Confirmation Bias--I'm in Denial

OK, so one of the big branches on my tree of a problem, according to Dr. Ian, is that I have a very strong negative confirmation bias. That means that I expect things to happen a certain way and I over-validate evidence of negative outcome while ignoring most other signs of positive evidence that something isn't going to turn out badly. OK, I know that I have this problem, but see, it's not a problem--it's fucking reality!!

Things do tend to turn out badly. Or they only turn out well after much suffering through badness. They just do! I swear it's not a confirmation bias. :D OK, I offer the following pieces of evidence into the record:

* Yes, I did get an award. But ONLY after much laboring and cursing and not being helped (except by this one woman, who was very helpful). But other people were not helpful. That's putting it mildly.

* New Stinky Person comes to work for us wa-ay back in October. I had a negative "bias" that she wouldn't turn out right for the job. Now, tell me that's not reality??

* If the phone rings and it's my mother, what might I be able to expect? Probably something, well, hmmm...negative.

In fact, most of my dealings with others I have a negative confirmation bias about. And those turn out to be true, too. Batmite! comes into the office--administration has probably fucked with him again. Turns out to be *true*. On and on and on. I deal in the negative. I make lemonade from lemons all the time. It's part of my m.o. Maybe I'm invested in seeing the negative? But good god, somebody show me the positive outcomes. Because I'm not in the habit of dealing with them.

-- Virgil

Here's a Cigar--Tell Me About Your Mother

So, as I mentioned before, I'm in therapy. I have been for a little while. Mainly I went because I was very stressed out; I wanted to figure out why I keep getting myself involved in all these projects that tangle me up and control all my time. Why does that always seem to happen? What am I getting out of it? I'm at the most successful I've ever been in life. I'm very satisfied with who I am as a person; I love my job. I've got the amount of institutional education I want. I've got a great kid. My marriage doesn't suck. I'm not trapped in ludicrous self esteem battles with my mother. I know what I want out of life. I won a fucking award. I'm good at what I do.

I should be really happy right now, but I'm just not. To be fair, I'm not sad or miserable, either. I'm just really stressed out. I keep having physical stress reactions to things that shouldn't be that stressful. It eats away at me. At this point in my life, things should be getting better, not worse. There is nothing going on in my life right now that even remotely resembles the life I came from. Misunderstandings with El Hijo cannot even begin to compare to a physical fight between me and an alcoholic whom I tried to run over with my car to get away from (are you dead yet, fucker?). Giving presentations and getting up in front of 44 people every other day to teach should not be as stressful as figuring out how you and your one year old baby are going to eat for the next two weeks. Or having your sister burst into your room screaming "Daddy's dead!!" It sooo does not compare.

But I have the same stress reactions that I had then. My body hasn't learned to shut it off, I guess. I still sleep like crap at night. I startle awake easy. I have the most severe gut cramps you could imagine. It doubles me over sometimes. Sometimes the sleep/startle thing is so bad I have to sleep on the couch. That helps for some reason. It always feels like the other boot is going to drop. I'd like to make those feelings go away. I can get a hell of a lot done. But I'd like to do it without feeling entrenched in war all the time. Plus, I'm almost done with grad school. 5 1/2 weeks to go! Once I've finished, if I don't figure out why I'm doing what I'm doing, I'll just fill it up with a new job of some sort.

So, I go to therapy every week now. It's not what I expected. But one of the first things I learned is that I have a certain set of expectations that have helped me survive up to this point, but they no longer apply to life as it is now. So he thinks. (I know, I'm working on it!) I need to change my expectations. Heh. Easier said than done. I like Dr. Ian. I thought he was going to push pills on me (he didn't) or not understand what a fucked up JW background can do to you (he does) or the fact that I use sarcasm and humor to cover over the things that make me uncomfortable (he pointed that out). I like going to see him.

He asked if I had anyone to tell these things to. Apart from talking poor El Hijo's head off, not really. I have some good buddies up here, but I don't have a bff. She's back in Kentucky and dealing with her own problems. But, hey, I do have You, right? So, dear readers, you get to be a part of my therapy now (as if you weren't before). Don't you feel special?

-- Virgil

Vanity Trumps God

Latest bit of wackiness from my mother.

