Life Update June 2016

It’s been a while, dear readers. I haven’t posted anything in nearly a month now, probably more, but it hasn’t been because I haven’t had anything worth writing about, or because I ran out of things to say. More than anything I’ve slipped in my writing discipline, the farther and farther I get from the outset of this project the harder it’s been to keep on top of self-imposed deadlines. I need J. J. Jameson as my editor to shout at me that I’m not giving him near enough stories about that dastardly Spiderman. Actually, I think it might be more accurate to say that life has taken it upon itself to beat any writing discipline I used to have straight out of me. I haven’t been a proper student for a few months now, and while the gears of critical analysis still turn from some unstoppable momentum set in motion long ago, the person who had papers and grades and deadlines is being slowly eroded away to be replaced with a man that gets up every morning at 6AM sharp, works 10 hour days, and then is in bed by 10:30PM like clockwork. If you count that up, subtract the hour in the morning before coffee kicks in, and account for nightly dinner and chores, that means I get effectively about 3-4 hours a day to be a real human person with interests and goals and ambitions outside next week’s paycheck. Too much of that time I find filled by TV (Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a surprisingly good show nearly 2 decades later, you guys), but what can I say? I like my stories. I need to start reading more… but even then, if I read, I’m still not writing…

So anyway, while I sit here in my sweltering upstairs office on this 95 degree June day (happy palindrome week, everyone!) while Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger ekes out of my record player, I endeavor here just to write, with no more an express purpose than to update you guys on what’s going on around the offices of the Wheat State Pravda. There will probably be some politics and the usual ranting thrown in every here and there, but I don’t have my usual direction going in. Let’s just see what happens stream of consciousness Cormac McCarthy style no punctuation or nothing or OK probably not that last part.

Let’s see. Just what is new? Proletarian living has proven both dynamic and stagnant at the same time: I’ve shifted around to some different sites, and worked for a few different foremen; one of which I got along so poorly with that it drove me to look for new work. That search led to an interesting episode which I suppose I’ll come back to here shortly. Thankfully I shifted back to my old crew, and due to some personnel turnover, moved up a bit in the hierarchy. We have a bunch of interns on site now from various construction sciences programs from around the region, and having more guys to do the same amount of grunt work really helps. I also I guess proved myself competent enough to be trusted to do basic carpentry, which has led to me doing a bit more work that I actually genuinely enjoy—always a good thing.

We’ve also moved from doing the repetitive work of laying out a single massive concrete slab to building more complex structures, which has been a welcome change of pace. I’ve even helped pour some of the massive 20’ concrete walls that are going up: that was a trip of a day, standing around on a shaky catwalk for 5 hours pouring and vibrating something like 80 yards of ‘crete, surrounded by massive steel and wood forms that are held in place by massive bolts and steel beams. I’m supposed to be getting a harness soon that would allow me to help with the work where you go climb around on said structures, basically urban bouldering for money, but the date of harness training keeps getting pushed back. Either way, the rains of May have finally dried up, and we’re in full swing, so for the foreseeable future I’ll be averaging 45 hour weeks.

The personnel changeup hasn’t been all good. You may remember Little Chris and Mick from my earlier post, probably my two closest friends on site—Chris disappeared at some point when I was at the other jobsite, and Mick finally got in for his hip surgery, and now he’ll be out recuperating probably until I’ll have already left.  In their place there’s been an influx of people from another site that just finished work, as well as some new hires… very few of which I can stand to be around for very long. Some of them are just plain shitheels to work with (while Meth-Mouth Joe is gone, I’m now stuck with a new perpetual slacker named Zabie), while other guys are fine… until the conversation ever turns to women, race, or politics. Then I realize that I have absolutely nothing in common with these people. As Mick put it about one of our coworkers: “Oh yeah, he’s a nice enough guy! But if he has one flaw, it’s the racism. And the misogyny… Also, the bigotry…” Yeah, those turn out to be pretty big, noticeable flaws, and it makes me want to get the fuck away from them very quickly. I’ve taken to working almost solely with Anthony and my now sort-of boss Miguel, just because with them I don’t have to listen to white supremacist bullshit. This has had an interesting side effect, because now, even though I don’t speak a word of Spanish and my nationality, even if I did have Latino heritage would still be American, I have now been several times been mistaken as Mexican (even by Miguel, who I’ve had to correct on multiple occasions). That hadn’t happened in a while, though I do have my tan back so I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised.

