Sociology and Your 'Research': A How-to Guide for Professionals

I recently met a person from a faculty that shall remain nameless, although I will offer the 'clue' that it existed within the health research realm, and has only within the past few decades started to offer graduate level degrees based on research with 'human subjects' (their term, not mine). While working in the registrar's office as an undergrad, I discovered this faculty's penchant for graduating self-congratulatory, power-jockeying 'professionals' who tried to get in a fight with anyone who dared question their 'knowledge.' While conversing with this woman, I revealed that I was a graduate student in the department of sociology. She had the nerve to laugh at me, proclaiming "What could you possibly do with that?!" If this wasn't bad enough, she then went on to tell me about her 'thesis,' which was theoretically situated in the work of Goffman, completely unaware of the fact that he was a sociologist. Oh. My. God.

Upon reflection, I realized that a lot of people have this attitude towards our subject matter: it's a joke, it's easy, 201 was an guaranteed A so the rest of it must be, and it has no praxis. There's no clearly delineated career path associated with it, so it really can't be that important. I find that this attitude is especially prevalent amongst the professional groups in our society.

The irony is that when these said professionals take leaves of absence from their respective careers to pursue graduate level work, a large majority of them end up doing (often poorly done) research that's really just a spin off of sociology, but never seem to recognize and/or acknowledge this. As someone who has, in Latour's phrase, 'paid the full price' prior to even being allowed to do research (in the form of an undergraduate degree, an honours essay, a total of 4 methods courses, 3 statistics courses, and a year of graduate course-work), this really chaps my ass. So, because this online space is my personal soapbox, I'm about to be a totally polemic, non-gentleperson scholar, and answer the aforementioned question posed to me for all the 'professional' grad students out there. Here's exactly what you can do with sociology in your own research:

1. Completely rip off the nuance, depth and complexity of sociological theory and bastardize it into a rigid typology that 'completely' explains the phenomenon you're studying. Just remember: under no circumstances do you need to know anything about the disciplinary background of the theorist you're studying. It doesn't matter. The hundreds of years of social philosophy and subsequent social theory that preceded your entrance into grad school are totally irrelevant, and you don't need to know anything about them. Losers in the social sciences and humanities with no jobs can worry about that crap--you're a professional!


2. Read a qualitative undergrad soci methods textbook--while you're in grad school, or, more likely, in a graduate seminar--and learn a grab bag of methods, including ethnography, auto ethnography, phenomenology, narrative analysis and interviewing techniques. Do NOT try to delve into the philosophy of these techniques! Again, that is a concern for the jobless losers who wrote those books. You just need to know how to offer a cursory explanation of them to the children you TA, or the 'brilliant' powers-that-be who referee your professional journal. Any explanations of these techniques should not exceed a paragraph in journal articles, or one page in your dissertation.

3. Learn a couple of sociological terms, like 'informal social control' or 'master status,' and use them frequently in conversations with people who don't have post secondary education. It will make them think you're really smart and cool. Again, you don't have to know what these terms really mean, or who coined them. Just make sure you slip them into everyday conversation so as to convey your expert status.

4. When you meet a real social scientist at a social event, don't even respond to them when they tell you what they do, 'cause they probably don't really do anything except not make money. Remember, they really work for you: all of their theorizing, research, and publications merely exist so that you can put them in your lit review and then apply it to 'important' research. And, why would you bother entertaining a conversation with someone whose pay scales aren't available online on the CHR website? Without this key information, you'll never know whether or not to be nice to them, depending on whether or not they make more or less than you.

5. Take one course--just one--in statistics (descriptive should do) and learn how to write syntax in a software package. Then, tell everyone you know that you're a 'statistician,' which will make you look really cool and smart, especially to people who don't have degrees. Then, you can go and do cool techniques like data mining (fuck those sociologists who say that such practices run counter to the fundamental principles of confirmatory research; if you've never heard of confirmatory research in class, it can't be important).

