Modus Operandi

Thoughts on 2007:
I wanted to have a blog.
I feared having a blog.
I thought a blog would become a chore I would avoid.
I am successful at self-fulfilling prophecies.
Since this is the only entry for December so far, and I have merely 2 days remaining, I detect a need to catch up on my life. Determined not to use this as some casual diary, I hesitate to list 2007's happenings with resulting feelings. I think I will instead concentrate on one recent occurrence: I resigned my position at a community college.
Quitting has been my modus operandi for much of my life. Chidlhood was less than ideal in the details although above average in the aggregate. In other words, someone viewing from a safe distance would have seen an okay family of comfortable means with two bright children. Purposefully myopic glimpses would have yielded none of the damaging pathology, but I digress. Baggage from childhood and several interstate moves while an adult have made me adept at leaving--before someone or some project leaves me. I have been trying for years to change that pattern, so quitting my job was anything but frivolous. And now that I consider it, I wonder if the job had really not been quitting me over time. I came to teaching at the college level eager and willing to contribute to committees and such. The 22-30 hours per week tutoring gig was an opportunity to work with a great variety of students. So I taught part time, served in small ways, tutored, and learned. Life at a community college all comes down to this: there are good and bad in every group from students to faculty to administration. Additionally, the truly bad, be they lazy or ignorant or too self-centered to see any other world view, comprise a small percentage of the population of any group. Only when that small percentage bullies the rest of some group into believing they, the shortsighted, have control does life become unbearable.

The Plague and Other Annoyances

Whatever this uber-bug may be that some of us are passing to one another, one of the tutors at work--Josh--referred to it as the plague. I believe he has hit on something here. 'Tis so much nastier that the "common" cold and super-bug is already overused. So why not hearken back to terms of olde like the plague?
Why not? I'll tell you why not. . . because we won't be havin' any o' those wasted letters like the "e" at the end of olde. That's just too damned medieval elitist.
Now that I think about it, the word "olde" is not so elitist. It's more the Walmart version of elitist, isn't it? You know, you can't afford the real thing so you buy the cheap, mass produced item. A quick google gave me too many golf course links (no pun intended) including the word "olde," along with American shoppes and B&Bs trying to be British, I would guess.
Can you tell I have ingested way too much cold medication of various sorts? No longer running on empty, I am buzzed an an assortment of drugs ending in drine. My brain has become its own small scale, portable meth lab.
I think I will randomly telephone some friend to spread the confusion. Toodles.

Europe

Green is supposed to be soothing, isn't it? I could use some of that. Has anyone ever considered the categorization of European travelers by their relating of sites visited? I have encountered the following three groups so far: the tourists who tick off the familiar cities, regions, and sites already seen or on the agenda for an upcoming tour (either guided or semi-self-propelled), the visitors who may comment on food and currency exchange as they list the castles and shoppes they have haunted, and the travelers who mention sometimes obscure towns with opera performances or history rich ruins or childhood homes where someday-to-be-famous writers met their muses. I want to belong to that last club and travel for a year or more like some of my peers said they might back in our college days. I would be content to limit my wandering to a country or two. A year in the British Isles, hmmm. Could I pull it off?

To Teach

Some rewards do come from teaching college. This week I learned about emo from an essay by one of my students, and later a student tutor demonstrated google documents for me. I feel so young and with it. At a regular job I might have fumbled along without this knowledge. Think of the lack of conversation fodder at cocktail parties. There may be meager compensation, and as an adjunct, I may not garner respect nor be acknowledged. At least I get to approach cool. I think I'll go listen to some Weezer, put on my studded belt buckled in the back, and allow a collaborator or two into the nefarious plan I stored in the great ether I imagine google documents to be. (It's probably less romantic--an abandoned fridge sans door with tapes carelessly tossed on to the rusted shelves.)

Two Google employees

head for a newly arrived

storage unit. Note cool

attire and attitude.

