Category Archives: Class

Find Me at the Anthropology Moat

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Today I attended a meeting with all the honors thesis students in my department. At least, that was what GCal called it. It might as well have been retitled, “Impostor Syndrome: The Meeting.” Because seriously? My dominant thoughts upon leaving that meeting:

  1. Do I want to do this research? I don’t want to do this research. I signed up because of parental pressure!
  2. I can’t write anything this long. I can’t write. I have forgotten how to type and my fingers are numb, because I am an idiot. I bet they teach you how to type in SURE.*
  3. The IRB is going to read my sad application for approval, track me down while I’m trying to flintknap in the Anthropology moat**, and break my kneecaps with a bat. I deserve this.

These meetings! Not reassuring! I left the one today resolved to quit writing my thesis and, I don’t know, go commit ritual seppuku. (Or just take eight credit hours this semester and call it good. But that would be sad.)

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On Existential Itching

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Today I am going to talk about something that isn’t street festivals. (And lo, the small-but-dedicated blog audience cheered.) Instead of fried foods sold from tents, I want to talk about motivation–specifically, the complete lack of it that I have had since moving off campus.

I used to be the queen of Getting Shit Done (it’s like GTD with yelling). I was that weirdo that scheduled her homework six weeks in advance and then sat down and did it. I never pulled an all-nighter, and I was always in bed by midnight. My to-do list system detailed in that blog post worked very well for me.

Then senior year happened, and I just… stopped wanting to do what was on the list. I stopped wanting to check my email because doing so gave me a list of terrifying new things that I’d have to incorporate into my schedule. When my laptop charger died and my computer wasn’t terribly useable, I used this as an excuse to simply not look at online readings for a few weekends.

I’ve become a walking example of the creeping sense of dread that motivates people to be so on their Inbox Zero game. (For those who haven’t seen the original talk–which I highly recommend–Merlin Mann argues that allowing email to accumulate leads to this horrible dread where folks eventually shut down and quit processing anything, which is… not helpful.)

I’m pretty sure this is all due to the twin facts that I am currently living in a lovely, quiet, off-campus apartment and that I am underloading on classes.

Because here’s the thing: dorms suck in many different ways. (For example, shower vomit.) But as much as dorm life sucks, there is a great sense of camaraderie underlying it. Everyone is there for the same purpose, and being around peers who are constantly studying makes it very easy to do the same. That’s why you’re in the dorms, by their very nature, unless you’re someone’s off-campus boyfriend who’s living there for free and everyone hates you.

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The Cakening

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I went as king cake.

So on Friday, I had a cake party (aka “the cakening”). The story as to why this happened is long and boring (short version: I like actualizing stupid jokes!), but the results were adorable, as my friends were game enough to actually come to my apartment dressed as cakes. My friends are delightful.

Costumes included a pancake (a girl with a pan), a poundcake (with a scale), a golf-based Portal reference, an Occupy Cake protestor sporting a “down with cake/up with crepes” sandwich board, a pair of birthday cakes (birthday banners, balloons, and a glitter hat the remnants of which I cannot for the life of me vacuum out of the apartment carpet), two carrot cakes, two cupcakes, and (the most surprising duo of all) two beefcakes. My favorite costume was a girl who came dressed as a bun(d)t cake in a baseball uniform and a bat, mostly because another attendee noticed that she could also play the costume as “cake batter.”

Basically I really like puns. And my friends. Continue reading →

Car Cake

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Yesterday morning, I sat in my car and ate cheesecake.

I mean, I wasn’t alone. So there’s that. And no one at Emory shops at my grocery store, so it’s unlikely that anyone saw me. But outside of Your Dekalb Farmers Market, my friend and I ate (delicious) red velvet cheesecake and had a complete freakout. Because it’s senior year of undergrad, and that’s both terrifying and underwhelming. And that is a weird combination of feelings. So we drowned them in cake.

It’s terrifying because I only have nine-ish months (simultaneously a very long and very short period of time) to figure out what I’m going to be doing after undergrad. And I have had it beaten in to me by scare pieces about millennials that there are no jobs. And it would be one thing if–like some of my friends–I knew what I was doing when I finished school. But I don’t.

