Dr. Erika Alpert @ErikaAlpert@scholar.social

Frodo: “I’m glad to be here with you, Samwise Gamgee, here at the end of all things.”

Me, an intellectual: 😭😭😭😭😭

But I'm writing all this out just to illustrate how deep all these stigmas go, and how profoundly internalized they are.

This is classic Foucauldian stuff: Here I am, a self-disciplining workaholic, steeped in all the toxic modes of academic work and dreadfully embarrassed to have discovered I am, after all, only human.

How unreasonable it is all round.

And how amazing it is that knowing all this doesn't make me feel any less guilty and weird.

But you know, it also absolutely stings to get the reprieve and the focus that I need? I feel so guilty. Like I'm letting my department and colleagues down. Like they'll think less of me from now on, like I've proved unreliable, like they'll never think of me the same way.

Kind of feels like I'm ruining my career, like I've accrued debts I can never repay. My partner, bless him, insists that this is going to save my career, if anything.

So my book didn't get written. The extent to which my publisher can be flexible about a second deadline extension is... limited, but they're trying. Still, I'm absolutely at the end of my rope, and something had to give. I decided that something was going to have to be teaching.

I am SO FUCKING GRATEFUL to the colleagues who stepped in to help me out, at the end of the semester, with scheduling already in place for next term.

(What happened? 2 deaths in the family, 1 death of a friend/my department chair. Unearthed family secrets and my mother divorcing my stepfather in the way of her mother's death. An insecure housing situation with unreliable hot water, clean water, or sometimes any water at all. Moving house due to all of this. Advocacy on behalf of queer and mentally ill students in untenable situations. And my father was hospitalized last week as a bonus.)

Today I learned how to say "dickhead" in Kazakh AND Russian, you're welcome:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D2%9B%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B0%D2%9B%D0%B1%D0%B0%D1%81

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B1%D0%BE%D1%91%D0%B1

Bless my student for writing a paper on gaming insults.

And now... back to grading. Aieeee.

One day, in an absolute fit of elderly curmudgeonliness, I am going to stop accepting papers that do not indent the beginnings of paragraphs (especially when those paragraphs are also not separated by white space as in standard web style).

For as I tell my students, lo, I am old, my eyes are bad, they pass over many papers, and THEY ARE TIRED.

I will rot in semiotics hell for letting autocorrect mangle Peirce's name 🤦🏻‍♀️