The grad school situation

 I don't remember anymore how much -- if anything -- I've written about the problems with the grad school application process. I apologize in advance if some of this is repetitive.

GRE: Essentially, I got in the 92nd percentile in verbal, 75th in quantitative, and 84th in analytical writing. Decent, all things considered. It's more than enough to make the minimum requirements for the school that hasminimum requirements (UK in Lexington mandates 1000 combined verbal and quantitative, and I made 1360 total), but that doesn't guarantee anything.

Applications are in, and it's a matter of putting finishing touches on letters of intent and getting those sent in. I'm glad now that I hadn't actually turned those in yet, for reasons I'll explain in a moment.

One of the professors who had agreed months back (we're talking late April, early May) to write a letter of recommendation only got back to me a few days ago, despite the fact that I've been sending gentle messages for the past month asking what he needed from me other than stamped addressed envelopes. It would be a lie to say that the period during which I was waiting to hear from him was not nerve-racking. Granted, it was my fault for waiting until two months before the deadline to start contacting him again, but the three weeks of not hearing from him led to a minor freak-out during which I interpreted the situation as the Universe's way of telling me that I had no right to even bother.

The three professors I'd developed the closest relationships with during undergrad at UIC were Dr. D, Dr. G, and Dr. W. Several months back, I got some feedback from both Dr. D and and Dr W about the schools I was thinking of applying to at the time (a list which, at the time, included UT and UK as well as three other schools in Georgia and North Carolina). Dr. R had offered a consultation on the matter unsolicited (and I was more than happy to take her up on her offer!), and Dr. A had just happened to come and visit her during our meeting and gave his two cents while he was there. I hadn't asked Dr. M, despite my very high regard for her opinion, because she is a very busy woman, and I figured Dr. R's input would be enough.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Based on new information I've received from Dr. M in response to what my research interests are, I must now reevaluate everything about the approach to grad school. I knew that UT's program was stronger in archaeology and forensic anthropology, but there was one prof whom I thought would be a good match as an advisor, and a few more who would have made good committee members. Admittedly, my vision has been somewhat clouded because UT is in Knoxville, and therefore close to our new home. But the more I find out from Dr. M, the clearer it is that Lexington's program is infinitely better-suited to what my academic goals are. Not to mention that according to Dr. M, "Knoxville's anthropology program is famously dysfunctional. I understand the geographical attraction. But it does not compare to Lexington. It also might be a difficult place to survive as a grad student. Just so you know."

The previous thinking was that even if UT wasn't the best fit, it would still be doable. It would entail far fewer complications, would be the least expensive option (in-state tuition, no moving expenses, et cetera), et cetera. But if the program is as "dysfunctional" as Dr. M says, even on the off chance I got accepted, it might not be worth it.

This complicates matters severely. Because -- assuming I get accepted to either program -- my going to grad school hinges also on being able to afford it. Fiancé and I each contribute about half to our household income (I make more than he does, but we're at about 55-45). To continue paying my share of expenses as they currently stand for our abode in Blount County, Tennessee, I would have to take home at least $20,000 a year on top of whatever part of my income/loans/grants/whatever went toward tuition, books, school fees, et cetera. The cost of living is definitely higher in Lexington proper; I've no idea about the surrounding suburbs. And while Fiancé is open to moving to Kentucky for a few years, he would still need to get a job up there. It would be profoundly disruptive even if we could afford it.

The other day, Fiancé tried to comfort me by saying that no matter what, we would make sure I went to grad school. "Maybe it'll take five years, but we will make it happen." But that notion just reduced me to tears. In five years, I'll be on the verge of running out of time on the baby front. I've been warned by countless medical professionals not to have children after age 35 because of the potential health issues on both my end and on the potential baby's end. Grad school would be challenging enough under our current circumstances. I've known students -- including women, who for better or worse usually wind up taking up the brunt of child rearing -- who have gone through grad school with small children, so it's obviously possible. But I don't know that I can do it. Especially with the combined time/energy constraints on top of the financial problem.

As previously stated, I'm not giving up on the prospect entirely. Whether or not I should even bother is still in question, but regardless, I'm still bothering. I've already paid the application fees for both schools and can't get that money back now. Might as well see them through to the end.

