It's been a much needed repose from bloggerdome. I say a much needed repose and what I mean is something all together different, something not unlike the old adage "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."

I've been thinking about cowboys lately, not because I live in the wild, wild west, or because I was recently dragged to the Terri Clark concert at the Sky City casino. (I was, and I enjoyed it, but that's not the point.) No. I've been thinking about white hats, a symbol for all things good and just, the color the "good guys" wear in old westerns. Why all the pondering about white hats, good guys, and justice?

It's been a month of cruelties. Not the big ones, not death, dismemberment, true hardship, but the slow aching kind, the kind that comes from lost love or misplaced trust.

My sister's partner of 8 years walked away from their relationship with no reason given. Rather than making the split together, dividing up the houshold, the animals, the debt, she refuses to leave the house, the house earned on the back of my sister on whose good name the creditor relied on and, although both their names are on the lease, it is the house this woman never paid a dime for. The great hoodwink, something I feared from the beginning of their relationship, something that I squashed because my sister was happy, this woman is exactly who I thought she was back then, a chain smoking, mountain dew swilling, mullet wearing trailer trash dyke trading up.

My sister is one of the good guys. She works hard, never makes late payments on anything and pays extra when she can. She makes committments with her whole heart and means it. The first thing she said to me was, "You were right." This was not something I wanted to be right about. She wants this woman to say it's over but she won't, only saying that she doesn't know, the quintessential copout for those trying like hell to have their cake and eat it too. This woman says, "I don't know if I'm in love with you." and an hour later says "Love you." and kisses her on her way out the door. I tell her to call a lawyer. It's true, she can't just kick her lying, cheating, misleading ass out.

I didn't know what advice to give. I've never been though a real break up before, in truth, until Steph I had never really put myself in a position to be in a relationship. What did I know? What help could I give. None beyond an open telephone line and "Please, honey, call a lawyer, talk to a financial advisor." and "I don't know."

This came on the heels of visits by my sister, mother, and nephew, and a visit by Steph's mom on the assumption that she would be in town for her daughter's dissertation defense. The defense. This is the biggest reason I haven't blogged. I needed time to sort through my anger and disbelief before even grazing that subject.

What happened to Steph is the thing that people fear, and is the thing that never happens for real. I believed that, having gone through the elaborate and stupid rituals of graduate school myself. And all along the way we were reassured by the presence of her advisor, a thoroughly competent woman who, until the last possible moment, had not let us down. Promises were made, reassurances given, and then the sudden discovery that the communication we thought was present between the chair and the committee was a mist, a shadow, an idea rather than a reality. On the day before the defense a problem arose that we were told would not be a problem. The defense date was rushed, we knew it, this was an attempt to finish before the chair moved on to another school. She approved a draft to go to the committee that was not a totally clean draft. The committee had it for two weeks while Steph was working out the bugs and any minor typos or stylistic issues. None had a thing to say about the state of the manuscript they were given and it didn't worry us because the chair said they would send a letter to the committee explaining what they were getting and why. The letter was never sent. A day before defense, a question arises about the state of the manuscript, not the ideas, not even big things like organization, but simple typo and stylistic issues that had since been taken care of. It snowballed that day in front of her mother and all three of us watched the defense date dematerialize. I didn't understand it. The defense is a formality among many formalities. They could have had the defense knowing there was a clean copy out there. They could have gone through the ceremony of it all and signed off on it when they had a chance to look at the good copy. Most of all the two people who brought up these "concerns" admittedly hadn't looked at the manuscript until the day before the defense. This and the lack of communication by a committee of scholars infuriated me. If this deadline couldn't be met, it wasn't a problem, it would just have to happen later. But setting her up, working her like a dog and then yanking that away was unneccessarily cruel.

When I look at the picture of her graduation from Purdue I am filled with pride and love. We met and fell in love there, she learned she would indeed be going on to grad school there. It was the place that she had dreamed of years earlier when she read In Search of Our Mother's Gardens. She shook the Dean's hand with confidence and her winning smile, and this woman looked right at her, right in her eyes, and smiled back. Graduating from Purdue was tinged by the unbelivable news that her father had liver cancer. In the picture of her MA graduation from the University of Nebraska, the loss of her father is in her face, still smiling, if you looked, you might say his death was there in her eyes. Graduating with her Ph.D. is something she has looked forward to since her Navy days reading Alice Walker. She wanted the pomp and circumstance, the hooding ceremony, the dissertation defense. She wanted to experience every step of what I playfully called academic hazing rituals. She wanted it until they broke her down.

Like my sister, Steph works hard, doesn't cut corners, and actually gives a damn about her students. After years of teaching, no guidance, and gaining confidence with her experience, they questioned her ability to teach, cost her a job unnecessarily, and most importantly, made her question everything. It was a personal swipe at her for reasons unclear to faculty who supported her, but at any rate it did the job that cowardly men couldn't do themselves. She stopped loving the University, gave up the dream of going through graduation. She had settled, instead, on the dissertation defense. And then the very women who feigned support pulled the rug out from under her.

When I say that none of that was her fault I am not only saying that because I love her but because it's the truth. She worked hard, did what her advisor told her to do and then got completely hosed. I mention women because it is the last straw in a sense, not for her but for me. Feminism be damned. When things don't go as expected they're like rats jumping from a sinking ship. Nobody apologized to her, nobody talked to her at all. In fact, the announcement was made and the chair was like, "I'll talk to you in a couple of days, have a good weekend."

She should have let Steph know that at the pace they were working the deadline was too tight. They had other options, ones that I dare say would have been better for Steph. She could have wrote through this summer and defended in August (which is what she will be doing) and she wouldn't have been killing herself trying to get in all the revisions and clean copies in an impossible deadline. If the fucking committee had bothered to even take a look at what she had sent them earlier than the day before I wouldn't have ended up with Steph's mother sitting in my kitchen the day before the supposed event and Steph sitting in the office in complete shock. Everything that happened at UNM from the moment they questioned her teaching to the disappearing defense officially killed any good feelings that remained for that institution. I was devistated for her because I have watched her in every step of her education and I could not think of a person who deserved this kind of treatment less. And there is nothing we can do about it. Who to complain to, where to make our grievances. There is nowhere, and no one. Her mother doesn't understand that she still needs them to write letters of recommendation. She still needs to have a good rapport with them. I know what her mother means when she says it's not right. I think, couldn't they have put on the little ceremony, talked about the merits and bigger issues of her manuscript and saved the rest until later. Couldn't they have done that for their student, another hardworking woman in academia. No. And really, why should they. What's in it for them? I loathe the way women treat other women in academia. I had high hopes too, from amazing classes at Purdue that were like feasts for the brain, a place where women stood together because in a place that conservative and male dominated, you had to in order to survive. I was a hard core feminist and lover of academia back then. Now, I too join the ranks of the jaded.

But not Steph. Academia and women in academia may be a little tarnished, but she still loves it, still loves her students and as always, despite what little men in big offices think, is a great teacher.

After the last month and a half, I want the good guys to win. I want this knowing that I am not one of them. I know myself well. I like lazy days, little work, sunshine. I am a fanegeler, too lazy to even look that word up to see if I have indeed misspelled it. I am a storyteller, prone to tell a lie as much as the truth. But I need those guys in the white hats, I need the good guys to win, not everytime but most of the time. I believe in that kind of goodness even if I can't harness it for myself. I see Steph and she doesn't know it, but she carries that white stetson aura above her head, my sister too. The people who know them see it too.