On: Silence

To begin, I must apologize for the extraordinarily long delay. The past few months have been....revealing, to say the least. An existential crisis forced me to examine issues I was probably unaware even existed within my life, which in turn, resulted in a period of narrative silence. Dorothy Smith was right: experience is pre-lingual, and the Heideggerian assertion, "Tradurre è tradire" (to translate is to betray) seemed to ring true in ways my 'productive' life as an academic never could have prepared me for; I couldn't even talk about them, let alone translate the messiness of my experiences into the tidiness of grammatical and lingual rules. However, I like to think I'm not completely un-optimistic, meaning that this period of enormous personal revelation (or, 'shedding my skin,' as qmass (qmass.wordpress.com) would term it) was not without the sociological lessons that I'm always trying to extract from life. In no particular order, and bearing absolutely zero logical coherence--and in my favourite 'listed' style--here is what I've learned/thought about during this time (and am finally ready to write about) :

1. Medical waiting rooms are a sociological goldmine. The 'holy trinity' of sociology I've come to reify--based on the primacy of race, class and gender for personhood and personal outcomes--are contested within these walls, and appear as arbitrary markers of division that are somehow transcended by people grappling with their own mortality. Their truly is a primacy to health, making it (arguably) the richest topic that any sociologist could ever tackle.

2. Psychology will never be able to tell the tale of illness experience, given the relational nature of getting one's medical 'work' done: these day to day activities never exist in a social vacuum. To even enunciate your experience involves entering into communicative relationships with peers, physicians, pharmacists, and others, who, depending on their standpoint, will either validate your very being, or, in Max Weber's astonishingly prolific terms, give you "a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual."

3. I think that Facebook is bullshit. I know many wonderful people who adore it, but I honestly believe that it will eventually lead to arrested development, given that it presupposes a trans-historical and trans-contextual 'self' capable of transcending personal development that can thereby keep us all immutably connected to the past. I also it really speaks to the loneliness of the human condition, which makes me feel sad.

4. The most brilliant movies I've watched within these past few months present characters who defy dichotomous categorizations of being either 'good' or 'evil,' but, alternatively, keep you nervously awaiting their 'true' character, who is never fully or satisfyingly revealed. This truly is art imitating life.

5. In that vein, dichotomies are simultaneously destructively tragic and totally necessary. Opposing forces of good and evil, qualitative and quantitative, left and right, feminine and masculine, straight and gay, etc, etc, etc simultaneously create conflict (destructively tragic), but also force us into dialectic relations that promote a Hegelian 'synthesis' of the thesis and the antithesis, which creates change; this really is the underlying rhythm of our social fabric.

6. If you're gonna live in Cowtown, live in West Hillhurst (or somewhere close by). If Calgary is in black and white, this area is in colour. The trees, the display of alternative sexualities, the giant mess of fabulously rich and direly poor, and the juxtaposition of the young and the old create a 'pulse' in this small corner of a city which otherwise seems to be DOA.

7. And last (brace yourselves for the cheesiness about to ensue), I want to thank those few beautiful people who gave me the space to not narrate, to not produce, to not be reliable, and to simply let me go through it: Ma and Pa, Kaitie, Julia, Nate, Pauline, AWF, Dr. B, and others I'm likely forgetting: I am forever grateful.

Sunshine Girl/Cloudy Womyn

If any of you read the Calgary Sun and take it seriously, quit reading my blog. Or, keep reading my blog and the blogs of several of the posters, and get your sorry excuse for a self EDUCATED.

The greatest point of simultaneous tragedy and comedy in the Calgary Sun is the Sunshine Girl. She's tragic because she represents misogyny, patriarchy, the commodification of women's bodies, and the perpetual expectation that women should 'dumb down' as much as possible in an attempt to make men feel comfortable. Furthermore, she represents the rewards--albeit transient, unfulfilling, and intellectualy vacuous rewards--available via exploitation and the acceptance of such 'dumbing down.' And, if one needs to think about this in somewhat lighter--although still sociological--terms, the Sunshine Girl is pretty fucking comedic. Do I really need to expand on this? Do I?????

What if we had the antithesis of the Sunshine Girl featured daily? What would we call her? The darkness girl? The rainy-day bitch? The cloudy womyn? Whatever the title, I think such an effort is viable, and could potentially reveal the dangerous implications of this longstanding practice; if that's acheived, we'll have addressed the 'tragic' quality of the Sunshine Girl. If that's not achieved, it'll just be funny, 'cause then all 3 of us could read it and have a laugh.

So, I'm offering myself as a 'model' 'Cloudy Womyn' in this effort. Based on this week's Sunshine Girl coverage, I've composed some juxtapositions for the purposes of illustration:


"Sunshine Girl Dana....Our blue-eyed Pisces wants to be the next Oprah. As well as spending time with her friends and bengal cat Kadia, this 5-foot-6 fashion stylist enjoys playing beach volleyball and ultimate Frisbee, as well as collecting Trident wrappers and doing wardrobe makeovers."

