I forgot that I was supposed to update here. Things seem so undramatic, so banal, and this could only be the struggles and complaints of every other grad student, less interesting narrated.

Part of the issue is that I've got enough going on that all my extra energy is devoted just to putting the basic requirements into recognizable categories and steps. Step 1: Write NSF grant for Qualitative Methods class (elaborate substeps A-P). Step 2: continue interviews for MA research (Saturday: 9am and 11am interviews with pregnant teens, 1pm write up transcripts and decipher freeware coding program). Step 3: Rewrite the awful awful final paper (which I forced myself to turn in despite the fact that identifying myself as its producer makes me want to drop out. Not really.)

But the reality is, when I push myself a little further, there ARE other things going on in my life. Christmas break is the big one. I am SO excited about going back to D.C. Just, like, whoa. It sounds like there's going to be a little bit of anxiety-producing scheduling drama, what with having 11 days to fully satisfy my mother, my father, my (pregnant!!) sister, and my adopted family, but it will worth it. Totally. Beyond even the people who I'm excited to see (and one person in particular, yes you), I am just happy to be going back to my city. Every time I leave I become more attached.

After my last class, the prof and a few of us went out to have a beer together at the bar. The conversation quickly switched to where, geographically speaking, we want and/or plan to be. Unsurprisingly, there was little excitement about staying in Tucson. I had to announce that, despite the fact that I would love to end up back in D.C., I will go wherever I can find work in academia. I was extremely EXTREMELY pleased to hear my prof (who is also the head of my committee) laugh that, with an attitude like that, I was definitely going to get a job. Being aware of the saturation of the market and the relative lack of academic jobs, it was a relief to hear her confidence.

Whew! It's nice to update, after all. I think I need to get focused on Step 1 (substep c) now, but maybe I'll manage to take a break and write more about holiday goodness soon.

I'm writing a paper that's due tomorrow at 2pm. It's 10pm now, and I am just really starting. Here's what I've got:

The rhetoric of teen pregnancy is a crucial site to examine race. It carries enormous emotional weight for almost all participants in debate on the topic and sex education (one of the major goals of which is to avoid teen pregnancy) is “deeply grounding when it comes to morality” (Luker 185). Teens are between childhood and adulthood, and are moving from being “at risk” to “potentially dangerous,” and the act of becoming pregnant is often seen as forcing that social transition. Thus, descriptions of pregnant teens are descriptions as passive as “children having children” and morally aggressive as “welfare queens.” Both of these descriptions are loaded with racial meaning, but it is a meaning that relies on a degree of flexibility that seems absent from biological conceptions of race. Instead, Stoler’s emphasis on the folk theory of cultural contagions (151) coupled with the idea that such contamination is never entirely erasable (Dawdy 150) provide a useful starting place. What they discuss indirectly, I hope to reframe here in an exploration of the role of aging in racialization.

Normally, this would all be erased by the time the paper got handed in, replaced by something that hung together a little better. But I just haven't had the time, so it may just make it all the way.

Wish me luck!

I am a beast. I finished the poster I'm going to present at the SMAs. I haven't checked it for punctuation or anything, but it's done. I leave for Yale this afternoon.



That's two cartoons about sex ed, a Female Reproductive System, a chart illustrating my data and a pretty white poodle-like dog with toenails painted pink. Can we review one more time how proud I am of myself? Or maybe that's just 4:30 a.m. talking ...

Good night!

It used to be that when I got stressed out I would dream of driving a stick shift car in first gear in circles around a Takoma Park parking lot, just barely holding it from crashing, scraping the wooden fence all the way 'round. But now I own a stick shift car and I actually enjoy driving it FAR more than I EVER enjoyed driving a standard.

Last night my dreams were about hamsters. Because I leave for the SMAs TOMORROW and I STILL don't have a poster that I'm happy with at all, I tried to dream about sex ed so that I would wake up inspired. Instead, I dreamed I was going through my old stuff back in D.C. and I found one of my old hamster cages. I was about to empty it of the pine shavings when I saw something moving. It was, beyond all reason, a hamster. It had survived the past eight years with no one looking after it. I went to look for some food to give it and when I came back I realized there was another one. And then another. My three cages were overflowing with hamsters. I tried to separate them, knowing that two hamsters together almost always means more hamsters. But I didn't have enough boxes! And suddenly it became clear how these hamsters - some now massive, easily as big as the rats I owned in college - had survived the neglect - they'd been living off each other's flesh. Although none of them bit me, I just couldn't keep up with separating them, couldn't find enough places for them.

