Academia, What?

SANY1462
Originally uploaded by sarahkatina

It's been a pretty uneventful week, except for the daily joys of trundling about the city, looking at beautiful things, eating, playing with my friends, blah blah blah. I'm going back to Barcelona for the weekend, with Bri and Whitney, which I'm super pumped for.

Last Friday I had a meeting with Mattias, my Masculinity + Migration professor, and it was unbelievably fruitful. it was nice to be in the house of an academic, drinking tea, and surrounded by books and plants and talking about gender theory. He gave me a lot of really useful books and contacts that will help to further my project. For example, he asked me if I had read anything by Paul van Gelder, who is THE Dutch male prostitution expert. No, I said, because his work hasn't been translated into English. "Oh!" said Mattias, "But you know, you could talk to him! You will like each other very much!" And at the end of our meeting, I left his house with Paul van Gelder's email address in hand. It is times like that that I am sure that academia is where I belong.

But there are also other times. I emailed Christine a while back to update her and get an update (Christine, for those of you who don't know, is the woman who brought me into the WGSS fold where I since have been comfortably residing). I also wanted to pick her brain about History of Consciousness. She sent me back a nice long email chock-a-block full of the humor and bluntness that I had forgotten made me love her, and with a lot of information about the program. She talked about it as if she thought I could probably get in, if I play my cards right - and then she went into detail about what those cards are. it's not anything out of this world, but it reminded me that the life of an academic is more than sitting surrounded by books and papers and having revelations and publishing books that People Like and having cozy meetings with your students wherein you change their lives a little. It's also strenuous, and political - the politics of getting into grad school, the politics of doing and writing the right things to get you money and a job, the politics of academic self-representation. Maybe it's just because I'm still a little worn from the rigamarole that I went through with high school and IB and college applications, but I'm not sure that I have the patience for those games. Where does that leave me, though? I can't envision what my life would be without school, pens, books, an intellectual community. Maybe I just need to grow up a little before I can enter that world, and let go of my vague and unrealistic hopes of being a prodigy. Or maybe I need to use my mind to radically shape an intellectual world around myself and my beliefs. Possible? I don't know. Mostly, what I know is that I want to think and write as much as possible. I'm not sure that the sort of thinking and writing actually matters to me very much at all.