So, Like Wow

I have been taking an additional medication for a few months. I am not going to make this a confessional about the meds I have experienced along the way in an effort to "stabilize" my life. However, this new ingredient in the cocktail has implications I am attempting to accept. The stuff is called provigil and its original purpose and claim to fame is as an antidote to narcolepsy. Supposedly, the person who ingests provigil is able to remain alert, purposefully and appropriately grab a twenty minute cat nap, and then awaken again alert. Two different medical professionals claimed it is used by military who might at any time be engaged in battle. They may go for days without the opportunity for long stretches of sleep, so short naps and return to alertness make sense. I wondered if the same pharmaceutical rep had given the same spiel to both doctors. More recently, the medication has been approves for other uses.
Whatever the medical explanation may be, I believe provigil has made me more aware. Now I am left with all this damned awareness. It is similar to when I finally admitted to myself that I was an incest survivor. Oh swell. Now I have this yummy information. Don't I feel better? No.
This time I am becoming aware of things around me and inside of me that I don't like so much. So, deal with it. Right?

Fear of Writing

Maybe it is more a fear of life in general. It's difficult to determine. I have flirted with writing in this blog again for several days but was afraid to actually follow through with any writing. I don't know if I feel guilty for not having visited for so long. I really did not want to be tied in that way to a blog, having one more thing I would feel guilty about not doing any particular day. So much for my whining.
My life is typically messy. I have a family and a neighborhood and friends and church and work, so of course life would be messy if I am paying attention at all. Sometimes I just pay such close attention that I wake up one day and realize that craziness is reigning. Then there is the crawling back. In the Bill Murray movie What About Bob? the Richard Dreyfus character talks about baby steps to mental health. He publishes a self-help book about the concept. I personally think baby steps are a leap (forgive the mixing of metaphors). Crawling makes more sense to me. That action better expresses the weights that keep me from standing. I'm not envisioning a baby crawling but an adult in one of those Renaissance paintings of a classical figure pulling himself up out of the abyss. Cheery, huh? So I am crawling back once again, and posting to the blog has to be a positive component.
Work sucks. Not being listened to sucks. Being powerless sucks.

Honesty

So why is honesty the best policy? There is always the moral consideration, but I vote for simplicity. Keeping track of lies wears out the liar. Some may view lying as a challenging game, but the stakes get higher and higher, and I do not relish the possible embarrassment. As a teacher, I would find a few truthful explanations so refreshing instead of the tired, old and often lame excuses. Even originality does not impress me when I consider what the lie is doing to the person making up the excuse. I remember fondly a game show called Truth or Consequences, not so much for the format as for the title. It might be fun to live by that motto.

Application

In order to present myself in my best light when applying for a job, I must convince myself that I have a very real chance of landing the position. I have to want it, be passionate about it, see myself as the person performing it. In the meantime, I must continue on the job I already have, the one that now seems so unsatisfactory. I submit a long application, a personality questionnaire, my resume, a letter. I interview with administration and also with a committee of peers. During the one-on-one, I again answer personality questions. The committee asks more job related questions, but sometimes it is difficult to detect the nuances they expect. I try not to second guess. Instead, I go with what comes to mind and I give each meeting my all. I think the interview has been positive, but then I thought the same about that previous position. I was so comfortable, but someone else was hired. When I inquired, the director pointed out that my specific experience was not enough. Did they really need to get my hopes up to discover that the experience on my resume was lacking? Did they enjoy my performance?

But I must protest too much. Whoever gets the job has to jump through the same hoops. It's all part of the loosely choreographed dance that continues into the relationships once employment occurs. Allowing my optimism to slip away does no one any good. Like getting in shape for a sport, if I choose to seek a new job, then I will go through the required motions with the expected attitude.

Ebb

My emotional energy is at an ebb. I read posts by blowhard academics and instead of reacting in anger or going on a student centered tirade, I just have a generalized, "So what?" That is much of my life right now. "So what." I hesitate to share that with anyone in particular. I would not want to be the one to bring gloom into someone's life. But even the smiling comes hard these days. I need a dose of grandchildren. I need at least one of them around the corner night and day. Is this heavy sadness the simple truth I have sought? Even the irony holds no charm. And I begin again. Some piece of beauty floats my way and I manage to be awed. Then the untethered loveliness dissipates and I am amazed at the weight of the air around me. Some thing is naggingly unfinished, maybe a family curse to never quite know what it is.