Then G called to remind me to stop hiding in bed from my work. Thank goodness for supportive husbands.

Life. It seems to be going pretty well, I think. There's some stuff going on work wise that is neither full of drama nor angst, but is still difficult. I think that's a good thing. School starts Monday.

Family is doing well, as far as I can tell. I got to visit my sister in San Diego over the weekend and that was very yay. That trip, obviously, also involved multiple instances of getting to be Auntie Sam, which is always fun. I have learned about myself that I am not the fun aunt. Despite insisting to Mason (my nephew) that he think of Jelly Bellies when he thinks of me, I think, instead, he thinks of a second-rate unbuckler of carseats and a really awful stroller-pusher. ("Mommy," the two-year-old darling announced to my sick sister upon our return from the walk to the park, "Auntie Sam is a bad driver.") The thing is that I really enjoy reading him picture books and letting him make me pretend sandwiches, but I guess I just don't have the energy to spoil him. I am a failure of aunt-ness!

It was nice to come home, though. Guille is sick, but nice, and yesterday I got to see a whole bunch of friends from school. I realized that I think I can actually count many of them as friends and not just mere acquaintances, despite the transitory nature of grad school peer relationships. Life with the puppy is going very well, too. He and Nikos get along very well so far (knock on wood) and play together a lot. Life in a house that I own is going pretty well, too. We might buy a new car on Monday, too.

Dear Work Ethic,

Where did you go? When our relationship took a new direction last Fall, I realize things got hot and heavy really quickly, but I need you in my life. I mean, it doesn't have to be like before. We don't have to call each other three times a day "just to check in" and stay on the phone for hours talking about our feelings. But maybe we could still hang out? 

I know things got a little stifling. We could have handled things better. Fine, I could have handled things better. But it had been a while since I'd done this while in school. We've taken a break now, and lied to ourselves that we weren't the whole time. But I'm in a better place now, and I think I can make this happen in a sustainable way.

Miss you ...

-Sam

It's 3:30 and with the help of G's mom the house is in really good shape to pass back to its owners. These owners arrive tonight around 10:00 p.m. G's mom (and dad, brother, and nephew) are in a hotel.

But wait!, you might say, why aren't they in the house that you closed on yesterday. Your new house with three bedrooms and that unfortunate wall that previous owners painted black? You know the one!

Um, yeah. We didn't close on it yesterday. For whatever reason (it involves paperwork, and faxing between Boca Raton and Tucson and G's dad having power of attorney for his grandmother and omg I am so glad G's the one taking care of that end of things), we had to wait. So now we're hoping to close by Monday. It's (remotely) possible it will be done by Friday. It's (depressingly) possible that it will take all of next week and into the next.

In the meantime, G and I are hopping from friend's house to friend's house (thank goodness anthropologists do their research in foreign lands every summer) and blessing our lucky stars that we made some friends here. Also for the graduate student listserv.

I am taking the next few hours to catch up on some work taiwanese drama. I am so tired that I sort of want to cry. I feel like I should tell people I love (e.g. dad) the new state of things, but I really don't have the emotional energy to engage in conversation.

It's almost 3:00 pm. That means that I need to leave the house in an hour and a half to pick up Guille from work and go to the gym. I have been ready to work for the last six hours. I have accomplished nothing.

I have a lot to do. ( Here's a short list: )

But the thing is ... there are plenty of small steps and I'm just not taking them because what I REALLY need to be doing - getting the IRB so that I can start collecting data - is overshadowing everything. Like a big spaceship threatening to destroy Earth. Really, do you care about getting to work on time when you see a spaceship? No! Okay, that analogy makes sense in my head. I'm not going to worry if it makes sense to anyone else.

I'll let you know if this posting actually helped in a few days.

Yes, it's paper-writing time. I totally enjoy the researching part of it and I really really dislike the writing part. Getting all of the ideas in my head to lie flat on a page is never easy - I do much better with conversation/argument - and then organizing them into something that makes sense to anyone else seems like trying to decipher Linear A.

Luckily, this time around, I actually have something to say. And once I'm done, I'll have one more paper under my belt moving me closer to how to research and write about my real research interests.

This semester I learned that even when a professor tells you its too early to start worrying about writing their paper, it's really really not.

It's not that I'm a procrastinator (although I can be) so much as that I need time for ideas to settle, and for the crap to sift out of them. This is a lengthy process. The longer the paper, the more lengthy it is. A week is not long enough for the crap to fall out of a twenty-page paper.