Cloudy Womyn: Our brown-eyed Pisces wants to be the next Dorothy Smith, Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, or Bruno Latour. In addition to spending time with her unobediant and chronically-flactulating beagle, Bella, this 5-foot-7 sociologist enjoys studying the Hegelian dialectic and its connections to Marxist thought, as well as offering constant and unwanted advice on idealogical makeovers to the bougies she seems to constantly come in contact with. She thinks it's fucked up that anyone who isn't mentally ill collects Trident wrappers, and thus thinks Dana and her physician should consult the DSM (although it should be noted that Cloudy Womyn thinks the DSM is an incubator of dangerous and widespread social control).

"Sunshine Girl Jolene ... This 25-year-old sports fanatic says she has the perfect job -- working as the promotions co-ordinator at all-sports radio station The Fan 960 (although she does have to put up with morning show host Mike Richards serenading her with a certain Dolly Parton song). A beautiful girl who loves sports? No wonder she has a boyfriend and he's a lucky lad, indeed. "

Cloudy Womyn....This 23-year-old inequality-eradication fanatic says she has the perfect job--studying how oppressed social groups experience barriers to health care via a lack of cultural competence amongst health care professionals, particularly on the part of physicians (although she does have to put up with hack academics from non-social science backgrounds attempting to offer poor advice on how to structure her methodology). A postmodernist who also loves discussing the inappropriate bifurcation between theory and method? How the fuck did SHE get a boyfriend?! Is this a typo?

"Sunshine Girl Macy... Suffice it to say Macey is sizzling, especially when she's dancing to reggae and salsa music. A 24-year-old criminology student, she can handle herself, thanks to some karate lessons. After she graduates, she plans on getting a law degree and quitting her job at Hooters."

Cloudy Womyn....Suffice it to say Cloudy Womyn is bitchy, particularly when she's listening to people talk about their bank balances, and/or completing ethics applications. Formerly a criminology student--until she realized that traditional criminological approaches emulated grand theory to such an extent that the localized experiences of victims were silenced in the academic literature--she can handle herself, thanks to a bout of potentially serious illness. After she graduates (a contraversial subject, for she may not graduate....ever!!!), she plans on conducting research that critiques both lawyers and the practices of Hooters managment and employees, and in doing so hypothesizes that she'll locate deep and disturbing interconnections amongst all of her target study groups.

Beware the Perils of Calgary Driving.....

This past week, Calgary was hit by a snow storm that, 3 days later, largely due to global warming and an accompanying chinook, is no longer particularly evident. As someone who hates driving anyway, I get completely pissed and overcome with anxiety whenever one of these hits, and normally take refuge in a convenient location until someone a little more snow-driving-savvy can pick my sorry ass up until the snow plows do their thing. And I think I've finally figured out why these events are so frustrating. I don't know if these 'snow day' phenomena are particular to Calgary, but they annoy they fuck out of me nonetheless. My observations are as follows:

1. The 'I'm such a cool driver syndrome.' Whenever the roads turn to ice and our bridges/overpasses/major intersections turn into hockey rinks, there's always 2 types of vehice-driver combinations that give the danger NO regard: the first are people driving cars so completely incapable of handling it. They're typically behind the wheel of a dodge colt/hyundai (spelling??) something or other/or 1983 honda civic, with tires that haven't been changed in 17 years that resemble those on my bicycle. The irony of this crowd is that, in their completely inappropriate for winter vehicles, they're always getting so far up on your ass, and/or you see them barrelling down a slippery hill at warp speed in your rearview, wagering war on the bumper of your precious transportation device (precious only because without it you'd have a 2 kilometer distance for efficiently socializing in Calgary, the city of 1 million people and 3 bus routes). What are they thinking?!!!??!?!!

The second is the people at the other end of the spectrum--those driving opulent and totally unecessary SUV's (generally in the Range Rover, Jeep, and Nissan family, and contributing to said global warming at an alarming rate). They get a look of vindication in their eyes when the snow falls and the roads turn to sheets of potential injury and death: "Hahaha! This is what I bought this thing for!!!! Hahahaha! I spend $3498530945 a year on gas, and this is why!! Hahahah! You suckers in your lame ass economy vehicles!! Hahahaha! I pay my rent with my line of credit 'cause the financing on this thing takes up half my paycheque, but this makes it all worth it!! Hahahaha! I'll show you what this 4x4 can DO, bitches!!!" What' s hilarious is that our neighbour is a police officer, and he verified my assertions by telling me that it's exactly theSe two groups who cause the vast, vast majority of accidents.

