Monument Peak: First Target of the Summer?

As I've gotten more and more mountaineering experience over the last two years, I've slowly come to realize that successfully summiting a peak is less about the energy of unbridled enthusiasm and more about careful planning, patience, and a willingness to value safety over "adventure." 

But unbridled enthusiasm sure as hell doesn't hurt.

Nowadays, my preparations for a climb seem to move through three distinct phases, the middle one being the longest and arguably the most important. In this middle stage, I spend a bunch of time printing out topo maps, poring over them, marking out possible ascent routes, alternate ascent routes, emergency descent routes, camping spots, and the like. I read trip reports and stare at images like this one for way too long, making sure that I have all the navigational points and climbing hazards of my chosen route memorized. I do this partially for safety's sake and partially because it's fun. It's fun to obsess over details in the days and weeks of pre-trip excitement, but it's also fun to be out there on the rock for the first time and feel like you know it already, at least a little bit, despite  never having seen it before. Plus, it's also nice to run into a gendarme and know before you start passing it that skirting it to the south will cost you altitude but skirting to the north will require crossing a terrifying rock catwalk that faces a 2,000 foot drop.

One one hand: gorgeous. On the other hand: don't sneeze.

The point is, while this middle stage of preparation is generally very methodical, and the last stage of preparation (waiting for weather to clear and for various other logistics-related variables to fall in to place) is mostly out of my control, the first stage is interestingly intuitive. You see, even in the Palouse, there are a rather large amount of satisfyingly climbable mountains within a decent enough driving distance for a weekend or three-day trip (say, within 2-5 hours' drive). It goes without saying that "eventually climb them all" is not a reasonable goal, as much as I would like it to be. So here's where intuition comes in. 

Step one of preparation involves combing through information on lots of nearby mountains until at some point, one just...clicks. There's no other way to describe it. I've heard people talk about lots of other things this way, though; for some reason, choosing a puppy to buy from the neighbor's litter is the example that comes to mind. You happily wade into the sea of puppies, and play a little with all of them until that one that you just can't stop playing with fixes you with his/her huge, beseeching, adorable, slightly-stupid puppy gaze and you know that he/she is The One. And that's the story you tell for the next 12-15 years every time you tell someone about choosing your puppy. Puppy-magic happens, and BAM! you know it's puppy time.

Every time should be puppy time.

Anyway, my point is that there's a similarly weird chemistry at work when I'm reading up on mountains. Eventually one just clicks with me, and I know for sure that I'm prepared to invest the time and effort necessary to summit it just because. In this particular case, I came across this picture of Monument Peak the other day, and it hooked me. 

Now, this was a severe test of my climbing intuition, because I've done one climb in the Seven Devils Mountains each of the last two summers (He Devil in '11 and Devil's Throne in '12), and while both were definitely worth the trip, they were both easily the least enjoyable climb of that particular summer, for various reasons (heat and rock quality being two of those reasons). After getting back from Devil's Throne last summer, I joked to Lindsey that Seven Devils was a place where one should climb once at the end of each summer, after already climbing all the mountains one actually wanted to climb. At some point, the desert-scrub, flaky-rock aesthetic of the Devils becomes alluring, but only really once you've had your fun for the year and just want to see it once, briefly, before the snows set in.

So why Monument Peak, and why right away? I don't know! That's sort of the whole point of this blog post, I guess. I have no idea why I want to go there, but I do. I don't know why I can't wait to climb around in this shitty-looking basin...

...but for some reason, I do.

And this is even worse:

But now I've entered the part of the year where I (im)patiently wait for the high-altitude snow to at least mostly melt, and I hope (for some inexplicable reason) that I can get to Monument Peak sooner rather than later. Maybe it's a result of all the time I've spent hiking in Hells Canyon lately or something, but I find the idea of returning to that area a few more times this summer exciting, rather than being my sort of last-ditch option. Anyway, I've chosen my ugly, ugly puppy, it seems. I've probably go another month at least before I can seriously start considering climbing it, but I'll keep you posted.