As you can maybe tell, I’m still less than thrilled about where I’m working right now. This had led me to an impromptu job search a few weeks back, and actually got as far as an interview with, of all things, the Kansas Democratic Party. I had been approached about a summer fellowship position to help out with the campaign. I had been excited by the prospect of helping put a thumb in Brownback’s eye come November in local elections, but in terms of the national race I’m still pretty internally conflicted about the prospects of Hilary’s candidacy, so I was wary going in. Our correspondence to that point hadn’t indicated just what they would want me to do, so I decided to head to Topeka on a day where we had been rained out to hear about the offer. I met with the party’s field operations director, who I was surprised to find was about my age. She detailed the position for me, which was basically an shitty-paying internship to shadow how the inner workings of a campaign were ran to eventually groom me into either a candidate or future political operative. I gave a hard pass. I’ve had limited experience at small scale public service as part of the UW History GLC, and it taught me a very important lesson about myself—I want absolutely no part in career politics. In addition, the whole pay thing was a massive downgrade, so it wouldn’t have been feasible anyway. I gave her a very polite hard pass, but we actually had a very pleasant conversation about the state of politics in KS and the nation, and actually she got me in touch with someone who is the party’s liaison to Unions in the state… I was actually supposed to meet with him weeks ago, but time keeps on slipping… it probably won’t amount to much either, but it is nice to find some like-minded folks in this sea of nationalistic bullshit I’ve found myself in.

Since my last post, there’s been a few developments on the whole “I’m still trying to write a dissertation” front, but I’m afraid there isn’t a whole lot in the way of good news. I got passed over, pretty expectedly, for a travel grant from ASEEES that I had applied for that would have taken me to Russia this winter—competition was going to be incredibly steep, so I hadn’t banked much on this one. Still, it was a bit of a downer to get the rejection. This combined with learning that the history department is stretched extremely thin on its summer digital history fellowships, meaning that I would get no money to help do any sort of work other than construction this summer, kind of drove home the point that I simply wouldn’t be making progress on this dissertation for some time to come.

In addition, about 3 weeks ago, the funding situation in our department in general just got incredibly hairy, and here’s the part of the life update where Matt starts to get mad and political and shit. It was getting to be the time where everyone in the department was expecting to hear back about their funding packages for the 2016-17 school year. The process was taking longer than usual, and, as we’ve had trouble with in the past, the department was being very opaque as to just why that was. Turns out that just a few weeks before funding packages were to be announced, the College of Arts and Sciences hit their humanities departments (namely Political Science, Philosophy, Sociology, History, and Literature) were to receive 33%  cuts from their teaching assistantships. For those few of you who don’t know, this is the backbone of our guaranteed funding structure: graduate students work by helping full time professors manage their grading and discussion sections in exchange for tuition wager and a modest living stipend. The history department has had a long-standing policy that new incoming graduate students will get 5 years GUARENTEED funding, mostly in the form of TA-ships but we’re also available for fellowships and are of course encouraged to seek outside funding whenever possible. Still, TAships make up the most reliable way to ensure our students have the resources they need to complete their studies.

By making these cuts, the College has absolutely gutted these departments’ ability to look after their students. It is directly inimical to seeing graduate students graduate with degrees. It forces graduate students to compete for an ever-shrinking pot of financial stability. It’s entirely 0-sum: if I get a TA-ship now, that means I’m taking it from someone else in the department who needs it just as bad as I do, in most cases probably even more so. There are people I know in their fifth year who were offered no assistance for the entirety of the 2016-17 school year. They are in the middle of their dissertations, only quarters away from graduation. Their lives are now in limbo.

