Yesterday I woke up (too late) to the knowledge that I had managed to schedule myself to teach one class from noon to 4 and another from 3 to 5 on the same day. My alarm went off at the right time and I got out of bed at the right time, but it was mid-morning before I really realized that I had managed to double-schedule myself in front of the classroom—and almost noon before I realized that I might actually also have another meeting at 2. (That one, thank goodness, had been canceled.)
The 3 to 5 class is my regular weekly gig; the noon to 4 job was one I'd been volunteered for by my mentor, Billy Jack. Billy Jack sort of adopted me early in my career with this department (whodathunk I'd still be here almost 18 years later?) and had saved my butt more than once when things looked sketchy for me. So when he first asked me maybe a decade ago to fill in for two days during the summer courses he teaches every other year, I was happy to comply; I sort of didn't realize that I was signing up for a repeat gig every couple of years, but that's really worked out okay.
What I do in his reservoir management class is a condensed form of the tech writing course I teach on my own job description, and teaching his class gives me a chance to update a couple of slides sets that I wind up using in my own classes most semesters. So it's not a bad deal in the long run.
Yesterday I got to the noon class a few minutes early, and a couple of students asked me if I was likely to run as far past class time as I had the previous week. Didn't plan to; I had spent the morning tweaking the slides in an effort to cut the show to about an hour and a half. Too bad, they said; the World Cup Soccer match between Germany and Spain would be coming on at 1:30, and if I ran past then, they could sit in the back of the computer-equipped classroom and watch the match instead of having to go to work. I apologized for not expecting to be able to help them.
What I hadn't factored in was that Billy Jack was on campus yesterday, and he wanted to start class with a few housekeeping items. That entailed tweaking a spreadsheet to update his student presentation schedule and then briefing the students on their responsibilities relevant to it. That took up a half-hour or so of my scheduled time, but I figured I could still finish plenty before 3, and the students might get a chance to catch part of the Word Cup.
I hadn't counted on Billy Jack to sit in on the lecture, either. I'm pretty confident about what I do, and I have worked pretty closely with him in developing my philosophy and my approach—but that didn't make me eager to deliver the lecture with him in the room. Besides, he's older than I am, and I wasn't at all sure he'd be thrilled to sit in class for that long. But there he was.
I fired up the slide show and dove into the presentation, which went smoothly for maybe 10 minutes—when the bald guy in the back of the room stopped me to ask questions. I knew the answers were going to come up in a later part of the show—the first part was only an overview—but since I didn't know if he'd stick out the whole class and I didn't want to be rude, I answered his questions as completely but succinctly as I could.
He didn't leave—not for the whole class. And he continued to interrupt with questions all through the lecture. I never mind answering questions from the students because interruptions during the lecture give them more timely answers than questions at the end, and I can tell them what I think, after which I normally remind them that they are adults, and if they don't agree with me, that's okay, too.
But when the kid asking the questions is your friend and mentor and the class you're addressing is his class, not yours, the situation feels a little different. In addition, a good deal of the time he was playing the devil's advocate, challenging me on some things that I knew he agreed with and on other things that I wasn't so sure about. If I'd been in my own classroom with my own students where my word gets to be the law, I'd have just said what I thought without thinking about it much; standing in his classroom with his students whom I was supposed to be helping get ready for his assignments—a little different.
I typically tell stories along the way to try to reinforce the points I'm making, and one of my favorites is about the discussion Billy Jack and I had had when I was still new to the department (and, really, to both engineering and technical writing) where I was able to support my opinion with evidence from his own writing. I've been telling the story in class for years, and it's always gotten a laugh from the students when they catch the punch line. I told it in a class in the spring where Billy Jack was in the room but far enough from me that I couldn't see his expression in dim light; the students laughed, but I didn't know how he felt about it. He didn't mention it after class, so I figured I'd skated—but yesterday I couldn't possibly get off that easily.