So, Dante has been spending Spring Break in Kentucky this week. He got down there Friday night. This past Saturday was the day of the one celebration Jehovah's Witnesses officially recognize: the Memorial. Now, if you don't know what that is, I'll explain it to you. It's the most boring ceremony on the face of the earth. You go to church at "sundown" (or as near as you can manage it) to remember the night before Jesus died--the last supper bit. So, it starts off with a hymn and a prayer. A small speech is given about that night and the events that supposedly happened then. They read the scriptures from the gospels describing what happened. When they get to the part where Jesus sends the bread around the table and says "This means my body," the JWs pass around a little basket of unleavened bread. One of the little old ladies in the congregation basically bakes it beforehand and doesn't use any yeast. You pass it quietly from person to person. Then the speaker reads the scripture where Jesus passes the wine and says "This means my blood." Then a glass of wine gets passed from person to person. That part was fairly nerve wracking as a kid, because you didn't want to be the one who spilled the glass (oh noes! Jesus' blood is on my dress!).

Now, you don't actually eat or drink either of these items. Unless you happen to be among the "chosen" 144,000 who are supposed to go to heaven and rule with God. Then you get to eat the nasty bread and sip the wine. This is all self reported, of course, but only around 2000 people out of the 6 million JWs worldwide self report. Interestingly, they also seem to be mainly composed of old, white Americans. Hmmm. I think I've only ever seen one or two people eat/drink at that ceremony, and they were visiting. Afterward there is more prayer, and then everybody goes home. Bo-ring. I have seen brothers and sisters drinking the wine after the meeting was over. It loses its specialness then. Nobody noshes the bread afterward, because apparently it's pretty gross. It's the one event they publicize for. They spend prior weeks knocking on people's doors with special little tracts about the event. It's the one time you push hard to drag everything and everybody you know there. It's "Teh Big Deal."

So, I'm on the phone with Dante's dad and he gets a call coming in. When he switches back, he tells me, "Yo mom is a piece of work!" He was mad. Apparently, she had gotten Dante for the afternoon/evening for the purpose of dragging him to this event--which his dad neither knew about nor approved of. But now, she was whisking Dante back to his dad's apartment blathering about how she couldn't take him "looking like that." What was wrong?

Dante's braids were out and he had an afro.

In the course of the conversation, Mom called him a "wildman" and ranted on and on about how she didn't even have a du-rag to put over it, as if walking into church with your du-rag is better than walking in with a fro. She went on about how she had been "assured" that he would have his hair cornrowed, which begs the question by whom?? the Committee to Inform Nana about Dante's Hairstyles? but that would be a fact, and she doesn't deal in them. So, her put down of his ethnic hair set his dad right off the edge. Partly because such comments reveal Mom's subtle and latent racism that she doesn't want to admit is there, partly because she tried to sneak church over on Dante's dad, and mainly because Dante was sitting in the seat next to her listening to her go off.

I know I'm supposed to be mad at this, but I can't stop laughing about it. I warned Dante that Nana probably wouldn't like his hair out of braids, and for him to ignore it. He had already come to that conclusion himself. But here's the thing: she chose looking good in front of her church buddies to exposing Dante to the "Truth" of her religion on the one night where it doesn't matter who you drag in to hear it. She chose to leave her only grandchild in "darkness" for appearances in front of church.

LOLOL.

She hasn't called me all week, which is unusual when Dante is down there, especially if she's fighting with his dad. That can only mean she knows she fucked that one up good. And that all arguments about how "important" it is that Dante come to know JW "truth" is a bunch of horseshit. LOL. At least now we know that the way to get Dante out of church is to take his braids down.

-- Virgil

A Bitching Session

This is going to sound incredibly...vain...but I'm at the point where I don't care. It seems as though whenever I get any free time in some other corner, somebody else swoops in to claim it.

I work two jobs and I'm finishing grad school. I'm fucking busy. I've done it to myself by overscheduling, but when I got this job and then got accepted in grad school one month later, I just couldn't say no to either thing. It was like someone said, "Would you like Dream 1 or Dream 2? Or, you could bargain your soul and have both!" I chose the soul option, since I don't have one. My sense of timing is just warped. I grade papers, I do lesson plans, I run class, I have office hours, I read hundreds of pages a week for my own schoolwork, I write constantly for my own schoolwork. I write grants, I report on grants, I meet with and get tutors started (this takes about an hour per person, and I go through around 200 people a year), I go to a shitload of agency related meetings, I manage fundraisers, I do everything from taking out the trash to buying ink at Office Depot and then come back to put our finances in the computer. I track 400 people. Do you know how much paper they accumulate? It's a lot. I can hardly even squeeze in proper friend time. You have to basically be having an emergency (like JP and the Health Center, LOL) or rescuing me from one (like JP buying me a few beers after the recent crisis).