But it's also evident that an adjustment of expectations is necessary. The vast majority of people on Earth don't even have the equivalent of a high school diploma, so for me to attach my happiness to a piece of paper and a furthering in education is absurd. Especially when, realistically, the chances of an advanced degree improving my employment prospects is not great. Dreams are beautiful things, but dreams and goals also need to be at least somewhat practical. A pig can wish she or he could fly, but without wings, it just isn't going to happen. This isn't pessimism: this is realism. I might have to be content with graduating magna cum laude in undergrad, and if I'm lucky, being able to frame at least one letter of acceptance and know I could have gone further if circumstances outside my control had been different.

The root of suffering is desire; therefore, in order to avoid suffering, I need to curb desire, or at least be reasonable about my wants. It's a concept I've readily applied to material wants and need to get better at applying to academic wants. I'm not quite to the point of completely giving up on these dreams, but I know that I will probably never have a doctorate, and may never even get a Masters. And if I'm ever going to have a chance at being happy, I need to be okay with this. 

Wedding costs in perspective

(You must understand that I was a very, very lucky bride and found my wedding dress for $12.50 at a thrift store.)

As soon as I updated my relationship status on Facebook from "in a relationship" to "engaged," there was a notable change in the ads that clutter the sides of the window when I visit their site. Obviously, they're attempting to capitalize on the notion that a bride-to-be is going to be doing shopping for wedding-related stuff, and, not realizing that I'm a frugal femme, were going after my consumer dollars. Granted, every once in a while I find something somewhat useful. But more often than not, if I even bother to click on a link, I wind up rolling my eyes. 

The other day, an evidently brand-new company had an ad up which touted a "huge" fifty percent off sale on invitations. We're already 98% certain where we're going to have our invitations done, but I figured it couldn't hurt to at least take a look.

Imagine my horror to discover that their "normal" prices for fifty monochrome invitations started at over six hundred U.S. dollars... which means that even at fifty percent off, invitations would be over three hundred dollars!

There's a mix of social pressure and personal taste that can drive a person to want really fancy invitations to set the mood for a special event. I get that. Just because it's not something I personally need to spend a lot of money on doesn't mean that it's not understandable, on a certain level. 

But really... invitations at over six dollars each? When they're supposedly on sale? And they're nearly thirteen dollars each when they aren't on sale? Where the fudge did common sense go?!?

Later on in the day, I happened to read about a bride who was lamenting that a dress she really, really wanted was "two thousand dollars over my budget." Again, my jaw about hit the floor. Two thousand dollars over what you had budgeted for a dress you're only going to wear once? I could never even dream having two thousand dollars as my wedding dress budget.

I mentioned all of this to my fiancé while acknowledging that my own frugality was somewhat anomalous in this often topsy-turvy world of all things wedding-related. "It's just funny to think of how many things I can go around saying, 'Oh, we spent more on x than she did on her wedding dress.' Hell, we're going to spend more on alterations than we did on the wedding dress."

"Honey," he reminded me, "we spent more at Asian Buffet last night than you did on your wedding dress."

Touché, darling. Touché.

Liminality

Victor Turner wrote a lot about ritual, and one of the concepts he expanded upon was that of the liminal state, the transition between one phase and another, a state rife with ambiguity, uncertainty, and often characterized by relative lack of structure. Some scholars have argued that an engagement period represents a form of liminality insofar as you are no longer truly single, but neither are you married. But I'm also currently in a liminal state for other reasons.


I currently live in the suburbs of Chicago and met my fiancé while he, too, was in school up here. When he finished his own schooling, he moved back to his home state of Tennessee, which is where we had agreed we wanted to live when we get married. The original plan was that I would move down there when I, too, finished school. But over a month after graduation, I'm still up here. Why? Because, to put it bluntly, humans are social beings and my grandmother has antediluvian morals. My very traditional grandmother has proclaimed that she would have a heart attack if we lived together before marriage (not an idle threat, because she does have cardiovascular problems... still, emotional blackmail much?) and on top of that has threatened to disown me. As infuriating as the situation is, it's not as though I can simply disregard her. She's batty and old-fashioned, but I still love her, and can't imagine her not being part of my life while she is still alive. 


