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I turn 39 later this year and a variety of things that happened in 2024 made me decide there is no denying it: I am officially an old person if the youths are to be trusted. My body is giving up on me in multiple ways and I feel the ache of time as even 29 year olds feel impossibly young in both appearance and attitudes. I should have seen it coming since in 2023 while talking to some student workers in my library at our end of the year student appreciation lunch I found out that I have had the same cell phone number longer than her older brother had been alive. At the same time, I feel like hardly a real adult. I am barely self-regulated and need a lot of support to do what many seem to have no trouble doing. I probably listen to music too loud and stay up too late, stubbornly refusing to learn the lessons parents desperately hope to impress upon their teenaged children.
This is Annushka who is purring on my lap while I type this. She is my oldest cat and she has a very mighty purr. I don’t know her exact birthday, but she was found on the streets of Palo Alto in 2013 when she was 4 or 5 months old. I celebrate her birthday in May and her gotcha day in November.
Back in 2013, I was living in San Jose with an alcoholic housemate that was maybe also a narcissist. It was a really great place close to Japantown. It is closed now, but I would walk or bike a few blocks to this old school tofu maker. They only accepted cash and were open until they sold out for the day. If you went earlier in the day the tofu would still be warm. If you’ve never had fresh tofu you have no idea what you are missing but also I am sorry to say there are not many places that make it fresh. That place in Japantown was already an oddity that was holding out from the many pressures that replace all the family run stores with franchises.
In the summer of 2014, things came to a head with that housemate and she moved out. I would have two more housemates before I would leave California in January 2018. The 2nd one has in some ways come to represent all of the worst parts of living in San Jose. He was a programmer that through a series of events had become so crucial to a small company that when he wanted to quit they gave him a $100K raise. This was the same year that I and many other organizers in CalFac, the California State University system’s faculty union, came within 2 days of a statewide strike with our ridiculous demands like the first raise (we were asking for 5%) in 5 years and to set the floor for jobs requiring terminal degrees to be paid at least $60K.
He often had financial advice for me as I lived paycheck to paycheck with my main transport being a used bike I had bought 5 years before for less than $200. He told me that I could afford to go out more if I didn’t pay for Spotify premium. He didn’t understand why I would choose to spend my money for the cover to attend a jazz or blues show by myself instead of going to an expensive burger place with him and his exclusively tech worker male friends. I was then and still am now a vegetarian.
The last housemate was the best one and we probably interacted the least. She was the only one where we didn’t share any mutual friends. She brought two cats into the house to join Annushka. One of the cats, Blanket, kind of became my cat in some ways. He decided that I was a good sleeping companion and he loved the cat tree next to my bedroom window. He and Annushka became good buddies, but I think she was at least a little jealous because he demanded cuddles and lived up to his name covering my lap and then some.
Annushka and Blanket on the aforementioned cat tree in 2017.
In January 2018, I would leave California life and return to the East Coast. The cost of living as a single faculty member with significant debts from years of school had made it difficult on a financial front. A new Dean seemingly obsessed with controlling faculty like minions had led to more than one lawyer mediated meeting and near daily panic attacks. I probably could have used more therapy and less disassociation assisted with weed and alcohol, but I began looking for new jobs instead. I did interview for some other California jobs, but I didn’t get the one I really wanted and the one I took in Pennsylvania with a boss 3 hours away was too tempting and I pulled myself out of several other searches. A lot of California thought I was too loud and that I was angry with them when I was clarifying my point or just disagreeing with them or even just didn’t really care. People on the other coast would understand me better. I was sure of that. After passing 7 years in Pennsylvania, I’m not sure that is true but I was still young back then.
I didn’t mean to get lost in a reverie of that San Jose apartment when I started this, but I guess that is some of the point of a personal blog which is what this is. For almost 15 years I have been a faculty librarian at a research university. People who are unfamiliar with librarians or academia usually are not really sure what my job means. Lately, I don’t know what my job means… but that is for another day. For today, I will just say that a lot of what my job is is writing. Far too much is writing emails for my taste, but a major component of many that work in academia is that our jobs depend on being published.