And even as our lifeblood, it’s hard to see TA-ships as really great thing to begin with, especially for the current rate that we are contracted to work. Many of my colleagues work second jobs on top of teaching just to make ends meet, because UW sits in one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the country and until last year, the university had refused to give TAs a cost of living increase (while of course the salary of the president swelled to a whopping $675K a year). This only changed last May when we went to the bargaining table as a pissed off and mobilized force, with TAs across the university ready to strike if wages remained flat and our fees were increased. I marched, I organized, and along with many friends and colleagues held the picket line until finally, in the 11^th hour of negotiations, the university did concede a modest raise for the people that are on the frontlines of providing its undergraduates with their education.

It’s hard not to see these 33% cuts to TA positions in the humanities as anything but retributive. The humanities departments listed above were on the front lines through the entire negotiations, and were some of the most vocal and critical critiques of university policy. It’s almost like these departments produce scholars capable of critical thought and analysis—pretty inimical to hand-waving away raising the salary of bureaucrats because of the need to “attract the top talent to the university” rather than to actually make sure the people teaching in your classrooms can afford things like basic room and board.

The College justified the cuts by saying that enrollments in humanities departments were not matching that of STEM fields. Rather than incentivizing enrollment into our fields as something crucial to a higher education, the university is content to run this non-profit, state funded university as it would a corporation, bending to the will of supply and demand. Here’s where I may start sounding preachy, but what the ever loving shit is the point of creating a bunch of “code-spewing Trumpites” (thanks for that one, B.T.) that are capable of a basic task but incapable of critical thought? There is a social good that comes from average people engaging with big ideas that stretch our minds and expose us to different viewpoints. I don’t think that’s debatable anymore, since apparently enough of those incapable of these things have come out of the wood work to support a fascist demagogue white supremacist as a major party candidate for the president of the fucking United States.

The other big problem here is that while the people making these decisions were probably once educators themselves, they simply aren’t anymore. They’re self-interested bureaucrats, and nothing more. Once you are elevated to the position of dean or provost or president, you simply don’t have the connection to actual students anymore. It’s the same problem the Soviet Union faced when it elevated the sons and daughters of the proletariat and the peasantry to run the mechanisms of power in the state and the factories—at some point, those roots get lost amid the bullshit and the self-interest. It’s harder still to see faculty within our department just roll over and accept this. They know how important this is to their own students graduating, and yet so many were willing to just roll over and accept that this was just the way it had to be. It’s not. It’s not and some of us are fighting it. We’re fighting for each other against those who are fighting for themselves.

So there’s that rant. That story isn’t over, and I hope to engage more forcefully in the action against these cuts soon. But even then, life has moved on since this was the concern at the forefront of my mind…

I confess, I meant to post this a week ago. I was basically at this point last Saturday when I shut the laptop, figuring I would come back with some closing thoughts in the morning and post this whole shebang. That wasn’t to be the case though. Last Sunday I awoke to hear about the attack in Orlando, and my thoughts were immediately elsewhere.

At the time, I struggled to process it. I knew I couldn’t in good conscious not write about it, but at the same time, I just couldn’t write about it. The most disturbing thing that I’m still trying to come to grips with is just how numb I’ve become to news like this. There isn’t surprise anymore. There’s outrage but I’m not even always sure what against anymore. Mongolian Correspondent Eric Chase reported that he had been away from internet and hadn’t known about the incident for an entire week. It made me wonder if this instant inevitability of information is actually good for our mental health. Would we be better off not knowing just how mind-numbingly regular tragedy has become in this country? Would it help? I arrived eventually at a “no, of course not,” but by god… it might be easier. Ignorance is bliss, after all. Then again, ignorance is also terrible.

As I have in the past and will continue to do in the future, I tried my best this week to be a responsible ally of the LBGTQ community. I got into several fights at work over gun control and cultural culpability that I’m sure by now has fundamentally changed how my coworkers think of me, while unfortunately probably did little to change their thinking.  I posted what I thought was a thought provoking series of image macros to my facebook wall that, of course, sparked heated debate between some of my more enlightened friends and a former rowing teammate, culminating in a very powerful and brave moment that I sincerely hope will make him consider his perception of himself and the world. I tend to very much doubt it, but I guess it’s what I set out to do in the first place.

