Not another mentoring talk
My own feelings about mentoring – and the category of ECR – are at best ambivalent. Mentoring in the professional neoliberal workplace of is one of those classic words that can be used to invoke or simulate institutional benevolence when there is actually a waning of reciprocity in the employment relation. Whereas once academia resembled a vocation, with a clear model of apprenticeship that led to security and stability, this is no longer the reality we face. This is part of the post-Fordist shift in economic capital and employment that is moving from organizations to networks. The form of recognition encouraged by the current regime is less about accumulation and duration of service, and more about flexibility and productivity. Put simply: you are only as good as your last five years, or even, it seems, three years. You only need to look at what is happening at my own university to see how this can play out.

Mentoring also suggests an ongoing interest in the development of a career, the gradual realisation of your individual potential. It’s not enough to have gotten the job. No, landing the job is just the first step in a constant process of planning, assessing and maximizing “opportunities”. From now on, there will be little if any time to sit back and acknowledge your achievements, and yet part of what I want to suggest today is that you must fight for this time. And beware of people offering “opportunities”!

This is because the system is set up to make you feel that you are never doing enough, just as technology has accelerated the amount of things we are expected to be able to do. This results in us all feeling like we are constantly behind, always “catching up”. How many times do you hear yourself saying that to people: “we must catch up soon”. The “catch up” is one of the principal manifestations of our present ontological bearing. At work, it occurs in small and large ways, whether it is the sense of defeat you feel in “wasting” an hour deleting email or the failure you might feel at not seeing your colleagues regularly for coffee. But mostly it presents as a chronic low level internalized suspicion of incompetence, that there just isn’t enough time to do everything you need to do properly.

While it feels highly personal, these are in fact the routine affects of organisational life today. It is worth recognizing the extent to which they are also the principal conditions of your labour that you can control – that is, once you appreciate that there is no temporal or spatial limit to the networked information economy that employs you. The network, which is to say the office, which is to say work and the prospect of doing it, will always follow you home. So part of what we need to imagine collectively is the degree of compensation we want for that new reality, as well as strategies to cope with it.

But I want to approach this in a slightly different way by focusing on the often forgotten fact that the university needs you. There is plenty of discussion about the competitiveness of the job market right now and an impending war for talent resulting from difficulties overseas. But there, as here, the system as a whole can’t afford to lose you. The market for higher education in English speaking countries may be transforming, and in Australia reconfiguring, but on a global scale it is not declining (Marginson 2011). Locally, recent research puts the figure of sector wide job losses through retirement as high as 35% (Hugo 2008, in Bendix Petersen, 2011). Current studies of workforce patterns being conducted here at the University of Queensland continue to identify the large numbers of employed academics who regularly contemplate leaving the industry, whether annually, month to month, or on a weekly and daily basis (I for one certainly count myself in most of these categories). There is genuine concern, which is to say that there is existing policy discourse, that recognizes a “lost generation” of academics that may or may not be recoverable. And while there are obviously many more PhD graduates now than previous decades, what I think this calls for is a level of strategic complacency among entry level staff that is currently under utilized.

By now you will have heard a lot about what you should be doing to get an academic career, and what to do once you’re on the cusp. You’ll have plenty of thoughts on the limitations of that formula. But the point at this stage is that you are all here; you’ve done something right to finish a PhD, or be hired, publish a book or win a grant. So now’s the time to make space to think about the kind of work you want to focus on doing more – and less – of. This involves identifying different styles of academic practice.

Expand your imagined audience
You can begin doing this by thinking about the audiences you want for your thinking and research. It’s tempting to think that the audience for your contribution is the reader, the person who happens to find your article or buy your book. This is only a very small audience. In relation to the multiple publics you address day to day, your readership may be the smallest. In teaching and research jobs, your audience includes your students (undergrad, postgrad) and your colleagues (department peers, committee colleagues, superiors). You probably engage in written communication daily with all of them – but do you count that writing as output? Do you count it as part of your intellectual project? If not, why not?

Here I’m trying to offer ways to think about scale: the audience for your work can have local, national, and international reach. It’s a continuum of interaction and it all matters. One nice email can change the course of a student’s day, even her year; but we tend to want to think that it is our scholarly papers that will change the world. Identifying the many audiences for your practice is an empowering thing.