Anyway, because of that whole situation, there are only two "legitimate" reasons for me to move down to Tennessee before the wedding: either be in school or have a job down there. Assuming everything even goes to plan (which is a whole other ball of wax), I would not be starting graduate school before fall semester of 2011. We want to get married before I start classes. So the key is to find a job down there, right? Unfortunately, it's hard to get employers to take you seriously when you're applying for positions from over five hundred miles away. (Since I plan to attend grad school, I'm not looking for anything serious or long-term, i.e. the kind of jobs where they might actually consider someone who plans to relocate.) And of course I can't get an apartment down there because no one will rent to me without having proof of some sort of income. Lovely little catch-22, isn't it?


The other thing currently nagging us is that we don't know where I'll be in graduate school. My top choice for both geographic and academic reasons is the University of Tennessee's Knoxville campus, but since this is graduate school, admissions is by no means guaranteed, and I have to have several contingency plans; hence the applications for Emory, University of Georgia, University of Kentucky, Appalachian State University, and my undergraduate alma mater the University of Illinois at Chicago (with the caveat that doing my MA and PhD at the same school as undergrad is not the most desirable option). Yes, my undergrad GPA was 3.76 with an in-major GPA of 3.88, but that doesn't guarantee anything. I still need to take the bloody GRE, and if I'm honest I'm terrified of not doing well on the mathematics section. It's not even just getting in with the programs; I also have to hope that schools will offer decent financial aid packages, assistantships, et cetera.


And to further complicate matters, UT has one of the most outstanding anthropology departments in the United States. I'm not sure if the fact that they're particularly geared toward biological anthropology helps or hurts me as a cultural anthropologist. There's one particular professor with whom I would love to work because his area of research dovetails beautifully with my preferred potential project; since UT attracts more biological anthropologists, there could conceivably be less "competition" to work with that particular professor. But if he isn't taking on new students for the semester I'm trying to get in, or if there are a bazillion more qualified candidates who want to work with the forensic anthropologists at UT and they take all the spots in that particular cohort, well, I'm SOL.


We have to proceed with the understanding that there is a not-insignificant possibility that I will be in Georgia, or Kentucky, or North Carolina, or even Illinois for graduate school instead of Tennessee. (My fiancé has stated that if necessary, he would move wherever I wound up in school, but I'd hate to do that to him.) Or worse, that I won't even get into grad school at all. But that's something I'd really prefer not to think about, because the prospects of that are simply devastating.


I miss being in school. Of course I am continuing to pursue independent research, but I miss the structure of having classes, of meeting with professors. I miss writing twenty-page papers and having someone who wants to read and grade them. It's bad enough that I'm seriously considering making the whole wedding planning process into a self-ethnography. (Kamy Wicoff sort of already did that in I Do But I Don't: Why the Way We Marry Matters, but this would be even more anthropological.)


Above all else.... I just wish there were a modicum of certainty about the relatively near future.


All of this is a long-winded way of saying, liminality can suck huge donkey balls.

"Deportee" and dehumanization

When Woodie Guthrie wrote the poem that eventually became the song "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos"), he was referring to a tragic plane crash where, in addition to the pilot and three crew members whose names were listed in the papers, twenty-eight Mexican nationals (27 men and one woman) who were being flown back to Mexico also died. This was during the time of the Bracero Program, a sort of guest worker program which let Mexican agricultural workers (braceros) come to work in the United States during a labor shortage in the U.S. Then as now, there were many workers who came outside the confines of the Bracero Program, usually at the behest of those who were hiring them who would rather have an undocumented workforce than one they had to pay under contractual terms. The song mentions that, "They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border / To pay all their money to wade back again," in reference to the practice of "drying out the wetbacks" (seriously, that's what they called it), where immigration authorities would take undocumented workers to the border, have them place a foot back in Mexican soil, and point them to the Border Patrol to pay to sign back up under the Bracero Program and get them back to work. The plane was taking them to a border town so that they could do just that when it crashed, killing everyone on board.


Woodie Guthrie expressed outrage at the fact that newspapers did not report the names of the undocumented Mexican nationals (he gives them symbolic names in the song). Whether this was due to mere callousness or if the papers really and truly could not obtain information about their identities is not a question for which I can find a straight answer. It is clear, however, that many of the attitudes taken toward the Mexican workers in 1948 carry through today in the debate over Mexico-U.S. migration.