I'm suppposed to be on Spring Break right now. At least I don't have to teach or go to classes myself. But this is how my day went yesterday. I started my day at 8:00 doing the nonprofit thing and related things. I left at 3:00 because I had to accomodate someone else's schedule--but I'm only supposed to work 25 hours a week (because that's all they pay me for), so that works out OK anyway. Got home around 3:30, and until 7:30 I worked on a 4 page response for one class and read my ecocritical economics stuff. I have a presentation on that next week. At 7:30 we left for dinner. I had some awesome Thai food and got back to the house around 9:00. I went braindead for about 30-45 minutes. Then I graded 10 essays (I have 30 left). I got done at 11:45 p.m. I got in the bed after midnight, after having wandered around the house for about 20 minutes going "Wha?" Today will be more of the same and so will Friday. That is actually a typical day, in spite of this being a break week. I get started earlier when Dante is here and has to go to school. The details change, but the time frame does not.

That part is my fault. I signed up for everything, and if you want to do everything, it takes time. Shitloads of it.

What juices me is all the emotional crap flying around right now. Not on my part, for once. My therapist (yes, I'm in therapy to figure out why I like piling it on so thick and so high) was actually amazed at my lack of panic when all this personnel and work shit hit the fan and there was a very real possibility that I would have to run both programs by myself in addition to the above schedule. I think I was just shell shocked, actually. Dazed. I just know how to keep working through shell shock, that's the only difference. It looks like competence. It's really just survival. I can't even remember half of what I did to get through it once it's over. But back to them and away from me!

I swear, it's as though people smell free time and want to suck it out of me. I love D/B (not in a mobile library driver stalking way). But she's absolutely bleeding me dry right now. She's a wreck. The other two employees are a wreck. When I'm alone with them, they all want to dump it on me. So they do, and all the while, guess who's still tap-tap-tapping on the computer trying to get shit done? I don't have time to negotiate people's personalities for them. And I don't need the emotional stress of knowing things I have to somehow navigate around like a minefield. For example, I found out that the other employee--the one who batmobiled Stinky away--left not because of Stinky, but because D/B reminds her of her abusive dead ex-husband, and she just lost it. I don't blame her. But how the fuck do I help both D/B figure that out without having her own breakdown (she's had abusive relationships, it would kill her to think she was repeating the cycle) and how do I help Batwoman get some skirt and say "shut the fuck up", which would've probably stopped the abuse? That is one of hundreds of little emotional pairings flying around this office.

I should've had this whole week to work my little 25 hours and then work like hell on my major papers and grading. It's how I normally spend Spring Break--getting ahead, because I have so much to do once school starts back up. Yesterday was the first day I actually got to do any of my own work because of all this other crap at their work; I'm almost done with my 25 hours now, and it's the middle of the week. Monday and Tuesday I just came home braindead. I hate having to be the one who sits in on everything because I'm the only one not running around with straw in my hair whooping like a monkey.

When do I get my turn? I hate people sometimes. I'm tired. Leave me the hell alone to get my stuff done. Or at least recognize that I'm doing a lot right now and accomodate me for once. Don't always ask me to accomodate everybody else just because I'm better at it than you. That pisses me off. I haven't even raised my voice about this whole thing. They stick to me like magnets because I'm the only one who hasn't yelled or thrown a hissy. But I'm about to have a bigger fit than any of them have up to this point.

-- Virgil

Wait, Wah?

Shield your delightful children, Meg, for herein I curse.

see more crazy cat pics

OK, so updates are in order.  I'd like to give you a nice, succinct account of what happened, but unfortunately, I'm still rather confused about it my own damn self.  I got ready for Thursday's meeting totally prepared to be the only employee left standing, going to all said meetings myself and generally just bunkering down for nuclear war.  I wore my best "white woman means business" outfit.  The look had somehow frizzed out by the time I got to the bar to meet JP and Batmite! and tie one on.  Thanks, by the way, JP, for paying.

