trivial

Tonite I was at a pub quiz with Michelle, Ness, and two of my new Aussie friends Davina and Claudia. Our other mate Cambo was going to come too, so we'd called ourselves 'Cambo's Angels' although he got held up at work so (story of my life) we proceeded without a man. I've always wanted to have a group of mates that goes to trivia nites, and I'm very pleased I've had a chance to be that girl, even just for a nite. (And, well, we plan to go back next week too.) It was really fun - lots of good questions that had us guessing, and I had a few chances to contribute... I'm usually pretty bad at trivia so I was pleased to be able to help out in a couple of places.

It all got me thinking abut trivia: the stuff that's not actually very important and yet is very interesting. Small, little bits of information that you could look up or google if you needed to but which it's fun to know off the top of your head. We all had our strengths, and I realised how large the gaps now are in my recollection of literature, my supposed field of specialisation. Luckily the main question was about Robert Louis Stevenson, including an extra point if you knew where he was buried; most other 'literature' topics and I suspect my team would have wondered whether i had a PhD in English at all. I also realised what small things I remembered, and why, and felt a bit like the main character in Slumdog Millionaire who has a speific account for every piece of information he knows - I know that agar comes from seaweed because I studied high school science with my friend Kirsty Agar, I know that a spinaker is a sail rather than a type of boat because i grew up in Auckland and remember driving around Tamaki Drive with Dad saying 'look the boats have got their spinnakers out,' and for some reason I know that amethysts are purple even though I'm not sure what that reason is.

Part of being an academic is being an specialist, but you're also called on to be a generalist much of the time. In teaching the early undergrad classes, especially, I find myself introducing students to writers and histories with which I only have a passing acquaintance myself, and when supervising postgraduate topics the student is necessarily doing something about which they know more than me (because otherwise it's not original and therefore not suitable for postgraduate level research) which means I spend a lot of time giving feedback about things I know less well than the student. When examining theses, I find myself providing specific feedback and having to make judgments about topics with which I am  familiar but, again, are not my own specific expertise. The same goes for reviewing articles, chapters, book manuscripts, published books, and fellowship applications; I know the general area but possibly not the subject under discussion.

Since starting sabbatical (and in 3 days I will be at my one month anniversary of being on sabbatical!) I have done all of these kinds of 'generalist' reading... this work is often framed as a kind of 'service' in whcih I am contributing to the big 'pay it forward' system of scholarly writing and reading: I read someone else's chapter now, and someone else will read my chapter later. I read my supervisees' writing now because someone did the same for me. And so on.

When I was telling my students about going on sabbatical, I would explain it as a chance to write, and also a chance to read. I suppose I'd been thinking about the specific reading I was looking forward to doing in my own research area and for my own specific purposes rather than the more generalist (and perhaps 'service') reading I've spent more time doing over the past month than any other task. I admit that I feel a bit frustrated that since being on sabbatical I've read so much of this other writing, which requires a different kind of reading than when I'm reading 'for me,' compared to the reading I've been doing for my own projects or interest (likewise, I've written heaps of reports and feedback but little of my own original work). Actually, with the exception of writing this blog each evening, this whole week has been taken up with focussing on doing this kind of reading and writing.

One option is to think about this generalist 'trivial' reading and writing as a distraction from what I should 'really' be doing - reading and writing my own specific stuff - and, while this is tempting, I am also keen to see what happens when I think about it in another way. If I focus on the 'pay it forward' system then this is just a part of a bigger process. An ecosystem of thoughts and ideas. An organism of many codependent parts.

I made an appointment yesterday to get my eyes checked when I'm home in Wellington, and I remember being told by an optometrist that the best thing to do for my eyes when I'm working on the computer for long periods is to move my eyes away from the screen to focus on the furthest visible point every once in a while. Maybe this 'other' (distracting, trivial) reading and writing is a refreshing break from all the focussed work, and so the problem isn't the existence of these things on my 'to do' lists but the proportion of time spent on them rather than on my focussed work. All of us know in our own parts of the universe that there is a fine line between a break and procrastination after all! Tomorrow I'm going to make sure I write something and read something 'for me' - I'll try to do this first, before any of the rest, and so will treat it as the protein on the dinnerplate rather than the dessert I will get to eat if I've got room after a necessarily big meal. I'll let you know how it goes.  

Yes, I know what you want to know: how did we do at trivia? Well, let's just say we got the same score as Matiu and his team get each week at Basketball. We won in our hearts :)