and now that summer's here, I spend almost 14 hours every day--either sitting at my desk writing or reading online or with my desk chair swivelled around and my feet propped up on the bed reading books, journals, magazines, &c.  When I confess to Mike that I'm a very boring person, well, I'm not kidding.  I'm a veritable shut-in, the kind of person who wakes up one morning and realizes that the sexy stubble he'd created with his beard trimmer what seemed like just yesterday has become quite the manly beard, complete with chops.  (I am, however, a shut-in of the bathing variety.  I bathe every single day and brush my teeth at least three times per diem.  And according to a self-selecting group of former students, even my minimalist approach to grooming's enough to keep my "hotness quotient" hovering around 71.49 percent.  But I digress.)  So one answer to Mike's question is that my possibly pathological fear of leaving the apartment improves the quality of my scholarship. 

I'll return to my actual work habits momentarily, but first I want to address some of the other issues Mike raises:

Your academic background is, I can't help but notice, just a wee bit prolific, vastly more so than my own. Honors undergraduate program? Rigorous Latin studies? A.B.D. at one of the nation's most respected English departments? You've done pretty well for yourself. Not to mention the fact you've been married for how many years is it, 5, 6?

All I can say to this is that it's very easy to make the accomplishments of others look planned.  But a little "behind-the-scenes" look at my academic career will demonstrate that much of what seems planned or earned is actually the result of circumstances I never could have anticipated.  I'll take this compliment-by-compliment:

Mike mentions that I'm an Honors Scholar, i.e. that all of my introductory classes at LSU were taught by Honors professors in the Honors College.  What Mike doesn't realize is that my being in the Honors College was a complete fluke.  I've mentioned before that one thing people would never guess about me is that I graduated high school with a 1.67 GPA and that for the first two years of my undergraduate career I was on academic probation.  How did I get into college at all?  LSU was my "local" school, so they had to let me in.  How did I manage to weasel my way in the Honors College with a GPA well under two?  Simple: I had read and re-read and re-re-read Gravity's Rainbow, so when the representative of the Honors College "interviewed" me--I'm sure they only brought me in to mock the hubris it took to apply to the Honors College with a record like mine--the normal question-and-dismissal of patently unqualified candidates was replaced with a long and involved discussion of the works of Thomas Pychon.  In short, my fan-boy love of Pynchon allowed me to sneak, entirely unqualified, into the Honors College despite the fact that I spent my freshman and sophmore year on academic probation. 

The next thing Mike mentions is that I'm an accomplished Latin scholar.  He's right: I read The Aeneid and The Confessions and every single word Cicero ever wrote in Latin.  But--and this isn't a trivial "but"--I only studied Latin because if I studied any other language I'd have to take a language lab.  Being that I'm deaf, the thought of a language lab frightened me beyond my ability to express fear. Then or now.  (My phonetics class, on the other hand, went swimmingly: all those years of speech therapy provided me with an insider's perspective on how the tongue, throat and lips worked, so I easily outpaced all those students who spoke as if speech were "natural.")  In other words, that's not "impressive" so much as "the only thing I could've done to meet the language requirements that would allow me to graduate." 

Then Mike mentions that I'm in one of the most prestigious English departments in the country.  He's right: UCI's impressive.  But what Mike fails to realize is that I shouldn't really be here.  He doesn't realize that the only reasons I'm at Irvine is that 1) someone who had already been accepted dropped out, and so they started looking at the "alternates" like me, and 2) the contributing factor to my being an alternate in the first place was that my undergraduate advisor is a very close friend of the person in charge of graduate admissions that year.  In other words, I'm a favor.  (Try sleeping with that sometime.)

As to being married already for five years, well, that's because I lucked out.  I spent my undergraduate years working at a used bookstore--and believe it or not, my love of Pynchon's the reason that sweet position opened up for me--and the Little Womedievalist did too.  We fell in love after working together for almost two years, and strange as this may sound, it wasn't until I was dosed at a lesbian bar that I worked up the nerve to tell her how I felt. 

Why am I airing all this confessional nonsense?  Because I like Mike and I want him to know that the things he thinks I've earned depend on coincidences I couldn't have counted on.  What seems impressive is actually the product of me coping with situations that I couldn't have anticipated and didn't fully think through. 

In short: I'm the product of my life, and so far most of the breaks have gone my way.  I know that this won't always be the case, and I don't want Mike to think that I've earned whatever status I currently have.  It's all arbitrary.  The difference between me and the fellow to my left is that the cards have fallen in my favor. 

But that doesn't mean that I haven't taken advantage of the opportunities that've presented themselves to me.  I certainly have.  What I want to do tonight is dispell the notion that I've earned the position I currently have.  I recognize that were it not for a series of circumstances I neither predicted nor controlled, I wouldn't be where I am now.  (The fact that I've spent the past week reading Horatio Alger novels shouldn't be brought to bear on this conversation at all.  But more on that later.)

"In other words," he says for the fifth time since he started this entry, Mike S. shouldn't labor under the impression that I'm worthy of where I am.  He should know that I'm the product of a process I couldn't have predicted (but benefit from).  That said, I have overcompensated for what I feel is the undeserved nature of my success by adhering to a work ethic that even I know (but will never admit) is unhealthy.   That, however, will be the subject of tomorrow's post.

Comments

[Mike S]

Scott, your modesty is exceeded only by your openness. What's funny is that your post answered questions that I planned to eventually ask. Like you, I finished high school with an unimpressive (how's that for a euphemism?) GPA. And we even share the unbecoming distinction of spending years one and two of college on academic probation.

It's refreshing and encouraging to have an accomplished academic admit his shortcomings.

"What I want to do tonight is dispell the notion that I've earned the position I currently have"

C'mon, Scott. It's okay to take just a teensy weensy bit of credit. Serendipity may have had a hand in your success, but there's no denying the fact that you've done quite a bit to earn the "position" you currently have.

What's funny is that just the other day, I was remarking to a friend that humility is often irritatingly lacking in most professors. Professors, at the schools I've attended, are often so self-assured and smug and condescending and socially inept that their lectures(and office meetings) tend to stifle rather than promote enthusiasm among the students. I am hoping (praying, in fact) that some of the professors at my next institution have the same humility and decent manner that Scott has shown here tonight.

[John Emerson]

I believe that Kotsko has a regular Christian self-abasement series. Probably they'd accept this as a guest post. (If you're Jewish -- yes, I do know a Kaufman who isn't -- it would be an ecumenical guest post).

No one ever asks me, the newly anointed crazy uncle of the liberal blogosphere, how I did it, but I'll tell them anyway. I drink a lot.