Elk Creek Falls Recreation Area

In search of a short but beautiful dayhike, yesterday afternoon, Lindsey and I headed out to Elk Creek Falls Recreation Area, about an hour away from Moscow and just west of the town of Elk River on Idaho Route 8. What I was hoping would be a short(ish) hike in the heat with some pretty scenery turned into a short hike in pleasant coniferous-tree shade with absolutely gorgeous scenery.

Since we decided to move to Klamath Falls at the end of this summer, I've been making a list of beautiful places nearby that I've always meant to visit but never got around to, in the interest of checking them all out before a trip to the Pullman-Moscow area becomes a multi-day endeavor. The list has been taken in large part from this helpful site, and near the top were Elk Creek Falls, Hobo Cedar Grove, and Palouse Falls. I'm unreasonably excited about Palouse Falls, but I guess Lindsey's parents want to go there with us later in the summer, so we opted for Elk Creek Falls instead.

Like I said, it's a pretty (and short) drive from Moscow on Idaho 8, a road that winds east for about an hour through valleys and within pine forests, occasionally interrupted by a small town (Bovill, I believe, had a working gas station in case you need to fuel up partway there). About three miles short of the town of Elk River (51 miles from Moscow), there's a sign for Elk Creek Falls, which directs you to turn onto FS 1452. FS 1452 winds around a bit, but if you take it slow and watch for signs, it's easy to not get lost. The road itself isn't paved, but it's a gravel road that would be gentle on pretty much any undercarriage. After following FS 1452 for something like 3-4 miles (I wasn't watching the odometer), you it dead-ends into an obvious trailhead, with a bathroom, a visitor's register, and a map.

At the beginning of the trail, you can either turn left and walk three miles to the Elk Creek Reservoir (apparently), or you can go right and see the falls. We were there for the falls, obviously, so we went right. I couldn't really find any information (then or now) about what's at the reservoir or why one might want to hike there.

If you head toward the falls, you head into a small network of trails that in fact take you to three different falls: the Upper Falls (the smallest), the Middle Falls (the largest), and the Lower Falls (the best). The trail network looks a little confusing at the trailhead, but each and every intersection is clearly marked so you can make sure that you catch all three.

It was about a mile from the trailhead to the Upper Falls, and we headed there first. A little less than half a mile down the well-groomed trail, we saw a small game trail that seemed to lead off to the side of a hill and came out here:

Lindsey playing with the larkspur.

It seemed like you could actually follow a network of game trails down into the valley from here, but we were within pretty strict time constraints and didn't want to be too naughty, so we headed back to the mail trail and after taking a brief jog out and around the Upper Falls to the west that involved a pretty sharp uphill, we our first look at the river.

After this, there was a rather steep descent to the east and we found that the Upper Falls was actually below the small mini-falls pictured above.

From there, it was a bit of a winding, steep affair to regain the main trail and head off in the direction of Middle Falls. Nothing that would challenge anyone in any kind of walking shape at all, mind you, but I'd come expecting a stroll and the uphill and the heat combined made it a bit more work than I'd expected.

Anyway, after we climbed back up a few switchbacks, it was a short jaunt to the large, spectacular, and further-in-the-distance Middle Falls.

There was a pretty obvious and frequently-used trail running from this viewpoint straight to the top of the falls, skirting a huge "Please Stay Behind Barrier" sign. Not wanting to be jerks, we followed directions, but it would be really easy and apparently extremely safe to walk around the crown of the hill  to the left of the above photo and end up at the rocks at the top of the falls.

We continued on to the last falls, and what it lacked in size compared to the Middle Falls it made up for by HAVING A FREAKING RAINBOW.

Waterfall + Sun = Eternal Rainbow

So that was awesome.

We decided to sit and stare at it while eating a small lunch, then we hoofed it back up out of the valley a ways until we'd traveled a mile back to the car. All told, the entire loop likely took about 3, maybe 3.5 miles, and we definitely didn't bother to navigate it in the most efficient way, either. There really wasn't any challenging terrain, and like I said above, anybody in any sort of walking shape could likely do the whole walk in a little over an hour if they wanted. Considering the relative ease of the hike and its closeness to Pullman, it was a pretty incredible deal for getting to see three amazing waterfalls and to just be in one of the green, coniferous valleys of western Idaho for a few hours.

