The thing is that I'm up for tenure and if you are an academic, you totally know that's like going bankrupt while having the chicken pox with the world's worst case of insomnia and you are 17 years old, hallucinating that your prom dress is possessed by a demon while also developing a zit the size of a coffee mug on the tip of your nose.
It's more than just: Facing imminent unemployment. It's like facing imminent unemployment and you must parade naked through the mall without having taken a bath in three weeks. And then you will be judged on comportment. Your reward for your naked mall walk: You get to keep your job!
These sad analogies are my attempt to describe the indescribable. Let's just say it involves exposure, shame, humiliation, potential betrayal and it makes you realize that there's nothing more embarrassing in all the things a person does in such situations than attempting to maintain your dignity.
It's the strangest thing but for some reason, there's something about trying to maintain one's dignity that is simultaneously pathetic and degrading. Why is that?
In other words, tenure itself is pretty darn sordid and yet it's also the best excuse for not posting sordidity ever! It's the best excuse for everything, I think. And yet for some reason, it has gotten me out of nothing.
I hate that. I hate it when I suffer and there are no perks involved.
I realize this will only make sense to academics who are up for tenure in the next 3-5 years. I realize all the rest of you will be: You freakin' whiner.
And I am. Whining is a very central part of my life.
I try to hide the fact I am a whiner by relying on the fact that something bad is happening to me. I always misconstrue what counts as a good excuse. I complained when I put together my wedding. (I did this kind of fast...this excuse was only used three weeks before the wedding). At the time, it seemed like a great excuse. I felt I needed to use it as much as possible and I was pleased with my brilliance. Now, I hang my head in shame. It's always like that, with me and excuses. Whatever's causing my angst seems like a well from which I can draw sympathy, I do this and everyone goes along with it and then I later realize: Oh my God, no one actually cared.
Damnit, I felt that I had so many sordid things to say but then they require all this time to think up and write and this is what I don't have. Sorry about that.
I have decided to put married sex back into the category of sordid because damn, that's all I've got:
Now, you may have heard that married people don't like to have sex. Or that after you get married, you lose interest in sex. And then after you have kids, your genitals just dry up and fall off.
Well, I'm here to tell you that it just isn't so! The real truth is that you want sex but you can't have sex. Sometimes, you want sex so bad! Why is your spouse never around and/or why are you never alone when this happens? You think about it quite often! Will you get to or won't you get to? And how will you do it? When? It's just like being a teenager! And just like being a teenager, everything is all furtive and not quite the way you thought it would be. You might get to have sex but there will be issues. Especially if you forgot to exactly time the Curious George Record to find out just how long you have and so find yourself wondering throughout whether you are running out of time.
Except it's not sordid. Teenage sex is sordid. So married with children sex is furtive without the sordid. I am now writing about the absence of sordidness.
Sordid month isn't almost over, I should point out because I have decided that a month can be 30 days, and run non-consecutively.
Stopwatch sex! Isn't that sexy? Are there any porno movies where people must complete the sexual act within a certain number of minutes but are in fear of discovery? There are, right? Sexy housewife movies where the husband is about to come home? (Does the husband ever come home? Or does the next door neighbor stop by instead?)
Or is this just 1950s porn that people are still joking about and there is something much more sordid? And did I just prove to you how unequipped I am to talk about the sordid for an entire month?
The problem is that there's something about these attempts at sexual congress that make my husband so funny and we used to have time for that, before he was my husband and we were still young and in graduate school, classes starting at noon or later! This time, when I said 'hey this lube (recommended for conception) is natural." And he said, "sure, well so is napalm" this added at least 8 minutes to our time. Why? I don't know why! Because napalm is not natural. And yet the idea of natural napalm created much hilarity in our marital bed, as did his suggestion at my suggestion of patents for certain innovations on his part should in fact be shareware. So there's another puzzle--the mystery of really bad jokes. Why are bad jokes funnier sometimes? Why does sex/laughter not go well together and yet they are often conjoined--at least in my life?
Yeah, married sex isn't quite the same as un-married sex and sex with kids? Damn near impossible. At least when they're really little.
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