The Golden State

Reflexively I navigate to the Purchasing Portal to see whether my $483 in miscellaneous catering expenses has been reimbursed. Half of them have gone through, although this only means they have successfully navigated the labyrinth of approvals associated with the original submittal. This means that our financial analyst looked at the fund number and confirmed that the Al-Ihsan Foundation would theoretically countenance the expenditure of endowment income on twenty-four donuts two meze platters and two coffee cambros to enliven a workshop on Islam: Theme and Variation, but that no one has actually released the money to pay me. I remember that I had to pay for extra daycare for that workshop for which I will not of course be reimbursed. I also remember that a man named Todd spent most of the allotted time talking about Yarsanism, which as far as I can tell has to do with Islam in only the most arcane and theoretical sense, and that Faisal from Religious Studies spent the rest of the time talking about Islamophobia, which is more of a unifying Islamic experience than a variety of it, and that Hugo then chided me mercilessly for letting things get off track. Hugo is of course notoriously and militantly irreligious, if not actually Islamophobic himself, but he has an Arab surname and family origin which was presumably what impelled the Vice Provost to appoint him director of the Institute, a post highly sought by many faculty members due to endowments that provide over 300K in no-strings-attached funds annually, most of it from Saudi entities with no mailing address. In fact currently none of the staff of the Institute for the Study of Islamic Societies and Civilizations is a Muslim. Not me, not Meredith, not Karen, not injured Maryam, and not the other work-study, a poli-sci-majoring redhead from San Diego whom we think Hugo personally interfered in the hiring process to select over Meredith’s and my preferred and head-scarfed applicant from Senegal because he found her sexually compelling. He can do this because we live in a lawless shadowland, one of the hundreds of Institutes and Centers and Programs and Initiatives that have blindly replicated themselves over the body of the University so that it is like a once-vigorous person covered with tumors that behave exactly as they please.

I look at my remaining e-mails which are various things dealing with THE CONFERENCE. I already know that the end result of all these e-mails will be great personal frustration and the expenditure of $20,000 of endowment funds in direct costs and untold taxpayer dollars in person-hours. We will be left with a series of badly lit recordings wherein people either (a) deliberately ignore the exhortation not to read prepared papers and drone on at length from a journal article they are polishing up (b) talk in extreme generalities about things that any fool could read about online or (c) deliver a cogent and accessible statement on the topic at hand based upon a vast body of knowledge they have amassed in the course of their research. The latter people are typically about to be denied tenure or are in the middle of negotiations with another university and will be somewhere else within the year. The taxpayers are rarely in evidence at these events, although they are all ostensibly free and open to the public.

There is no e-mail about Ellery, but I know the voice mail from the Office of Risk Management is still sitting inside my office phone like an evil charm. I smoke one more cigarette and then I feel sick and then I go back inside and lie down on the couch. With the eight books for Honey I brought no book for myself, the TV has five channels, I don’t have my Turkish notebook or poor Sait Faik, I have literally nothing to do except mother my child who, thank god, is still in her Pack ’n Play giving me a respite from this obligation. I am thinking about how stupid I am and wondering when Honey is going to wake up and suddenly I am myself waking with a start, my hand over my face and the skin baking a little in the sun.