On a scale of one to ten, I give the Elk Creek Falls Recreation Area a baloney-and-cheese sandwich with extra mayo.

What the Internet Is Doing To My Brain

So, this is nowhere near a novel argument or idea at this point in our (ab)use of the internet, but for some reason this particular video about it really resonated with me and a I felt like writing a little bit to get the ol' brain going since it's Sunday afternoon and all and generally at this point in the day I would just be...well, you know, reading about panda bears on the internet.

Now, before anyone jumps on the "The internet does lots of good things for us too, lol n00bz, STFU!" train here, part of what I like about this video is that it presents the idea that a lot of internet use encourages shallow thinking, but that we should simply be aware of that and balance out the type of work we make our brains do on a daily basis accordingly, rather than being all like "teh internet sux0rz!" (actually, does anyone really type like that anymore?). So don't stop using the internet. I'm not going to stop using the internet, and I don't want to be out there all alone, because I've already got a big enough echo chamber here in this blogspace. But.

But I think the distinction between shallow and deep thinking is an important one. The ability to engage in deep thinking (or "critical thinking," which is either the same or close to the same thing) is, as far as I can tell at least, a learned behavior. You get better at it the more you do it. If you don't do it, or if you don't have to do it, you never learn how. Much of my teaching lately has been increasingly focused on trying to get students to think deeply (or critically, or laterally, or however you want to label it). Some of them take to it like a laser-mounted shark to water, while others flounder and never really find their stride (or stroke?), but by and large the common factor I see in pretty much all incoming college students is that they've never been expected to do it before. At least not in concentrated amounts. And this is weird to me. Not only is it weird, based on my own experiences and biases, it's also just bad.

"In The Iliad, Homer portrays war as fucking awesome."

When I was a kid, I thought about everything. And (let's get this out of the way right away) it wasn't because I was smart or somehow exceptional, it was because I was curious. When I wasn't in school, I spent a fair amount of time playing outside pretty much every day, I played video games obsessively, but only as much as my parents would let me play (usually an hour a day or so), and I read voraciously (big surprise!). There were always times when I wasn't doing any of those things, though, and much of that time was spent wondering about things like why the sky was blue, or why there was evil, or why there was good, or whether or not I believed in God (or any god(s)), and so on. I spent a lot of time thinking deeply, and part of the reason, I think, is because I couldn't access "simple" answers through an internet search like we can nowadays.

"I JUST WANT TO KNOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!"

Recently, I had my Humanities 101 class read excerpts from Plato's Phaedrus, and now every time I think about What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains I can't help but thing of Phaedrus's treatment of the then-new "art" of writing. In the dialogue, Socrates and Phaedrus are arguing about the efficacy of writing as a form of communication (and I'm summarizing loosely here), and Socrates relates a story meant to show the supposed danger of writing:

"At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

The tl;dr here is basically that by recording the memories and stories of what had traditionally been a predominantly oral-historical culture in writing, people would actually lose their ability to remember as well because they would begin relying on the written versions of records, stories, myths, etc. Later on in the same section of Phaedrus, Socrates argues that choosing to value the sign of a piece of information (i.e. the written version of a record) over the direct memory of that record itself, we also make ourselves less versatile in our thinking; for him, the important ability is the ability to successfully and convincingly debate a piece of information, a stance on an issue, etc. When you write that information or that stance down as a static document, your opinion becomes less able to adjust on the fly and becomes less robust in the face of criticism due to its existence (primarily, at least) as an artifact rather than a thought or memory.

Pictured: versatility.

And regardless of whether you perceive of it as a good thing or a bad thing, history has borne Socrates's idea out. He was right about our codification of knowledge. As just one example, consider how much of modern-day Christianity is based on trying to retroactively fit values and mores from a two-thousand-year-old culture into present-day society, just because we have an old book with a bunch of rules encoded in it. How different might that particular religion be if that book (and, indeed, all books) never existed?