"They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves." The vast majority of undocumented individuals are not criminals, although they sure as heck are treated like it. It's all too easy to think of "illegal aliens" as amorphous, faceless beings, and that's exactly why the terminology is problematic. I'm going to copy and paste from an earlier entry because I can't be arsed to re-word this argument:


The question of calling people who enter the United States without authorization or overstay their visas "illegal aliens" or "illegal immigrants" or simply "illegals" versus "undocumented immigrants" is not just an issue of semantics or trying to be PC. Undocumented and unauthorized are not perfect terms, but they at least acknowledge that the nature of the imposed status is whether or not they have papers or formal authorization to be in a particular place. The word alien simply means non-citizen, but the connotation of the word is dehumanizing because it conjures up images of something downright otherworldly. Illegal alien is a term used by the INS to describe immigrants who have been convicted of felonies; it is not a blanket term for anyone residing in the country without authorization. Illegal immigrant is a relatively mainstream term, unfortunately, but it still conjures up images of criminality when immigration is a civil, not criminal, issue (although the Arizona law has changed that, which is a problem in and of itself). Of course, when "illegal" modifies the word "immigrant," at least then the main descriptor is immigrant, maintaining some semblance of the personhood of the individual(s) being described. "Illegal" as a noun, by contrast, completely dehumanizes them and implies that the very nature of the person is their "illegality." 


What would happen if we stopped seeing undocumented immigrants – or economic refugees, or unauthorized residents, or whatever you wish to call them – as collectivities and started seeing them first and foremost as human beings? To recognize that their nature is not that of a worker, or an immigrant, or a deportee, but as aperson? To remember that every single one of these people, whether they come from Mexico or Guatemala or Laos or China or Haiti or Ghana or Senegal, is a unique person, with their own story, their own set of loved ones, their own individuality?


Maybe it would be easier to give a damn and to treat them with a little bit more respect.


And maybe once we recognize their humanity, and listen to their stories, putting them in global context, we could begin to recognize that the people who are disparagingly called "illegals" aren't the bad guys in the immigration debate.

Engaged

My boyfriend and I have known that we were going to get married for well over a year now, and we've been calling each other "husband" and "wife" for long enough that I can't even remember when that started. (Not in public, of course, because we are not legally married and don't want to confuse others, but we'll say things like, "My darling husband" or "my beautiful wife" to each other in private.) Our society's standards dictate that we can't technically refer to each other as "fiancé(e)" without a formal display and a gift of jewelry, but for all intents and purposes, we considered ourselves affianced.


So when he took me up to Foothills Parkway (this is in Blount County, Tennessee) and asked, "Would you marry me?" as we were gazing at an absolutely gorgeous mountain view, I just smiled and said, "Of course!" without even thinking about it. (When he asked a second time, I realized this was a formal proposal, and gave an unequivocal "yes." At least it gave us a funny story to tell.)


Picking out a ring was almost anticlimactic. We wound up with a silver ring with a Celtic design and a synthetic emerald stone. My grandmother, of course, thought it was incredibly insulting that the ring was silver instead of gold or white gold, insisting that she had never heard of a silver engagement ring. (At least she understands my feelings about diamonds.) Grandma also was shocked that it is likely going to be well over a year before we have an actual wedding, and could scarcely believe it when I told her that the average engagement period for U.S. couples today is something like seventeen months. Of course, one has to remember that (a) she grew up in rural Lithuania and what little she knows of wedding customs in the United States comes from who-knows-where, and (b) she got married at the ripe old age of sixteen to my grandfather when she'd known him all of three weeks. This same grandmother, incidentally, has had a wedding fund set up for me since way before I even met my fiancé, let alone had anyone on the horizon with whom marriage was a remote possibility... but never set up an education fund. You can see where her priorities lie!


What's interesting is how people treat us differently now that we are formally engaged. Empirically, nothing has changed except I have a ring on a certain finger. But friends and family alike are "squee"-ing and applauding and squealing excitedly, and asking us if we've set a date, where we want to have it, et cetera, et cetera, and prevailing norms dictate that we now call each other "fiancé(e)" instead of "boyfriend" or "girlfriend." Funny the difference a social construct can make. I guess we're officially in a sort of liminal state.


