When I first started my current job, I took on a fight. I meant to take it on, but I didn’t have any idea how outmatched I was. I got beaten up, knocked around, threatened, and told I was ruining civilization itself. In sum, I lost. Badly.
Recently, I encountered a problem to which I offered a simple solution. Here’s the rub; the problem occurred in the same arena as my lost fight. I knew I was stepping close to the edges of that fight, but I had allies now, knew where the punches were likely to come from, and really wasn’t starting up the fight again.
Last night, I found out that the old opponents, unbeknown to me, had stepped into the ring and started punching me. To say I was angry was an understatement.
Sigh. I miss Madeline Kahn.
Anyway, I was furious. Flames on the side of my face furious.
There is nothing, and I do mean nothing, I hate more than having my integrity questioned. Nothing.
It was being questioned. Beaten up, really.
I thought about what to do. I backed up and looked at what I wanted to have happen. The problem is not solved yet, but I pushed it out of the boxing ring and sent it down another road. I have back-up. I have firepower. I haven’t yet used my fists or my guns, but they’re loaded and ready. (Am I taking this metaphor too far? It’s all rather martial, admittedly.)
Four years and a lost fight can make a difference in perspective, but I also think I’ve gotten pretty good at what I do. Late this afternoon, in another context entirely, a guy I’d been having a little trouble with of late, came up to me and said something really nice just because it occurred to him. I know external validation is fleeting. In that moment though, with this other issue on the road I prepared, I felt good.
Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you figure out what you’re good at and somebody lets you do it. Still and all, if someone can tell me how to protect my integrity from attacks, I’d be grateful. Bubble wrap? Plastic couch covers? Maybe it needs boxing gloves?
It’s real–my integrity–even if not everyone can see it. That is also true of my invisible friend.
I cried more than usual last week. I’m not a big crier, but sometimes things get to a stress level that my usual calm exterior breaks down.
Stress? Me stressed?
My tenure file was due on Friday. This event can cause stress for even the most sanguine academics. My effort was made more complicated by a number of factors.
To wit:
+This was my first file of this type. Normally people submit what’s called a “retention file” first. I didn’t have to because I just got my job permanently summer before last and because you don’t have to submit a file your first year.
+My file qualifies as weird. Most faculty teach. I do too, but my day-to-day effort focuses more on administration.
+If I don’t get tenure, I lose my job.
No pressure. None at all.
The mofo required a 5 inch notebook. Priced one of those lately? They’re not cheap. $30 not cheap.
Also, Avery needs to try a lot harder. Don’t sell 12-tab dividers when the template doesn’t work with Word for Mac. I managed to find some 5-tab dividers in the office. Someone had left a sheet in the box that had all the labels pulled off. I formatted carefully, printed and discovered that I had printed on a used, no-label sheet. Um-Hmm. Would you put a used-up sheet back into the label box? Neither would I. Did we have any more 5-tab labels? Nope. Did I need to reformat for 8-tab labels? Yep. Total time making, printing and applying the labels? Well over two hours.
If Avery lodged itself firmly on my office product shit list, Swingline became my office product hero. How? Well, they make this wondrous thing:
Behold the bit of magnificence, friends and neighbors, that is Swingline’s electric three hole punch. A friend secreted it away from a neighboring department. After using it to punch for a while (and having several co-workers come by to try it), I asked our office folks to order us one. I heart Swingline. Honey asked, when I was raving about it, “who punches holes any more?” I do and think my office deserves the brilliance and efficiency of the Swingline 525.
Here’s the completed product:
Thick, huh?
Look at those labels. They look nice, despite Avery’s stupidity, inanity.
My normal bag didn’t seem even close to capable of holding the five inches of hole-punched me for delivery to the dean’s office. Fortunately, I had gotten a bag for travel that was up to the task.
My green bean machine was ready to carry me for the delivery.
I won’t know anything until the end of the semester.
The thing is called a PIF. That’s sort of how I feel now that it lives in the dean’s office. Like all the air’s been released.
When I was younger, I would often go into my mother’s office. She has always kept Hershey’s Kisses in a jar and I’d have one or two. Because of what she does, I had occasion to spend a lot of time at her workplace as a child and teenager. Occasionally, I would also go to my father’s office. He didn’t have kisses, but inevitably had a better view. Hers was always a ground floor office and his was a high rise office. Sweeping vistas are ingrained in the American consciousness, even if the vista in question is of other high-rise buildings.
