Today I bought an antique ceramic piece that looks like a knight’s head, and I pledged over $100 for a custom made dice rolling pad/thing/dealie. These were, of course, not items I NEEDED to have. But I consider it feeding my soul, spending a bit of the profit from my two winter classes on something other than food, utilities and bills.
But I’ve always collected toys. Sweet lord do I have a number of Funko Pop figures. I have game stuff everywhere. I have comic art posters. I wear graphic t-shirts and bright colored sneakers.
These were the things I loved as a kid.
I swear I’m not going for sympathy with some of the things I’ve shared recently, but sometimes the more somber things come out. My father left us when I was 3. My mother and I bounced around a bunch, trying our best to survive. I grew up quick in a number of ways. I didn’t hold illusions of immortality, I didn’t misunderstand money or safety or where things came from or how hard a person had to work for this or that. I never thought the world was fair.
But I like to think I’m creative. When I can’t take the world– like when I realize that a woman who hates education is about to become the Secretary of Education under a President who thinks that Frederick Douglass is a contemporary– I recede into my imagination. It’s a storyteller trick. I can entertain myself, or entertain others, with stories and weird connections between things.
This is true because I’ve always known how to play. Even when things weren’t a game. I had a weird conversation with my dissertation chair (hi, if you’re reading! Miss you!) once. I was explaining to her my thought process, and she said “you’re not treating this like a game are you? Is this a game to you?”
I couldn’t answer that, because as my brain works, academia is a game, but she didn’t want to hear that and we didn’t mean it the same way. It’s a very, very serious and important game, mind you– like the game of thrones where you win or you die– but at times the irony of how people act in the academy isn’t lost on me. I was, at one point, homeless. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was. I’ve had to claw and scratch to keep myself afloat the whole time I’ve been building a career as an academic. I had to move my disabled mother over an academic break because she couldn’t handle living alone. I had to leave for my first teaching job with $50 in my pocket for gas and hopes of a paycheck coming. I’ve been in life and death situations in my life. I know what danger is. I know how the world works.
But the academy itself seems like it’s pretty clearly a ruleset and it’s pretty easy to predict. Sometimes it’s a line of flaming hoops to leap through. Sometimes it’s an amazing experience about growth and development. But it’s a game. I mean come on, fellow academics, all we do is level up and gain new skills and level up. Full Professor is end-game content. Academia is the most gameified thing on the planet.
To survive the world we live in now, you need to remember the things you knew as a child, before you started trying to live in some sort of strange adult world. Because without playfulness and exploration and creativity and stories this is just a hard, cynical messed up world where unless you’re in the 1% with all the money and power you’re pretty much screwed.
So I embrace my grown up kid mentality. If you don’t like it… your mom. Twice!