Parliaments Are White People Cigarettes

Friends want to know:  is graduate school a continuation of undergraduate school?  The answer:  no.  No in terms of the amount of reading and writing one does.  The focus on theory and methodology.  And yes.  Yes in terms of people.  In terms of people who are burgeoning addicts/alcoholics.  Which is a vague, unhelpful answer to the question.  

At the English Department reception, everyone was smoking, talking about nothing, being alternately self-deprecating, ingratiating and self-congratulating, and drinking freely from bottomless cups of free wine.

Mingle, mingle.  Apparently academics thrive on conversation.  The lively ones eluded me.

"Have you started the readings for Literary Methods?  Have you read Poetics?"

"No."

"It's boring."

"I hate cats, but I am not a misogynist."

"My mother made me buy these shoes."

At one point the head of the department and I were discussing New York City.  He admitted that he had never visited the places where I briefly worked and lived (Harlem and the Bronx).  He stuck mainly to the Village.  When I started talking about the interesting things you find in the Bronx, he was more amenable to my enthusiasm since, recently, the NY Times published a piece about the Grand Concourse.    

If I ever was a famous author, people would probably enjoy my descriptions about them as much as people enjoy it when Jamaica Kincaid writes about people she knows.  However, this isn't truly about other people and how pompous or ugly I find them.  It is about me, as evident in my participation in the self-involved rigmarole of journaling.

I left the reception with a sore throat from secondhand smoke and a little damp from all of the white wine doused on me during an emphatic conversation about Tori Amos' decline since Scarlet's Walk.  I also left having perhaps cemented myself in the position of "Mama Hen," the one who will cluck about how everyone is destroying their health and who may herself acquire chronic stress from this choice of profession, but who will not develop any bad habits she doesn't already have (and which she keeps avidly concealed).   

I probably would take up smoking and binge drinking if I felt I needed to escape--if I was exceedingly overwhelmed by the dogmatism of hurtful ideologies.  Currently, I am exactly where I want to be.  Postcolonialism and gender studies are fields that challenge academia and want to transform epistemology.  If I was the age I am now but the year was 1950 or so, I would definitely be writing this with a cigarette in my hand.  I'd probably take up hard drugs.  (I say this after indeed having been on a binge--a binge of Mad Men).