I always admired their degrees on the wall. I read them and then re-read them. They went to the same college, so the bachelors’ degrees looked the same, but their advanced degrees differed and I found their language and appearance very appealing. There was a deep commitment to education as an idea in my family, but the material culture of education also appealed deeply to me. The degrees themselves, the regalia, the places. The verdant landscapes in otherwise normal contexts.
Really, I wanted those pieces of paper. I have some of them now. Four, if you want to know. One of them has a typo. Two of them are framed. I really have no idea where the fourth one is. The “highest” one, as they say, had been sitting in its frame in a closet. I had never put it on a wall anywhere. I had it on top of a bookshelf at home for a while, but then our roof leaked and our office ceiling collapsed and, as I hauled ceiling and insulation out to the trash can, I put it away in the closet to keep it from forming some undeniable bond with the wet insulation.
This weekend, we cleaned out that closet so the house can be re-floored. I found that highest degree in the closet.
This morning, I brought it in to work. The frame had some smudges on it, so I cleaned it a little. I took down a picture I had taken some years ago of a cyclist whose name I don’t know and hung the degree on my wall. I like the language on it more than any of the ones my parents have, “The Regents of the University of California on the recommendation of the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate, Los Angeles Division have conferred upon [insert name here]” Isn’t that great? So florid.
It continues, “…who, by conducting original research has demonstrated thorough knowledge of [insert field here]” So, original research demonstrates thorough knowledge. Good to know. Now, with all of that, you still don’t know what degree it is. Way to bury the lead, UC. Good things come to those who bother to read the whole thing. The degree comes next.
…”The Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.” There it is. Whew. Took a while. “with all the rights and privileges thereto pertaining.” I’m not sure what rights it gives me, but it is a privilege (most of the time) to be an Associate Professor for the same state the issued the piece of paper I’m currently discussing.
“Given at Los Angeles This Twenty Sixth Day of March in the Year Nineteen Hundred and Ninety Nine.” Note the lack of “of our Lord” language. Secularity is SO rampant in, well, secular institutions. Rightly so. It’s signed, by among others, the ousted former governor of the state. There’s also a gold seal.
It looks nice on the wall, I have to say. It perches right above a picture of a starling eating watermelon and next to my Union Pacific Las Vegas poster. I don’t know why I didn’t hang it there before. I wanted it for so long and then I got it. It belongs in my office with its first floor view. Come by and read it, if you want.
I have for some time suspected that the folks who have always had mobile phones interact with the world differently than I do.
When I suggested last semester, for example, that it was possible to live without a cell phone, one of my students became incensed. I mean red faced, angry, and very loud. The idea of living that way was such an anathema to him that the very idea made him enraged.
I was in line at Starbucks last week, fairly early in the morning and the young woman ahead of me said (into her phone): “I just got up. I’m at Starbucks and am going to have a frappucino.”
While there’s nothing wrong with that per se, it struck me as odd. Why not go to Starbucks and have the frappucino and JUST NOT TELL ANYONE?
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “In silence we must wrap much of our life, because it is too fine for speech, because also we cannot explain it to others, and because somewhat we cannot yet understand.” The woman in Starbucks and many of her generation believe just the opposite. Don’t wrap up lives in silence. Narrate them. Tell everyone you know everything you’re doing every moment of every day.
This afternoon, I passed a young woman on campus who said into her phone, “I’m really thirsty. Should I get something to drink?” I wanted to stop her, hold her by both shoulders and say, “Yes you should get something to drink if you’re thirsty. The more important thing, though, is to be able to make that decision on you own without your phone.”
Here’s the thing. My academic field has taught me to believe that the stories we tell have great meaning about who we are as individuals and who we are as a culture. To borrow from another academic field, I also think, in this context, about phonemes. Those are the smallest discreet sound changes that indicate shifts in meaning. Change the c in cat to an h and you have the new sound and a new meaning. Folklorists have a similar idea. One way to look at stories, is to look for something called motifs. Motifs are the plot or character elements in a story that are unique. The glass slippers in Cinderella are a motif.