I reached the point in the lecture where the story fit, walked away from the podium, and picked up some papers lying on a nearby desk to use as "visual aids." I got through the story as usual, but not one of the students seemed to respond to it, which rattled and disappointed me. But as I dropped the papers and started back to the podium, I caught Billy Jack's expression: he was grinning from ear to ear.
Between the late start and the interruptions, the hour and a half had stretched to well over two hours, so I figured the students in the back of the room were still behaving politely because they must have had the World Cup match on their computers. I finished the lecture a little after 2:30, scanned a draft of one of the students' papers, chatted momentarily with another, and headed upstairs to my 3 o'clock class.
I stopped by my office to refill my tea glass, zipped through the restroom, and landed in the classroom right at 3 o'clock, much to the apparent disappointment of the half-dozen young men in the room. One of them gutted up enough to ask the question they all were thinking: can we go back to our offices to watch the rest of the match?
"Why?" I asked him. "Can you watch it on your computers?"
Nods.
"We've got a perfectly good screen right here," I pointed out. "Put it on, turn down the sound, and you can watch the game and listen to me."
Really? Yeah, really. I watch television while I'm doing other stuff all the time. (I have a set on now. Don't ask me what's on it; not sure I know.)
Before the nearest student to the computer got the match on, I had sat down in one of the comfortable chairs in the conference room I use for class—and suddenly felt nearly three hours on my feet and talking. By the time I got my bearings with the "futbol match," I realized that only 10 or 15 minutes were left in the game. For that, I could delay a 2-hour class a few minutes and run over time if we needed it. In fact, the computer operator had carefully turned the volume down to a whisper; I had him run it back up loud enough to here the hum of the vuvuzelas in the stands.
The game ended and went into a couple of minutes of overtime, and the guys saw a couple of chances for Germany to tie it up with Spain. But when time ran out it was Spain 1, Germany 0, so we all knew the championship was going to be the Netherlands and Spain, and my group of Middle Eastern students was ready to go to work.
The lesson of the day was writing SMART objectives, so I laid out the rules and practiced examples for various students, and most of them took notes furiously. Several are writing literature reviews that won't need objectives, so we worked on how they might approach writing their methods for their next assignments. All in all, I thought it went pretty well, and I wrapped up everything I needed to cover in time to let them out at 5.
On my way out of class, I stopped to tell the post-doc in the office next to our room that I hoped we hadn't disturbed him, and he looked at me in surprise. "You let them watch the match in class?" he asked. "That's cool!"
It hadn't been a big deal to me, and in fact I had appreciated the few minutes to rest. But it was neat to know one of the other young men in the department had seemed to think I'd scored.
Or at least my throat was telling me something close to that; after almost 5 full hours of lecturing, it was at least a little sore!
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Isn't she lovely?
When my favorite oldies radio station played Stevie Wonder's "Isn't she lovely?" the other day, I thought, as always, of my own daughter and was struck by how lovely she really is.
I can't remember many times in her twenty-something years that I haven't been proud of her. Oh, sure, she's pulled some stunts from time to time that have made me want to wring her little neck, but she's almost always wormed out of those by reminding me that she has done so much that's good—and sometimes outright amazing to me—that I've never been able to stay angry with her for very long.
When I shipped her off to New York at 16 with a suitcase full of pasta salad and macaroni because we didn't know what she would find to eat on her tiny budget in a big city, my sisters worried that she was too young for such an adventure and would certainly suffer some horrible doom. My personal feeling was that if they believed God was taking care of her south of the Red River, they ought to trust his judgment north of it, and if something horrible happened, maybe that was the way it was meant to be. She had a wonderful time, and I loved the Saturday I got to spend there with her, walking up and down Manhattan, riding the escalators to the top of the Macy's in Times Square, soaking up sunshine in Central Park—things I would never have done if she hadn't gone ahead to learn to be my tour guide.