And at the same time, it feels totally insane to think about the end of school now, as it is a reasonable amount of time away and things could change dramatically in 9 months. I could physically create another small human out of my cells in that period of time! (I don’t plan to.) I could accomplish a lot in that span of time, but it still does not feel very long because it is all one unit–the school year–in my head.

I have a few friends who are engaged or on their way to being engaged (or are otherwise in fairly stable relationships that will probably last post-graduation). I am not, which is fine. The same is true of the friend that I was eating the cheesecake with. But there is something that makes both of us pretty jealous of those of our friends who have some sort of life plan in place at this point.

Anything past graduation is a gigantic black hole, and that is incredibly frustrating. I’m the girl who plans her homework six weeks in advance! My main destresser is writing things down, in bulleted lists, and then doing what is on the lists. Not being able to do that for most of the next nine months is going to drive me insane. I don’t want a wedding, but stability of some kind would be nice.

The underwhelming part of this whole thing is the feeling that I am limping towards my finish at Emory without anything concrete to be moving towards. I am excited to be back, and to be academically engaged, and to learn and write a thesis. But (and perhaps this is true for everyone entering senior year) I feel less and less tied to the college. I’m simply continuing to do the things from the summer with the addition of classes, rather than starting a concrete new phase for the year.

One way or the other, I need the weird holding pattern of this summer to hurry up and finish. I start classes and two of my jobs this week. If I stay busy enough, there will be no more car cake. I hope.

And with that, I am off to my first class of the year.

Being Idle

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I finally got around to reading “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” a NYT article that’s been making the rounds. I particularly enjoyed this quote:

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

This is something I used to write about with greater-than-normal frequency at HackCollege. Though the author of the NYT piece is talking about busyness as a specifically New York thing, I think it certainly manifests in universities like my own. Busyness–pulling all-nighters, not having time to do anything but eat, sleep a little, and study study study–is next to godliness for a certain kind of American college kid. And why wouldn’t it be? We’re never asked to consider if our work is valuable before we’re in college, and so we don’t once we’re there, either.

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On Cultural Stress

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So for class (“Seminar on Living and Learning in Dakar,” which is equal parts wonderful group therapy and headdeskingly awful) I had to write about what cultural intensity factors (which used to be “stress” factors, but we don’t like that word) have been the biggest for me. The cultural intensity factors we were able to reference–things like language, cultural expectations, visibility/invisibility–are basically a pared-down list of Why Field Work is Hard. If you’re interested, consult the second part of the first chapter of every ethnography I’ve read in my undergraduate career. But basically, they’re all the things you think would make living abroad difficult.

So, while thinking about that, I realized that my biggest stress factor right now (and the one that directly leads to like 90% of the stories on this blog) is that I possess a complete inability to figure out why people want me to do things now.

Do you know how difficult it is to respond to other people without the ability to predict why they’re talking to you and what their requests are leading up to? Turns out, it’s really difficult. I can no longer filter what parts of requests are really important and what aren’t. Operating in a second language, in an environment I’m unfamiliar with, has given me a mild filtering disorder. It’s disconcerting.

It’s less bad now, but I remember a particular moment about a month after I moved in to my host family, which I now think of as the Worst Dinner Ever. I had spent all day being told to move chairs and plates and bowls of rice in ways that were never fully explained because—to my host parents—they were obvious.

(Of course the rice goes in the living room and not in the dining room—we don’t eat in the dining room, and we need to eat the rice. For dinner. Which we are having now, because it’s 9 pm and that’s when dinner happens.)

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Controlling the Narrative of My Personal Failure

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The squid thinks my tears taste delicious.

The squid of my own personal failure.

So I cried again in Wolof. For those of you playing along at home, we’re up to four sessions of this class in which I have teared up. Given that this is a class that has only met ten times in the last two months, this is Kind of an Issue.

Don’t get me wrong: I do not want to be crying in class. This is not an attention thing. Something about my teacher’s style simply makes my eyes leak tears like a squid squirts ink. (In all fairness to my body, this one saves me a fortune on bleach.)

It’s not that classes haven’t made me cry before. I tear up easily and mostly define my self worth in terms of academic achievement.* But in every occasion that I can think of doing this sort of massively embarrassing thing, it happened after I left the room. Wolof sucks so hard that I literally cannot keep it together while sitting two feet away from my teacher. Continue reading →

I Drank Cheese Tea

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So for school I have this group project. It’s a 20-page paper that is supposed to be written by 7 people in what is for all of us a second language. This is supposed to teach us something about teamwork, or why we should go to business school, or why other countries hate the American educational system or something.