These non-stories aren’t really stories at all, then. They’re non-motifs strung together to fill the silence. Is there meaning? I can’t say.
So here’s my advice to the cell phone over-users. Go forth and live. No need to narrate while doing so.
Finding jobs during my summers in college was a challenge to which I was not up. I have never been good at finding jobs, truth be told. They tend to find me.
Teresa says that when you stop trying for things, they happen. Maybe, but in college, I needed summer jobs and I had a hard time finding them. I should note, in a fit of sibling bitter pique, that my brother never seemed to need a summer job, for some reason. But that’s a story for another time. One particularly low moment involved my going to an interview. I didn’t know what the job was, but they had advertised in the local paper for “college students.” It turned out to be an “opportunity” for selling encyclopedias door to door. It seems quaint now, the notion of encyclopedia BOOKS sold door-to-door, doesn’t it?
The encyclopedias in question, by the way, were not your big names. No World Book, no Britannica.
Britannica aside: We had a very old set of Britannicas in our basement. I didn’t do well on my report on the moon in 4th grade when I noted (using the EB) that someday people might get to the moon. It was neat set, though, as my great-grandfather had read most of it and annotated a lot of it. I met him once when he was very old and I was very young. Mostly, I remember his large hands. I’ve always been glad to be able to get a little glimpse at how he interacted with the world. Small careful pencil marks.
At any rate, in the door-to-door interview I was asked how many sets of encyclopedias I thought I could sell in a week. I thought about it and replied, “one.” That seemed about right to me. He was appalled and said something to the effect that if I could only sell one set, this was probably not the right job for me. I agreed with a depth of feeling not usually expressed in employment situations and vacated the premises post haste.
I spent part of that summer delivering pizzas and another part back at college taking summer school classes. Neither was great, but there were no sales involved.
I thought about all of this last night when, during the course of a discussion in the class I’m teaching this term, I mentioned how motivated people are by inconsistent rewards. Very much like some experiments done on pigeons, if we’re rewarded but there’s no real pattern to the reward, we’ll persist in believing the reward could come again at any time. Las Vegas thrives on our motivation in this manner.
One of my students raised her hand and went into a five minute monologue about selling and being taught by Anthony Robbins and The Secret and how all you had to do was believe and things would come true. At the end of her moment, I mumbled something about how well motivational speakers and authors know psychology and changed the subject. After class it did occur to me that perhaps I had missed my calling all those years ago. If I had only BELIEVED in my ability to sell, I may have been able to–I don’t know–sell TWO encyclopedia sets a week.
An aside, I seem to have lost my calendar after class last night. I’m, sure were I better motivated that would not have happened.
Guy walks up and sits down in the “to-go” waiting area and sings a snippet of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.” He turns to his companion and says:
“That’s the first song I ever knew as a kid that I thought had deep meaning. I mean, like, I was really impressed that I figured out that the lyrics meant something and weren’t just words. I totally thought I knew what it meant.”
(pause)
“I didn’t. I’m still not sure I do now.”
(pause)Sings a bit more.
“R.E.M. is deep, man.”
Later that same evening, I indulge in a self-torture habit, which is looking myself up on ratemyprofessors. Only one comment from last semester has appeared. It’s from a deaf student who I KNOCKED myself out to help, but she just couldn’t understand the material. That may have had something to do with the fact that she NEVER watched the interpreter and tended to chat with her neighbor in ASL.
Here’s what she said:
“She is good teacher very understanding with concepts of the class teaching but with the written test she is so picking and myself being deaf i am struggle with grammers that she is picking with but i do understand the class concepts but written so picky so she gave me D+ She does 3 papers and 2 written test that overall for semester.”
Understanding comes the way it comes and in its own time. Or not. Damn grammers.
I’m not particularly fond of summer in my job. Like most faculty members at colleges and universities, I was spoiled by having a nine month job. Now I have twelve month job and lots to do in the summer. Most of what I have to do is tedious. Very tedious. Writing reports and the like.
There’s nothing I loathe more than having to click on this icon at any point in my day.
And there’s nothing more likely than summer to make me click the little bastard.
