Attention, people who say “Oh, it must be so much easier with both of you in the same program. You can really help each other out,” upon finding out that my husband and I are pursuing the same degrees in the same department. There have been so many of you this week, many of whom I like and respect.

No. It’s not. Yes, it’s all Rhetoric, but we have very different research areas. I do intellectual property theory and law, digital texts, and authorship. He does visual rhetoric and philosophy of technology. We have the same three degrees in name, but that’s about all. Even our literature degrees are entirely different, despite being from the same department. He was a Romanticist, I was a Modernist. Now, I’m all up in French theory and wikis, and he’s engrossed in the Frankfurt School and 19th-century scientific and photography texts. There’s some odd, small overlaps there, but they’re not enough to be of much “help.”

And what exactly is it that you mean by “help,” anyway? That we must each only do half the reading? That we must write for each other? That we do each others busy work? Because none of that happens. Ever. Last year, one of my colleagues asked if I would help him create PDFs “like you did for Jeff.” I’ve still not forgotten it, especially since I watched Mister Huband spend a whole afternoon making those PDFs, which involved many, many pages. He does his own work. I do mine. (And my colleague found someone else to do his.)

One might point to the fact that Mister Husband and I are often in the same seminars — even both of the same seminars, this semester. This is generally pure coincidence, as is the fact that I am often in many of the same seminars with other folks. About 10 of us are in the same two seminars this semester. This is not that odd, because there are only so many 8000-level seminars offered at any given time. It’s just the way it works. And being in the same seminars doesn’t provide much advantage, because our interests are so different. We don’t bring the same background or take away the same things when we read the same text. One of us might find something incredibly useful and the other consider it a terrible waste of time.

The advantage, if there is one, comes when class is over for the week, because we both have someone to keep talking about the material with. This cuts both ways: it's good professionally, but it has the potential to transform the house into a 24-hour graduate seminar. Not all of you may wish to live your lives this way. We don’t, necessarily, and make sure to watch lots of stupid, stupid movies in order to counteract it. But it still creeps in all the time, even while appreciating the cinematic wonder of Dude, Where’s My Car? endlessly.

Thus ends my rant, dear people. But really, what a thing to say.