Despite the fact that my group is full of smart, capable people, this project is going about as well as 99% of group projects go, which is to say terribly.

It’s no one’s fault, really. Seven people papers of this length are doomed to fail, because they’re a stupid idea. So when my group decided without me to move away from printing our annotated bibliography* off a Google Doc to a system where we emailed our individual components to a single group member, I happened to vaguely lose it on the poor person who was sent to tell me.**

I feel bad about this, because he is an Exceptionally Nice Person in what appears to be an alarmingly genuine way. You know how I know that he is nice? Because after I lost it on him about five extra minutes of work on my end, he invited me to his Thursday night ataya party.

Seriously, he’s a really nice dude.

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Making Stuff, Doing Things, Stubbing Toes

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My first semester of junior year is over. I’m not dead. I have all of my limbs, still, though my arms are uncomfortably sore and I think my kidneys are kind of twinging every time I move (at least one of those is from moving). All my earthly possessions—with the exception of some canned asparagus that I left my roommates, because I am a giver—are sitting in my parents’ house, waiting until I get tired of stubbing my toes on boxes for me to unpack them.

This was a weird semester. For one, I was kind of worried that I was going to get C’s in several of my classes, though so far that hasn’t happened. The experience has taught me that I’m no longer a good multiple choice test taker and that I have no ability to predict my own levels of success, which I could have told you four months ago without having to be reduced to manic hair-pulling during the semester, I’m pretty sure. Good to have my suspicions confirmed, I guess. Cortisol is healthy, right?

My major goal for the break is to finish the short story that I started early this semester and quit working on in order to spend more time on drinking heavily and whining about class. It involves zombies and booze. The other major plan is to push an ebook I wrote last semester through the painful process of being edited into something that won’t shame my ancestors into retroactive seppuku, and see about pushing it through Kindle land.

In the times when I’m not doing that, I’ll be busy moving back into the room that I’ll be leaving in two months, because my life basically consists of putting things into boxes and taking them back out in a somewhat irritating cycle. It’s either a terrible metaphor for my life or a sign that maybe I no longer need to bring a blow dryer with me everywhere now that my hair is two inches long.

My broader goal over the next couple of months is to start making some things. I don’t even care what, but my hands are itchy and my keyboard is getting all greasy because all I ever do is type. So, if everyone I know gets custom butter and some limoncello for Christmas? You’ll know that this is why.

Three Things I Hope To Never Cover in Lecture Again

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I am in an entirely in-major courseload this semester. This has led me to the startling realization that there are basically three things that will be mentioned in every single class I ever set foot in during the course of my career here. If I could never have them discussed again, that would be awesome.

  1. Frat hazing: I get it. American culture is hard to pull rituals–particularly age-cohort coming-of-age rituals–from, and you want to pull from your students’ culture in order to make things Relevant. But I swear to Christ, if we talk about fraternity initiation one more time, I’m going to throw a DVD of Animal House at your Google Image picture of frat boys getting their homoerotic on. I have had this used in literally every single class that I am enrolled in this semester with the exception of my archaeology course–and that’s because wooden paddles don’t hold up in grave goods. Please find a new example. (I suggest the Masons. Everybody loves the Masons!)
  2. The “gender is not sex” lecture: I did in fact just have this in my archaeology class, so we’re 3 for 4 (and I’m pretty sure we’re batting 100% in my previous classes). It’s not that this isn’t a good thing to drive home. It is! It’s awesome! But if you’re not going to go into any more depth than this, this is a 101 topic that doesn’t need to be brought up again. It should be taken as a given that your students already know this, particularly if you’re not going to go in depth with this topic beyond that statement. Stick it in one of the required major classes, address it there, and go into it in more depth any other time it is mentioned. It does not need to be a full lecture every single time.
  3. Hijras: Hijras are interesting! They were particularly interesting when I covered them in 101. They have gotten less interesting as they have become the example for third genders in every class I’ve had since. Instead, talk about Native American third genders or invite students to talk about the modern American trans movement. If you’re going to try to relate coming-of-age rituals to the American context by using frat boys, then you have to relate gender issues to that context, too. Stick up some Youtube clips from Buck Angel! It’ll be a novel change of pace.