Publishing: realistic outputs, actual numbers.
How many publications is enough? Homework: check your university’s minimum requirements for research output. Some of my closest colleagues with dozens of publications still think they haven’t done “enough”. Yet they have already published more than most Professors had at the same age. There is a self-punishing dimension to the productivity imperative that today’s PhD graduates have experienced. It has genuine effects on people’s sense of self-worth as well as damaging effects on the research being conducted.

What helps with planning your writing and pacing it? Counting each stage of writing. When you are considering submitting something for publication, or wrestling with the fantastic “opportunity” that’s been offered, take account of how much time it takes to write even a short academic article. I can think of this many steps, but there are more:

Planning the proposal, proposing, planning the writing, writing, rewriting, proof-reading, peer review, recovering from peer review, response to peer review, proof-reading, editing.

Double that for co-authorship (done well).

From what I’m told, writing is like having a baby. We have amnesia about how painful it is, because the end product is so amazing. To push the analogy: try to remember the pain, and that it can be very hard to make happen by force! Also think realistically about how much time you have free to write without interruption, at which times of the year. i.e. without teaching, without meetings, without someone waiting for you to come home for dinner.

Grants: motivations for them – different types – which one is right for you?
DECRA. Discovery. Collaboration. Linkage. Non-ARC (all external income counts). On ARCs, it’s a known secret that the best track record for an ARC is a previously funded ARC. But there are exceptions. Time spent working up a collaboration should be weighed against more time spent on your own writing (track record). Also against how much the focus will change. Assessors will reward something that’s coherent and distinctively yours. Assessors will also be wise to opportunism, and don’t necessarily favour seniors who are overcommitted. Again, be cautious about accepting “help” from mentors: what’s in it for you vs. them?

Teaching and service: making it work for your research goals.
• Course design and content – rarely will your teaching directly match your research. But even overview courses can help keep you in touch with the field (and you can turn lectures into writing outcomes too, eg. book reviews for peers, feedback to colleagues whose work you set, etc).
• Don’t give written lectures every week. Find alternative delivery modes (eg. radio, TV documentaries, student participation). This maintains your energy and encourages others to get involved in the course content/experience.
• Marking: Plan to have it happening regularly over the semester to avoid binges. Continuous assessment helps, eg. small tasks to mark in class or during consultation hours.
• Approach marking in relation to your workload. How much does your workload formula give you for marking? Preparation? Supervision? eg. Honours. Stick to it. Tell your students. Keep records.
• Committee work: inevitable, so try to find things relevant to your research. But don’t go every time. Every third meeting, perhaps. And not when it challenges a research deadline.

Offloading: Claiming time for research
Make time to plan what you want to do. Keep that time factored in to each week. Often we avoid scheduling research time because it’s not face to face – other people won’t notice if we don’t show up. Think of your research hours per week in the same way you do face to face teaching.
• Try to write for a short period every day rather than blocks and binges.
• Maximize the best part of the day. PRIME TIME! Tell others when you are writing so they learn to contact you later.
• Write lists. Try to distinguish between things that you must do, should do, or what would be nice to do. Have daily/weekly lists and don’t be hard on yourself if you need more time.
• Learn to say no, and when you do, say why, or suggest alternatives. Recommending other people for a job can save several people time – and help others.

Invoke strategic complacency
Academics, like other professionals, navigate a range of internally and externally imposed pressures to be productive – and to conclude I want to get you to start getting in the habit of asking: to what end? The model of worker that is rewarded today is that which is endlessly, limitlessly productive. The university will take everything from you if you let it. There are minimum performance levels but you’ll note that there are no maximums. You will rarely be told that you are publishing too much.

In universities today, it is also unlikely that you’ll meet anyone who doesn’t feel overworked. In this context, some of the strategies that can be most useful are discursive. To draw on some cultural studies terminology, you can use the hegemonic language – the commonsense of the university – to pursue counter-hegemonic goals. As academics, your goals are probably not even that radical: you want more time to read books and write. Have a weekend now and then. But it is increasingly obvious that these privileges, the ones that motivated many of us to join the profession in the first place, are unevenly distributed, particularly by age, race and gender. You need to understand that to be able to fight for it.

