Noticing

The south in September is just lovely.

I am co-chairing a section for our big national conference this year and as part of that job I had to go to Houston to meet up with the other chairs to do the nitty-gritty work of arranging papers into sessions and so forth. Anyway, I noticed some interesting things on the trip.

-- I realized that I am totally the odd man out on this division, and yet never knew it before now. I've often submitted papers to this division instead of to our special interest group and they've always been accepted, but it turns out this group is actually really super cog-psych ish (which I am not). Not only that but they consider the work of a lot of my colleagues to not really "count" as research, and sort of see themselves as the protectors of those standards. It was a bizarre slow realization on my part what was really going on. Like, you show up just assuming people will agree with you and then you start to realize that actually they're all a bunch of Republicans or something, and you're the sole closeted Democrat. And maybe one or two of them are actually tea party members, starting to let the crazy out because they assume you're all on the same page.

That said, these colleagues were all quite lovely people regardless of their stance on research. It drove home what a big divide there can be between my field and ed psych, and in many ways I am lucky, so far, to generally not have to deal with the fighting that can occur across the groups. My mentor and I have a grant with an ed psych colleague at our institution and it has been a great experience to co-create a research project together and learn from one another's disciplines. Our ed psych colleague also happens to be a really smart, nice guy, which also helps.

-- When you are getting ready to go up for tenure, academics love to talk about that.

Both evenings turned into an ad-hoc counseling session about tenure, and believe me I was not in the mood for the conversation to go that way. I think that full professors like to dispense their wisdom, be helpful, proffer advice, and so forth. Part of this is probably related to my demeanor, because I tend to elicit that type of helpful stance from older men, but I think part of it is also this universal desire to bring out shared experiences. Everybody has gone through tenure, and they all want to talk about it, and give me advice in the guise of re-living their own past experiences.

In general I do not mind this phenomenon because I do enjoy the sense of camaraderie that emerges. People like to mostly give advice that borders on the self-help or spiritual realm at this stage in the game, things like, "you just have to take a Zen-like approach to it". One person asked me outright how many publications I have, which I found interesting in how unusual a question that is. Nobody has ever asked me that before. It kind of feels like somebody asking you how much money you make or how many sexual partners you've had.

-- Most people don't like humidity.

It was still warm and summer-like in Houston, and I was acutely aware of how it was going to be my last chance of the year to experience that warmth. I think the highs were in the upper 80s, and it was humid, but it definitely wasn't uncomfortable or oppressive. In fact, I loved it. We took a walk around the campus at night and it was just so perfect in every way. The warm, moist air, the crickets still chirping, the stillness that comes after a rainstorm, the art installations and statues silent in the darkness, it was incredibly nostalgic for me. I am not sure why this is the case because my town has humid summers, but there is a particular quality to southern humidity that is somehow different from what I experience in my northern state. It felt exactly the way it felt in St. Louis, where I went to college. And I just love that feeling. It is so comfortable, so gorgeous.

I've noticed most people don't agree, though, and find humidity to be oppressive. I didn't find the weather in Houston to be hot at all but my colleagues complained a lot about how uncomfortable it was.

And now I prepare to return to my northern state where autumn has arrived -- in fact, it arrived quite definitively on Friday. Thursday was actually a warm, humid day there, but that night the winds were up, and they blew in autumn so that we woke up on Friday to a crisp, cool morning. The leaves are turning and starting to swirl around in the streets, and there is that particular autumn scent in the air. I do love fall and am ready for knee-high boots and sweaters, so it's okay, but this weekend has been a treat, a joy, one last indulgence in summer before returning to autumn, to students and meetings and harried drop-offs, to real life.