Culture Tremors

[rax]

I've gotten enough done on my tasklist this weekend (and still have time to do more this week) that I've decided I earned spending the rest of the evening on things I actually wanted to do. So here's a post about little bits of culture shock I've experienced in Bloomington, presented as a short list of things I would find perfectly reasonable to

Comments

[eredien]

was relieved that I didn't get a negative reaction and the conversation went on to talking about how furry porn is selling not just, well, porn, but an eroticized vision of the self embodied artistically, and how this was related to this whole somatechnics thing.

Is there a publically available recommended reading list/syllabus on the internet already for the Transsomatechnics class? I remember discussing with you the possibility of just doing all the recommended readings for this class on my own because I was interested in the concept as it related to furry and the body and the idea of a spiritual vs. a physical body and the legality of body modification, and I am still interested in doing those readings by myself.

[rax]

I don't have a syllabus yet, but when I do I can send it to you. I may be able to give you individual papers as well; if you have access to a college library with a bunch of journals there are some somatechnics special issues of things that look exciting. Haven't seen much about spiritual bodies yet but it's only week one; I'll definitely have an eye out.

I'm also looking forward to reading from Queering the Non/Human because dude. How cool is that.

[rushthatspeaks]

I would also be extremely interested by the syllabus.

[ff00ff]

I'd like to see, at your doctoral committee, some sort of misunderstanding or disagreement breaking out about your first person crotch piece, and your sponsor requiring you to take off your pants in order to clear things up. Haha, sex college. How demeaning. But sexy. I'm off to write some erotic fiction about a university with suggestive initials.

[rax]

Have fun with that. ;)

[thomasyan]

I remain both bugged and amused by the TV commercials for UTI. To me, those are not initials you want to advertise with.

random

[oonh]

germane is also GeH4

[lindseykuper]

*thinks* Yeah, I think that it's unusual here for someone to be a technologist and not be studying something that appears to be technology-related. I'm not sure if it's a Midwestern thing or a trying-to-bootstrap-a-middle-class-life thing or what, but some people here have a "must...make...self...EMPLOYABLE!!!" bent, and there's an attitude that, you know, if you're one of those people who's capable of going for something that makes you more employable, like a technology-flavored degree, then for crying out loud, why wouldn't you? [0]

So, someone interested in gender and technology could probably do a Ph.D. with, say, one of these professors and have it be essentially the same research as they would have done for a gender studies Ph.D., but at the end they'd have a piece of paper that said "informatics" or "information science" on it, which would be more immediately EMPLOYABLE!!!-sounding. (Of course, actual technologists tend to care more about your experience than about what your degree is in. In fact, actual technologists

[rax]

Oh my god, those professors look amazing, and make me really want to rock informatics as a minor. Once the semester settles in, I should get in touch with them, thank you. :) I do find that technologists tend to care more about experience than what your degree is in, but they do seem to care a lot about where your degree is from --- I think a creative writing degree from, I dunno, IU even probably would not have gotten me into the startup scene the way the same degree from MIT did. Of course, it helped that being at MIT got me the experience I needed to dive into that world

[lindseykuper]

Yeah, I have to admit that I went "oooh!" when I saw you went to MIT. That, plus the fact that "rax" is the name of the first register on the x86-64 instruction set architecture, made me go "ooh, she's a nerd! FRIENDED." I guess the latter was probably a coincidence, but I wasn't wrong about you being a nerd.

[rax]

The latter is a coincidence, although I was aware of it; I think of that as "the great killer of my pagerank." ;) My standard lie is that rax is short for Rachel, which is eminently believable; the truth is also nerdy but much more embarrassing on a number of levels.

Hooray for nerds!

[kelkyag]

Most of the other grad students I've talked to have other hobbies, interests, and occasionally even jobs, but I haven't met anyone else with as serious of a sideline, or one that they intend to continue on with like I intend to continue my work with MetaCarta/Qbase.

I'm not surprised. Grad school, especially if it includes TA'ing, is full time work by itself for many people. I would be squished flat under the load you're planning to take on.

[eirl]

At least in physics grad school, I'm not aware of any grad students who have successfully kept outside employment while being grad students. I know one who tried but had to quit his job after a semester because it wasn't working out-- he simply could not manage both.

The only way this tends to work in physics is if the job is paying for the student to go back to school as part of the career development for the job. This is not common, and even less common in my sub-field.

I'm not surprised that it's uncommon for people to have outside jobs in other areas of study, either. Grad school is hard! But if anyone can do it, you can. And it is possible that my experience with physics doesn't apply directly to gender studies, anyway. So good luck!

[rax]

That makes a lot of sense --- honestly I am not 100% sure it will work for me, and if it weren't for three years of MA plus full-time+ work under my belt, I wouldn't even try. In places the MA plus work really burned me out (any week where I had two final papers due, the time I was trying to these and get PhD applications in while dealing with customer issues) but for the most part it wasn't that bad. Here my job has the understanding that it's not my top priority --- which is good, because the MA program at UMB, while rigorous, expects you to have at least part-time work on top of it, and the grad program here expects your soul Aphex Twin style.

Having fewer social expectations of me is helping me to get stuff done, which is awesome, but I'm a little worried that it will leave me really wrung out in a year or two. Luckily the grad program here has other extroverts in it and we seem to be helping each other out with that in advance.

[rax]

I might be still! ;)