Grad Life / Erin Lee Mock
Summer Fling
I’ll never forget approaching the field in Prospect Park last summer for a friendly game of Graduate Center Humanities-on-Humanities softball. I squinted in the sun, searching for the group to which I belonged. Looking to the left, I saw a group of athletic teenagers sprinting with ease around their diamond. On the right, a number of corporate-by-day players, whose company uniforms barely revealed gym-toned physiques, and whose casual high-fives gave away a slightly off-putting confidence. In the middle, I found my people: a mass of twenty-and-thirty-somethings, categorizable only as skinny or chubby, faces flushed from unaccustomed sun exposure, wandering aimlessly around the bases, already discussing the location for follow-up beers.
Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely belonged with this motley crew. My blindingly pale, doughy calves were peeking out for the first time in months (years?) from beneath a pair of shorts, and the taste of a cold Hoegaarden was on my mind from the moment I stepped foot off the F train.
We were all engaged in the well-meaning activity, more psychological even than physical, of doing what we could to purge our sedentary cerebral geek identities for just a moment. Here we were, playing a sport, moving our bodies, and nobody could be picked last.
Graduate school is unhealthy. It does not have to be, it’s not in all cases, but I would venture that the average graduate student, without intervention, is essentially a physical and emotional mess. Most of us arrive with a good deal of pre-disposition: we turned to books because we weren’t jocks, because we had more faith in our minds than in our bodies, because reading didn’t aggravate our allergies, asthma, Osgood-Schlatters disease. Our bodies were uncooperative and, more often than not, in our way. We were accepted into graduate school because our college studies had remained uninterrupted by rowing practice or away-meets with the university track team. Our writing was often fueled by the creative flights associated with hunger, caffeine highs, and re-ups of high fructose corn syrup, after nights of furious alcoholic deliberations with others like ourselves about all those cerebral topics that allowed us to forget about our bodies.
What’s more, while reading and discussing what excited us, many of us in the Humanities found plenty to romanticize or, at least enable, our frailties and indulgences. I often justify my dependence on alcohol and caffeine through literary allusion: I drink hard like Joan Didion, Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, Ernest Hemingway, Harold Ross. I analyze the feeling of my body under the influence, like Walter Benjamin considered carefully his experiences of hashish and William Burroughs contemplated the world through the glaze of heroin. Many of us found inspiration not only in our heroes’ bad behaviors but in their justifications of, and contrarian delight in, those behaviors, as embodied in G. K. Chesterson’s snotty complaint that “[t]he trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind,” and Mark Twain’s famous remark that, “[t]he only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d druther not.” I find moderate drinkers, tea-sippers, and healthy breakfast eaters suspect and smug. People who function without the aid of at least 2 cups of my own required morning stimulant seem somehow to be quietly saying, “I’m better than you.” And I comfort myself, like many of my academic peers, by feeling smarter.
So, here I arrive, with so many others like me, at graduate school. Welcome to 2/2 teaching loads while taking 3 courses of your own. Welcome to a place where you can never stay up late enough because there’s always something you should be reading or writing or grading. Welcome to a gang of fellow social misfits, all of whom need alcohol as a social lubricant and a way of forgetting our many, many inadequacies. Welcome to not enough money to fund organic produce, vitamin supplements, and a gym membership. Welcome to too little time to use any of these purchases even if we had the cash. Welcome to all of this . . . without health insurance.
And while the chances of our finally getting decent health insurance look quite good (thanks to everyone who worked in that effort!), very little else about the unhealthy culture of academia is likely to change, if our current professors can be looked to as examples of what years of academia do to the body. Certainly, eight hours in the sack each night is even less possible when working toward tenure Going for your morning run around campus is even less appealing when you’re teaching a 4/4 load. And coming home to make a healthful home-cooked meal, much less shopping the farmer’s market for fresh ingredients, seems even less likely with committee work piled on top of ungraded papers and articles waiting for revision. One professor I know carries a flask in her suit jacket pocket so that she can start drinking on the train on the way home following afternoon classes. Another professor’s voice sounds twenty years older thanks to a strict diet of chain-smoking and candy since graduate school. A third professor claims he has not slept more than four hours a night since he started as a first year in the Ivy League thirty years ago. While the luckiest of us might gain tenure, which allows greater possibilities for lifestyle changes (a favorite professor of mine balances out her heavy drinking with a private yoga coach), our lack of health too easily becomes part of our academic identities. We laugh publicly about our borderline alcoholism, frighteningly sparse and/or processed diets, our pathological insecurity, untreated depression and anxiety, insomnia, and sedentary nature. In an atmosphere that can be competitive and divisive by field, discipline, period, or theoretical approach, it seems that our overall terrible health is one thing many of us share in common.
Moreover, many of us don’t want this culture to change because we entered it with all these predispositions; joining a group of people who actually shared, defended — lauded even — the most commonly condemned of our bad habits, made us feel better about ourselves and, despite all evidence to the contrary, surprisingly whole. It’s not the problem we don’t speak about, the problem we don’t admit, or the problem that has no name, but the problem we shout from the rooftops and, in doing so, unite in its perpetuation. It is as if, in accepting the infantilization we experience as graduate students, we embrace a childhood image of adulthood, where bad is good, we can eat ice cream for every meal if we want to (damn the parents/bourgeoisie/medical establishment/government for suggesting we clean the vegetables off our plate first) and we’ll stay up as late as we please, thank you very much!
With all this in mind, I embarked this summer on a health quest. While studying for my foreign language exam and my orals and preparing three classes for the fall semester, I sadly realized this might be my last chance to explore what it felt like to be in decent health. I vowed to exercise at least five days per week, to cut down on my ample intake of sugar and alcohol, and try to get many good nights of sleep. I set up a calendar above my desk to record and reward myself with stickers (seriously, it was mighty effective) for days without reliance on liquor and insulin spikes to fuel my reading or to chill out, and stickers for the days I stuck to my fitness routine. My calendar is bright with colorful metallic stars and, without question, I feel better. My sleeping habits have dramatically improved. I have been cooking, with actual recipes. I have replaced a significant number of black coffees with green teas. I have stopped feeling like I have a constant headache. And though I have not done it yet, the idea of learning to meditate suddenly doesn’t seem like a total joke.
What is a joke, and a cruel one, is any notion that this health kick of mine will continue when classes resume next week. I don’t blame the institution of academia entirely — I watched one classmate run the New York City marathon last fall after months of his turning down the free wine at departmental receptions — but I don’t think it’s a cop-out to say academia functions in a way that makes trying to care for one’s body and soul, in addition to one’s mind, teaching evaluations, and publication credits, more than a bit difficult.
My current plan is to stick with this health journey, but even now the idea of getting an hour of exercise in, showering, and getting dressed before my two hour commute to teaching sounds a bit farfetched. Making healthy lunches to take on my 14-hour teaching-office hours-teaching-office hours-teaching-office hours-class marathons seems overwhelming. Sleeping eight (hell, five) hours a night, with my orals lists looming seems unlikely. And hardest of all, I don’t know how I’m going to get through a faculty membership reception without a glass of the GC’s cheap wine. Like the graduate student softball player trying an athletic identity as a summer lark, I fear that my unhealthy inner geek, when my newfound health nut is faced with the slightest pressure, will always prevail.
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