I get to work and at least D/B has shown up and dressed up.  I was very convinced I'd come in to find an answering machine message that she'd quit and fuck it all if she cared.  She'd sent an email to a board member saying basically that, and since she'd bothered to put it in writing, I figured that was the next step.  So at least when she showed up for work, that was one step ahead.  I packed for the event, because I figured the state people would be there along with the two spineless jellyfish bitches that run the program.  They're the kind that love to take in the gossip and spread it around, but be damned if they'll make a firm decision on anything truly important.  I packed five copies of Stinky Moochy Hippy's personnel report.  (Later, JP, Batmite! and I perused them over beers.  Unethical?  You betcha.)  I packed all of the copies of emails we'd sent to her.  With highlighted portions showing where we'd tried to remedy the problem and failed miserably.  And plenty that seemed to say "WTF???" in business tone. There were probably 150 of them.  I also packed her actual file.  

I came loaded for bear.  Stinky bear.

To make a long and painful story bearably short (see the pun I made there?), we got to the meeting, and I was immediately ejected.  Mainly because it simply wouldn't do to have a rational person in the mix.  It would be much better to put two spineless jellyfish bitches and two highly emotional and angry people in the same room together.  Doesn't that make much more sense?  You'll notice I didn't mention any state people.  We-ell, that's because they weren't there.  Said spineless jellyfishes cancelled their appointment with the state because it makes their management look bad.  I had already pointed out that they had more to lose than we did, which seemed to bolster D/B's confidence a tad.  So this problem was "solved" internally.  There are quotes around that word for a reason.

The "resolution" to the problem came something like this:

SJB (Spineless Jellyfish Bitches):  OK, so we want you to take Stinky Girl back and just pretend nothing happened.

Us:  Um.   No.  Actually, we don't want her back.  What's Plan B?

SJB:  Well, if you don't take her back, we'll not fund that position again for your agency for the next two years (evil cackles).

Us:  Fine by us.  With workers like that, who needs them anyway?  Fuck that noise.

SJB:  (Shock) --------

Us:  Are we done here?

SJB:  So we are in agreement that you'll be taking her back.

Us:  No.  We don't want her back.  She sucks.

SJB:  I'm glad we've found a compromise.

Us:  ???  We don't want her.  

SJB:  We reject your reality and substitute our own.  Thanks for taking her back.

Us:  We don't want her back.  She stinks.  And she's a crappy worker.

SJB:  I'm glad we see eye to eye.  So, she'll be back next week.

Us:  Wait?  Wha???

So, yes, Stinky Hippie was back on the job today.  Funny how you can claim to be so miserable at a place and still want to come back to it.  She's not the masochistic type.  Things were very uncomfortable at the office.  We had a simple task list for her to complete waiting on her--basically fixing her fuck-ups.  She tried to engage me in conversation.  I did my best to keep it to three words or less.  I know it's petty, but she's pissed me off and I don't think there is any way for her to fix it with me.  She'd have to want to give my son a kidney.  And he'd have to need one.

And she still stinks.  D/B  moved her into our (tiny) office to put the supervisory omnipresence on her.  That just means we're now working elbow to elbow and the room smells like burnt hippy.  It's disgusting.  I'm pretty aggravated on all fronts right about now.  D/B needs to go to some fucking management classes and grown ass women need to grow the fuck up and do their damned work.  And use deodorant.    

-- Virgil, proud user of deodorant

Shit, Meet Fan

Sigh. It's been a long day at the office. Just before I got there, apparently, crappy management met poopy worker, and well, shit hit the fan. The stinky hippy I've been bitching about for months now got a good chewing out by Director/Buddy, who isn't exactly the most tactful or subtle manager in the world, granted. It all started over a bag of trash that Stinky Girl was supposed to have taken out. Ordinarily, it would've miffed D/B, but given the problems we've had with Faux Hippy, it was basically the straw that broke the camel's back. Instead of weathering the minor tirade (which normally goes away after about 5 minutes), Stinky Hippy stormed out of the office.