Don’t assume this is an anti-Microsoft rant. I am not anti-Microsoft. I don’t root for them or anything (any more than I root for the Yankees), but they make some fine products. I cleaved to WordPerfect for a long time and then abandoned ship like everyone else. (Bring back WP 5.2, I say!) But I don’t mind Word. I am capable of producing PowerPoint slide shows that aren’t excruciating (and isn’t that the goal, after all?), and I even use Entourage as my e-mail client at work. I say all of this despite a deep loathing for Windows. Deep. The Office suite, though, is fine. Except for that little green thing.
And, no, I’m not going to name it. To name it is to give it power. There it sits waiting for me to click it. It knows where I live. It knows where I work. It haunts my dreams.
Really, it’s ruining my summer. Go ahead, name it defend it, you won’t change my mind. Evil, thy name is……..
I work in a place where every employee is represented by a union. There are lots of them. In my office alone, there are employees in three bargaining units. I’m the only one in mine. And I’m not actually in it. The “represent” my interests theoretically and I pay a fee for that, but it’s less than I would pay if I was a member (card carrying or not). I still get mailings and the like.
At the risk of giving away where I work…
This union is threatening a strike. I was at a meeting yesterday where a colleague noted that “most of us are from union families.” He meant an us I was part of. And yet I am not. My family is not a union family. On the contrary, I come from a very non-union family. Not only are most of my relatives white collar folks, I also come from the Southeast, one of the least unionized parts of the United States. I don’t know of a single close relative (living or dead) who was a member of a union. My grandfather was a chamber of commerce executive who favored what he called “total community development.” I can assure you that t.c.d did NOT include unions.
When I was in graduate school, the teaching and research assistants (of which I was usually one or the other in any given year) tried to unionize. There were strikes and lots of talk. It worked eventually (well after I had finished my PhD) and they’re now unionized. I never participated. A lot of the rhetoric wasn’t about working conditions or the like, but about the need for the University to “recognize” us. Since I was in a marginal field in a program that was literally falling apart, the need for recognition seemed less urgent than whether I’d ever find a permanent job (that took eight years) in the field (nope) or whether the program would survive long enough for me to get a degree (yes). Union stuff? Not really my thing.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I can teach about unions, Marx, Engels, and the like. I understand it intellectually. It’s fun to teach about it. One of my favorite documentary films is about the struggle of Pullman Porters to unionize against the racism of mid-twentieth century American. Watch it sometime. It’s called Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle.
But when it comes to me, things get muddy. This weekend I had brunch (yummy) with treecup who works at a different branch in the same system as me. We are, in other words, both represented by the union. She asked rather nonchalantly whether I was going to “walk out” if there is a strike. Without thinking much, I said “no” and asked if she would and she said “yes.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about it since brunch. (That is, when I’m not trying to teach Scout (the dog) to pee outside. Scout (the Honey) knows where to pee.) My job has me operating independently most of the time. There are no “comps” to me, unlike most folks, who are in departments with other faculty. I am totally flummoxed about how to feel and what to do. So, I thought I’d blog.
There’s a vote about the strike. I can’t vote unless I join the union.
“We’ll all be colleagues after it’s over,” our uni president has said. My dean reiterated those sentiments.
What I feel is mostly ambivalence. Should I join the union and vote no? Should I join and vote yes? Should I not join and come to work? Should I not join and not come?
I’m not asking anyone to tell me what to do. I am interested, however, in where others stand on unions. So share out in comments!
So the scientists kept coming and I learned more stuff.
Do you know about Sun Dogs? They’re false suns, usually directly west or east in the sky of the actual sun. They’re caused by hexagonal ice in the atmosphere.
They’re also pretty. The phenomenon is related to rainbows. I would like to suggest that we lesbian/gay types adopt sun dogs as our symbol of pride from now on.
I also learned that if you skydive from high enough up, you can’t tell that you’re falling because there’s so little air above a certain point that there’s no wind. I’m not going to try it. Good to know, though.
The fire talk didn’t learn me much about fire, so I can’t pass it on. One factoid I did learn is that even in really wet environments, things can catch fire. Wet things can catch fire. Who knew?
The fire talk was complicated and sophisticated and there were some pictures, but lots of it dealt with satellite image mapping and various coefficients for understanding maps. Ah well. My fog knowledge will serve me well. I don’t know how, but I have it wield as needed.
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