The (long, boring) point I'm trying to make here is that our "choice" (if you can call a world-wide cultural shifts that) to value the written word over the orally-disseminated memory caused a fundamental change in the way that information was understood. I don't think it's a huge stretch to suggest that the advent of the internet might be the next such shift. As with most such things, I don't think that this shift is necessarily automatically bad or good, and even if it was "bad," what the hell could we possibly do to stop it at this point? The fact is that it's happening and that internet use, much like writing, brings with it certain advantages; however, we also stand to lose a lot in the transition that was good and meaningful and important to the previous information culture (i.e., me) such as what I was calling "deep thinking" above. And, like Socrates, it's hard for me to understand how this loss could possibly be a good thing.

Just like anyone else, I certainly understand the dopamine rush that comes with instant-gratification internet searching. I've gone on my fair share of Wikipedia and TVTropes binges (or, even nerdier, phish.net and ryanadamsarchive.com). And yet I can't help but feel that on some fundamental level, the experiences I have when I step away from the internet are somehow more meaningful, more fulfilling, and more human. That's not to say, again, that there can't be real human value in utilizing or even just listlessly surfing the internet (and in fact, I've built what little of a career I have so far arguing for just this), but it seems to need to be balanced out with experiences that give you an opportunity to think deeply. I make a point, for example, to go for a walk, run, or even a drive pretty much any day I spend more than a few hours working in front of my computer (and thus either actively or passively connected to the internet). Out in the world, doing these activities, is in some way the polar opposite of being enmeshed in the global social sphere of the internet: I'm forced to confront silence, I'm forced to think, and I'm forced to reflect (no mp3 player, CDs, phone calls, anything on these excursions, unless of course someone calls me and I have to answer). For a brief period of time every day, at least, I'm put back in that position I was in as a kid, where I had to make my fun, to use my brain to wonder and learn about the world, and to ultimately make meaning out of nothing rather than having it given to me. I love my work, and I love finding bigger and better ways in which our newest information dissemination technology can make us more human, but it's precisely so that I can keep doing that work, and doing it well, that I need to disconnect as often as I connect.

There's a lot of outcry right now over the apparently reality that college students aren't able (let along willing) to critically think like they used to be able to. Honestly, by and large I don't disagree. While this might partially be an effect (in this country at least) of No Child Left Behind (and that's a whole other blog post in and of itself), and the answer might partially be to Teach Them Harder, I wonder if much of this unwillingness to think deeply comes from a more fundamental place: they way that they understand, create, and access information in their day-to-day lives. Maybe it's making them smarter in new ways while making them dumber in old ways. But I'm pretty convinced we can have our cake and eat it too if we just unplug a little bit (more) each day.

Thoughts?

The End Of An Ear*

Hey guess what? It's another post that's not about Phish! That's two in a row!**

Hey, I got a real job (is the slightly less important announcement I came in here originally to make)!

Yeah, the impossible has happened.*** I got a tenure-track job as an Assistant Professor of the Humanities at the Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls. Like, they met me in person and afterward had me sign a piece of paper and everything, so I know for sure that they don't just accidentally think that I'm someone else cooler and better looking and then will be surprised/disappointed/less attracted to me than they expected when I show up in September and start teaching the hell out of students.

This is the part in the blog post where I feel this weird, public-blog-y obligation to now go back and explain everything that's happened in the last four or so months, and so much has actually happened that my natural response to said urge is to just brain-lock and shove the post under the virtual bed with the virtual toe of my virtual sock until next week, when I'll try to write The Post To End All Posts again. This time, though, I'm just going to push through that whole tangle of mind-shit and keep writing.

Blah, blah, blah, blahdy, blahdy, blog.

It's just like old times in here all of a sudden, ain't it?

Speaking of old times, I actually spent a bit of time today in between sessions of working on an essay I'm trying to get published reading through lots of my old posts from 2008. And oh shit, are there lots of old posts from 2008. In August of that year alone, I had 114 posts. Just to remind you, there are only 31 days in August.

