Rants other people wrote...

... or should write, so I don't have to.

First, Julie and her bitchy, crass commenters (and I mean that as a compliment!) on the hell of infertility bulletin boards. You know, 7 months after I left, I still have a bit of a reflex, when I open a new browser window, to start typing "memb..." and wait for the URL for the Resolve "Getting Started" board (to which I refuse to link) to complete. Oh man.

My biggest problem with the boards, I think, was women for whom infertility was the worst thing that had ever happened to them. You know, there's some bad stuff in the world. I've lived through some of it. (E.g., an episode I haven't gotten to yet in the family stories: in '97, my mother had a breakdown while living on her own in a very bad neighborhood. Disappeared after acting oddly for days. We contacted crisis teams, the police, emergency rooms. No luck. Finally one hospital took me to see the only crazy white woman they'd admitted in the last 24 hours—and I didn't recognize her, all curled up in a stretcher in a hallway, due to her emaciation and aging and to the long estrangement that had preceded that breakdown. Oh—did I mention that I was in the middle of sending out academic job applications at the time?) I can anticipate that some more very bad things will happen to me, or to people I love, in the future. It's not like I wasn't sad after the cycles failed, or like I won't be very, very sad if we can't manage this baby thing. But life can get so much worse.

Second, grading. Oh my god grading. Three stacks are waiting. Would I rather be sick in bed, like Abu Aardvark? Should I try to taxonomize my students' errors in areas I hadn't suspected could be problematic, like the Little Professor? (On the most recent batch of exams, non-native speakers of English did notably better on certain abstruse syntactical points... oh goodness, is that depressing.)

Meanwhile, is it fair that the Chronicle this week has not one, but two articles in the "adjuncting isn't so bad" category, summarizable as "I got a permanent lectureship, but it's not so different," and "I love my Maine freeway flyer gig," respectively, but Invisible Adjunct is off at the beach? C'mon!