2. The 'You're so stupid/I'm so cool' tow-truck operator. I'm not only completely hateful of driving, I'm also really bad at maintaining my car. Thus, I require frequent visits from AMA, making my $80 a year membership arguably the greatest deal in human history. However, not only have I, but several other people I've chatted with, experienced the complete patronization of these people. They routinely make comments like "Well....you'll know next time not to lock those keys in the car;" "Ya know, you could have just plugged it in;" or, my personal favourite, "If you'd checked the air in your tires, I wouldn't be here right now." Well ya know what douchebag? If you weren't here, you wouldn't be getting paid! In fact, human stupidity on some level likely comprises about 90% of the bases of tow-truck drivers visits. With very few exceptions, accidents, engine freezing, flat tires, and lock outs are due to both enormous and small oversights by motorists. Ipso facto, if people actually THOUGHT about the consequences of their vehicular oversights, these tow-truckers (often self-employed) would have a pretty sporadic and un-profitable line of work. Lesson learned: don't bitch at your bread and butter, dickheads. I probably put your kids through college by neglecting to change my oil. And my failure to own a tire pressure gauge probably financed your summer home.

I'm applying to the University of California for a PhD.

GSA Health Services Warning

It is hardly news that graduate students are often not the happiest of campers. Only recently, however, have scientists, psychologists, and discourse pathologists come to appreciate and diagnose the full range of maladies afflicting the graduate-student population. Now the publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Graduate Students (DSMGS-1), the first book ever dedicated specifically to disorders of those pursuing advanced degrees, promises relief to this long-suffering population. An excerpt follows:

1.Global Irony Syndrome (GIS)
Indications: GIS is an affective disorder most commonly characterized by the following symptoms: an erosion of belief in Enlightenment values; snideness toward the concepts of truth, objectivity, and universal ethical codes; cynicism about the two-party system and the wealth-leveling effects of global capitalism; an ironic stance toward all physical laws and reality itself. The onset of GIS is often signaled in the sufferer by the replacement of easygoing laughter with sarcastic smirks, and by the refusal to debate any issue except through indirection, punning, and sneering banter.
Prevalence: GIS has been largely concentrated in humanities departments, with occasional outbreaks in the "softer" social sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, government, and politics.
Treatment: Intensive viewing of It's a Wonderful Life has proved salutary. Failing that, a semester's leave spent in a hard-labor camp of a despotic regime is effective in more than 75 percent of reported cases.

2.Hyper-Theory Disorder (HTD)
Indications: HTD is a cognitive disorder distinguished by an increasingly abstract frame of mind. Sufferers gradually lose the ability to speak in a manner unmediated by poststructuralist theory. In extreme cases, sufferers come to view all aspects of popular culture (e.g., SpongeBob reruns, Oprah, the National Football League) through the filter of Heideggerian metaphysics or Lacanian psychoanalysis. HTD is often misdiagnosed as Tunnel Visionitis (TV), a similar, though etiologically distinct, malady marked by a gradually escalating inability to communicate with anyone -- including friends, family, spouses, and domestic pets -- who does not share all of one's theoretical presuppositions.
Prevalence: HTD is endemic to literature departments. TV, by contrast, is rampant throughout all disciplines, often hitting the natural sciences hardest.
Treatment: Complete abstinence from all French and German texts remains a controversial treatment for HTD. Until further therapeutic remedies have been discovered, a travel advisory for Continental Europe has been issued to all humanities students.

3.Sycophancy-Authority Malady (SAM)

Indications: SAM is considered a speech pathology increasingly common among advanced graduate students. It is marked by a tendency to speak in flattering, fawning, ingratiating, and even idolatrous terms to persons in positions of authority such as full professors, conference organizers, and powerful department secretaries. Oddly, sufferers of SAM, when conversing privately, tend to speak of these authorities in only the most derisive, disdainful, and even violent terms. (This syndrome is not to be confused with Manic Mentor Mimesis; see below.)

Prevalence: Cases of SAM have been reported in most graduate centers, though serious outbreaks tend to be concentrated in the lobbies, conference rooms, and bars of hotels hosting annual meetings of professional associations at which job interviewing is taking place.

Treatment: Tenure-track appointments were once considered effective in curing SAM, but recent studies challenge that conclusion. Those studies also suggest that tenure itself provides less relief than previously assumed. Researchers now believe that retirement constitutes the only fully effective treatment for this complex and poorly understood malady.

