Victorianitas

My new and wonderful GP is referring me to a specialist to find out what's going on with my eyes. She's fairly sure it's not going to be anything terrible, although she did suggest that the migraines I've been getting for the past few years (thanks, academia!) might be putting too much strain on my already-damaged optic nerves, but thinks it's definitely worth checking, plus I should probably be seeing an opthalmologist regularly anyway shouldn't I, hmm? (I should. The reason why I never got that set up when I moved away to university is purely because I was eighteen then and thus obviously immortal.)

Anyway, in honour of that, here's a pre-operations picture from back before my condition was diagnosed. Thanks, surgeons!

Now that Article One - my baby, my firstborn - has gone back out into the world to try its fortunes once again, and I can step back and think about it without a miasma of nail-biting guilt settling over me, I've realised something strange. The part of the article I liked best, the one part I was happiest with when I finished it the first time round, was grumbled at in both readers' reports. This in itself isn't surprising, but the part of the article I hated, the part I knew was weak at the time, didn't know how to fix without a major overhaul, and cringed at on re-reading, was received well. I know I'm not the most objective judge of my own work, but still, I can't help thinking that this is the academic equivalent of reviewing Return of the Jedi and telling everyone that the Boba Fett character was an unnecessary and irritating bit-part novelty, but the Ewoks were just great.

My patchwork blanket of summer jobs is still holding together well enough to keep me warm. At the moment, two of us are moving a large quantity of withdrawn library material into boxes and sending it off to loving homes in various departments, which involves a whole lot of stamping things with a 'Withdrawn From [Such-And-Such] University Library' and a small amount of making boxes. (Me and Dr K have agreed to ceremonially stamp each other's foreheads with that very same stamp when we leave here for full-time academic positions.) Because it's noisy and we need space, we get to do this in a gloomy area at the back of an old bindery.

Dr K got there before I did. When I met him there the next day, the gloomy area at the back of the old bindery featured:
- a desk,
- a decent swivel chair, on which Dr K was sitting,
- a computer, connected somehow to a network socket I didn't even know existed,
- a desk-tidy, filled with stationary that looks suspiciously purloined,
- and a phone. ("I feel like we're more important if we have our own extension," as he explained it.)

We might still be minions, but now we're minions with our very own in-tray.

apart from somewhere in the existential state of forgetting I have a blog. But yeah, mostly there.

I've been graduating (finally! FINALLY!), at what turned out to be the same ceremony where the first students I ever taught were graduating with their BAs. Lots of applause. And then my department forgot to invite its PhD students to their own graduation party, because they're great like that.

I've been finishing the Article of Pain, Doom and Despair, which is a revise-and-resubmit for a journal that I still think is way above where I should be aiming. But, the editor had some very positive things to say about the first version of the article (you know, after the 'no'), and the revised version is a whole lot better. I'm even happy with it, almost. So, yes, the article which has attached itself to my life like a remora and sucked out every element of non-procrastinatory free time for far too long is done.

I've been tidying my flat, although sadly not well enough to prevent it never needing to be tidied again. One day, one day.

I've been at work, too, doing (seriously) five different jobs in the same building. I have long since lost track of who I work for; these days I just do whatever I'm told so long as the person doing the telling looks vaguely like a librarian.

I've been doing a 1000-piece jigsaw, and pretending it's some kind of thinking time for working on the article.

And I've been considering going back to Article Two, the one I haven't done any work on since, um, March. Please hire me, universities of the UK! I am so very productive, between my part-time job and my jigsaw!

(via Dance)

Jobs I've had:

1 - Babysitter, for the world's quietest, sweetest baby. She slept, I watched TV. All paid employment should be this way.

2 - General helper/skivvy/extra pair of hands at a vet's. Maker of coffee, cleaner of cages, holder of newborn puppies and arranger of appointments. This job taught me about the meanness of herons (evil!), the most common names for dogs (Sam/Sammy, followed by Holly and Lucky), the theory of performing caesarians on Staffordshire bull terriers (messy), and how to get your insurance company to count your Land Rover as a work vehicle (drive the rep around with a dead calf in the back).

3 - Care assistant, at three different nursing homes. This paid the lowest of any job I ever did, and it was definitely the most physically demanding, but I'd still count it as one of the best jobs I've ever done. (Except for the uniforms, because apparently it's very important that nursing home staff should look like 1950s nurses, and the practicalities of moving fast enough to dodge unpredictable dementia-influenced punches in a heavy knee-length dress be damned.) The last place I worked at, a grand old building that served as various things over a few centuries, was once a GP's surgery where my grandfather worked in his first job after coming to England; I never knew him, but I was always "Dr C's granddaughter" to some of the residents there.