It was a fascinating little aside, though; sort of like one of those weird info-benders where you click on one link in a Wikipedia article you opened out of purely professional interest and suddenly three hours, two bags of tortilla chips and one cigar later you realize you've somehow gone from "post-structuralism" to the page for Van Halen's album "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" and there's nothing in-between in your memory except for the cerebral equivalent of those ghostly fire-tire-tracks the DeLorean leaves behind when it travels through time. Except this wasn't Wikipedia. It was my actual past life.****

It was actually a really fascinating trip. Often, when Lindsey and I talk about life (That's what couples do, right? That and the sexy-thing?), I realize I'm saying a lot of things about my mid-20s that characterize them as this difficult but heroic struggle to find out who I was so I could grow to be more calm and more content and Go Out And Get What I Really Wanted. Sometimes this makes me self-conscious because that's exactly how I remember things, but talking about it makes me sound (in my mind) like I'm making a spirit quest out of a life that's really been more like a walk to the grocery. Rereading some of the blog entries I wrote during the summer and fall of 2008, a period of time that would have been very harrowing and challenging because of the number of big changes I was experiencing even if I hadn't been batshit crazy at the time, I realized that this actually was what had happened. 2008 and early 2009 were really the tail end of about 4-5 years of at times aimless, at times purposeful soul-searching (and job-searching) and reading through the entries I made in this blog over the course of those four months or so, I could actually see myself changing from someone whose perspective I barely recognize now to someone who would clearly become me, now, five or so years later. It was a little haunting, actually, but also fascinating in the sense that my words from the time did such a better job of explaining what it was like for me then than my words now explaining my now-memories of then could ever do.

In fact, it struck me in the process of reading how sort-of amazing it is that I blogged so frequently during the five years of what I like to think of as my "second album" or "sophomore slump" phase. At the time, I did it to keep my sanity in a delicate balance; looking back, though, I also seem to have made an enormously detailed nearly day-to-day chronicle of surviving my mid-twenties. And at this point in my life, that's a really cool artifact to have. In fact, I'd love for Lindsey and any interested friends I've made since that time who didn't know me then to go back through and read what I wrote back then (of course no one would ever do this because it would be hideous boring to them, I'm sure). It's often self-indulgent, but it's also sometimes really insightful and interesting in a way that I'm sad to say I might be too self-conscious to be today, and it shows where I've come from and how far I've come since then while still being, clearly, me. I like the idea of there being a record of that part of my life recorded in the medium that I feel most comfortable expressing myself in. Even as an avid and sometimes even rabid blog user over the years, I've still always been a bit self-deprecating about my blogging and frequently poo-poo'd the idea of blogging in general; however, after this afternoon it strikes me now that if someone happened to be looking back fifty years from now, wondering (for whatever reason) who I was and what I was about, this blog would honestly not be a terrible place to start.

So maybe I'll start blogging more again. Maybe for no other reason than to be able to pull this page up five years into my life in Klamath Falls and laugh at how stupid I sound, not expecting at all to live in a ranch house with three dogs and five kids, or be homeless and half-frozen to death after it turned out that Lindsey was a fucking FemBot all along and was only waiting until I was at my highest before razing the house and all my clothes and my The Captain and Tennille records around me with her eye-lasers.

Or maybe I'll start working on my academic website again tomorrow morning and forget about the blog for another three months. Who knows?

Either way, it's been a fun trip, and still is.

Now, enjoy some footnotes!



*Or "era," if you prefer. I don't.

**This part of the post no longer makes sense, as I've moved all my Phish-posts over to Skyballs and Saxscraper, but I'm leaving it in because typing all this was obviously way easier than using the backspace key.

***Yes, despite constantly applying for long-term jobs in academia for the last two years, I was always just sort of living on the assumption that it would never work out and eventually I'd be forced to give up and embark on a career building beans or slashing pylons or something.

****For some damn reason, Wikipedia lists this album as "hard rock." If any Van Halen album is "hard rock," then let's just all agree to start referring to Katy Perry's second album as "glockenspiel-driven proto-roots-rap," okay?

In Which I Argue Against That Article About Hating Grad School That Everyone Loves

First, for your perusal (and potential embittered vindication): said article.