Replace productivity with strategic complacency. Use the discourse of productivity against itself. Start by using the language you hear routinely around you: “I’m just so busy”; “I can’t do it that day, today’s impossible”; “This week/month is crazy, I just can’t”. The best line I’ve ever been told to use is the simple: “I’m sorry, I’m fully committed”. If what people say is true, who will have the time to check what you’re actually doing? Take your own goals seriously, and set boundaries on doing more.

Setting up these strategies will help to see clearly the source for the multiple pressures you encounter – where they come from. Are they intrinsic (part of the make up of being an intellectual) or externally imposed? Are you just being polite when you don’t say no? Can you still be polite and excuse yourself from certain things?

Making time to organize and rationalize your time can mean you maximize the “good” parts of your job and make better decisions about minimizing what takes you away from them. This is also about developing some institutional nous. Learn whose job it is to take responsibility for things, who has the last say, so you don’t take on more responsibility than you will ever be recognized for.

P.S. The phrase “strategic complacency” is a hybrid term that is inspired by both the autonomist “refusal of work” tradition, and some very sound advice offered by my colleague, Chris Gibson, at the State of the Industry conference in 2009. In the closing session of day one, Chris urged us to exercise some “institutional irresponsibility” as an appropriate response to the more ludicrous conditions of our labour. This post is an attempt to bring these different influences to bear.

References
Simon Marginson (2011) ‘It’s a long way down: The underlying tensions in the education export industry’, Australian Universities’ Review, 53 (2): 21-33.

Evea Bendix Petersen (2011) ‘Staying or going? Australian early career researchers’ narratives of academic work, exit options and coping strategies’ Australian Universities’ Review, 53 (2): 34-42.

Every time I go home to Tasmania I tend to become very introspective about where I’m at in life. Taking holidays in Hobart and on Bruny Island – where I spent a lot of my childhood – inevitably involves trying to make sense of the physical and metaphorical distance that separates me from many of the people and principles I was brought up with. It is something I find extremely difficult to reconcile, and it often means I don’t feel particularly relaxed on holiday. But I do think it is vital to go through this experience regularly and to keep close to my (growing!) family.

Among the old friends I caught up with this year were E, an ex-banker who hadn’t visited since being convicted as a rogue trader; T, a registered nurse who has moved to Hobart after living for years as a tattoo artist on Venice Beach and the Cayman Islands; and B, probably my oldest friend, a superstar commerce graduate in town for just a few days.

For the past ten years B has been working all over the world for a major investment bank she joined at the same time that I started my Phd. Like me, lately she’s been wondering if she might be better off doing something else with her life, having worked so hard all through her twenties. Christmas morning had us comparing notes about the rhetorical strategies of cultish workplaces faced with employees thinking of leaving: “But you’re working with the best!” “What else would you do?” “This is as good as it gets!” And the classic: “But you’re so good at your job!”

These thirty-something dilemmas and the usual feelings of uprootedness were even more complicated this year, after six months of commuting between Sydney and Canberra. William & I have been in a long distance relationship of one kind or another for years now, and we should be used to it. But for some reason, being away from home this time round made me newly susceptible to asking what, precisely, it’s all for.

Evidence suggests I have always been the kind of child people describe as “bookish”. My dad was a farmer, my mum a teacher. Almost all of the women in my family have been teachers – but more on this later. Bruny isn’t the kind of place that can provide much support at the early stages of a writing career. The main industries are farming, fishing, logging and tourism (the latter to a much greater exent these days).

Now, when acquaintances from “the mainland” visit Bruny on a gastronomical adventure, I often feel a deep sense of melancholy. I have no right to do so, having left home 11 years ago this week. I suppose it’s an accentuation of what feels like my own personal conflict of cultures. Sensitivity to the process of class mobility – occasioned by the fact that I was sent away from home to “get an education” – plays out when I witness the leisure tastes of peers. It is perhaps a classic case of nostalgia: mourning for a home that has irrevocably gone; one that I felt the need to leave anyway.

In retrospect this has to be one of the reasons I was attracted to the writings of cultural studies pioneers like Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams in the first few years I was away from home. It is certainly no accident that, as a “scholarship girl”, I chose to dwell on their feelings of loss and mourning for the cultures of their upbringing. In those years I was not only feeling an extreme sense of culture shock. I was also grieving my mother, who died the year after I moved to Sydney. These comings and goings are always likely to be tied.