When I sent her to college at 18, my biggest worry was probably that the car she was driving was completely unreliable and the road from here to San Marcos could get dark and lonely and even treacherous at night. Her biggest worry seemed to be that I wasn't ready to let her grow up: she had started experimenting with hair dye when she was in middle school, and my rule had always been only that she had to keep it to "real" hair colors, like blonds or browns or auburns rather than anything out of the Crayola box. It may have been her first weekend back home that she refused to take off her cap until she told me she had dyed her hair Crayola red and she didn't want me to be mad at her. So she was at least a little surprised when I reminded her that she was an adult and on her own, and as long as she wasn't living with me, I didn't much care what see did with her hair. As it turned out, she had only sprayed a few bright-red streaks into it, and it was much less annoying than some dye jobs I've seen on adult friends since then.
When she moved to California to go to school at 18, I bit the bullet to put her into a new car that would let me rest more comfortably (although she was pretty ticked off at me for taking away her sporty little T-top), and I knew that she wasn't likely to come back to Texas for more than a visit once she was gone. Her adventures in college, getting a job, and building a life for herself are her story, but she went about all of them with the same determination and talent that she had displayed growing up. And she never lost sight of the fact that I was always here, supporting her where I could (it took me 3 years to pay off the car, and I was the cosigner on her student loans) and ready to listen when she ran into walls or had reasons to celebrate.
Three or 4 years ago, she found herself in a position where she wasn't optimally happy with her life. Mostly, she was living with a boyfriend who had a lot of good things going for him, but she was beginning to realize that he wasn't the man of her dreams—or even one she wanted. The phone calls became more frequent (okay, partly because she and her brother had set me up with a cell phone that she still pays for, so calling was free), and the questions became more focused on my opinion of how she could handle things. I've always thought of her as mature for her age, and I've always thought we had a pretty good mother/daughter relationship, but I knew something was changing since she was asking more than telling and really seemed to be taking my advice earnestly, even if she didn't always follow it.
Ultimately, after a particularly tense visit there, I sent an email that told the two of them what I had observed. I didn't consider the situation hopeless (and I told them so), but I did think they needed to bring some issues to the table and work them out. Shortly after that, she called me and asked me how to go about picking out a dog.
The Junkyard dog moved in a few weeks later, and before long, she and my daughter moved into a new apartment, where my daughter had the good sense to take some time off to regroup before she got into another relationship.
That lasted for about a year before I got a message that newest man in her life "might be the one." I heard lots of good things about the young man (including that his dog played well with hers), but before I had a chance to go to the left coast, he took off for school somewhere too far north to drop by for a visit, so I never had a chance to form an opinion about him. In fact, before I got to travel again, she had already begun to express some disillusionment. She had been concerned about the notion of another "long-distance" romance; she had learned a hard lesson about those during her first year of college. And she had begun to get feedback from the young man that suggested that he wasn't exactly focusing on his studies so he could hurry back to her.
So by the time I did go west again, I was a little surprised to hear that she was pretty sure she was about to call off the relationship with that young man, but she was almost equally concerned about the reason: one from Texas had come to tour the wine country and had invited her along. Texas is even farther away than the other young man's school, but the tour of the wine country had shown her that this one had some very positive qualities that she wanted to know more—although she had known him through a working relationship almost 10 years earlier.
She sneaked a trip back to Texas at Thanksgiving to spend time with him, and they decided to see where life took them. On the one hand, I was a little hurt that she hadn't let me know she was here; on the other, I suspected the apron strings were being cut in a different way from any of the little knicks they had seen before. Last summer, her Prince Charming quit a good job in Houston and packed his bags for LA.
My visits there—and theirs here—have been fun for me. She acknowledges that he's not "perfect," but the "flaws" she sees are mostly attributable to testosterone, and she's okay with that. On the matters that count, he measures up very well—including having taken over the heart of the JY from the very beginning. I have always considered my daughter high-maintenance (although I know she knows how to squeak by on a tight budget) and high-energy; she says he often presses her to keep up. They're really a pretty neat couple.