Now, the question becomes: How can an anthropologist get married without analyzing the whole process?

Online activism, fighting by writing

I've said before that reading the news and reading people's comments on the news are two methods of taking the pulse of society. This is what leads to a not insignificant amount of despair and frustration when so many of the public comments on news stories are profoundly against what I believe in (whether they are railing against environmental protections, rigid pro-capitalist diatribes against anything remotely resembling social and economic justice, racist and dehumanizing remarks about "illegal" immigrants, et cetera). But a wise professor has noted that there are groups whose sole purpose is to troll the internet looking for stories and blogs on specific causes, and to rail against them. That there is a virtual project by the Minutemen to look for articles on immigration probably shouldn't have come as much of a shock.


This is why I recently joined a group whose raison d'être is to provide an online voice to counter the often-hateful comments made on news stories regarding "illegal" immigrants. The idea is that, to quote the group's description and information:


We need to BE VOCAL (AND VERBAL) ONLINE. We can't just "speak" during occasional marches, nor can we think they will "hear" us only at the ballot box, and we certainly can't rely just on signs that end up in the garbage! Stand up and WRITE / FIGHT !... 


We will defend our friends, families, and neighbors by blogging after news stories and standing up to the xenophobic and racist "Comments" (reader-response blogs that are attached to newspaper articles) that are running roughshod over the immigration debate. We will support one another by coordinating our responses, and we will win the "turf wars" that swirl around every page of online news. We stand united for our friends, our families, and the future of our democracy.


To a limited extent, this is something I've been doing for a while on a much smaller scale whenever I came upon certain news stories on the Knoxville News-Sentinel. But this group takes it to a whole new level where members are encouraged to actively seek out news stories at the Huffington Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, et cetera, and post the stories on the group's Facebook page so that everyone else knows where to focus their attentions. They even suggest everyone to do their online activism in a specific time of day so that members know their fellow bloggers are there with them, virtually, although we're encouraged to do this virtual vocalizing at whatever hour is most convenient for us personally.


So far it has been... an experience, to say the least. The same rhetoric and misconceptions get recycled over and over again. Personal attacks are often made. I strongly suspect that some individuals (on both sides of various arguments) post under multiple monikers to give the illusion of additional "support." And some stories wind up with hundreds or even thousands of comments. Where does one even begin to address all of that? It's only been a few days and there already exists the distinct feeling of wrestling with pigs in the mud. An English professor once said you can't argue about issues of belief or taste, and it's become apparent that many of these individuals are firm in their beliefs and are not likely to budge on them any time soon. And – this is going to sound horribly elitist – I fear that there are many folks out there who simply cannot handle an intellectual argument. They don't understand what someone else is saying, so they get angry and counter with, "Whatever, you [expletive] liberal" and then go after straw men. How is that productive?


On the plus side, though, there are definitely also a number of individuals who are being far more sane on the issue, including those who are on the "other side" of the debate but who are at least debating intelligently rather than using "illegal is illegal" as their mantra without any consideration as to what that phrase means or the implications of it. I can respect someone who is respectful and open to true dialogue, even if I don't share their opinions. And of course it is a source of hope that many individuals are also on "our" side, calling people out on their xenophobic remarks and providing reasonable, rational arguments as well as emotional appeals.


I vacillate between thinking that this medium of online advocacy is the best idea ever, and worrying that this is relatively lazy "armchair" activism. Is responding in a virtual forum going to have the same effect as staging a sit-in in Arizona and risking arrest? (Especially for someone like me who has the luxury of U.S. citizenship, where the worst problem I would face would be a heavy fine, not deportation.... the only excuse for not doing something like this is my own cowardice.) Is it going to have the same effect as marching in the streets? (It would probably take something pretty extreme for an online forum to get a blurb in the nightly news.) Is the point to change the minds of the racists and xenophobes who are posting? (If so, I doubt that will work.) If the point is to simply be a presence, though, this may really be something. 


