I Got Holes in My Socks, I Can't Get No Sleep

Last night PJMB friend KHD was talking about shit about my socks just because they're full of holes. She suggested I put "holes in socks" on my CV under the heading "Quirks and Affectations." Although, I suppose the main thing would be my tendency to shout "Fuck!" (or "Fucker!", "Motherfucker!", etc.) loud enough to be heard through my closed office door whenever I fuck up something I'm working on. Maybe that's best kept off the CV.

Doesn't Take Much Time for Plans to Go Wrong

A howl of pain from the Chronicle forums:

I didn't get the job. I cried so much last night that my eyes are still swollen. I have no other prospects. I went to the state employment agency yesterday, and the guy there directed me to a couple of $8/hour jobs, including one I applied for a few weeks back and failed the strength test. . . .

I'm going to take a few days and just sleep, play banjo, and drink beer. Then, I think, I will try again, but I don't know. I'm very sad, and kinda wish I could simply disappear.

God damn.

Welcome to the New World Order

Call Tom Friedman! I came back from a relaxing weekend away from my e-mail to find my inbox full of honest-to-god globalization!

This paper I just had accepted a little while ago? I guess the journal's doing my page proofs, and they e-mailed to check up on a little detail. The e-mail came from some guy in Mylapore, India. The guy works for something called Scientific Publishing Services. So this journal's outsourcing their copyeditting to some Indian publishing company. Seriously. I had no idea this went on, but after a little looking around, it looks like it's SOP. Who knew? What a flat, flat world we live in, no? Very flat. No bumps at all.

This also helps explain why the journal in question seems to work at light speed, as opposed the worst offender of the other journals currently sitting on my papers. At this journal, someone's actually working. You know, as opposed to letting papers collect in some random e-mail inbox, unread for months and months and months. On a related semantic point, can you call it "outsourcing" if in your home country the work never actually gets done?

Let Me Drink When I'm Dry, A Dollar When I'm Hard Up, Religion When I Die

It’s late. When it's late it’s hard for me not to daydream about what I’m going to do with my money when I make more than 20k. Thinking about those nights last fall when I got home at midnight, after a day of working on my writing samples, teaching, and dealing with the Old World Septuagenarian and Evil Columbo—thinking about those nights, I really can’t wait for when I can afford Talisker and Woodford Reserve instead of Ballantine’s and Jim Beam.

Got Some Questions That I Got to Ask, and I Hope You Can Come Up With the Answers, Babe

From Eric Schwitzgebel, here's a good summation of the gender imbalance in philosophy:

At last weekend's [Society for Philosophy and Psychology], one woman told me she heard about a man there who was hoping "to get laid". She unthinkingly responded, "oh, I didn't know he was gay!"

Funny stuff. And it reminds me of story I've been meaning to tell. A friend of mine from my program had some good interviews at last year's APA. One of them got off to an awesome start with some sweet, old school-vintage sexism. My friend was let into the search committee's suite, got introduced to everybody and sat down. Usually, the first question in an interview for a research school has something to do with your dissertation or your research program or something like that. But one of the interviewers saw my friend's wedding ring and decided to go in a slightly different direction. The asshole came out the gate with, "So what would your husband think of you moving so far away for a job?"

That was the first question of the interview. The first fucking question.

Not for nothing, it's also against APA regs to ask that question. But what the fuck, right? Since the APA meets out its stern justice in the form of an asterisk beside the department's name in the JFP--the asterisk being the most terrible of all typographical marks--departments don't really have any incentive not to bust out any fucking question they want. "What reassurance can you give us that you're not going to spend all your time reading romance novels and watching "Martha Stewart Living"?" "How do you balance your work and the biological fact that you'll never be happy without babies?" "Are you going to be a total bitch when you're PMSing?" Take the asterisk like a man, and these questions are all good.

How'd You Get You So Much Money, Who You Trying to Impress?

A while back I mentioned how stupid I think fancy resume paper is. Who's dumb enough to get fooled by nice paper into thinking you're a good candidate? I mean, I sort of expect this sort of bullshit in the private sector. (Middle-managers are idiots after all.) But in academia? Who's going to look at the linen paper your CV's printed on say, "Damn, I bet this guy's an awesome epistemologist"? That would be idiotic, right?