4 - Waitress at a golf club. I can still carry a plate on my wrist, as well. The strangest part of this job was having to chase down very wealthy people who were trying to sneak off without paying, and/or steal their steak knives (I KNOW!), but to do it in such a way that we could all pretend they'd just, you know, forgotten. The second strangest part was dealing with people who believed that if they Made Their Grievances Known in a Very Loud Way, the world would fold to accommodate them, no matter what those grievances were or who they were talking to. (Like the man who was very angry indeed about the size of the car park, and what was I going to do about it? Hmm? And he actually folded his arms and glared down at me in a not-prepared-to-take-'nothing'-for-an-answer way. I challenge you to come up with a response to that that doesn't end up at "...I'm a waitress.")

5 - Till-monkey ('customer assistant', whatever) at A Place I Will Not Name Lest Its Legal Teams Descend On Me, because I really want to mention that time someone brought back their fresh salad with a dead frog inside it (cute little thing, blue, covered in salad dressing) and Management were rather keen on us not mentioning that on the shop-floor at the time. Which was a shame, because we had a great line going in "This is not just a frog - this is a sapphire-blue Amazonian tree-frog, covered in luscious tangy vinaigrette dressing..." jokes. This job affirmed the rule that a friend once taught me about any customer-service job, which is that while 80% of customers will be polite, decent and reasonable human beings, the other 20% will all come along at once. Best customer line from this place: "I was told by the girl at that till I could find the poinsettias here, and I don't know if that was true or if that was just one of the ways you have of making the customer's life more difficult!" As a general rule, anybody who refers to themselves as 'the customer' is going to be a nightmare.

6 - Reformatter. Scanning and text-editing for the assistive technologies people at my university, so that visually impaired students can get the reading as well. This one's sort of fun, especially when the student's studying something interesting, but it's on a zero-hours contract and I only get work when there's work to get. Thus, it exists simultaneously with:

7 - General Library Minion, in various capacities.

8 - Various conference-related things within my department, which - despite the chaotic stress and the sixteen-hour days and the photocopiers that break down at ten to midnight* and the inability of Certain Academics to tie their own shoelaces** and the angry drunken arguments between organisers in the early hours of the morning*** - are huge amounts of fun. With dancing. And hey, you can sleep when you're dead.

9 - Language tutor for international students. Sort of. I don't know. It was an idea the university had for a while. I think they might still be having it, if I'm around next semester. Sweet students, good pay.

10 - TA. I don't need to say more about this one...

-----
* - A slight exaggeration.
** - Another slight exaggeration.
*** - Entirely true, sad to say, but at least I didn't start it.****
**** - Other party's accounts may differ, slightly.

Two plagiarism posts in a row. It's an epidemic!

The General Medical Council has ruled that Dr Raj Persaud, psychiatrist to the nation, has brought his profession into disrepute through plagiarising other academics' work in his books and articles:

Dr Persaud admitted plagiarising four research papers for his 2003 book From The Edge of The Couch.
He also admitted copying the work of two foreign academics for five articles he wrote for publications including the British Medical Journal and the Independent.
He claimed he was in a confused mental state at the time because of the pressure of juggling his NHS and media work.

[Italics mine, because I loathe the BBC News style guidelines of non-italicised titles.] See also this piece from 2006, at the start of the situation:

The psychiatrist, who has nine degrees and has written three psychology books, has attributed the similarities in text between his own work and the work of US professor Thomas Blass to editorial errors.
An article written by Dr Persaud in the February 2005 edition of Progress in Neurology and Psychiatry was withdrawn in September last year, after Professor Blass claimed that "over 50%
of his piece was my work".
Dr Persaud apologised for the error. He told the Guardian newspaper in November 2005 that the error occurred "when I cut and pasted the original copy, the references at the end were inadvertently omitted".

And from Monday:

The former Radio 4 presenter admitted plagiarising four articles for his 2003 book From the Edge Of The Couch.
But he denied that his actions were dishonest and were liable to bring his profession into disrepute.

So, in short: a) it was just a copy/pasting error that left out formatting, references and quotation marks, and he didn't mean to hand that version in, okay?, and b) anyway it's not his fault that he did, because the computer and/or somebody else messed up, and c) he had so many other things to write for that week, and he was really busy, and you can't expect anyone to think straight under that sort of pressure, so lay off him, and d) anyway, it's not like he was being dishonest.

