Last night, I met a smart, well-regarded scholar who writes about ________ and _______, and he dispensed some advice—apologizing, as advice-givers usually do, for slipping into advice mode (is giving advice always something you have to be in a “mode” for, like you’re that away of your programming and it’s the same as everyone else’s? yes?)—to the graduate students gathered around the table in the bar.
The thing, he said, about the lifestyle of academia is that you need a good support system. In other words, you need a good life with a good partner, so that chaining yourself to a computer to write out your ideas and make sense of your research is a real choice, not the alternative to a big nothing that makes that choice something like a delusion. It sounded a lot like he was saying, Hey, you dudes all need girlfriends or wives. Which was weird. As the only person at the table who is currently single but who tends to, uh, make out with people and then feel weird about it for weeks and weeks, I was struck by how much of a turd I am, but also by how terrible this respectable scholar’s haircut was. Dude needs to make a change. Then again, he’s pretty kickass in other ways, and hair grows faasssst. For the record, my hair is no museum piece either.