Environmental activist/author Derrick Jensen writes about how every day he asks himself whether he should continue writing or if he should go blow up a dam, and every day he chooses to write. While my own dilemma isn't quite that extreme, I can certainly understand being torn between more active modes of advocacy and the somewhat more passive act of simply writing about one's beliefs. Is the pen mightier than both the sword and the picket sign?


Émile Durkheim noted that division of labor in society is a form of organic solidarity, reinforcing social bonds through mutual interdependence. There are brave souls who will risk arrest and deportation by staging sit-ins, as well as relative cowards like me who can't bring themselves to do much more than march at a rally whose organizers went through the pains of obtaining permits. Even writers have their place in activism, though, for their words can reach a larger audience and perhaps educate others in a medium that may seen less "threatening" than carrying a picket sign. Antonio Gramsci couldn't do much from prison other than write, and his prison notebooks influenced the likes of Howard Zinn, Eric Wolf, Noam Chomsky, and David Harvey, who in turn have influenced (and continue to influence) countless others. I am no Derrick Jensen or Vandana Shiva, but am proud to say that my entry about the DREAM Act, cross-posted at Open Diary and at AlterNet, received several positive comments from people who said they'd never even heard about the DREAM Act before and were now going to write to their legislators in support of it, and it got positive "tweets" as well. (There was also a nasty person on AlterNet who posted several nasty comments, but that's another ball of wax.) To paraphrase Julia "Butterfly" Hill (who gained fame by sitting in a California redwood for over two years), we all make a difference; it's just a matter of the kind of difference we make. And, perhaps, the medium we choose in which to make it.


The tentative conclusion to which I've come is thus: Certainly, fighting by writing cannot serve as a substitute for more active activism. But it can certainly complement it. 


Thoughts?

News Story: TN tea party won't drop speaker for Islam views

Blogger's note: I am actually going to the Gatlinburg-ish area next week, but as I won't be arriving until Monday, I'll be missing out on the Tea Party. Somehow, I think I'll get over that disappointment. Although I would like to take this woman to task for what she has to say. As though people who call themselves Christians who claim the Bible as their authority have never perpetrated outrageous atrocities? And she's actually claimed on her personal blog – no joke – that "Hitler and the Nazis were inspired by Islam." Uh.... what? I'm all for free speech, but this just adds to the growing pile of evidence that a not insignificant proportion of Tea Partiers are racist and/or xenophobic. And maybe just a little bit stupid.

The video at the bottom of this post is the same video posted at the News-Sentinel website.

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2010/may/21/group-wants-speaker-dropped-tenn-tea-party/

TN tea party won't drop speaker for Islam views

• ERIK SCHELZIG, Associated Press Writer
• Posted May 21, 2010 at 6:40 a.m. , updated May 21, 2010 at 10:28 a.m.

NASHVILLE - Tea party organizers will not drop a speaker from a Tennessee convention this weekend despite calls from a national Muslim rights group that considers her anti-Islamic.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations had urged that Pamela Geller be cut from the Tennessee Tea Party Convention in Gatlinburg over her views on Muslims. Washington-based CAIR said in a release Thursday that it objects to Pamela Geller's presentation titled "The Threat of Islam."

Convention organizer Anthony Shreeve said in an e-mail today that Geller will speak despite those concerns.

"We will not follow any request from CAIR," Shreeve said. "We also believe in the right to freedom of speech as given to us by our U.S. Constitution."

Geller heads a group called Stop Islamization of America.

"CAIR is trying to get good, decent Americans in the Tennessee Tea Party to crush free speech by dropping me," Geller wrote on her blog.

The Gatlinburg meeting has been organized by a coalition of more than 30 tea party groups around the state that chafed at the goals and price tag of a national tea party convention held in Nashville in February.

The registration fee for the Gatlinburg event is $30, while the Nashville event that featured a speech by former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin cost $549.

Grass roots activists have criticized Nashville event organizer Judson Phillips' leadership of the Tea Party Nation for being too closely tied with the Republican Party and for designating the group a for-profit organization.

Phillips' group has scheduled a "National Tea Party Unity Convention" in Las Vegas in July.

The Gatlinburg meeting features a keynote speech from U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, and a debate among Tennessee gubernatorial candidates.

More details as they develop online and in Saturday's News Sentinel.