Last night, I had the following dream: I was on a city street, and ran into a colleague of mine, who was carrying a kitschy plastic punchbowl, molded to look like cut crystal, and two matching melon-ballers. "They're for [colleague X]," she explained, and I thought "Of course, because [colleague X] is gay, so it's a friendly joke on the stereotype about gay men and melon ballers."** She was also carrying a plate with some broccoli and other vegetables, with different sauces, which she described to me in detail.
Later in the dream, we were both getting ready to leave the house that we had arrived at to go off for the evening's activities, and she asked, "Where is your plate?" "I was supposed to have a plate of broccoli, too?" Turns out that I was: that all attendees at the evening's function were supposed to submit a plate of broccoli with 2-3 different sauces of our own devising. These were the minimum requirements; we would be evaluated on the tastiness and creativity of our submissions. So I ran out to the sauce store, berating myself for not having put together something homemade, because surely the evening's arbiters would see through my store-bought sauce and give me low marks, but the store was closed anyway. And then I woke up.
I think I must be more worried about tenure review than I'm aware of.
**There is no such stereotype, as far as I know, but in my dream, it made perfect sense, and colleague X was expected to appreciate the joke.
3 comments:
Yeah--that's pretty clearly a tenure-related nightmare.
Broccoli? You almost make scholarship sound like it's work, instead of our greatest pleasure and delight! Why not competitive brownie-baking? Comparative pies? Tastiest homegrown tomatoes?
Wait 'till you get tenure, and you wake up to discover that your reward is to continue to bring delightfully sauced broccoli to every engagement for the rest of your career...but, it's better than the alternative, of course.
Maybe it's a handy hint as to the sort of bribe you should be handing out.
Ah, the little-known Broccoli Cook-Off Tenure Requirement. I'd forgotten about that one. Better get crackin' on my broccoli sauces!
Still wondering about the gay melon baller ... gotta be a joke in there somewhere.
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