4.Manic Mentor Mimesis (MMM)

Indications: The disease, difficult to diagnose in its earliest stages, first manifests itself in the sufferer's subtle mimicry of an adviser's hand gestures. Gradually, the mimetic tendencies deepen and spread to include head movements and distinctive eye rolls of the adviser, as well as slouches, gaits, and even, if opportunity presents itself, dancing styles. As MMM becomes more systemic, tones of voice, sighs, vocal tics, and even idiosyncratic expectorations come to be included within the ambit of imitation. In its final and most humiliating stages, sufferers find themselves mimicking the dress of their advisers and adopting their hair styles. Typically, Acute Adornment Ataxia then sets in as the sufferer finds movement restricted by all the laser pens, cellphones, soda cans, backpacks, and assorted pedagogical props used by the adviser.

Prevalence: MMM is especially prevalent in departments, such as philosophy and mathematics, with high concentrations of eccentric faculty members. Treatment:

Extreme ridicule from peers outside academe, such as siblings and attractive baristas, has been known to abate the condition.

5.Terminal Graduate Paralysis (TGP)

Indications: This chronic, debilitating, and sometimes fatal condition represents the most serious and widespread of the many behavioral disorders facing the graduate-student population. Symptoms often appear in the fourth year of graduate study, though this can vary from discipline to discipline. Early signs are typically mild and therefore easily overlooked or ignored. These often include a subtle shift in media-consumption habits, from National Public Radio to South Park, and from professional journals to extreme-makeover television. More serious symptoms include compulsive retitling of the dissertation; a pathological overinvestment of time in TA-ing; a tendency to misplace routinely or otherwise lose or obliterate thousands of hours of work as a result of alleged computer failures (clinicians investigating these mishaps frequently find suspiciously mutilated hard drives). Advanced symptoms include substantially impaired performance on all cognitive tasks; hyperanxiety and night sweats; bibliophobia; comma-shifting mania; and a marked adviser-avoidance response. At its most extreme, sufferers display a deer-in-the-headlights appearance; epistemological aphasia (the conviction that one no longer knows anything); morbid feelings of lack of self-worth often accompanied by paranoiac delusions of victimization; a deepening of syntactic torpidity (the loss of the ability to write clearly, simply, and, ultimately, at all); a resurgence of teenage acne; even renewed thumb-sucking and bed-wetting. Failure to File (F2F) represents a particularly heartbreaking, and dimly understood, form of TGP, in which the sufferer mysteriously disappears on the eve of filing the completed dissertation, or otherwise inexplicably decides to "tighten" the argument.

Prevalence: Cases of TGP have been reported in every state and in every graduate department. The Morningside Heights district of Manhattan has produced rates suggesting a veritable epidemic that is matched only by certain areas in Berkeley, Calif.

Treatment: In its advanced stages, TGP is considered untreatable. For early-stage sufferers, long walks in open farmland accompanied by a complete termination of parental financial support has proved effective. Application to law school has also been known to offer relief.

(Authors: Lawrence Douglas and Alexander George).

The 'Gentleperson' Scholar

Oh, Frank, I miss you. For those of you who haven't heard of Frank, he's the brilliant, brilliant, brilliant philosopher, composer, musician, filmaker, chef....ahh, the list could go on, that I knew well during my undergrad. Sadly for many of us, Frank left Calgary in the fear that he'd die of boredom remaining here (probably a good move) and moved on to greater artistic and academic pursuits. But, his lessons remain. And the one that I remember SOOOOOOOOO much right now that he constantly grappled with? The gentleman/woman scholar.

At first, I never knew what the hell he meant by this, but as I've gotten a little older, and a lot more chilled out and less egotistical than I was as an undergrad, I've come to both appreciate and understand it. Perhaps what's most seminal is that I understand now why Frank would have a pronounced need to grasp and implement this in his own life....but more on that later.

The gentleperson scholar is someone who, parsimoniously defined, doesn't shit all over everybody under the guise of being 'smart.' And don't we all know people who don't fit in this 'gentleperson' category? I seem to encounter them more and more often: the academics who are hell bent on demonstrating to everyone within earshot that they posess infinitely more expertise than the 'philistines' they encounter in the world both inside and outside academia. They love to tell you about their publication record, their GPA, and they revel in the opportunity to tell disinterested friends and family members about their knowledge in, of course, only the most esoteric terms possible.

