"Professor Trowbridge! Have another, dude! And tell us that awesomely funny story again about Chomsky, Said, the ambassador, and the poodle!"
Number one piece of advice is don't drink with the flakes....
Thursday, December 9, 2010
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My colleagues from my department try to get together once a month to drink, bitch, and laugh. It's always good to see them outside of work and it does promote collegiality, but I'm happy it's a short night.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I don't drink with my students now, but I wonder if I should start... when I was in undergrad, we often drank with our faculty. There was the token "art bar" and you could usually find any number of professors, grad students, and undergrads all bellied up to the bar or around a table. This created community. It instilled respect for the fact that my professors had respect for me enough to hang out at the bar and talk shop. It was some sort of common denominator that allowed us to talk about the art world as artists, not as teacher/student. I never thought twice about it until now... yet, as I do reflect upon it and how much I enjoyed that as a student, I can't imagine being comfortable drinking with my students now... is it that times have changed that much in 10 years? Is it that there's a lack of community where I teach (I don't even go out for drinks with my colleagues)? Is it that my memory is skewed? I don't know, but I distinctly remember bringing a case of PBR into the classroom for critique on my 21st birthday and I know my students would never have the gall to do that.
ReplyDelete**I should note, we weren't getting blitzed.
ReplyDeleteI went through a period of graduate school where I didn't drink at all...this had less to do with any moral issues and more to do with some medication I took that made me a meeaaaan drunk.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how other people feel about this, but I found being sober whilst our faculty members got tanked was a uniquely horrific experience. The head of our department would regularly get blitzed and end up in the bathroom or outdoors weeping. Another faculty member got "handsy" as a friend of mine puts it. And then there were the faculty members who cornered you and told you what a fuck-up you were.
Oh yeah. It was awesome.
And then we played charades.
As in any situation, never underestimate your own ability to be a complete ass when you're loaded.
(I include myself in the assness...I made out with some random guy from another Big Southern State in an elevator during a geography conference in Las Vegas, then we had 99 cent shrimp cocktails at Circus Circus. It was awesome.)
Oy veh. A very lovely grad prof of mine in the early 1990s had a little get-together at the end of a class she'd taught. I have vivid memories of a fellow student zooming through her house, arms extended, making airplane noises, culminating in jumps off her couch. How to drink like a gradflake: only with other gradflakes, please.
ReplyDeleteFuck the snowflakes, the endless hours reading, the struggling research... my favorite part of academia is drinking with other professors. The commiseration, the intense but drunken conversations, the gossip about who hooked up at what conference...
ReplyDeleteLOVE IT.
I don't drink, and the one thing I think I miss is the camaraderie it can engender. Of course it can engender all sorts of other things, and I know at least one person who did not get a job because they got plastered in front of the wrong people at a conference.
ReplyDeleteWhen I want a drink, I wait until I am home. One drink in any setting will get you labeled a lush. Worse, you could say something that you will regret. Why compound the possibility with alcohol?
ReplyDeleteI despise beer and wine but love to drink the hard stuff. Somehow, people who drink beer and/or wine are considered good, fun people. Hard stuff drinkers get tagged as future AA participants.