I've seen this article and the various responses it's spawned making the rounds lately on Facebook, and as a former graduate student in the humanities, I felt compelled to respond. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that between the time that I began drafting my response and now, I actually got a tenure-track job in the humanities and will be an Assistant Professor come fall. However, the meat of what I want to say has been in my head since before I even knew about my campus interview and my point(s) of contention with Schuman's article remains largely unaltered by my personal good fortune.

For me, said article presents one particular (and highly subjective) set of expectations about the grad school experience and how oneself should be as a grad student; Schuman's is a viewpoint that I disagree wholeheartedly with while realizing that many people (including many of my colleagues) have ended up in grad school precisely because they believe now (or believed at one point) what she seems to have believed before her recent disillusionment. I don't write to disabuse anyone of their particular notion of grad school or of their own grad studentdom; as I'm well aware, many of us only survive the grad school process (especially the doctoral program process) by clinging desperately to our ideas of ourselves as Graduate Students and not questioning them too much. I write, instead, because my experience of grad school in the humanities was almost entirely positive, and I'd like to think that even bitter, bitter Schuman would prefer that more students have experiences like mine than like hers in the future. In short, I find her point of view overly critical, one-sided, and as such, unhelpful, and I'd like to think that mine might work as a counterpoint that could help someone, somewhere, someday, and thus validate my hope that my experience is worth sharing for a few paragraphs on a stupid blog that hardly update anymore.

I'm going to attack this thing a bit systematically, because I don't want to miss anything. First, there's the probably-trolling title and subtitles ("There are no academic jobs and getting a Ph.D. will turn you into a horrible person" or "Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor," take your pick). Well, here's a counter-troll: I received my literature Ph.D. in May of 2012, and it did not make me an emotional trainwreck; in fact, grad school was the first time in my life that I felt challenged enough and had enough of a sense of purpose and sense of self to not be an emotional trainwreck. In many ways, beginning grad school was actually the culmination of a long, slow climb out of a lot of issues with depression and aimlessness that I've had since I was a young kid. It was hard academically, and in the sense that it required me to do a lot of soul-searching and self-evaluation that I might have not been motivated to do otherwise. But that was good for me. Oh, right, and on top of all that, grad school actually did make me a professor.

Next: I'm not sure if Schuman's opening paragraph is still trolling or not. Beginning grad school in any discipline with the apparent end goal of getting "a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired" is pretty naively utopian. Let's just say that if you're interested in pursuing a literature Ph.D. only because, basically, you don't want to work hard or you only want to work nine months of the year, then you're barking up the wrong tree right off the bat (how's that for portmantidiom?). How you could not realize this right away is absolutely baffling to me, which is why I choose to assume that Schuman's being a bit tongue-in-cheek here. Just like you shouldn't decide to become a doctor because you like riding in an ambulance and wearing scrubs, you shouldn't decide to become a teacher because you want summers off. If you need me to explain why that's dumb, I'd be happy to devote another post to it later this week.

The "two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning" line admittedly hits a bit closer to home, but this is one of the major points that I wanted to wrestle with anyway. I spent the first three years of my undergrad as a computer science major. I had started college with the twin beliefs that a) more education is just plain good for you in the old, liberal-arts sense and b) you still needed to be able to do something semi-practical by the time you graduated so you could get a job. I chose computer science because I liked computers, but I took as many electives as I could on the side, just because they were interesting. In practice, though, a) worked out quite well while b) did not. I struggled with computer science, not because it was a difficult major (though it was) but because I couldn't make myself care about the material. By the end of the second year, every single class period was spent in agony, waiting for the clock to strike the end of the hour so I could leave, say, Data Structures and head across campus to The Short Story. By the end of my third year, I'd changed my major to Literature and I fucking loved it. Of course, the obvious downside to a Bachelor's degree in English surfaced when I graduated and ended up spending two years working at gas stations, restaurants, and shopping malls. I had changed my major originally with the idea that I might someday become a college professor in mind, and of course I knew that that required graduate school, and yet I had absolutely no desire to attend a graduate school that would require me to pay tuition. Even with the specter of future decades of menial service jobs looming before me, I couldn't bring myself to accept a graduate student position that would require me to go into debt. I didn't want to have that sort of debt hanging over my head, and, more importantly, I didn't want graduate school to be framed throughout my entire experience of it as a gamble that I needed to win in the end (i.e. get a "real job") or else spend god knows how paying back loans while working at McDonald's.