I have discussed this with several talented people (particularly Paul), and I certainly understand that much of this emanates from the insecurities that the academic environment seems to generate. Moreover, I completely recognize and appreciate the loneliness that can emerge from having a deep sociological knowledge of the world; we tend to recognize consequences--often unintended, and generally negative--of behaviours and choices that others simply take for granted as 'normal.' However, once we recognize this, can't we get past it, at least in our outside lives? Or must we be so hell bent on coming off as the expert that we alienate everyone but our colleagues (and potentially even them)?

Alternatively, Frank advocated the 'gentleperson' role, in which the academic seeks to engage people from outside academia in its tenets, but does that using a method of dialogue versus monologue, and in that, strives to achieve the goal of empowering versus belittling. Given that he came from a very working-class family and community, I think that he saw this as a means of remaining connected to his history rather than giving it a wholesale rejection in light of the enormously different worldview he acquired while studying philosophy. In this, I see much more integrity than those I know who abandon their past in search of more 'appropriate' or 'fitting' future; this seems so paradoxical, given that the people who know nothing of sociology (or philosophy, for that matter), are probably the ones who need it the most. And to assume that they can't understand it seems so arrogant! Perhaps it just needs to be framed in terms that resonate with them, which is a difficult task, but not an impossible one. This is evidenced within my own department, where a brilliant professor constantly seeks to share his own knowledge of illness experience with many people outside of academia; in doing so, I know that he's touched many lives, which is evidenced by the fact that everytime I attend a colloquial social gathering, somebody seems to have picked up his work, or when I was in the hospital last year for treatments, I'd see obviously socioeconomically disadvantaged, ill individuals reading 'At the Will of the Body' while awaiting their own treatments.

Is this not how we can acheive the goal of 'infiltration' that I've discussed in previous posts? By stepping outside of the narrow box of academic egoism and attempting to give a fuck about anybody besides ourselves?

I know this must seem enormously idealistic, but the way I see it, idealism is the historical root of our very discipline. Furthermore, I'm in my early 20s, so if I'm ever going to embrace such idealism, now's the time!

I'll get off my soapbox now, and just hope that this means something to somebody other than me.

My Favourite Words

Ah, yes....another list! Here are my favourite words to use in everyday language, and especially in my writing:

1. Predicate
2. Fresh
3. Receptive
4. Encompass
5. Extant
6. Prospect
7. Explicitly
8. Complexity
9. Parsimonious
10. Tangential
11. Emanating
12. Abstruse
13. Implement
14. Capacity
15. Concomitant

Don't you just love how words look? Although many of these aren't particularly sophisticated, they just sound so good!! Yaaay!

.....I'm officially a huge nerd.

Eat it, Caitlin Flanagan

Often, I accidentally think that the women's movement, and the tenets of feminism that accompany it, have finally entered the popular vernacular, and that we can now revel in equality with our male counterparts. Aspects this could include would be equal pay, equal opportunity, and elevated self-expression unconstrained by deeply entrenched notions of gendered expectations. But then, I shut down Microsoft Word, close my laptop, leave my ninth floor office, and enter the sad, sad reality of the outside world. Case in point: Caitlin Flanagan. This woman infuriates me:

http://www.elle.com/article.asp?section_id=37&article_id=8556&page_number=1

And you wanna know what really pisses me off? That people read this shit in volumes that I'm sure outstrip any authentic research and commentary on the current state of women's issues in North American (or global, for that matter) society.

So what's the solution? Should we, as sociologists, start infiltrating the popular media? And, if we did, would people pay attention to anything we had to say? And, if we chose to strive for household name status, would we have to dumb it down to such a degree that our work lost all integrity? I'm so confused....

To make up for my discouragement, I made my usual move of turing on the television. I watched American Idol tonight. Although I hate this show with the fire of a thousand hells, I do thoroughly enjoy the annual 'intro' episode, where you get to see completely misguided misfits humiliate themselves on national television. I think the toppers tonight were:

1. The juggling Minnesota adolescent with braces who sobbed and sweared like a psychopath (and I use that term deliberately, not in the generalized way it's so often thrown around) following his rejection; and
2. The woman who screamed out Bowie and Queen's 'Under Pressure,' and then subsequently made the claim that she had a 'degree in vocal performance' upon her 'shocking' rejection.

I really wish they'd create an entire series on these people. They're so much funnier, sloppier, and conventionally less attractive than the douches who make it to the finals. While I'm no marketing expert, I do think you could find a real demographic of people who'd thoroughly enjoy, and religiously follow, the trainwreck-ishness and embarrasingly authentic excursions of this rejected crew. It'd be like Maury with bad, bad singing and a cheesy orchestra.