The GMC should consider themselves lucky, considering. At least Dr Persaud's mother hasn't yet phoned them to complain about the verdict.

Interesting post at the (seriously compelling) sociology blog Scatterplot on the subject of academic citation:

I’m not sure any “necessary evil” part of this job feels like a more pointless waste of time than when I’m searching on the web to find where a book publisher is located so I can fill in the [city] field in the sociology citation format. I wonder when was the last time that a single human being anywhere in the world used that information for any purpose whatsoever.

Plus, the corollary frustration of explaining to students (especially students who've never had to do any kind of referencing or bibliography before, which seems to be most of mine) why we make them do such pointless-seeming things as well. Because it's the way academia works, and it's about consistency and clarity and that works better if everyone's doing it the same way, yes, okay, I know that History and Politics make you use a different system, but this is the system we use in this department because it's about - I mean, we need to know the - well - look, because I say so and I am marking your work, all right? All right.

The person who's worked out a fluent and convincing way of saying 'Okay, so your job specification asks for someone who can do X, and while I don't exactly have any experience of doing X, I totally could! Hire me and see!'

My advice for anyone with a rare neuromuscular condition that they're interested in learning more about, what with their GP being patronisingly useless and all: DO NOT GOOGLE IT. Trust me on this. Sure, you come up with some interesting articles in medical journals, and you find out interesting stuff about what nerves do what (including the fact that the cranial nerve you've most likely got problems with is actually associated with migraines and light sensitivity), but then you will read a little more, and a little more, and before long you're paragraphs-deep into articles full of things like "cerebral cortical and basal ganglia misdevelopment," "structural abnormalities of the brain," and "developmental delays."

The rational part of me points out that not discovering anything about developmental delays until I was twenty-seven and had a PhD suggests I have most likely dodged that bullet. The less rational part of me is jumping up and down in exclamation marks, wondering what bullets I might have been attributing to other things. I'm terrible at recognising faces; maybe it's because I have structural abnormalities of the brain? I can't tie shoelaces that don't unravel themselves and snake for freedom after five minutes; is that because I have structural abnormalities of the brain? Inability to function in a coherent state before double-digit times in the morning? Inexplicable fondness for Wham's 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go'? Maybe it's all in my head in a very literal sense.

Or maybe not, given the odds. Sadly for my irrational fears, I am fairly normal. But you can't tell me that your mind wouldn't have gone galloping off down that path in that same situation, any more than you can tell me you wouldn't also be thinking, right now, that such things should come with an associated superpower and waiting to see what yours is. Long, sad years of experimentation suggest that I am unable to do Wolverine-claws or fly like Nathan Petrelli, but damn it, there should be something. That would be fair, right?

I have this thing with my eyes. It isn't very common, and it took a long time and a lot of doctors to get diagnosed as a child. This didn't bother me much back then, because being a medical curiosity with a non-painful, non-fatal condition is sort of fun when you're young, and it hasn't bothered me much since, because, well, these are my eyes and I'm used to them, but it's bothering me right now.

My eye condition is one of the disorders collectively known as congenital fibrosis of the extraocular muscles (CFEOM). The eye muscles are filled with useless fibrous tissue, and so eye movement is very limited. I had ptosis (extreme droopiness of an eyelid), hypertropia (a type of misalignment of the eyes that looks like this), lack of binocular vision, one eye that wouldn't move above the midline, and one eye that mostly wouldn't move at all; the hypertropia, ptosis and limited movement got fixed after diagnosis, but the 2D vision is here to stay. CFEOM was traditionally diagnosed as a muscle condition, but later research has found associated issues with one or two of the cranial nerves (usually the oculomotor nerve), and the general medical opinion is now that it's a neuromuscular condition where the muscle problems arise from a neurological defect.

Following that? Sort of? Doesn't really matter. If you even read that, you're currently doing a better job than my GP, who is uninterested in reading my medical notes beyond a single word.

As far as my GP's concerned, my sole medical problem was hypertropia - a kind of squint - which was operated on and fixed. It says so in the computer summary of my records, after all! And when he went to get the paper file, clearly pissed off with my insistence that no, really, there is an underlying condition that caused that squint, as diagnosed by a paediatric opthalmologist at one of the world's best children's hospitals, no really it will be in my file go and look, what he read out to me was 'operation for hypertropia caused by congenital fibrosis of the extraocular muscles'. Which I think proved my point, but which he was equally sure proved his point, and we were left with him saying 'I think this 'fibrosis' thing is just the way they described your squint, but at any rate, you do not have an existing eye condition,' and me and my single contact lens blinking at him in bewilderment.