So, for two years I mucked around doing various minimum-wage jobs until I got an offer from Washington State University, whose English department would pay my tuition for two years while I got my M.A. degree as long as I taught freshman composition classes for them. Tuition paid, and just for doing what I wanted to be trained to be able to do anyway?! It was a no-brainer. A few days later, I was packing up my things and preparing for a long cross-country drive to Washington state, and the rest is history.

As a result of this opportunity, I was able to not only go to grad school for almost-free, I got on-the-job training and was (in theory, at least) more hireable out the door as a result. If after getting my M.A. I didn't get a job, so what? I wouldn't be any worse off than I'd been before, and I'd have a graduate degree to show for it. As it was, I went on to get a Ph.D. at the same school with the same deal, and then got a job, but the point of all my blabbering here is that I'd decided from the start that if I wasn't able to get into a school that would pay my way in exchange for teaching or research work, then I just wouldn't go to grad school at all. It was important to me to be able to treat grad school as its own valuable, meaningful opportunity, and not just a means to an end or a long-odds gamble on some future money. At WSU I did real work in both research and teaching while fulfilling my degree requirements and if anyone ever had the nerve to insinuate that what I did for my eight years there wasn't a "real job" because I was a grad student, I'd probably dropkick them in the face and then calmly explain why they couldn't be more wrong. It seems to me from Schuman's article that she only perceived of grad school as means to an end, and then when that end wasn't reached, she took it out on the experience of grad school retroactively.

I didn't by any means get paid a massive amount for my graduate school stipend, but it was enough to get through the year on as long as I spent carefully. So, yeah, I did research for most summers, but I got to make my own schedule for the most part and I wasn't really "unpaid" in the sense that it was explained up-front that I would only get paid for nine months of the year. Easy math (even for English majors!) said, then, that I save a quarter of everything I made and set it aside for the summer. Voila! No longer "unpaid" research! It also helped that the research I was doing was, by and large, seriously fascinating. For my M.A. thesis, I regurgitated a bunch of information about Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale" because I thought grad school was about impressing imagined muckety-mucks who wagged their fingers at me from the top of the Ivory Tower in my nightmares, and it was miserable. When I came back for the Ph.D., I sat down and literally (like, in a list!) identified all the things that made me unhappy about the research I'd done thus far and found a way to reinvent my work so that I was doing something I truly enjoyed. Subjecting Kafka to first-order logic sounds fucking horrible to me. I'm sure to someone out there, it would be endlessly fascinating, but it's one of those topics that, at least at first blush has the ring of "I chose this to impress my committee" rather than "I chose this because I love thinking about it and talking about it and teaching about it." Why would anyone set themselves up to do that much work on an become that immersed in something that they don't really care about? Obviously, it didn't make Schulman happy. My research was based on finding similarities between a few of the things that were important to me (hiking, video games, and geocaching), and then figuring out how the theorizations of writers like Heidegger, Tuan, and de Certeau might help explain how those practices were just as worth talking about in academia as Chaucer and Shakespeare and the global literature author-du-jour and "the long eighteenth century." And it was a blast. I spent as much time hiking, blogging, taking pictures and playing Minecraft for my research as I did writing. And at the end I still had a 300 page dissertation to show for it, which I'm now in the process of turning into a book manuscript. Because it was fun. Not because someone was forcing me to do it. There are much easier jobs than this one. Why the hell would you choose to do this one if you're just going to do what you think you have to do?