Now, where she expected to go, considering we're in the middle of the county on a country road and she has no damn car--still!!--was beyond me. But one of our other grant funded employees happened to be coming into the office at that exact moment and basically swooped her away Batmobile style. Said Normally Smart Woman later sent a text saying she wouldn't be in for the rest of the day. WTF? She didn't witness the incident, so I'm not exactly sure what happened unless her mothering instinct kicked in. Considering I'm pretty sure she played a pivotal role in what happened a few hours later, she's really playing with fire. Not only was the incident none of her business, but she deliberately shucked her own job to make it her business. If she's aiding and abetting the problem, she's liable to wind up fired. Hell, she may have already quit. We're used to working under the gun with absolutely no help, so when that possibility came up, after we raged for a minute about it, we shrugged, said "Whatever," and got back to work. It's her job to lose, if that's the way she wants it, but the whole thing is still damned puzzling.

I can't get the full story of what happened from D/B, which makes me suspect she said something really bad, but then again, she's not stupid either, and although she may feel a certain way, she by no means puts herself in a position to take a beating in her career. That's the gist of what I walked into this morning.

Four hours later, we get an urgent email from the coordinator of the project saying we are to meet at a different time and at their main office. We had already had a different appointment and we were supposed to get a site visit for the purpose of reviewing Stinky Hippy's progress so far. Har. Now, we can't get Stinky to do her own paperwork and the things we ask of her in a timely manner. But she sure as hell beat it to the main office and got the state commissioner of the project in on it. Long story short, I'm pretty sure the meeting two days from now is for the purpose of railroading D/B, and Stinky thinks she's going to hide behind a wall of suits and cry "poor little me" so that they do her dirty work for her.

Now, I'm not saying D/B was in the right to scream at her. But after I typed up Stinky's personnel profile so that we would have some context to the situation, things look quite a bit different.

Her infractions and reprimands total three pages. Single spaced.

I had no idea how much she was costing us in time and money until I had to put it all together. So, since I'm always spoiling for a fight anyway, my next move is to say Bring it. I even found the places where we'd asked the state commissioner for help, and he chose to screw around instead. If we do one thing well, it's documentation. If Stinky expected this to be a smooth train ride over D/B's career, well, she's got a shift in the tracks coming. Then my conspiracy side kicked in and I thought, you know what? She knew she had that review coming on Thursday, and she had to know it wasn't going to be good. So why not make the first move and wag the dog for somebody else?

So now, after all the misery she's put us through, she's stirred up the wrong hornets' nest.

Having recently won my last protracted battle, I've been itching for a new arena to walk into. I can't help it; it's in my nature. If there's a dog fight, I can't stand not to be in it. After all, I basically got an award for it.

-- Virgil. Grr.

Tomato, To-MAH-to

I don't know if you've ever heard people say that children tend to have the complete opposite interests of their parents. I'm sure there is a witty adage about that, but my brain is fried, and I can't think of what that would be, and that 's the best explanation I can come up with, so that'll have to do. Anyhoo, it's certainly true in this household between me and my son. Pretty much in every category of comparison (except stubbornness and temper), we're completely different. If you've ever heard of "multiple intelligences", he is a body learner and I'm an intrapersonal learner. If you haven't heard of multiple intelligences, you should really click the linky. It explained me to a "T". So, anyway, it took me a while to figure out that he didn't just want to curl up in a ball with a book like I did; I totally don't understand how he just slams through the day with extreme prejudice basically until he passes out.

But when it comes to school, we're even more opposite. He could care less about school; because I was in a fundy cult, education was the only breath of fresh air, so I latched on to as much of it as I could. It's not that Dante doesn't care about books and reading--so long as it's something that interests him. He'll read. But he just doesn't have that drive to learn stuff like I did at school. He's a very "passive" learner. He also knows how much it galls me that he's so passive about it, and he finds that highly funny. Consequently, every time he gets the chance to screw with me about what he's learning in school, he takes that opportunity to drive me batshit insane. I call into evidence a recent dinner conversation that went something like this:

