The Repetitional Imperative

The emails I've received this week about where I stand vis-à-vis my program and the job market forced me to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth about blogging under your own name:

You're not nearly so important as you think you are. 

The assumption that everyone knows everything about you is pure hubris.  Some people know some little something, but those people can be counted on one hand.  Most people only know you as someone who writes what they read when stranded hikers and basketball brawls bore them to the bottom of the world.  They know naught of your hopes, dreams, or life-and-death struggles with cancer.

So it behooves you to repeat yourself every once in a while.  Or write an "About Me" page which includes all this information.  Thing is, preemptive pity parties strike most people as more than a little crass, so repetition it is:

I won't hit the market this year.  Before I started this blog, I lost a year I should've been working to feeling like shit.  You see, I spent about seven months barely able to stop puking long enough to sleep.  I slept-walked whilst dehydrated through a quarter and a half before I went to the doctor and discovered I had cancer.  But as I'd been taught to keep my pain to myself and not make excuses, I kept it to myself, didn't make excuses and continued to teach. 

A sane person—by which I mean, a Jew without a Puritanical work ethic—would've taken a leave of absence.  But I didn't.  So in addition to the seven months I lost to feeling the effects of the tumor, I spent another six feeling the effects of its cure.  I should've spent all of them working.  (Not that I didn't work, mind you, I just didn't work well.) 

So after losing that year and some-odd months, I'd reestablished my writing routine and was looking forward to finishing my dissertation ...

... when I got hit by a car.  The next seven months, I struggled to continue my researches.  I would've done better were it not for that nagging feeling of impending vomit.  And now it is today. 

So there you have it.  I would be on the market this year were it not for a truly extraordinary string of bad luck.  Now that I've fulfilled the repetitional imperative, I beg of you to come back.  Repetition may be necessary, but it sure ain't pretty.  If only there were some way I could guarantee you came back ...

NEXT: BAKHTINIAN DIALOGISM, GIRL TALK AND INAPPROPRIATE EXPLOSIONS!

Comments

[A White Bear]

Seriously, Scott, just LAST NIGHT I was out with Unfogged people talking about how one of my friends knew this guy in college who is now this super-famous guy who calls himself "Girl Talk" and his work raises all these really interesting radical questions about the limitations of IP lawsuits. Last. Night.

[Mike S]

Don't sweat it, Scott. You've had it rougher than most.

By way of comparison, I likely won't the hit the market until Barack's second term.

[N. Pepperell]

Hey... Sorry this has gotten to you... :( There's a scattershot dimension to reading on the web - people can miss things, particularly given how rarely you have commented on these issues. If it helps, these sorts of emails at least do reflect that you have managed to write through all of this with a wit and style that have kept people from suspecting that anything might be keeping you from working in top form...

[Adam Roberts]

"... I'd been taught to keep my pain to myself and not make excuses, I kept it to myself, didn't make excuses and continued to teach ... a Jew with a Puritanical work ethic..."

You are certainly one of the most English American Jews I've ever known. Bravo. If you could just come clean about your liking for (a) tea and (b) cricket, then, man, you could simply move to a small village in Hertfordshire and call yourself Nigel.

[Rich Puchalsky]

This is truly the most horrible time of the year, isn't it? All those people bothering you about whether you're on track for where they think you're supposed to be for next year -- the chance to look back on how much you've done this year, as compared to some ideal -- the holiday "arrangements". Anything that you have to arrange is not a holiday.

I think that someone should theorize exactly why the MLA chose to set its yearly conference at this time. Sure, ostensibly it's supposed to be because everyone is free (consider the implications of that word) between Christmas and New Year's, I'd guess. But in a more Foucouldian sense (not that I'd know what that is) I suspect that it's a disciplinary move, a panopticon plopped down among the festivities to say that your colleagues know where you are, and that you'd better be working on your presentation / job interview prep / networking outfit.

Wait a minute -- am I supposed to be cheering you up or something?

[uncomplicatedly]

Scott, all 3 of those things are guaranteed to bring me back for more. I doubt it's ever come up, but my undergrad honors thesis had a whole lot to do with Bakhtin. And I just heard Girl Talk for the first time recently, and I've always said there ought to be more inappropriate explosions in the academic blogosphere. Awesome.

[Nigel Kaufman]

I realize now the faux-exasperation sounds a little, well, exasperated. All the emails I've received concerning my job status have been overwhelmingly positive—some of them outright encouraging—but the need to tell and re-tell my sad tale weighed on my close-vested soul. This way, I only had to do it once.

AWB: There must be something in the air. Before I left for Houston, Joe">http://kugelmass.wordpress.com/">Joe Kugelmass and I discussed Girl Talk in much the same way. Of course, neither of are within three degrees of separation from him, but still, it really is amazing—if frequently unsettling—to hear seventeen songs smashed into a single, looping beat: Pixies, Grandmaster Flash, Neil Diamond and is that Paula Abdul?

Unsettling, I say.

Mike, Adam, N.P., thank you for the kind words. Rich? Grrr... (kidding, kidding)

Uncomplicatedly: Explosions? Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet.

[The Constructivist]

Try show trials and cage matches, too!