Tasmania has an extensive community of ex-pats. Bruny I’m less sure about. Taking the famous adventure cruise this past New Years Day, the boat was captained by F, the daughter of one of our nearest neighbours on Cloudy Bay Road. (There “neighbour” means someone who is only a 10 minute drive away). F is a mad surfer and it made me so happy to see her taking command of the vessel, showing her home to the world with such pride.

It was different for me. Like a lot of Bruny kids, I was sent to school in the city at a certain age. I would have been about 7 when it started. On Sunday afternoons Mum drove my brother and I up to “town” (Hobart) and we would stay with my grandparents during the week. Mum taught at the same school we went to. When I wasn’t avoiding her I was spending interminably long afternoons in the car waiting for her to finish work.

By the time I reached high school my parents were able to buy a home in the city, with some help from Nanna, I think. These were the days of record interest rates and the wool stockpile. Dad was reminding us just the other day: oversupply in the livestock industry was so bad that the federal government was subsidising farmers for shooting sheep.

My dad is from a farming family. Some of my favourite photos are those that seem to glamorise the glory days of Tasmanian country life in the middle of last century. Football and horse-racing were major sources of investment, pride and fulfilment; social occasions hovered around religious and farming festivals, such as the Apple Queen.

On my mum’s side, Grandpa worked on the docks, for a fish shop and in the jam factory. The old IXL building is now a 5 star hotel on the waterfront – little wonder I feel conflicted about the tourism business! Before moving to Warrane on a housing commission scheme, mum’s family lived in a tiny place in Salamanca, almost next door to Knopwoods. I would make jokes about this in my twenties when mum dropped me off at the pub: “I’m communing with my roots”, etc.

Having been raised somewhere isolated, maybe it’s inevitable that I would be attracted by city lights. It’s not really that simple though. My brother has never wanted to leave Hobart, for instance. And I’ve never loved Sydney the way some people are prone to. I do like that it gives me options – like any big city. But a) options come with price tags and b) options aren’t so great for a Libran anyway.

For the past year I have been struggling with the idea of Sydney, with the role of teacher; exacerbated, no doubt, by the fact that I was a student in the very same corridors I now work. Given my family history, and the personal connection I’ve been forced to have with schools throughout my life, teaching seems an unimaginative endpoint – an intimate, almost masochistic discipline I continue to subject myself to. What others call a “vocation” full of autonomy and freedom feels to me at times like a prison or a conveyor-belt. I’ve never had any significant period away from school; I never left or took time off from the semester cycle. That said, marking lambs, herding cattle, pumping petrol and weeding baronia probably gives me a more diverse CV than most. And I wouldn’t do any of those things again by choice.

Of course the machinic imagery of the factory also describes the tendencies of an industry that seems determined to set a commercially profitable pace for writing, learning and thinking. And that’s probably enough motivation for me to stick around: it would be good to make sure some decent space continues to exist for “bookish” kids, whether it’s here or another city. A benefit of working at a big university is that it allows me to help a few of those without a foot in the door, just as it gives me a chance to offer some perspective to those who aren’t quite aware of their privilege.

While she worked at the Bruny school, my mum was a home economics teacher. Another of her roles was to teach “social skills” to girls who would hardly have thought to catch the ferry to town to have dinner in a nice restaurant for fun. I’m grateful that she took me with her to explore the world of education. But I wonder what she thinks of me now, teaching the latest forms of etiquette to the white collar apprentices vying to enter a new global elite.

I can’t ever be sure it’s what she had in mind.

Me & baby nephew, Noah. Christmas Day 2010.

The Pixies close their set with “Where is my mind?” at the Horden Pavillion last night.

After the Magic Dirt show at the Doghouse in Hobart some time in ’95 or ’96 my friends and I stole tour posters from the power poles all the way home. Dean played Fairy Park and I asked Miles to teach me bass guitar. Puppyfat must have covered every track of Life Was Better that year, with Jenna stepping in to sing on He-Man and Ice. Magic Dirt made sense when a lot of things didn’t. RIP Dean. Thanks for showing that real men can stand alongside ladies in rock.

Someone can’t RSVP for an event later in the year because she might need to have an operation. Someone who was going to come can’t anymore: the chemo is taking longer than expected.