Virgil: So, what are you learning in school right now?
Dante: Stuff. (Smirks)
Virgil: What kind of stuff?
Dante: School stuff. (Big grin)
Virgil: Such as??
Dante: WAR!
Virgil: OK. Which one?
Dante: The one where people died. (Laughs)
Virgil: Which would be...........
Dante: The Revo-LU-tionary one.
Virgil: Oh, good, what was that all about?
Dante: People died.
Virgil: YES. Yes they did. Why?
Dante: "Give me liberty, or give me death!!!" (Gives sly sideways glance at me)
Virgil: Oh! Good! Who said that?
Dante: I did.
Virgil: Yes, and who said it before you?
Dante: (shrugs) Idunno. Some man.
Virgil: Patrick Henry?
Dante: Probably.
Virgil: OK. So it was over liberty?
Dante: Yes. And tea.
Virgil: Tea?
Dante: Yes. They threw it in the water and then people died. (Another grin)
Virgil: The tea in the water made people die?
Dante: (Big grin) Yep.
Virgil: -er, I don't know--
Dante: But one of them died first.
Virgil: Who died first?
Dante: Crispy Attack-us. (Huge grin)
Virgil: Crispus Attucks?
Dante: Yup.
Virgil: Wow, Dante, I'm glad your teacher taught you that. Most people don't know that. Did you know that he was also black?
Dante: ::shrug::
Virgil: So the first person who died in the name of the revolution was a black man.
Dante: "Give me liberty, or give me death!!"
Virgil: You don't care, do you?
Dante: Nope.
Virgil: Sigh.
Dante: Then people wrote their names on a paper--and one guy wrote it really big.
Virgil: And who was that?
Dante: JOHN HANCOCK!!!!
Virgil: I'm sitting right next to you, and now I'm deaf, thank you very much.
Dante: ::giggling::
Virgil: What was the paper called?
Dante: The Constelution.
Virgil: ?????
Dante: ::giggling::
Virgil: What did it say?
Dante: Give me liberty, or give me death!!!
Virgil: Is that your way of saying you want to be excused from dinner?
Dante: Yes.



Sigh. I know he knows this stuff. But he much prefers torturing me with the question of whether or not he knows stuff. Argh.

-- Virgil

HA!

I clipped this from a longer post over at RateYourStudents--a sanity saver to me when I'm overwhelmed with the semester and my other lives, like I am right now. The best ones come from an old semi-retired prof they've dubbed "Wicked Walter." WW tells it like it is, no holds barred (probably because he has tenure and a retirement plan and the site is, well, anonymous). Fellow English grads will especially appreciate the humor:

Oh, and English profs. They're delicious. English departments are where dreams go to die, right? I mean these English profs always have the nice Shakespearean fonts on their websites, a big quill next to their unbelievably white faces. They're always writing about how summer will bring them to England or Scotland,where they will trudge down some muddy trail to where Wordsworth once smoked a big bowl, or where Coleridge once ate a beaver because he thought it was Mary Shelley...

...And I won't even get started on the whole insular world that is academic blogging, with all the above inanities tagging each other with memes. "I tag WonderProf and TeachingSuperstar with this newest meme: 5 authors you'd like to poke with a stick and 5 sexual positions you could get into where it'd be easiest to revise your un-sellable and boring dissertation."

...Finally, a special shout out to those cretins on the job path. Oh, they are lovely, sweet dears, so persecuted, so incredibly sure that the system is out to spoil their chance at success...all the search committees have ganged up to find ways to make them unhappy, and when they do get interviews, they imagine senior faculty
Stanley is flicking boogers at them, and not playing along with the modus operandi which is supposedly: "We welcome you and your intellect, and can't wait for you to show us how it's done, you 27 year old fucktard."

el-oh-el.

What I like about RYS is that it comes from real people in the business of academia. God, I'd love to put some faces to names. If we did, maybe we'd all have less reason to rant anonymously. Semester stress. I has it.

-- Virgil

Go, Me!

Remember way back when I said I thought something good might be happening to me?

Some of you might know about the project I've been working on with the classes I teach at the university. I've struggled to get it off the ground, my mentor dumped me, I retooled the program myself, picked out all my own readings, blah, blah, blah. When I finally went to get a little recognition for it within my own department, I hit a brick wall. The person who was my immediate superior just seemed incredibly negative about the whole thing. It was pretty discouraging, because there was even talk about yanking parts of the program away from me.

One phone call and a couple of letters away, and I won a damn university award for the project. The secretary of state came down and presented it. I was one of three instructors in the whole university to get the award. Departmental kudos have come officially flying my way. My brick wall crumbled yesterday at about 2:00--I would give glorious details, but I have no control anymore over who reads this blog from *there*, so I may present those a little later. Suffice it to say, the road was smoothed, every problem solved for me (even though the problems weren't really there to begin with, in my opinion), and it ended with some surprising results, which I may post later if I get brave enough. It helps to have people with a stake in the fight.