The idea that “this could have been our community” doesn’t hit me as hard as many of my friends, but at the same time maybe it should. Until a lunatic with military grade hardware decided to turn it into a warzone, Pulse was having a Saturday night just like any other. I’ve been to plenty of gay bars in the course of hanging out with friends in Seattle. I feel like many people don’t understand that a gay space doesn’t always mean flamboyant displays of homosexuality, or that I’ve spent plenty of nights in a gay bar in heated arguments over which team had the better defense, the 2014 Seahawks or the 2016 Broncos. Or that they’re just places like any other, where likeminded people go to have fun, relax, and escape the ever pressing onslaught of bullshit that life throws at us. I feel like I can try to educate them, but to really understand it’s something you just have to be willing to experience for yourself, to take that ever so scary step to try to empathize with another human being that you don’t immediately understand. We live in a world, unfortunately, dominated by cowards.

We’re still not done with the fallout from the massacre in Orlando, and hopefully for once the opportunity to change things won’t be washed out by the tide of “thoughts and prayers” from people willing to do literally the barest of minimums in order to sleep at night. I’m not terribly optimistic, though when am I ever?

It’s made for a hard week at work. Conversations I hear within earshot make me so disgusted that I simply have to withdraw from it all. It’s made things on site just a little more lonely and stressful, which, to top off, has been thrown in on top of the Gods putting Kansas in a pressure cooker and turning that bitch on high. Heat indexes topped out at 110 this week, and by the time 8 AM rolls around I’m usually already drenched in my own sweat. I’ve been working on putting in a white gravel rock bed, and the sun reflecting right back up off that has made me feel like one of those hot dogs spinning perpetually on the rollers at the Kwik Trip for 11 hours a day. I think my skin has the texture and the color to match at this point.

Not all was glum and sweaty in the Wheat State this week, though. Just as I was about to resign myself to another full year away from making any forward progress on my own career, someone pulled the lever on the slot machine and the line came up all cherries for yours truly. My wonderful amazing adviser Glennys was appointed to some committee that was going to be a big CV booster but a huge drain on time and energy (one of those “Congratulations, I’m sorry!” situations), leaving her with a quarter off from teaching, but with a course already on the books. That course is “The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union,” and it is going to be taught by Professor Cotton come Fall of 2016. I won’t be just a TA—I’ll be running the whole show. I’m going to be teaching the class from top to bottom, from reading assignments to daily lectures and discussions, from final paper topics to entering grades for the course, it’s all me. It’s the moment I’ve been waiting for basically since I started this whole grad school gig back in 2011. This is my Rudy moment.

So yeah, now while I’m cutting boards or shoveling rock or pounding nails I get to start thinking about lecture topics, reading assignments, course themes, group assignments… not to mention the D&D campaign I want to come back to with my Seattle group! It means I’ll be leaving the Wheat State for a short time, I should be able to push back my fellowship to a later quarter, which means I’ll be back by the New Year (the other TA-ship I was offered I plan to decline, hopefully under the provision that it will be given to one of my classmates who can benefit from it more than I). The future in that respect

Random side thought! Jocie and I went and saw the Lobster last night. It’s quirky and weird and cute and dark, everything you want in an indie film. It reminded me of something Wes Anderson might have made it he read a bit more Kafka. I found that I like films with completely arbitrary and unexplained rules. It makes me feel a little better that I live within a system sometimes just as equally baffling if not more so. Highly recommend if you’re into that sort of thing.

Dang it, I just realized I forgot to relay the story of my interview with an actual living, (mouth-)breathing Trump supporter! It went about as well as expected, you know, with threats of violence. I guess that's a tale for another time...

Hopefully I can come back with something more substantial and what I consider content soon. Who knows, maybe it will even have to do with my dissertation? I tend to doubt it! Eric mentioned something about a work vs. happiness piece that I would love to devote some time to, I feel like I have more insight into that than ever before! Anyway, that’s how it is with me, it is my sincerest hope that everything is well with the rest of you!

Until next time, comrades….