Mud on my shoes

Judging from the wardrobes on the academic women at this conference, I have to admit that I don't accessorize well. They look sleek, professional, polished, with belts that match their shoes and coordinating earrings, necklaces, and clinking bracelets. I arrived with no earrings (because when I travel with earrings, I lose them) and mud on my loafers that I certainly didn't pick up in an airport. That mud may have been there for weeks. You can't be a sleek sophisticate with mud on your loafers.

My academic wardrobe is the opposite of sleekly sophisticated, but it's not the "antipodes," a word I would never use in the way I heard it used yesterday. A scholar kept referring to something as "an antipodes," rhyming it with "modes," as if "an antipodes" meant "the opposite." Also, I'll never fit into sleekly sophisticated clothes if I insist on going to papers extolling the virtues of the Hershey Bar. "For most Americans, the Hershey Bar can do more than Milton can to justify the ways of God to man," said the Hershey Bar scholar. He said this on Good Friday, which Ms. Mentor (Emily Toth) calls a holiday for all academics because it's about "good people treated badly," a topic on which we are experts. Ms. Mentor encouraged her listeners to remind others often of our goodness: "As an academic, it's good to talk about your greatness because people will believe it." Unless you have mud on your shoes.

But, as Ms. Mentor also pointed out, "guilt is a useless emotion," so I'll put the mud out of my mind and move on. Perhaps it's time to transmute my inferior wardrobe into something more sleekly sophisticated, but another scholar yesterday asserted that "Transmutation is harder than transcendence." So let us all transcend!