Can You Go Home Again?

[kelly_chambliss]

Contrary to what Thomas Wolfe would have you believe, it appears that you can go home again.  You can sublet your house, head off to the big city, spend a year away from paper grading and meetings and academic politics -- and then you can return, and it will all be as if you have never left.  The political stew won't change -- it will be as as thick and pungent as ever, with just a few more veggies and a couple new nuts thrown into the pot.  Your dean will be as clueless and feckless and hapless and hopeless as ever.  Many of your colleagues will be as impervious to logic and evidence as they've always been.  You'll be happy to find that your friends are still fun and supportive; even the cafeteria food will be better than you remembered (except for the oddly inedible desserts, which is, of course, good for you in the long run).  Your students will be the same exhilarating mix of the noble and the naive, the enthusiastic and the apathetic, the thoughtful and the thoughtless, the humorful and the overly-earnest, the bright and the not-so.  Oh, sure, there are some differences:  papers seem to take longer to grade, meetings seem to take longer to finish, Fridays take longer to come.  But otherwise, you're home.  Again.  And it's okay.  (And if you think for a minute about New Orleans, it's more than okay -- it's paradise.)

Now that I'm home, I keep finding inventive ways to avoid doing my school work.  Today, I did it by reading a lesbian romance that I got in the fifty-cent bin of the local used paperback store.  It was about cops in Canada, and it was as predictable and generic and implausible as anything written in the grand old days of reliable Naiad trash.  I got through the whole thing in about two hours and found it pretty worthless, but even so, it was comforting and satisfying.  You don't have to believe in happily-ever-after silly romances in order to enjoy the fantasy. 

Plus, books like this one provide useful models for writers; you can tell yourself (and hope like hell it's true) that you would never write anything this lame.  Better to stay unpublished (as, um, you are) than to get into print with something like this, you tell yourself complacently.  And yet at the same time, you can have a good time reading it -- it's a fun escape, and you get to feel superior.  Kind of like eating Twinkies.

Comments

[seemag.livejournal.com]

Better to stay unpublished (as, um, you are) than to get into print with something like this, you tell yourself complacently. And yet at the same time, you can have a good time reading it -- it's a fun escape, and you get to feel superior. Kind of like eating Twinkies.

LOL! Yup, exactly (g).

BTW, your comment about desserts made me smile. At UMASS, many times, the only edible fools in the DCs (dining commons) were the desserts. Ah, so many nights I went with jello and ice-cream as my entrees...

[seemag.livejournal.com]

That'd be 'foods', not 'fools' -- there were plenty of fools there, but no one I wanted to eat. Just so y'know cannabilism isn't something I practice.

[kellychambliss.livejournal.com]

Haha! Actually, I quite liked "fools." But I agree that most of the fools I know (and sadly, there are many) don't look very tasty to me, either.

[projectjulie.livejournal.com]

Kind of like eating Twinkies.

I LOVE trashy lesbian romance (also, twinkies -- though gosh, it's been a long time since I had one). I DO (most often in the form of J/7 fic). I'm not ashamed to admit it.

so, all good things come to an end? glad you don't sound too brokenhearted about being back at school...

[kellychambliss.livejournal.com]

Ah, well. . .there's no point in being broken-hearted, or else I would be. I miss my partner like mad, and I had allowed myself to forget how time-consuming paper-grading and class prep can be. I haven't been able to do any of my own work since school started. But still, it's beyond selfish for me to be complaining because I have to come back to work after 15 months off. I'm damned privileged, and it's important not to forget that.

I love lesbian trashy romance, too, although sadly, they aren't quite as fun as they used to be. I'm too jaded about them now, I guess. But I remember the thrill of reading my first one -- a real book about lesbians in love, with no one dying, being killed, hating themselves, or having to give up the gf for a man in the end.

[projectjulie.livejournal.com]

academe can be a pretty good life, right? I mean, for the schedule alone. I'm still determined that I can do it without inordinate suffering. I'm trying to embrace my slacker identity.

I can't imagine being jaded about romances -- they're just so bad they're good! like brain candy. need more...