1) The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication is an amazing thing and will hopefully help me make my ethnographic discourse analysis paper on livejournal worth reading.

2) There's no way in hell this paper will be done by Wednesday.

Didn't get the NSF. Life goes on.

Okay, so there's like a million awesome school things to talk about today. So awesome, in fact, that I have to list them. (A great opportunity for a pretentious list, too! Can this day get any radder?)

(adviser) I met with SS today. She is a total beast. I've been wanting her on my committee but she's been in the field all year and wants to KNOW ME before she jumps on board. So, I'm taking her class on Women in U.S. Health next semester.
I want her because these are the research interests she lists: Identity, ethnicity and community in health care; United States; HIV/AIDS; governmentality; access to health care; social movements; gender and sexuality. Did I really not immediately identify her as THE NUMBER ONE PERSON I TOTALLY HAVE TO WORK WITH?
And I read one of her articles on the "Politics of Recognition" and she talks about getting away from bounded notions of identity and "cultural competence" in health care and towards a participatory model based on reciprocity and getting target communities involved in their health care instead of some hierarchical, "here's what your people need" approach. And, can we just review? Her work is totally theoretically grounded AND applicable in meaningful (politically engaged) ways! *dorky cry of glee*
And when I met with her? I was totally cogent talking about my research! 

(bootstrap bullshit) After that I went to a talk about welfare queens. That is, the scholar - a prof who opened by telling about her teenage pregnancy, domestic violence, and use of welfare - debunked a lot of the ideas held about what mothers on welfare look like. She presented all of these amazing women - most women of color - who fate had shit on, standing up and getting degrees and pulling themselves out of poverty. She challenged the problematic scapegoating of teen moms, and the awful oxymoron of saying teen moms are too immature to be welfare recipients (cuz they'll just spend it on fake nails) - it was all very relevant to the lit review I did last semester. The PROBLEMS were that she really didn't ultimately combat the problematic bootstrap myth, the neoliberal discourse of choice, that underlies all of this demonization of poor women. And she reinforced a couple of things about Latinas (specifically that Mexican American families don't want their daughters to be educated). But, she said some really important things about higher education as, economically speaking, the best route for gov't intervention for poor people.

(committee) THEN I met with SL, my prof in the History of Anthro Theory and told him about my secret intellectual idea about writing an article type of thing defending tenure. I have this whole thing in my head. With a little more cross-cultural research, I think it could be really good. And it would be very differet from my main research, which could be good for showing my depth down the line.

(dissertation) And then there was ANOTHER talk, this one about undocumented students, and making schools safer places. They basically compared the problem with "color-blindness" (that is, teachers pretending that their students "don't have a race" and thereby erasing their identities and their real lives) to the Don't Ask, Don't Tell approach to legal status. On the one hand, I'm with it. On the other hand, however, I think that community work has to happen alongside this, because getting kids talking about legal status with OTHER kids who might tell their Border Patrol mommies and daddies is not cool. Also, I have my doubts about school as a safe space for immigrant kids of color, regardless of this silencing of legal status. I mean, as long as gang involvement is linked to immigrant status and ethnicity, and as long as suspected gang members are being targeted for policing (e.g., "go home and change that shirt, there's too much blue on it!"), I doubt that creating spaces for students to talk freely about a (stigmatized) legal status is very helpful. HOWEVER, the idea that there should be an oath for teachers protecting them from having to share information about students that might incriminate them seems like a pretty good one to me, as long as it puts no other student in danger.

(ethnography) And so I've been thinking about my research again, and I'm pretty excited about it, but that will have to wait for another entry since this one's already too long!

The articles I am reading for medical anthropology this week talk about phenomenology of the body and they challenge the old mind/body dichotomy. They also make the very important point that this (Western) dichotomy may make it hard to write an experience-based ethnography of the body because we aren't so much used to thinking about, say, a bodyful mind.

One example was when the author (Thomas Ots) and his Chinese buddy (in China) ate a bunch of crappy food on the train. Author started to feel nauseous. At this moment, his buddy announced that he was feeling vertigo (or something close enough to that I'm not going to bother explaining), which makes more cultural sense (he explains in the article, but I'm not going to bother here). Author stops, and tries to feel vertigo and sure enough, he realizes that, along with the nausea, his head feels a bit muzzy. Eureka! They go through "identical" experiences, and emphasize different locations for the yucky.