Her recent visit home, though, is what flashed to my mind when I heard Stevie Wonder. On the last day we were home together, I had had to work during the morning, and she trooped off to visit her grandfather, who is in hospice care following a couple of rough years combating prostate cancer that has probably metastasized to the bone. We got our signals crossed on who would decide when to leave for our family reunion, so she stayed with him longer than she intended to. In some ways she was glad, because she knew these were likely to be her last few hours to see her grandfather alive; in others, she was sad that she had so few hours to spend.
When she finally called me to see if I was ready to go, I was actually wrapping up from work and tossing clothes into a bag for travel, so her timing was great. She stopped by a favorite taco stand for the salsa and chips she loves, grabbed a burrito for me, and headed home. A light rain was falling as she juggled bags and drinks through the front door, and her brother's dog bounded out past her into the street. It wasn't the first time he had gotten out past her in the rain, but like me, she considers him prize property: that brother has orders to go to Afghanistan, and right now the dog is the closest we can get to him. But the dog also has been known to dart out into the nearby highway or charge around the neighborhood, and neither of those makes him any fun to catch.
By the time I got to the door to help her, she was in a much bigger puddle than the rain could have caused; the stress of losing her grandfather and possibly losing her brother's dog was far more than she was ready to take. I grabbed a ball, bounced it on the driveway, and starting calling the dog to play fetch, and within a couple of minutes, my smaller escapee dog had led him back to the fold. We penned the dogs in the backyard, spread out our food, and enjoyed a sense that somewhere, somehow, we'll get through all of it okay.
But I realized then that I wasn't just sitting there eating lunch with my daughter this time. I had pitched in to help her with the dog because I've done that drill before, and I know that calling him to play fetch is about as good a way as any to get him to come home; she hadn't learned that yet. It wasn't at all the adult helping the child; it was one adult pitching in with another.
She's been an adult for a long time—surely since long before that weekend when she came home from San Marcos with the Crayola-red hair. And we've had lots of adult conversations about things going on in our lives. But this time it felt different; this time, I really think she's found who she really is and where she really belongs.
And she is lovely.
I can't remember many times in her twenty-something years that I haven't been proud of her. Oh, sure, she's pulled some stunts from time to time that have made me want to wring her little neck, but she's almost always wormed out of those by reminding me that she has done so much that's good—and sometimes outright amazing to me—that I've never been able to stay angry with her for very long.
When I shipped her off to New York at 16 with a suitcase full of pasta salad and macaroni because we didn't know what she would find to eat on her tiny budget in a big city, my sisters worried that she was too young for such an adventure and would certainly suffer some horrible doom. My personal feeling was that if they believed God was taking care of her south of the Red River, they ought to trust his judgment north of it, and if something horrible happened, maybe that was the way it was meant to be. She had a wonderful time, and I loved the Saturday I got to spend there with her, walking up and down Manhattan, riding the escalators to the top of the Macy's in Times Square, soaking up sunshine in Central Park—things I would never have done if she hadn't gone ahead to learn to be my tour guide.
When I sent her to college at 18, my biggest worry was probably that the car she was driving was completely unreliable and the road from here to San Marcos could get dark and lonely and even treacherous at night. Her biggest worry seemed to be that I wasn't ready to let her grow up: she had started experimenting with hair dye when she was in middle school, and my rule had always been only that she had to keep it to "real" hair colors, like blonds or browns or auburns rather than anything out of the Crayola box. It may have been her first weekend back home that she refused to take off her cap until she told me she had dyed her hair Crayola red and she didn't want me to be mad at her. So she was at least a little surprised when I reminded her that she was an adult and on her own, and as long as she wasn't living with me, I didn't much care what see did with her hair. As it turned out, she had only sprayed a few bright-red streaks into it, and it was much less annoying than some dye jobs I've seen on adult friends since then.