A colleague gets her hair done before a seminar and wears a suit to feel more professional. She is the second person in a few weeks to tell me that most of her hair is already grey.

Now she has tenure all she wants to do is catch up on all the TV she’s missed.

A lover is attached to a football team and to cigarettes. Both break his heart.

A fellow researcher returns from fieldwork with a new interest in affect theory. She can’t get the memories from the sex change clinic out of her head and wants to know how to write about it ethically.

Old friends meet for lunch and before anything happens a pregnancy is announced. She wonders whether she should have known sooner if she really was a friend.

A visiting academic gives a lecture that talks about a homeless step-son. People want to know what is actual and what is virtual.

A former co-worker loves her job but misses the place she used to work. She says she can still get everything done each week if she just stays awake one night out of seven. We joke about the ordinariness of jet-lag.

Someone inspiring leaves for an indefinite amount of time. People improvise strategies of mourning based on their preferred visions of the past or the future – and what may or may not happen if she returns.

The contract worker we all feel protective about has given up coffee to stop writing emails so quickly. Another contract worker we all find endearing drinks coffee to stay writing into the night.

A neighbour’s partner banishes him from the house on Saturday to get an essay done. He can’t find anyone who will drink the afternoon away.

A collaborator isn’t showing enough signs of commitment, but she doesn’t want to raise the issue in case it means the project might die. It is one of the few things still linking them.

My best friends want to be able do things that aren’t as boring and disciplined, but they have mortgages, travel plans, renovations, responsibilities.

The number of people writing emails on Sundays.

The fetishisation of cooking on Twitter (as if food can forgive everything).

I will wake up on my birthday in Melbourne on my own.

My niece might not be coming to my wedding.

The next few days I’m sitting out the remainder of a month long stint in my home town, Hobart. Today I got back from Bruny Island, where I grew up, having spent the best part of a week there with my family sampling the delights of Cloudy Bay Lagoon. Thanks to William’s culinary skillz, fresh pipis, mussels and oysters were on the menu, which is a long way from the meat and three veg we were used to as kids. Succumbing to my hayfever, we packed up a little earlier than I would have liked today given that my little niece had just learned to say “cuddle”. Now we are back in Hobart, although we brought with us some amazing cheese and chocolate that, apart from oysters, are now the main things Bruny Island is famous for.

The whole time I’ve been in Tasmania I’ve been ruminating that things seem to have reversed since I left. Now the local city council is apologizing for discriminating against gay advocates, at the same time that others are retreating so spectacularly on this front (I will need to write about the Pope’s attack on gender theory – the vocation I chose over Catholicism – another time). Meanwhile Bruny has gone from being an embarrassing place to take my friends to a gastronomic and recreational wonderland. The hire cars and 4WDs that populate the island these days seem to be the antithesis of the rusty old utes I rode in as a kid, singing “Take Me Home, Country Road” and “Road to Gundagai” into the wind. Now I have to line up and pay the same ferry fare as all the other tourists. Not to mention the $20 pass to go to the lighthouse and the beach that my property backed on to for the past 30 years.

I feel alienated by a lot of these changes, even though in the wider scheme of things they are trivial. On the way back to the city today we visited a very sacred site honoring the memory of Truganini, and I remembered again the horrors that have been conducted in the name of territory and sovereignty on that island, in this state, and the country more broadly. The signs at The Neck might describe in detail what we now know about Truganini’s life, but that knowledge doesn’t help me know what to do with the potential that my direct ancestors may have been involved in these acts on land I also feel history through.

Clearly, these changes compel me to come to terms with the reasons I left home and the reasons I continue to stay away. I think some of the answers come from the fact that I’m writing this because Facebook is seriously compromised tonight, and I can’t read a message that’s waiting there about something not very important but from someone who has become very special to me in the past year. The function lag I can only assume is due to the number of people all over the world that are using Facebook this holiday to share their special moments with others. That, combined with the parlous state of regional broadband that I will bore you with another time.

Catherine and I have already written about the special kinds of intimacy that social networking and online culture allows. It offers a sense of connection between a range of people outside the normative arrangements of family backgrounds when this need for escape is pressing. This strikes me so much the greater when I am here, removed from the speed of the inner city. Even though I struggle to tell them exactly how much, there are so many people I miss when I come to Tasmania because they are the ones who have only known the side of me that could develop after I left home. Often these are the people who value things about me that my family do not or cannot ever know or see.