The problem for me is that, when I woke up, I felt a little sick to my stomach (after reading articles like this until I fell asleep last night). Then, I felt hungry. Then I felt hungry and nauseous. Then I felt hungry, nauseous, muzzy headed and headache-y, and my chest feels full of energy. None of this is actually very bad, it's all low-level annoying and could very easily be what the author talks about re: psychosomatization of emotion (ie, I'm pissed that I'm back to 7 days a week of work, there's nothing I can do about it, I swallow my bitterness, I feel like crap). But you know, it could also very easily be that because I'm reading about this stuff, I'm feeling it. I do that a lot. It's part of why I like books. My mommy says I'm sensitive. ;-)

My prof keeps asking us: why the HELL do healers want to be healers? Being around sick people sucks. They're sick! And needy!

More and more I've been thinking about this and about the fact that I really am not so much interested in making my life about sick people. And part of the reason that I like doing stuff with sexuality is that - even though there is DEFINITELY some big bad stuff out there - sexuality is a great thing.

Anyway,  I continue to think medanth is SO KEWL and I want to keep doing it. Even if it does make me feel like crap from time to time.



*Ots, Thomas. (1991) Phenomenology of the Body: The Subject-Object Problem in Psychosomatic Medicine and the Role of Traditional Medical Systems Herein. Curare: Anthropologies of Medicine, special issue 7(91): 43-58.

Ots, Thomas. (1990) The Angry Liver, the Anxious Heart and the Melancholy Spleen: The Phenomenology of Perceptions in Chinese Culture. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14: 21-58.

Spring Break - which was, despite my being fairly consistent about doing work, super fun and relaxing - is over. Dad and Trish are here (actually, at the moment they are at the Desert Museum) and I am attempting to write essays. I'm struggling. Derrida is not my friend. But Derrida is not the problem. The problem is that Spring Break is over.

Commiseration welcome in lieu of flowers.

I just spent all day online reading posts over at the About.com Parenting Teenagers Forum on Dating & Sex and reviewing backposts from RaceFail '09, helpfully compiled by rydra_wong and it wasn't procrastination. You might be wondering how that's possible, you might even be guessing that I am already on Spring Break. But I am not on Spring Break. In fact, I am writing a midterm paper I have been attempting all semester long, but not able to pull together around any one theme.

Originally, this paper was going to be based on my fieldwork. My fieldwork was going to be, as I have mentioned previously, in local high schools with educators. But when that didn't happen, with the advice of my Ethnographic Discourse Analysis prof JRG (who I've got mad respect for), I switched to the internet. But I couldn't find anything that worked for me. Sure, there's plenty of stuff on sex and racism, but not much that let's me use my shiny new discourse analysis skills. And I thought that the about.com forum would work, but then it wasn't coming together and then, BANG! It did!

So I'm writing on the Forum after all, but reading RaceFail '09 - especially the very interesting way that comments are handled - gave me the idea about how to approach it. I'll be talking about footing, I'll be talking about stance, I'll talk about (emergent) genre, and I might even be talking about participant roles. I'm still working out the details, but I will absolutely positively have an outline by the time I go to bed tonight. Among other issues I will be bringing up is the problem of face-threatening utterances and how the medium of the pseudonymous internet changes it.

Poll #1361643
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 6

Can I use this comic to demonstrate this phenomenon in my midterm paper?

P.S. I went for a run today when I thought my body was going to keep me from being effective and it TOTALLY WORKED. Thank goodness for smart partners who make you do exercise when you're freakin' out and don't wanna.

Despite the fact that the class I am TAing for, called Many Ways of Being Human, is an intro to anthropology and not intended to be about racism, I cannot envision doing anything without talking about racism. Given the history of anthropology, given where I am working, given who my students are, I simply cannot imagine it.

When I worked with Identity, Inc and the Spanish-speaking immigrant youth who participated in that program and talking about (surprise!) identity, racism came up. It came up because people experienced racism and because they had racist things to say. Usually they experienced racism from White people and Black people, and those who had had racist things to say said them about Black people (and occasionally Asian people). It was not my job to teach them how not to be racist, it was my job to support them in resisting the racism they faced.

Now, here, I have a very different job description. I don't know how many kids in my section identify as PoC. It could be as many as half the 3/4 of the class, it could be as little as 1/7. When I brought white privilege into a conversation (I tried to ease us in by talking about classed space), at least half the class was extremely resistant to the idea.

