A big role to fill:

"Intellectuals are the vanguard or ideological proponents of both well-entrenched and nascent social orders. It is their task to explain what has been, to justify or to overturn what now exists, and to chart what must become tomorrow." -- Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (pg. 18-19)

Things that make me go :D

So I picked my tote bag up to put my books back into it as my meeting with my Independent Study professor was coming to a close, and she interrupted me to ask, "What does that bag say? 'I'm not stuck up...'" "Oh," I said, lifting the bag up somewhat hesitantly. This 30-something black female scholar was either going to give me a rant about how stuff like this divides the community, or she was going to love it. And...she got about halfway through before she started to CRACK THE FUCK UP. Like she had to calm herself down so that she could continue reading and then she got to the end and was in hysterics all over again. And then she noticed that it has, in very small font, blacksnob.com, so she starts typing. And she instantly goes to the store and sees they have LOTS of bags and starts reading some of the other ones and laughing and laughing. So I tell her she should check out the blog too, and then I mention that I read almost 140 blogs and if she likes this she might like BougieLand, and when she checked that out she said "Girl, where do you find this stuff?! You're gonna get me addicted." We were just laughing and laughing and I told her I was glad I could provide entertainment and that I would see her next week. 


It makes me feel REALLY GOOD to be entertained by the same things that entertain her. I feel all sophisticated and like my tastes are mature and shit. [Oh, she also is evidently comfortable enough with me that she said she'd write my Mellon Mays dean a letter confirming that I'd read "a shit-ton of books". :D] This little moment we had, it provided a little bit of validation that the career track I'm planning on is for me, like I know I'll fit in. Because in that moment we felt like peers, rather than professor and student; almost like under different circumstances we could be friends. In that moment I imagined her on the trip she'd just taken to Florida with her girlfriends from college who are also academics, and I just craved that lifestyle. It also sort of reminded me of being in Chicago, where my closest friends were all real adults with real jobs and real lives. Also, I think she likes me, and that means I'm going to make sure I keep in touch even after we aren't working together anymore, because it's always good to have established members of the academic community in your court.  

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge--Day 11: Letter to your Future Employer

Dear ___________ College/University,

This letter is hard, because I've never really thought about what I want from you before. That probably isn't good, so I'm going to try to rise to the occasion. 

First off, I suppose I should thank you for taking a chance and hiring me. I was just one more in a sea of eager grad students waving their dissertations in your face trying to show you that I was just a little more interesting than the guy next to me...and you believed me! For that, you have my eternal gratitude. I hope this works out well for us. 
I work best under loose structure. My hope is that you'll provide assistant professors with a mentor, a higher-up in their department who can show them the ropes and help us make the transition from being a student to teaching them. [My work deals with the sociological social psychology of identity in the midst of transitions, so I expect that I will feel a little lost  during this shift. I would like a professional shoulder to lean on, if possible.] We're going to get along great if I can pick what I want to teach, or at least choose from a list of available options. I would like to design my own syllabuses, or at least have the opportunity to modify established ones. I expect the freedom to come to class as I am, curly fro and all; I don't want to be one of those stuffy old professors who wears a suit every day. Again, my work is on identity: I hope we can find a way to let me be me while still representing you. 
I can't tell you how excited I am to have an office. As a student, I was always fascinated by those professors whose offices mysteriously contained just the right book/journal to help you, young grasshopper amidst countless volumes and mountains of paper. There was always something to be inferred by the condition of one's office: the carefully organized shelves professor v. the precarious stacks making the floor a maze professor, the comfy chairs to sit and chat in professor v. the two wooden chairs in front of his/her desk professor. I'm thrilled at the prospect of decorating a place of knowledge, even of having a physical space of knowledge to call my own. 
I hope you're the kind of school where professors precept and office hours are widely attended. I want to get to know my students. I want to help them. I'm not sure yet whether I want to be a PowerPoint professor or a chalk-stains-on-my-pants professor, but I want to inspire them. I want to teach an intro class and an advanced one--I want to reel students in the way I "caught the SOC bug" at Princeton, and once they're in I want to make them ask the harder questions. I won't be afraid to ask the harder questions. I hope that's why you hired me. 
I hope you're an institution that favors interdisciplinary work. I want to be friends with social psychologists (yes, even though I'm a sociologist!). I want to work for (or even in) your African-American studies department. In your Gender and Sexuality department, too. I don't want to be put in a box; I hate boxes. I hope you're a fairly liberal institution...I don't want to be afraid that I won't get tenure because you're scared of what I have to say. I hope you're not scared of controversy. I hope we serve each other well. 

I'm really looking forward to working with you,

Maya

Today I finished reading a wonderful book called My Name is Memory

Ann Brashares is on the road to becoming one of those authors I read everything by (like Jodi Picoult) because of her ability to be taking me along through a beautiful story that I can get lost in, developing characters whose pain and joys I feel as if they were my own (or, at the very least, those of someone I'm close to), and then all of a sudden hit me out of nowhere with a line or a phrase that brings me up out of this delicious book-world and back into the real world and makes me question something major in my life and the world at large. 

All her descriptions of the eternal undying lasting love and devotion between the two main characters nestled warmly into the depths of my heart like someones snuggling under a blanket, but they're not what I want to talk about. That happens a lot these days. 

Example A

The little tiny afterthought-like bit that blew me away was as follows:

"It took a half-dozen of those lives for me to recognize the difference between a means and an end." --Ann Brashares, "My Name is Memory" pp. 154

I suppose I first wondered some semblance of this towards the end of high school, when Student Council president came around to ask the Top Ten graduating seniors to fill out this sheet with some questions on it for little blurbs about us that would be put in our yearbooks. One of the questions was "What is your favorite memory from your time at Oakcrest?" or something to that effect. The 8 other members of the Top Ten who were sitting in AP Calc with me started laughing and remembering awesome times they'd had in this club or at that party or whatever, and I was struggling majorly to come up with anything worthy of eternal glorification in the pages of my yearbook. It dawned on me then that these people, my friends, had legitimately enjoyed high school to some extent. Particularly after my personal life exploded at the beginning of junior year, I had been treating it and my experiences in it like a means to an end. It was one more thing I was ready to get the hell away from, til it was over and I realized I had never really experienced it at all. 

And so I made a vow to myself that I was going to start living my life differently. I was going to stop taking my life and my day-to-day experiences for granted, I was going to treat each day like an adventure, I was going to do x-thing and y-thing and become an awesome person. And to varying extents at various times, I have done those things, I think. But although I pause to look at my life with wonder more often, and I meditate, and I occasionally walk around Princeton just to look at its beauty and marvel at the fact that I'm here, and I tell my friends just how much they mean to me, and I have begun to take chances...just like college was the end-goal of high school, grad school has been sneaking up as the end-goal of college. Professorship as the end-goal of grad school. And yes, these things are my goals, they are what I want to do with my life, and I'm okay with that. I like them. I actively chose those goals over the other options and am happy with my choice (for now, at least). This is what I want. 

...But what is the end-goal of professorship? Can that be the end-all be-all of the end-goals? Should it be a means? What end would it serve? #BigImportantLifeQuestions