But for precisely the opposite reason, I love coming home because my family know those things that the rest of my life can never remind me of, or find the time to reveal. Until now there have been few opportunities to blend these two histories – but the last few weeks have made me very grateful that they can and do combine. Now I can at least tell Dad how popular his miniature donkey is on Facebook (!) and for Christmas I was spoiled with some selections from the Amazon wish list I added to this blog a while ago.

The wishlist exists not because I assume there is a huge crop of generous long tail donors out there, but because I’m about to move to a much slower broadband area, and I wanted to ask some of you without restrictions to help me stay on top of the TV I want to write about in future! On this… stay tuned to New Matilda this week for another Underbelly piece. I have been trying to display the Amazon list and my All Consuming badge here on the blog for some time now, but have been stumped by the new design layout, so if anyone reading is able to help me get the badges to fit my new design, I would love to hear from you.

When I get back to Sydney next week I’m finally moving in to a brand new house. After a lot of thought and hesitation, those in favour of a seachange have convinced me to live in Austinmer – about an hour and a half south of Sydney. There are lots of reasons for this, including what Genevieve Bell described to me as ‘the two body problem’ in academe. But mostly it’s time to start practicing what I preach, and put my work life in perspective. Waking up with the sun rising over the ocean should certainly help with that! Here’s to a happy 2009 for all of you as well – and to many more connections, online and off. xx

For the moment I will be continuing my current fellowship for as long as I can, particularly given the amazing material that is coming out of the second round of Working From Home interviews. But because my APD is a contract position, even if I wasn’t MOVING FOR A MAN as my senior feminist colleague so kindly put it, now would in any case be a suitable time to start embracing the serendipity of job advertisements and fellowship due dates.

Keeping a few different options in place and talking with several universities over the past couple of months has actually provided a fascinating insight into a range of different administrative structures. It’s also been interesting to reconnect or develop relationships with a range of people in my field, in sometimes surprising and mostly delightful ways. In fact, if it wasn’t so emotionally draining, the whole process has made me keen to recommend moving, or trying to, as one of the fastest ways to learn some very important lessons about academic life and your place in it. Then again, I think I *did* learn this last time I went on the job market… and had forgotten… which is why it is the right time to leave.

With nothing yet concrete, I’ve been gathering lots of opinions on what someone like me would be best placed to do in the current tertiary environment: whether a track-record in obtaining funding and fellowships suggests I should continue a research career, or whether I should pursue the traditional tenured route. This would finally allow me to contribute to a university program in an ongoing capacity (the problem with teaching at the junior level of a research only position is that you are generally confined to ‘parachute lectures’, that is, one-off guest appearances. This is an almost impossible genre to master when the courses and students for your teaching regularly change. It also means additional work adjusting lectures to meet idiosyncratic requirements, and a lot of diplomacy when the time involved can’t be justified for every request).

A number of higher level advisors have mused that mine is the first generation to have the possibility of a research career in the humanities–with new initiatives like the Future Fellowships, and recent changes to the rules for ARC Professorial Fellows. While this means they feel genuinely unable to give me clear advice, it also goes some way to explaining why I have often felt guilt-tripped or shamed by other tenured colleagues who argue that without teaching, you aren’t really contributing to or experiencing the full dimensions of the vocation. The news for them is: the profession is changing. Graeme Turner’s argument about teaching – a reflection building on last year’s CSAA plenary, and forthcoming in Cultural Studies Review – recognises this. It pivots on his perception that there has been a shift away from seeing teaching as the more glamorous and critically challenging side of academic work, especially in cultural studies. He cautions the majority of young researchers away from thinking that just because grants exist a career in research is possible. He also wonders, as others I’ve spoken to do, whether the grant system has significantly altered the self-perception of teaching staff, and how this poses real dangers. Among these we could list the careerism and competitiveness grant funding encourages, and the prospect that students graduate without having benefited from the latest research available.

With all this in mind, it doesn’t give me any more security to know that my efforts to prove that RO jobs are possible would be a interesting experiment for those in tenured positions to watch from afar. And as a close friend described it, just because a research career is valuable – in the sense that it will bring in more money for the university – doesn’t mean it is the right thing for me personally.