When she moved to California to go to school at 18, I bit the bullet to put her into a new car that would let me rest more comfortably (although she was pretty ticked off at me for taking away her sporty little T-top), and I knew that she wasn't likely to come back to Texas for more than a visit once she was gone. Her adventures in college, getting a job, and building a life for herself are her story, but she went about all of them with the same determination and talent that she had displayed growing up. And she never lost sight of the fact that I was always here, supporting her where I could (it took me 3 years to pay off the car, and I was the cosigner on her student loans) and ready to listen when she ran into walls or had reasons to celebrate.
Three or 4 years ago, she found herself in a position where she wasn't optimally happy with her life. Mostly, she was living with a boyfriend who had a lot of good things going for him, but she was beginning to realize that he wasn't the man of her dreams—or even one she wanted. The phone calls became more frequent (okay, partly because she and her brother had set me up with a cell phone that she still pays for, so calling was free), and the questions became more focused on my opinion of how she could handle things. I've always thought of her as mature for her age, and I've always thought we had a pretty good mother/daughter relationship, but I knew something was changing since she was asking more than telling and really seemed to be taking my advice earnestly, even if she didn't always follow it.
Ultimately, after a particularly tense visit there, I sent an email that told the two of them what I had observed. I didn't consider the situation hopeless (and I told them so), but I did think they needed to bring some issues to the table and work them out. Shortly after that, she called me and asked me how to go about picking out a dog.
The Junkyard dog moved in a few weeks later, and before long, she and my daughter moved into a new apartment, where my daughter had the good sense to take some time off to regroup before she got into another relationship.
That lasted for about a year before I got a message that newest man in her life "might be the one." I heard lots of good things about the young man (including that his dog played well with hers), but before I had a chance to go to the left coast, he took off for school somewhere too far north to drop by for a visit, so I never had a chance to form an opinion about him. In fact, before I got to travel again, she had already begun to express some disillusionment. She had been concerned about the notion of another "long-distance" romance; she had learned a hard lesson about those during her first year of college. And she had begun to get feedback from the young man that suggested that he wasn't exactly focusing on his studies so he could hurry back to her.
So by the time I did go west again, I was a little surprised to hear that she was pretty sure she was about to call off the relationship with that young man, but she was almost equally concerned about the reason: one from Texas had come to tour the wine country and had invited her along. Texas is even farther away than the other young man's school, but the tour of the wine country had shown her that this one had some very positive qualities that she wanted to know more—although she had known him through a working relationship almost 10 years earlier.
She sneaked a trip back to Texas at Thanksgiving to spend time with him, and they decided to see where life took them. On the one hand, I was a little hurt that she hadn't let me know she was here; on the other, I suspected the apron strings were being cut in a different way from any of the little knicks they had seen before. Last summer, her Prince Charming quit a good job in Houston and packed his bags for LA.
My visits there—and theirs here—have been fun for me. She acknowledges that he's not "perfect," but the "flaws" she sees are mostly attributable to testosterone, and she's okay with that. On the matters that count, he measures up very well—including having taken over the heart of the JY from the very beginning. I have always considered my daughter high-maintenance (although I know she knows how to squeak by on a tight budget) and high-energy; she says he often presses her to keep up. They're really a pretty neat couple.
Her recent visit home, though, is what flashed to my mind when I heard Stevie Wonder. On the last day we were home together, I had had to work during the morning, and she trooped off to visit her grandfather, who is in hospice care following a couple of rough years combating prostate cancer that has probably metastasized to the bone. We got our signals crossed on who would decide when to leave for our family reunion, so she stayed with him longer than she intended to. In some ways she was glad, because she knew these were likely to be her last few hours to see her grandfather alive; in others, she was sad that she had so few hours to spend.