Perfecting People

I perused a book last night. War Against the Weak was written by a journalist, Edwin Black I believe, about eugenics. The topic was not entirely new to me. I was interested in some of the connections he claimed to make between the movement and the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations. There were other claims and suggestions, but something I found puzzling was a current that went through some of the leaders' proclamations. They were against helping the downtrodden(sp?), the disadvantaged and impoverished. Without charity, they reasoned, the true fittest would survive and the least worthy would die off as a breed. That odd conclusion was coming from elite and sometimes even intelligent sources like Margaret Sanger, although I might want to further check the citation. But recently I saw something on the Neanderthals in Europe and there, as with other anthropological studies I have read, marking a species as human rather than animal had everything to do with compassionate charity. Finding skeletal remains of members who must have been cared for in order to live as long as they did proved their humanity. What an interesting circle of thought. Survival of the fittest may have something to do with evolution but eugenic theory certainly tips toward devolution.

Did I Mention?

Did I mention that I would like to start a political party? That sounds pretentious, but I am not thinking about fame or fortune. The best scenario would be the party coming into existence spontaneously. What I envision is a number of like minded people meeting under the comfortably loose bylaws of the Reasonable Party. We would not even have to be all that like minded since we would hold as our goal and our highest value the practice of reason. Of course we would have to hammer out what that means, but then we could indeed be reasonable.
In the meantime, I really, really need to comment on a couple of things that should immediatly provoke, at the very least, social ostracism or, at the other extreme, pain and embarrassment. The first is blue tooth technology, that now familiar plastic tumor extending from some poor schmucks' ears. I could devote a separate entry to the myriad possibilities for rude behavior involved in that technology, but here I will concentrate on another technological phenom: the listserv. I admit have no clue about its history. What I do understand about the email chat kind of site is that it is meant to be devoted to a subject or purpose common to the users/subscribers. I believe there is also a moderator or director who has some power over what may be posted. I belong to a neighborhood organization listserv and the threads run the gamut from who might be good at repairing a 100 year old roof to automobile break-ins. It is a chatty, sometimes newsy site and performs pretty much as advertizede.
Wouldn't one think that a listserv dedicated to the English Department at a community college would focus on English and teaching concerns? Writing is what community college English attempts to teach, so that might be a priority. In this era of painfully strident political correctness, one might even assume that politics would only be suggested, only whispered in inuendo. After all, like many two year colleges, 80% of the teachers are part-time and trying not to step on the toes of the all-powerful full-timers, so the full-time profs would be especially careful about not being too pushy with personal agendas. (They might even rescue part-timers who fall into traps of pedagogical argument? Right. Maybe if the victim is young and kisses up satisfactorily. . .surely if the victim is a young kiss-up recently ranked among the full-time.) One listserv that shall remain unnamed has, however, become the political arm of the small but vociferous, full-time, communist, anti-Bush faction of the English faculty. There are sometimes even caveats, ah, the caveats. "I know I shouldn't. . ." or "This may not be the place to. . ." Sometimes we are spared even the insincere quasi-apologetic warning. One wonders why the majority of faculty no longer post. There is no conversation, just ranting and occasional backslapping over clever, left-wing rhetoric. So instead of reacting to challenges of theory or responding to calls for suggestions, I now scan the listserv for departmental info I may need and I spend quality time considering what painful punishment the abusers deserve. Dante would be a bit outmoded. Something technological would be so much more appropriate. Hmmmm.

philology

I was playing in the OED today. No telling what that may lead to, but I was interrupted somewhere between linguistic and morpheme. Language is pretty interesting stuff.

A Visit

My son Ian visited St. Louis last week with his family. I have not posted in two weeks due to prep followed by visit followed by recovery. Aren't house guests an interesting phenomenon? (Now, there's a mix of singular and plural, just like the issues suggested.) Actually the best encounter we have all had since Ian's sojourn to college over ten years ago, the interaction is currently replaying in my mind and the critique is under construction. I know I held up well, and my husband managed to maintain through heat and three active granddaughters aged six and younger. Bevin was here some of the time and Colleen came into town for a few of the days. When Terry and I drove her back to Columbia, MO, we got to see her new and rather cute apartment. A couple's first meager home can be so much fun, as it plainly is for them. She is such an optimist and that makes her optimism often be the truth of the situation.
One moment of touristy, family activity orchestrated by Bridgett, or a vignette taken from Grandma, Uncle Joe and Aunt Jackie's joining the rest of us for barbecue on Friday, reflects more than can be taken in at once. Something like peering at that drop of "clean" water under a microscope, it takes awhile to discover all that exists within the microcosm of the larger world.