My mother was a teacher, and many of my aunties and cousins are too. Growing up around schools and teachers showed me how teaching changes lives, even while I was told as much by many of my mother’s ex-students (who were often from modest backgrounds in outer suburban Hobart). But maybe this history is precisely why I don’t think teaching should be the only way intellectual work should make an impact. Something that’s struck me this week is that my current position means there are now 3 people I directly employ who can pay their rent or gain a foothold into a job they want because of my fellowship project. And because of their help, I can write the three or four books I currently have underway which I hope will have their own kind of impact too. This means reaching audiences in the present and the future (or at least, this is what writers must hope) in more places than I could ever teach. I was reminded of this in Jamaica when I had conversations about my work with people from almost every continent. That’s not just fun, it’s amazing! And I so want it to continue in whatever job I may be lucky enough to have.

The thing I have valued most about this difficult period has been the generosity of those colleagues who have wanted to offer advice as friends, in spite of their professional location. The choice between teaching and research, one such friend has noted, is that teaching will still allow you to have a life. That’s the reason people fought so hard for tenure in the first place. The logic here is that the cycle of teaching and research provides the security – that is, the freedom – to operate at different speeds depending on what else might be happening in your world. Feeling inspired or getting stuck. Having a baby or losing a family member (my mum died during my PhD). Reveling in the ordinary or seeking travel adventures. Research contracts, by contrast, demand constant productivity, in spite of outside demands.

Clearly it’s hard to argue against that logic, since my research deals directly with the question of overwork and its many seductions. And yet, sitting here in the busiest kind of limbo, I can’t help but wonder whether there might be a way to prove everyone wrong.

Except that it is. Beyond the local opinion polls, Lennon’s resignation has to be understood in the context of a number of media campaigns–particularly in relation to environmental issues–largely run by mainlanders and which famously play to an image of what Tasmania should be rather than what it actually is and has always been for those who live and work there. Demographically and geographically it is a very splintered island.

I was briefly excited that The 7.30 Report ran the resignation as its second story before dissecting Clinton, but still, was there really only one Tasmanian academic commentator available to speak today? And without a local accent either?

Knowing almost nothing about the new guy I can only say anyone would have to be better than Lennon at this point. I was even embarrassed to join the bid for a Tassie AFL Team seeing his face on the front page. The new Premier has a background in IT which suggests interesting new possibilities for how the state might define its potential economic strengths. It’s also wonderful to see a lady, Lara Giddings, as Deputy. New blood, new hope?

Of course there was another high-profile resignation today, in the Australian blogosphere. Not being a Melburnian I don’t have much idea of what she did BB (Before Blog), but is Marieke being literal when she signs off with the words “I am richer for the challenge”? There will be more to write about this, but for the moment it is worth paying tribute to one of the first female bloggers in the country to successfully translate her online persona to the elite of portfolio careers I’ve discussed here before. Of course she is but one of many early adopters currently learning how to capitalise on the ‘broadcast impulse’, translating web work into recognised employment rewards. And when a paid job’s demands get in the way of blogging’s insistent temporality, she makes a choice many others have and will, without disowning blogging in future either. Good on her.

Since I last wrote a few big-ish things have happened. I am now planning Brisbane’s best ever engagement party having successfully proposed to my beau, William. Yes. Perhaps I am getting closer to the lifestyle implied in my blog title’s after all. Stay tuned. And after having been a bit grumpy with the state of blogging and internet studies for the past few months I’ve now written a draft of most of my thoughts for Catherine’s amusement or indeed despair. She may never come back to the country, but I will at least see her in Jamaica. We are scheduled to give papers on the panel we’ve organised with our lovely colleagues Kate C and Genevieve B. Finally, as is the way with these things, just after I threw my tanty about A-Listers online a bunch of good friends and colleagues have taken up the blogging mantle much more fervently than I. So it feels much less lonely here now after all.

That’s right people, the lesson for today is together we can beat the Googlearchy. Yes we can.

* This may or may not be related to the fact that I finally joined the Facebook group “RIP the Doghouse, Bav Tav & Round Midnite, c. mid 90′s, Hobart”.