I promise you, internet, I am not making this condition up. Nor did I diagnose it all by myself with the help of Dr Google. I'm used to trying (and failing) to explain this to people, doctors and opticians among them, and I have a lot of experience of being a Mac user phoning tech support ('Okay, just click on the 'Start' menu...') and being a person with a difficult-to-spell name, which all comes in handy in such situations ('no, I can't see through both eyes - no, not even if I try very hard'), but not quite to this point. It was a strange, strange moment.

Also, a very annoying one. But you got that.

And the point of this is, the reason I was talking to the GP in the first place is that my eyes have started doing some weird things over the past year or two. Suddenly, bright sunlight has gone from being a minor inconvenience to being painful. I've started getting migraines, which I never had before. And in my reasonable sensible way, I thought, hmm, existing rare eye condition which is partly neurological plus photophobia plus migraine, eh? Maybe that's worth speaking to a doctor about. (Which of course I didn't, because I'm useless, but I did end up mentioning it to my mother, and she shouted at me, so I ended up going to a doctor after all.)

But my GP will not refer me to a specialist, because there is 'nothing wrong' with my eyes.

Sigh.

- Although you wouldn't think it, weather like this:



is not the best kind of weather to have. Notice how few of those people are smiling. It rains at Hay; it always rains at Hay; it's supposed to rain at Hay, and blazing sunshine just feels wrong. Thus, the atmosphere was a lot cheerier the day after, when the world looked like this:



Much better.

Anyway, for someone who doesn't much like hearing authors talk about being authors, I had a really good time. And I rubbed shoulders with Jimmy Carter (if only because it was really crowded and he and his security people were squeezing past, and I didn't have any idea who he was until afterwards anyway, but still).

£42.78 is what it costs to get one copy of your PhD thesis (if it's exactly the same as my PhD thesis) printed on the right kind of paper and bound in the right kind of way. You could buy a lot of things for £42.78, and most of them will flitter before your eyes as you hear the cost, but at least you will have your thesis, bound in black with gold lettering, looking like it's a real book that you really wrote.. For a second, just a second, £42.78 will seem worth it.

And then you'll look again at that spine, with a vegetarian-spotting-chicken-on-the-pizza expression inching its way across your face.

And you'll say, Um.

And there'll be a brief conversation with the book-binding people, who will go and fetch more book-binding people, and there'll be some muttering and some whispering and some "well, when did you claim you sent this e-mail, exactly?", and some (quieter) "oh, that e-mail," and some apologies. Which will not help you very much, because there you are in a city that is not your city, tired, rain-soaked, fed up of your stupid PhD thesis and everything to do with it, and wondering what else you could spend £42.78 on. Now. Today. If you just walked out of here.

And you're also sort of hung over, but it's not exactly hung over, because while you were indeed drinking last night and while your first words this morning were indeed to tell your friend to change out of that bright pink t-shirt right now because there is a time and a place for verging-on-neon and this is very much Not It, you were fine four hours ago. You were fine four minutes ago. The hangover that kicked in just then has nothing to do with alcohol; this, my friend, is a PhD hangover.

And the book-binding people will say, reasonably enough, that they can have the whole thing done all over again for you inside two hours if you don't mind coming back then.

And what you'll think is not even that you're worried about your thesis, or that your PhD is resting on this being handed in on time, or that you have done so damn much for this thing over the years. No. What you'll think is: but it's raining.

And although you will eventually decide that, oh, all right, you might as well, and you will come back two hours later (even soggier, even grumpier), and you will pay that £42.78, you'll surprise even yourself by how close you came to giving up the whole degree at the last minute just because you'd had it with going out in the rain.

What I was going to say here at first was that there's a teenage couple at the next table, having one of those painfully civilised pre-breakup conversations. Bit lips and eyes staring at the table, turning sugar packets into little pellets of damp, gritty mush in their hands while they talk. And I was going to say that I'm not the only person who's glanced over at them, and that there's something comforting about the silent, sympathetic "ouch" that just rippled out across the leather sofas and arty photo prints on the walls.

And then as they kept talking, I realised that wasn't what was going on at all, so I was going to write about the teenagers at the table next to me who were planning a party, or something, of some sort, and how the girl didn't want somebody else to be there, and the boy was disappointed by this, and the girl was disappointed by having to tell him. Except the way they were talking, it sounded like the idea of this being bad news was some kind of pretense, and that neither of them was all that unhappy at all.