When she finally called me to see if I was ready to go, I was actually wrapping up from work and tossing clothes into a bag for travel, so her timing was great. She stopped by a favorite taco stand for the salsa and chips she loves, grabbed a burrito for me, and headed home. A light rain was falling as she juggled bags and drinks through the front door, and her brother's dog bounded out past her into the street. It wasn't the first time he had gotten out past her in the rain, but like me, she considers him prize property: that brother has orders to go to Afghanistan, and right now the dog is the closest we can get to him. But the dog also has been known to dart out into the nearby highway or charge around the neighborhood, and neither of those makes him any fun to catch.
By the time I got to the door to help her, she was in a much bigger puddle than the rain could have caused; the stress of losing her grandfather and possibly losing her brother's dog was far more than she was ready to take. I grabbed a ball, bounced it on the driveway, and starting calling the dog to play fetch, and within a couple of minutes, my smaller escapee dog had led him back to the fold. We penned the dogs in the backyard, spread out our food, and enjoyed a sense that somewhere, somehow, we'll get through all of it okay.
But I realized then that I wasn't just sitting there eating lunch with my daughter this time. I had pitched in to help her with the dog because I've done that drill before, and I know that calling him to play fetch is about as good a way as any to get him to come home; she hadn't learned that yet. It wasn't at all the adult helping the child; it was one adult pitching in with another.
She's been an adult for a long time—surely since long before that weekend when she came home from San Marcos with the Crayola-red hair. And we've had lots of adult conversations about things going on in our lives. But this time it felt different; this time, I really think she's found who she really is and where she really belongs.
And she is lovely.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Rats!
I knew this day was coming; it had to be inevitable. But I didn't expect it this soon.
I typed away on my laptop at home this morning on a project I wanted to have posted to a course site by noon, and I got it just the way I wanted it. But the website had timed out, I forgot to copy the text before I saved it, and saving cast it off somewhere into the ether. I had to do it over.
I got to the office a while ago, handled some immediate business, and opened a new file, determined this time to capture the text in Word and copy it over to the website, thereby skirting the possibility of being timed out. (And Word has gotten pretty good about recovering documents if something happens before I save.)
But it's turning into a miserable experience. I'm sitting at my desk, typing on my full-size, high quality keyboard with my dual 19-inch monitors to display my work (and lots of other stuff if I want it, like, right now, this blog...), and I hate it.
I want my laptop back. And my easy chair. And my dog.
When I first got a laptop, Soldier Son had told me I might as well get rid of my PC; I stubbornly held onto it for a couple of years, at least, although I seldom turned it on. Until today, I have often bounced into the office, ready to go to work on the nice office PC with the dual monitors and plenty of space to blow things up to as big as I wanted them to be. (And better speakers if I wanted to watch a video.)
But SS was right: I thought I'd be able to regenerate the missing file in a matter of minutes on the "business" equipment, but today I officially want my laptop back.
And I have miles to go before I sleep.
I typed away on my laptop at home this morning on a project I wanted to have posted to a course site by noon, and I got it just the way I wanted it. But the website had timed out, I forgot to copy the text before I saved it, and saving cast it off somewhere into the ether. I had to do it over.
I got to the office a while ago, handled some immediate business, and opened a new file, determined this time to capture the text in Word and copy it over to the website, thereby skirting the possibility of being timed out. (And Word has gotten pretty good about recovering documents if something happens before I save.)
But it's turning into a miserable experience. I'm sitting at my desk, typing on my full-size, high quality keyboard with my dual 19-inch monitors to display my work (and lots of other stuff if I want it, like, right now, this blog...), and I hate it.
I want my laptop back. And my easy chair. And my dog.
When I first got a laptop, Soldier Son had told me I might as well get rid of my PC; I stubbornly held onto it for a couple of years, at least, although I seldom turned it on. Until today, I have often bounced into the office, ready to go to work on the nice office PC with the dual monitors and plenty of space to blow things up to as big as I wanted them to be. (And better speakers if I wanted to watch a video.)