LIBRA (September 23-October 22): Something’s got to give in your day-to-day routine, Libra, insofar as you’re balancing (or trying to balance) a brimming schedule of work duties, domestic chores and personal-care maintenance measures. If you’ve been managing it the same way for a while now, chances are that your desire to put in a good effort every day may be waning. You desperately need some instance of reinvention in the daily grind, in order to rekindle your passion for productivity. It could be something as simple as finding a new workstation location, a different type of exercise class, a shift in your waking-up and going-to-sleep times, or a consolidation of household tasks into one chock-full day a week. Alternately, you may crave a much larger change—a totally different job, a drastically improved nutrition plan, or a part-time assistant to help with what’s not getting done. It’s all about pulling a vastly relieving breath of fresh air into your stale ho-hum workflow. Otherwise, should you ignore the need for reinvigoration, the quality of your efforts will continue their downhill slide. And if any certain person (a heartless boss, a selfish spouse, a bumbling colleague) is standing in your way, refusing to acknowledge your ongoing investment with wholehearted support of these greater-self-appreciation moves, then maybe they don’t appreciate you enough.

For a while, the novelty of being a bit older than the characters turned into a pleasant enough holiday pastime given that the first time around I was quite a bit younger. It was also nice to have the chance to feel a bit reassured contrasting my own twenty-something progress — career wise, at least — with each of the uniquely goofy/ lovable/ annoying members of this claustrophobic clique.

But I can’t take it any more. Knowing what I know now, at the end of my twenties, the narrowness of their lives proves unbearably contrived. As another famous 90s Manhattan sit-com lady might write, “it makes me wonder”: was this show the greatest ideological ruse of the decade?

Leaving aside the complete disconnect between the theme song (your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s D.O.A…) and the perky lifestyle of adjoining lofts and lattes that enabled the narrative, I guess it never really rang true to me how this group of friends could plausibly be content to keep seeing each other so often. Especially at a period in their lives when so many people I’ve known have seemed variously broken, disappointed or emboldened to finally leave the constraints of a formative friendship group and move on, already.

Trouble is, for many of us moving on has literally meant leaving those one or two amazing and perfect friends we did want to keep with us for the rest of the life we were looking for. And now, the struggle to keep hoping for something somewhere better has left some of us exhausted and wanting to retreat to a place that feels safe — all the while knowing that we have changed, maybe just slightly, but still fundamentally.

For me this change has come from living my twenties surrounded by the kinds of people that would pose significant scripting challenges for a sit-com. Of course by this I mean that the vast majority of my ‘friends’ and colleagues are gay — or at least not straight, and even this distinction is still hard to discern on TV without an accompanying joke or pathology. For all its historical significance, The L Word is moving even further away from any credible relation to its theme song ( ‘this is the way that we live…’ ); meanwhile watching The Line of Beauty this month* has been a confronting reminder of the conditions faced by those a little older than these liberated lipstick ladies. As such important alternative stories emerge (thinking of two other powerful portrayals of AIDS in recent mainstream visual culture) I find it hard to even imagine the magnitude of the trauma that still lingers from that time — just a few years before Friends started screening (although Eric Michaels and Eve Sedgwick are just two of the writers who have helped me understand a little, and from a distance).

I was also forever changed in my twenties by my first long-term relationship, which was with an indigenous partner. This partly explains why I have found the last few days in Australian politics immensely exciting. But along with the usual challenges of monogamy and cohabitation, these were some major issues to reckon with, and once I’d moved state, there weren’t many people around to help.

Thinking back, I seem to remember this TV show being credited by pop-sociologists as marking the shift to ‘friends as the new family’ for a generation who had little choice but to move away from home to cash in on their parents’ investment in their future. It captured the prospects for mobility in our prosperous times, or whatever. But no matter how insistently positive those 22 minutes of content, they were never any match for the momentous amount of solitude that is still so constitutive of modern metropolitan life. Certainly after 2001, they would never compensate for the feelings summoned by the Manhattan landscape once it became associated with terror.

Watching Friends in Australia 2008, the ad breaks are dedicated to health insurance, STD prevention and skin cancer awareness. Ever stop to wonder why? Maybe it’s because the next generation need to be taught to look after themselves; maybe it’s because they are smart enough to see through the utopian promise, ‘I’ll be there for you’.

*My own half-cooked theory is that the ABC could only screen gay male sex on a Sunday night because the Australian Open was on at the same time.