"Come home."

A new graduate student came up to me at the beginning of this year and said that they were going to try and work by the "Tim Hetland" approach to graduate school. While I was well aware that "Tim Hetland" was me, I was unaware of any kind of methodology I had established, practiced, or published regarding graduate studies. The internal frantic attempt to recollect such a method that was at that moment occurring in my head, must have physically manifested itself on my face by either raising one eyebrow above the other, making the corner of my mouth twitch, or the end of my nose scrunch up because the colleague, feeling they had to clarify, said, "you know, you do all your work in the office and none at home."

When the colleague explained what they meant, it then made sense. And while I had not previously thought of the practice as a methodological approach to graduate studies, I had made a conscious attempt to practice it. I went to the office everyday at seven in the morning and would stay until four or five in the evening. Upon leaving the office, I would leave my books, laptop and class notes locked inside, silently awaiting my return the following morning.
"You treat it like a normal job," the colleague continued, "that's what I want to do."

When I first entered the graduate program, I was immediately overwhelmed with the intellectual requirement I was facing. I found that I would go home and over dinner put my wife through a number of explanations of composition theory, literary theory, social theory, film theory, theoretical approaches to literary geopolitical theory and theory of theory. And one night, maybe two weeks into these nightly expositions, my wife, as she took another bite of the meal I had prepared for us, said, "You know Tim, theory doesn't make this food taste any better. I like it the way you make it. It's good as food, you know what I mean?"

I did. I knew exactly what she meant. She wasn't taking a jab at my chosen profession, nor was she discounting the importance of theory, she was simply reminding me that sometimes theory wasn't needed: aesthetics (or in this case taste) were sometimes (and actually, probably most of the time) sufficient. I had become so inundated with theoretical work that it had begun creeping into places it had no right creeping. Then my wife, with tiny droplets of red wine sitting at the corners of her mouth, said, “just come home at night, ok?”

And so I did.

I did my work at the office and I went home. This is not to say that I never talked about my work at home, or on the occasional weekend had to do some last minute reading at home, nor is it to say that my wife was not interested in anything I was doing. Instead, it is simply to say that I made a conscious effort to distinguish home from work, to separate my marriage from my scholarship. And, for the most part it worked and continues to work.

It is as Knobloch writes, “Academics are rewarded for the prestige of their degrees and their fluency in the languages of abstract ‘fields,’ not their full habitation (including work) in places...Whole careers are made routinely from material that has nothing to do with home…” (16). The dislocation might have something to do with the fact that a tower is too high and too far away from home to keep home included, or maybe it has something to with the frail attempt to make all academic work objective. Whatever the case, the truth is that what I was hearing in graduate seminars was that home had very little to do with scholarship and so I purposely separated the two.

Dinnertime was dinnertime.

Theorytime was theorytime.