Another's Take on Language

According to “The Writer's Almanac” today, William H. Gass, an essayist and novelist born 30 July 1924, once wrote, "[Language] is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination." Just think of the power language has for the speaker or writer, all of that before meaning is even considered.

Semiotic Linguistic Stuff

As I try to wade through some of Derrida, I begin to wonder if we might not be going at this language thing from the wrong end (no suggested pun). Observing my 2 year old granddaughter Maeve communicate, I appreciate the simplicity of getting meaning across: "M'poop in da pot," speaks volumes, especially when expressed proudly via telephone. Someone might comment that I don't get it, but I fully discern the grammar, logic, and rhetoric of that sentence; the meaning is crystal clear.

Definition

I looked up both found and foundation in the Oxford English Dictionay, a Christmas gift from Bridgett a couple of years ago, and now I am thoroughly confused. It may be the font size (less than 6 point and requiring a magnifying glass), but I think I have probably confused myself by trying too hard. I can now throw "melting metal," as in foundery, and some obsolete meanings into the mix. I did go to "find" and one of the definitions said "to come across." That is pretty much what I expect when I refer to finding myself: I will be looking for that other brown shoe in the bottom of the closet one day and there my self will be. I only hope the surprise will be pleasant and not disappointing.

Foundation

Every once in a while, I will hear a word used and realize some connection anew. That may not exactly be the way to describe the experience. The connection was always there, but I was unaware. Today, during a sermon at College Church, Father Fleming, who happens to remind me of my dad but that is for another blog, said that we have to be found, that we have to have a foundation. Isn't it correct to say an organizaton was founded by someone? If there were a venn diagram or some kind of set theory of words that fit together, it would not be much of a leap to place foundation in that same set. But "found" often connotes the result of a different kind of effort. "I found my watch." or "He found his uncle in the census of 1900." even "She found herself." As the past tense of find, "found" never fit comfortably into the word set containing foundation, until today. Now that I am trying to put this on paper, so to speak (What would Derrida have to say about that phrase and preceeding clause?), I feel clumsy. What made sense at 11 a.m, this morning has become foggy. But I will attempt my mental acrobatics anyway: when I have a foundation to my life, that means that I found (did find) something. By finding my center, a beginning, the course to follow, I laid a foundation. I then choose to build on what I find. Maybe others' "finding" me builds on that foundation as well. God finds each of us, no matter where we are or what we do. Then we find ourselves and each other? Now I am getting tired of my own rambling.

Do I gotta?

I emailed my daughter Bridgett (far left with Bevin) that I have begun a blog and she replied that if I keep it up for a while, she would link to my blog froms hers. That's just what I fear: the obligatory diary, the dishes that must be washed, the plants that must be watered. How different then is the monitor from the TV screen? Am I replacing one kind of mindlessness with another? Now I have mixed my metaphors. Is it a chore or is it a mindless passtime? hmmm. I would tell my students that writing is never a waste of time, and this particular experience is anything but mindless. Actually, the more I write, the more I have to consider.

Derrida, Derrido

So, like I was readin' this stuff by this dude named Derrida and he says, "To be what it is, all writing must, therefore, be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence, it is a rupture in presence, the "death" or the possibility of the "death" of the receiver inscribed in the structure of the mark. . ." And I like thought about it for a minute and my head exploded.

I am strangely drawn to him. But is it only nonsense wrapped in a pretty French package? What would Woody Allen have to say about Derridas? So much thinking to do and so little available brain space.

Defining

I am not keen on putting my every emotion out there for anyone to analyze. I also promised myself that I would not make this a whiners' anonymous kind of site. Having defined those parameters, I'm not sure what will be appropriate. Maybe I could come up with some anarchist's manifesto or spearhead a religious cult. I hear Tom Cruise commissioned some Scientologist specialists to clear his newly purchased home of bad vibes. I see lucrative possibilities in the religious angle.

beginnings

Having just force fed myself the exclamation pointed rantings of a distant but listserv connected coworker, I decided it was time to succumb to the technology of self-disclosure. The next decision will be how discreet I will remain.

On a much lighter note, Colleen looks happy about this college graduation thing, doesn't she?