One thing I agree with Schuman on is the idea that getting a job after graduate school is, generally speaking, not really related to how "right" you do things. The application and interview process for academic jobs was/is pretty much the most depressing, harrowing, agency-less process I've ever been through in my life. But, throughout the two years I was on the market, I kept two things in mind. First, that I had begun and had always continued graduate school as its own experience/reward. I came out of my Ph.D. program (as a result of preplanning) in no debt, and with tons of experience in writing, publishing, and teaching that I hadn't had before I started. I'd had a great time, and it had made me a better and happier person in so many ways than I'd been before I started in 2005. That was enough for me. If I didn't get The Job and had to end up working for a publisher or teaching at a community college to make ends meet, so what? I'd had a great time and gotten to do what many, many people haven't been lucky enough to get to do already. Demanding more seemed (and still seems) ungrateful.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, I really don't understand how getting a job in academia is any harder than getting a job anywhere else right now. To hem and haw and hand-wring and so on because you spent six years (or however long) preparing to get a job that doesn't now exist sounds (again) like you made a bad gamble, setting aside years of your life for some imagined payoff down the line, especially now when you can no longer claim that six years ago "things were better" with the job market (both in academia and in general). People at various levels of education and with all sorts of types of specific training are jobless and even homeless all over the country; do we really have to keep pretending like the employment situation in academia is a special, extra-horrible case?*

Perhaps the most troubling part of the original article for me is this: "During graduate school, you will be broken down and reconfigured in the image of the academy. By the time you finish—if you even do—your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe, incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you, and nobody outside of academia will understand why. (Bright side: You will no longer have any friends outside academia.)" I never believed any of these things, and I firmly believe it's because of the attitude I had toward grad school, which I described above. Ultimately, for me, grad school was a job. Admittedly, it was a job that paid less than most, required more hours than most, and, at times, seemed more thankless than most...but it was still just a job. I was willing to continue to do it in spite of these poor(ish) conditions because I thought the trade-off was worth it in the name of getting to do a job that actually meant something to me. And it was worth it. As a result, it was never in danger of consuming my identity, of usurping the other values and activities and relationships and facets of my personality that I valued before I began and that I still value now. I have known and know people who react to grad school in the way that Schuman describes, and I can't help but think that to react to a job in such a way must indicate an intense, perhaps repressed need to make a significant change to one's view of oneself, and that that fetishization (Aha! Grad school word!) of the grad school experience that results is meant to be the catalyst for that change. When the end result is "failure" (i.e., not getting a tenure track job) that shatters this new self-image and results in embitterment. But "the system" or "The Man" or grad school isn't to blame for this disappointment: none of those things are ever going to transform you into a special, magical (and possibly holier-than-thou) butterfly. Only you can do that.

In the end, I know that I, to some degree at least, got lucky. I got lucky to get into WSU in the first place, then I got lucky again to be allowed to come back. Then I got lucky to get a postdoc position, and again to get a faculty position. Of course, it wasn't just luck; I also worked really damn hard throughout all of that in pursuit of those opportunities. But it likely wouldn't be too far off base to say that all my hard work had very little to do with where I actually ended up, and that's a depressing thought. It's also, I think, the main thing that Schuman and I can both agree on. It's unfortunate that taking the "right" track through academia doesn't automatically result in a tenure-track job, yes, but show me a place and time where everyone always gets what they earn and I'll invent a time machine and move there. The trick for me was (and I mean this in the hippiest way possible) to enjoy the journey and worry as little as possible about the destination. I didn't have a backup plan going into graduate school because I waited until I didn't need one. My research wasn't drudgery because I wasn't willing to let it be. Grad school didn't consume my life because I entered grad school so that I could have a life, and live in a place where I could be myself, before, during, and then after I learned what that actually meant.

When I read pieces like the one that Schuman wrote, they don't make me happy that I "figured it out" (or whatever I did). They don't make me feel like I won and others lost. They make me sad that there's no way to explain my experience to more people, so that others can get what I got out of the grad school experience. It was really the best 6 years of my life, but it didn't just magically happen that way; I made it that way. I have a suspicion that when it turns out to be the worst 6 years of your life, the same thing is still true.

* I'm talking generally here. The treatment of adjuncts, especially in the humanities, as a form of cheap, easily disposable labor is a trend that definitely needs to be talked about and, hopefully, stopped.