How academics work both has and hasn’t changed since a bunch of German monks thought that we should maybe formalize this higher education thing more than a thousand years ago. Then as now, those new to the institution had to show in writing that they had something to offer and were worth keeping. Now that largely means peer-reviewed research in reputable journals that are still largely controlled by corporations that also invented the ranking systems that are written into many promotion and tenure guidelines across many universities in many countries. There are some shifts on that front in my career, but the entrenched powers are not giving up without a fight and I can at least say for myself that I am tired and have become doubtful that my boycotting of providing my labor to Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, Wiley, and others has done much to move the needle.
But that brings me to my point if I have one. (I usually do but I sometimes forget what it was until I am hoping to be asleep at 2am.) For the last 14 years, I guess more if you count my education, my writing has had to fit in a box that would be easy to explain to people who may think my interests are not worthy of the academic stamp of approval. What could games, comics, and queerness have to do with education? I will always recall the notes from a peer reviewer 2 that felt my proposal about lessons we could learn and apply from how videogames like Portal introduced new mechanics should be rejected because kids play games too much these days and we shouldn’t encourage them. I am honestly not sure if he (okay I don’t know it was a he but yeah it was) read past the title. All of my writing energy for the last 14 years has been spent convincing the peer reviewer 2s of the world to publish me so I could keep the job that I think I am pretty good at.
This fall I submitted 42 pages of writing, not including the full text of some of my publications, to see if I will get tenure. An Associate Dean who left long ago told me if I tried to argue my Cal State system tenure was worth something to Penn State that my salary would be the same and I would lose out on having the largest pay bump without applying for a new job. So I started again and kept the peer reviewer 2s in mind as I stretched where I could and tried to write what I found meaningful while checking off the appropriate boxes along the way. It will still be some time before I know if this gambit pays off, but as I reflect on if I even want to stay in academia or librarianship at all I know that I want to hone my writing voice in ways that aren’t so directly connected to my health insurance.
2024 was a very hard year in a lifetime of too many bad years, which is all too common for a massive number of humans and animals alike. I guess probably trees too. I’m not ready to talk about all the bad and may never talk about a lot of it, but this post is a start to meet my goals instead of department guidelines. I want to write faster and let some of the many ideas I have possibly have life outside of my head. Maybe it will help someone avoid some of my mistakes or it could be helpful to know they aren’t the only one that made it. I hope it will let me feel like I’ve gathered all this information in my head for more than selfish reasons. If nothing else it may be a collection of the things I care about in the open because my object permanence is less than the ideal and I quite literally forget about things I love for too long if I don’t have regular reminders.
I’m not planning a writing schedule and I haven’t set any other specific goals. I also decided to skip a good deal that my brain said I should probably learn first like how to actually use github and markup and a bunch of other bits and bobs that would allow me to have more technical control over this space. But instead, I decided to just start.
You won’t have America’s ass with just a short walk every day, but that momentum can build to taking care of yourself in ways you might not have known that you needed. As I finally reconcile with the fact that I have to at least start taking care of my body by not waiting until I have the time or the work is less or the world is better, I realize that waiting for that star alignment that may never come to find out and share what I am outside of my job title means I will probably never do it. Long before the undergraduates that make up most of my library’s patrons were born, the internet was offering one neat trick to solve any issues you might have. Unfortunately, most never really turn out to be that useful and it just takes putting in the time and dedicating your attention to do anything that you think is worth doing.
But maybe if I get a balance board and use it a few minutes a day the creeping fear of that bad fall that you never fully bounce back from will be held back for a while longer.
If you made it this far, thank you for your time and attention. I know how precious a resource it is for us all. Here is one of the earliest photos I took of Annushka for your troubles.
P.s. if anyone has suggestions on not YouTube video hosting that would be dope because if I had one set up that would have been a video of her purring on my chest near the end of writing this instead of this photo.