Here's a brief summary of the award. My picture and my real name are in this thing, yes. Do I care? No. They took my student i.d. picture from the files, so that's why I look rather...flat. My own pictures from the event still aren't back yet. When they are, I'll post them, too. Linky

It didn't hit me until I was sitting in the presentation about to walk up to get the award that I'd done such a good thing. When you're working, sometimes you don't really see the greater picture. Some of my students have gone on to regularly volunteer from the experience they had in their class with me. One of my students is the director of philanthropy at her sorority--it's the first time they've ever let a freshman hold the position--and she's in charge of 90 girls and gets them all off to volunteer projects. When the director who gave the awards was talking about what we'd done, it was just amazing to think, "Wow. I did that. And it really wasn't so hard after all." It was the first time I really felt proud of all the work I've done up to this point, instead of thinking, "Where's the next fight going to be, and what will it be over?"

I was "strongly encouraged" to apply for a new job that was just created for the fall. If I got the job, I'd have to quit my nonprofit job, and I'm not too sure how I feel about that yet. The person on the hiring committee who strongly encouraged me is also the one who dropped me like a hot potato the first time around; so I'm having some trust issues there. But the job itself sounds like it's right up my alley. It's a combination of working with a certain demographic of students and taking on their sections of University 101 to help them figure out how to study and get engaged in college (which also is now supposedly to include a service learning component, thanks to this recent award). I've been asked at least to sit in on the planning of the class, if I choose not to apply or somehow end up not getting the job.

I'm still bowled over by the whole thing; and truthfully, I'm trying not to be mistrustful of the offer. I'll throw my hat in the ring, but I'm not making any definite plans until I see what shakes down. In the meantime, WOOT!

-- Virgil

This Blows

Thar she blows!

I do not want to ever have to write the word "whale" again. At least not for a good, long time.

-- You can call me Virgil

Midterm Mania

This is the part of the semester where I want to put straw in my hair and call it a life.

There will be another part of the semester like this close to the end, but for now, I'm still wallowing around in crazy. Midterm portfolios are due, along with my own assignments. This year, the second paper came due as part of the portfolio, so that the normal grading process has just been squared. It takes a while to really read 45 essays and give feedback--not a letter grade--to all of them. Especially if that's not all you have to do. But to have to grade 45 portfolios after you've done that and again provide feedback on all of them....blech. Eventually you just want to start writing things like "U did gud."

In addition to slogging through portfolios, which have to be turned back to them tomorrow, I have my own tidy little assignment to write: a short essay on some ecocritical perspective of Moby Dick. The irony of a short essay on an epic novel has set very heavily on my gut for several weeks. To paraphrase how a buddy in the department explained the book, "They chase a whale. It takes a while." But good god, there is so much going on in that book, that if you choose to Sparknote it (which I have never done), you're asking to get your ass handed to you. It's the Great American Novel for a reason. I actually liked the book. But it did indeed take a while. Now I think I'm going for some argument about the danger of conflating primary nature whales with secondary nature whales as resources. It's a Marxist argument, and the gist of it explains quite a bit about modern environmental problems. It makes my brain hurt to think about it.

Looming in the future is tomorrow's class discussion about a reading I assigned on Friday. My resident class Christian apologist has already emailed me concerning the essay and how best to approach class discussion, as he always sees any readings I give as being anti-Christian when there really isn't anything there to see. He's trained to see it. But he knows there are atheist tigers in the room ready to jump on him for saying the G word. Because it's discussion, he gets to say the G word, and the atheists get to counter his point. Which then sets them up to get *totally* derailed on the question of whether G even exists or not, and has nothing to do with the damned reading, which is about how doing small acts is just as valuable as doing big acts. He's intent on making his point about theology, and wants to be "mentally prepared" for what is ahead. Sigh. The other students don't really care for him because he makes sweeping generalities that he can't support; because they're fed up with neocons, they jump on him, and I have to educate them on attacking arguments instead of committing ad hominems left and right, but at that age to attack there argument is by default to attack the person, or so they feel.

Gad. Tomorrow should be fun.

-- Strawheaded Virgil