And then it turned out that that wasn't it, either. So I was going to write something about how the boy at the next table was thinking out loud about breaking up with his girlfriend, and that his friend sitting next to him was giving him the kind of advice that sounds like it's helpful and platonic and objective, if that's what you want to hear, but isn't necessarily any of those things.

And then she hugged him and said "You should so ask Stacey out! She'd love that!" And he grunted that he didn't want to talk about Stacey.

So I have no idea what's going on at the next table, but God I miss being seventeen.

Dear Miss Not-A-Doctor-Yet,-Maggot:

Congratulations! Academic Council has decreed that you do, indeed, deserve the status of Doctor of Philosophy. As such, you are hereby invited to attend your graduation ceremony on [a weekday]. Please respond to this e-mail NO LATER THAN the end of the month, letting us know whether you'll be coming along or not. (And do bear in mind that if you don't, we'll still charge you a graduation fee, because we're just like that.)

In order to graduate, you will need to submit yet another copy of the thesis you never want to see again, bound and formatted in accordance with the following set of mutually contradictory instructions WHICH MUST BE FOLLOWED EXACTLY. If you fail to comply with these instructions, your thesis will not be accepted as fulfilment of your degree requirements, and we will send your phone number to every student you've ever marked down for poor presentation. The cost of a single hard-bound copy varies depending on who you get to do the binding, how quickly you need it done, how far you're prepared to travel and precisely how many fits you think you'll have when the quote comes in, but we can safely say that it's going to sting.

If you choose to attend graduation, you must either hire (if you have a lot of money to shell out) or buy (if you have a spare Jaguar to sell) your graduation gowns. Bear in mind that these colours, which confer the highest academic degree you have achieved, are the ones you are stuck with for the rest of your academic career, no matter where you go and no matter how much cooler everyone else's look. Nobody tells you to think about this when you're deciding on a university, do they?

Anyway, we just wanted to say congratulations again, from all of us at Registry! It's been a fun few years, hasn't it? You and us, together? We've laughed, we've cried (well, you've cried - we in Registry shed no tears), we've had lively, energetic debates about matters like whether or not we had the power to physically bar you from the campus - ah, good times. And now you're graduating! Wow, it seems like only yesterday that your whole year group came in to register for your PhDs. Remember that? How we managed to lose all your details and send you back and forth across campus in the pouring rain all morning as everyone involved denied any responsibility? Oh, your little faces!

Anyway, it's been a laugh. For us. Take care, now!

Hugs and kisses,
Registry.

(p.s. - we also have very strong views about what to wear under your graduation gowns. Oh, come, now - surely you have enough money to spring for another new outfit on top of the graduation fee, the binding fee, and the gown hire? God, you are such a cheapskate.)

I bought two more fish! Foolishly. Maybe. I'm counting this as a tick in the 'sensible' column, though, since despite all the cool marine fish and corals in the shop, I'm still sticking to freshwater. (But one day, one glorious day, they shall all be MINE.)

Anyway, the new fish are some variety of gourami. They were labelled as 'Sunset Honey Gourami', which I guessed meant they were a colour variant of the honey gourami (Colisa chuna), and this was good because it was honey gourami I wanted. I would tell you how long I've spent researching the best fish to put in the tank given its current inhabitants, but you would only point and mock. Let us just say it was enough for me to laugh knowingly and shake my head when the man at the fish shop told me that the dwarf gourami (Colisa lalia) would be just as sociable and easy to keep, and then draw a veil over my current fish-related geekiness.

However. The internet seems divided on precisely what species these are, with about 50% of fish sites and forums naming them a variant of Colisa chuna and the other half arguing that they're not Colisa chuna at all, with a subsection arguing to my consternation and distress that they're Colisa lalia. This is a problem - NO NO SHUT UP, hear me out, I'm serious - because some gourami species can be mean/prone to disease/mean AND prone to disease (Colisa lalia, the consensus of the internet's tropical fish communities is pointing its finger at you), and what if these end up killing everything else in the tank via direct attack or biological warfare? The worry!

They're sharing a tank with five neon tetra, collectively named the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (or some of it, at least) and an apple snail who was originally called Tennyson but turned out to have a rather un-Tennyson-like personality and is now known as J. Alfred Prufrock. I have not named the new fish yet. See, if I have to convince the fish place to take back these two mean gourami, that'll be painful enough, because they are such gorgeous fish, but if I have to convince the fish place to take back Gladstone and Disraeli? I just don't think I'll have the strength.