silly love songs

Music: Death Cab for Cutie: Transatlanticism An indulgent travelogue is forthcoming, but for the moment: I've been reading the blogs of fellow academics reflecting on the past year, and they are often full of melancholy, and sometimes a hint of joy, but mostly they seem to intone we are a miserable lot, and we seem to justify joy by anchoring to the outside. Having no "outside" at the moment, I'm wondering if I am unhappy.

I don't know. Happiness seems to be the antithesis of what I do (that is, get critical and gripe and critique and warn), so I'm still working through what happiness means. I know it does not mean pills, which has caught on among my colleagues more than I ever realized . . . .

But I do know this: the academy is my home for right now, and I think that's going to work—at least for the moment. I've never felt so accepted (nor have I ever felt so attacked, but that comes with the territory I guess). I have not been called "weird" to my face in a decade. I have met more good people and lifelong friends since I started studying to be an academic. My closest friends I met in grad school. I make a difference in the lives of some people (even if it is miniscule). I'm not the dullest tool, but not the brightest (I would say "sharpest," but that would defeat my point), and there seems to be a place for all the tools here.

I suppose the reckoning is that being a scholar means that you have to embrace "boundary trouble." That is, there is no way to forge a divide between the public and private, or what goes on in the classroom, the bar, and the condo. I think I like this. Sometimes I'm not sure, but in general, yeah, I think having done this for almost ten years, the academic label is fine to weather in public. I'm surrounded by weirdos, the socially inept, the geeks in your highschool homeroom, and reformed druggies. I'm at home.