Right. But of course, for some people idiocy's no reason to say no. Check out this guy's advice on how to put together an application package:

1. Make sure your name is on each page of anything you send. Easy enough to do with Word these days.

2. On fabulous white linen resume paper, I print all primary documents and staple anything with 2+ pages.

3. Compilation of packet:

a. Right side: originals
b. Left side: copies of originals on plain paper, with a cover page on that side with the title "Materials for Committee Photocopying" (seriously)

Okay, point 1 is good sense. But then in point 2, we get the white linen resume paper. Not just any white linen resume paper, mind you, but fabulous white linen resume paper. This is the sort of stupid that makes you wonder how a person remembers to breath. Why, you ask? Because, as we find out in point 3, as fab. as the white linen resume paper might be, the search committee's never going to see it. The committee just looks at photocopies. So why the fuck are all those nice originals there in the first place? Because you're not already spending enough of postage?

I Saw Men With Dreams Like the Ones I'd Had Beg Quarters Outside the 7-11

There are so many awful things about the eastern APA, I don't really know how to start talking about it all. PGOAT's the same. It's just such fucking nightmare.

Well, this Leiter post hints at one thing. It's a post about senior faculty moves and tenure track hires in 2006-2007, so run-of-the-mill professional gossip. But it's not about all senior moves and junior hires, just the "major" ones. What does "major" mean? For the US, it means moves and hires at the top 50 or so departments. What Leiter's post only hints at, the APA has to a sickening degree. Professional status, and everybody's consciousness of it, is one of the most basic facts of the conference.

There's two different axes of status. One's binary--do you have a job or not? The other's more of a spectrum. Are you from a top-10 department? Top-15? Top-20? Middle of the Leiter report? Bottom? Or are you from one of the 90 or so American departments that don't even get ranked? Top-10 makes you a Brahmin; not ranked makes you untouchable.

The axes combine to make different statuses. Obviously, having a job at a top-10 department makes you a fucking emperor. Being from a top-10 department and being on the market's not so bad, either. You're a princess. In fact, you're prettiest princess in the empire. Everyone wants a chance to talk to you.

But to be from a department that's not ranked and not have a job? I'm in a department in the middle of the Leiter report, and I felt it. You're invisible. Or if people actually seem to see you, it's not like they're looking at a person. They see you the way people living downtown see homeless people. You're just an unattractive part of the background.

So Quit Wasting My Time

A fews days ago I mentioned I'd sent a revised draft of a paper off to the journal I want to publish it. Well, I heard back today from the journal's editor, and he's happy with the revisons. That's a relief.

The thing that caught me off guard was the editor's speed getting back to me. He took four days. Wow. For some perspective, I've been waiting for almost eight months to hear anything at all from another journal.

Is it a coincidence that the fast journal's not a philosophy journal and the glacial one is? I feel like the answer is likely no.

Take Off Your Pants and Jacket

So yesterday I was making fun of job market advice I thought was way too stupid to need mentioning. Well, I was wrong to do so, and I hereby acknowledge the error in my ways. Apparently, some people are so fucking stupid, there's just no way to overestimate the stupidity of the advice they need.

Check this out. It's a poli sci prof's list of really stupid things she's seen actual candidates do. Most of it's predictable dumb-assery, like lying on your CV and telling the department you're not really interested in them. But it gets worse. Look at number five on the list:

5. Wear sweatpants. Give your [job] talk while sitting on a table swinging your legs.

Holy fuck. To repeat: someone actually did this. Down thread, we discover the pants were navy and black.

I really hate sweat pants. I mean, I really hate them. I don't even own a pair, let alone ever wear them out of the house. They disgust me. So I'm not really sure I can fully wrap my head around the idea that some imbecile wore a pair of sweatpants for their job talk. I'd ask how a person that stupid could even dress themselves in the morning, but I guess the real point is, they can't.

Forever in Debt to Your Priceless Advice

Consider this one more low drum-beat from far off in the woods, portending the approach of something terrible: a Chroncle article telling me I should already be thinking about next year's job market. Actually, that's good advice for anyone who needs it. I don't, since I had a hard lesson last year about how early you should start this crap.

Less good advice is this:

Be sure to update your CV so that it includes all of your recent accomplishments including recently published papers, newly awarded grants, and anything else you may have achieved since you last updated it.

Yes. Do remember to update your CV. Also, remember not to send one of your crayon drawings of prancing ponies as your writing sample, and try not to drool too much on any one piece of your application package.