Last week, I spoke at length (outside of class) with a White female student who, in addition to living in Africa for a while, has a number of (adopted) sibilings of color, and went to high school where she was "one of three white students in her class of 120." Her response to this has been to decide (as I suspect her mother taught her) that the world should be colorblind, and that in fact, she IS colorblind.

We had a nice long conversation about it. I broke down for her a couple of the ways that being "colorblind" is so totally not anti-racist and challenged her both on the quotidian and ideal applications of her desire for a world that ignores the differences wrapped up in that symbolic word/concept "color."

I'm pretty sure she didn't get it. When she left, my parting words were, "don't get to comfortable with your resistance," but I don't think she's ready to be uncomfortable. It took me a while, too, so I still hope, for her sake, that even after she forgets this conversation entirely, some of the ideas nudge her in new directions.

But, after the conversation, I had to sit and think about my own advice. It's gotten pretty comfortable, sitting in front of a group of relatively uninformed students and challenging them to both stop exoticizing and reducing to white-for-all-intents-and-purposes. It's gotten pretty easy to forget that, informed or not, my words in the classroom and out of it (my words in my research in particular), however much they may INTEND to be anti-racist (as my student intended to be), may silence rather than support. In her good intentions, I saw my own, and it was an uncomfortable reminder. But if there's anything that reassures me, it is the fact that I am uncomfortable.

Now, back to work! 

I am, I must admit, a bit uncomfortable these days. I was accepted to grad school at least partly because I had a clear idea of what I would be doing with myself. I knew what I wanted to do my research on, the timeline for school, and the career trajectory. What I didn't have was the theoretical base.

After a semester and a half here, I am beginning to get a taste of what I don't know, which has had the effect of throwing my research questions into doubt. Then, on top of that, I've been going around and collecting advice from more senior students and professors. Here is a collection of some of the advice I've received:

• don't worry about your timeline, you don't know anything yet
• you need to have a clear timeline or you will never graduate but will spend the rest of your life in grad school
• you really can't move forward with your research until you have a theoretical base
• you really can't move forward with your research until you have IRB approval
• you really can't come up with any important questions until you've really been IN the field for a while, so you should do that ASAP
• you should stop having such a narrow topic and such specific questions
• you should know exactly who and what you want to study, and it should be something with lots of research already so that you can look at it with a new theoretical base
• you need to get IRB approval ASAP and you should really be publishing and presenting at conferences: publish or die!
• you shouldn't bother with the IRB for your Master's Thesis
• you will never get IRB approval for your topic
• it shouldn't be too hard to get IRB approval for your topic, even though you're dealing with kids and sexuality
• no one will ever do an Independent Study with you during the summer
• you should do an Independent Study with me over the summer!

In short, I am living in a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.

Beyond the advice of others, I am doing my best to be comfortable with my own feelings of uncertainty, to believe wholeheartedly that the discomfort I'm feeling is healthy and indicative of learning. I am trying to let go of my need to have a plan and to accept the lack of control.
I have made some mistakes, which helps me feel a little less anxious about making more. I've made some friends and found colleagues I deeply respect that are also trustworthy. In the end, those have been the only real lessons I can imagine being universal.

And now: I have a meeting with a grad adviser to try to put together an AnthGradAZ Wiki over the summer.

I never thought I'd go giggly for a structuralist, but it just goes to show that my brain is being blown open and my prejudices are beginning to spill out.

Marshall Sahlins' lecture "Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of 'The World System'" is (at least at this point - I'm only 1/8 of the way through) about the roles of "so-called peripheral peoples" in shaping the "modern global order" (5). I'm not going to talk about the paper, but I did want to reproduce his seventh footnote, found on page 6, here in full.

"The 'mystique of Western domination' encompasses a whole series of related propositions, ranging in value from absurd o false, and including: (1) that before the expansion of the West other peoples had lived and developed 'in isolation' - which just means that we weren't there; (2) that the historic adaptations they were compelled to make to one another do not count as such, for everything then was 'pristine' and 'indigenous'; (3) that their interaction with the West however has been a qualitatively different process since (4) European power uniquely destroys the ancient harmonies and coherence of these exotic cultures; and (5) in the process of their 'acculturation' or assimilation to the West their own cultural distinctiveness is irreversibly extinguished."

Agree or disagree, I am friggin' thrilled that statements like this are coming up in my reading.

Poll #1343929 2009 Summer Plans
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 4

What should I do this summer?

I'm not sure I have enough readership to make this useful, but here goes nothing. Did I leave out any viable options?