University II: Scholar's Revenge

Today my job shipped me off to the Congress of the Social Sciences and the Humanities, a yearly gathering of homo academicus. Every year it takes over a different university campus in Canada, hosting panels for a week, and leaving nothing behind but empty dessert trays and complimentary pens.

Or so the legend goes.

Sitting behind my company's booth, I wondered if it was appropriate to use newsie-style calls to entice the roving academics to pick up our book titles. Fortunately, I didn't have to startle them. We had dessert squares. The refined sugar did it all.

Some academics always seem hungry - like the memory of being a starving graduate student, and even hungrier sessional, has never died. Even post-tenure, they seem worried that someone will take it all away, and they'll be back with the rest of us, sunk deep in the dusty gutter of department-funded cheap wine and brie events.

A further observation: Roots Tribe Leather satchels and briefcases are the bag of choice for the ambitious young male academic.

A further further observation: The bag of choice for entrenched older male academics is whatever the hell they feel like. Now hand them a dessert square.

Wandering through the booths, looking at all the books I want to, but will never read, I felt a phantom pain for my imaginary scholarly career. With different choices I could have been reading that book, participating on a talk about that topic, dodging... that undergrad, and that undergrad's mother. Oh woe! I have the Roots bag (specifically the "Modern Satchel - Tribe"), but not the teaching contract to stuff inside it.

But I also never became a lawyer, or a doctor, or a writer, or any of the other careers I played mental dress-up before discarding. There's a persistent worry, three-parts Sylvia Plath's plums and one part Beast in the Jungle, that I will spend too much time trying to decide on what to be, to ever really be anything at all.

Persistent- but not overwhelming. I have always tried not to mix crises of being with events that have an official hashtag.

I shook it off, bought a book, and went back to the booth. I would have been a lazy grader anyway.