There’s this joke where a pregnant and very worried woman asks her friend what will happen if she has an ugly baby. And the supportive friend consoles the pregnant women by saying, ‘Don’t worry. If you have an ugly baby, you’ll never know’. I just hate that joke. I don’t find it funny. But above all, it’s factually untrue. I believe that if you have an ugly baby, you’ll know. You’ll know and you won’t care. And now, my dear readers, you will certainly ask yourselves how I arrived at that conclusion. The answer is simple: my first essay was due two days ago.
As the more astute among you might have noticed, I just love writing. While there is no denying that I do better at certain kinds of texts than at others, on the whole I don’t care much what I write. As long as I get to put words on paper, I will happily type away at my computer for hours on end. Therefore, I could not have been more content when I found out that we had to write an essay. To make things even better, we were told to write a CRITICAL essay, which in my world means that I get to bitch on paper in fancy words and in complex sentence structures. This makes me feel like God’s gift to academia and to the world at large. But best of all, I get to watch all my colleagues (most of whom are somewhat less enthusiastic about the whole business because if you don’t like writing, this must be one of the shittiest tasks ever) have one mental breakdown after another. That makes me feel even more like God’s gift to academia and to the world at large.
Another aspect I love about writing academic essays is research because research means I can hang out in the library all day and read, and people will believe I am working really hard. Add to that the fact that the library is filled with colleagues more than open to a quick chat and a café that also sells cookies and you know why this is my personal version of heaven. Another aspect of research I love is the fact that you can make yourself appear much more normal than you actually are. Thus, I used the fact that I am totally obsessed with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra for the following paragraph. ‘One can catch an additional glimpse into the kind of arts administrators involved in the production of the concert by looking at job advertisements from the Musikverein and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. There are currently no job advertisements to be found on either of the websites, but due to previous research, two job advertisements of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra were available to the author of the essay.’ For ‘due to previous research’, please read: Gabi is a bit of a crazy stalker and she really, really, really wants to work for the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, which is why she regularly checks their website for vacancies.
But I don’t want to pretend it was all rosy. Truth be told, I did have my moments of despair, the worst of which came after I had copied and pasted and crunched numbers for three days although I was running a fever and could barely sit upright and then my brother told me that I might be on to something but that my data set just fell short of actually being statistically significant. Another low moment came when I read a bunch of user comments on an article about the financial situation about the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and it came home to me that I was a citizen of a country populated by stuck-up, frustrated and humourless know-it-alls. My favourite was one cynical comment about how the second violins could double as percussionists playing the triangle as they did not have too much to do anyway. If I were back in Vienna, the appropriate answer to this would be, ‘I’ll laugh about your joke next week when I have a free slot’. Don’t worry. That doesn’t make much more sense in German than it does in this poor translation. On the upside, the comments were the perfect cure for most of my homesickness (for years to come) and also encouraged me to re-work my essay and take out anything that reeked of stuck-up, frustrated, humourless know-it-all.
Towards the end of the process, I got rather bored with the subject and thus gave up all pretence of doing academic work and just started jumping to conclusions. Among other things, I concluded that if the audience and the musicians of orchestras were middle-class, the arts administrators would necessarily also be so. I do realize that guilt by association has yet to be recognized as a valid method of deduction in an academic context, but no working-class or upper-class person would be able to spend all his/her days surrounded by stuffy middle-class people without doing them in sooner or later in an atrocious way. Therefore, the lack of crimes by arts administrators against audience members or musicians reasonably leads us to the conclusion that they must also be middle-class. Common sense, eh? I even found a paper to back up my theory and a way to express this thought in quasi-academic words (‘[O]ne might reasonably assume that a position in which one’s colleagues (the musicians) and one’s customers (the audience) come from a middle-class background would pre-suppose a sound knowledge of the behavioural patterns of said social class.’)
And suddenly, my beloved essay was ready. And I saw that it was not good. I had given this piece of writing everything I had had to give it and it was terrible. I had put every ounce of my brains into this and then some and it didn’t amount to anything much. So, this is what it felt like to give birth to an ugly baby. You could see all its flaws, you could see all its ugliness and yet you could not but love it. So in awe was I of the ugly little bugger that I decided to announce its birth on Facebook. Little did I know what that would do to my colleagues. It was close to midnight on the day before the deadline and a colleague commented that she was still stuck in the library and expressed her current state of mind with no fewer than five smileys that looked like they were choking. Another colleague was ‘crying, screaming, projectile vomiting’ and I sincerely hoped that unlike colleague number one he had found his way home. Colleague number three had trouble hitting the word count and a few other mothers of ugly babies commiserated with each other. But we had done it. We had all written our first essays and no matter how bad they were, I felt we could be proud of that. At least I was.