But SS was right: I thought I'd be able to regenerate the missing file in a matter of minutes on the "business" equipment, but today I officially want my laptop back.
And I have miles to go before I sleep.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
The price of their toys
In a former life, I had a spouse who used to say the difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.
That came back to me last weekend as I visited with one of my nieces at our family reunion in central Texas. Since I know Arge is the COO for a homebuilder in Chicago and that industry hasn't done well anywhere for a couple of years, I had asked her about her job situation. I'm pretty sure her income is well within the six-figure range, although her personal ethics and the situation in the industry could easily have dropped it somewhat from the figure I once heard. As a teacher, my personal take on income is that all we need is enough money to pay the rent and buy the groceries, and anything above that is pretty much gravy; a lot of mine goes toward helping my kids with the wrinkles that come up in their lives.
Arge's goes to toys. A little while earlier, I had heard her swapping details with my Number One Son about the new power boat she and her husband bought earlier this summer, a fine little craft that I'm sure cost more than my house is worth, even with the boating market farther suppressed than housing.
I'm too slow, of course, to see the irony of the situation I was in: In another life, Arge is quite well-to-do; much of the time outside of office hours (and commuting in Chicago), she spends traveling to the condo where her boat is stored and she and her husband zip up and down a lake at speeds over 100 mph. She wears four diamond studs that are each twice the size of the engagement ring I once wore. Her life is pretty much a celebration.
But in the life I was in, she was sitting next to me in a $10 lawn chair from Wal-Mart in the peanut gallery of a washers tournament in my brother's backyard. Her husband was one of four players tossing a stack of $2 washers from one end of the court to the other, parking his rum and diet cola on a stand my brother had built from scrap lumber and a discarded 12-inch floor tile. We stayed there—some combination of four to eight players and six or eight folks in the peanut gallery—until nearly 4 in the morning.
I love my niece, and I always speak of her with great pride because I feel lucky to share a few genes with her. And I love it that she appreciates her roots enough to be the first to show up at our family reunion every year. And I love it that her husband determinedly joins the washers match even when his foot is so tender from gout that he can barely wear his shoes.
But for all the expense of their toys, it's my brother—whose toys don't have to go far beyond the accouterments of a washer game—who shows me the difference between the men and the boys. I have no idea what my brother's financial situation is, but I'd be willing to bet it's not very different from mine. But he opens his home, he opens his heart, and he reminds us that paying the rent and the groceries is about all it takes to make life good.
I like the price of his toys.
That came back to me last weekend as I visited with one of my nieces at our family reunion in central Texas. Since I know Arge is the COO for a homebuilder in Chicago and that industry hasn't done well anywhere for a couple of years, I had asked her about her job situation. I'm pretty sure her income is well within the six-figure range, although her personal ethics and the situation in the industry could easily have dropped it somewhat from the figure I once heard. As a teacher, my personal take on income is that all we need is enough money to pay the rent and buy the groceries, and anything above that is pretty much gravy; a lot of mine goes toward helping my kids with the wrinkles that come up in their lives.
Arge's goes to toys. A little while earlier, I had heard her swapping details with my Number One Son about the new power boat she and her husband bought earlier this summer, a fine little craft that I'm sure cost more than my house is worth, even with the boating market farther suppressed than housing.
I'm too slow, of course, to see the irony of the situation I was in: In another life, Arge is quite well-to-do; much of the time outside of office hours (and commuting in Chicago), she spends traveling to the condo where her boat is stored and she and her husband zip up and down a lake at speeds over 100 mph. She wears four diamond studs that are each twice the size of the engagement ring I once wore. Her life is pretty much a celebration.
But in the life I was in, she was sitting next to me in a $10 lawn chair from Wal-Mart in the peanut gallery of a washers tournament in my brother's backyard. Her husband was one of four players tossing a stack of $2 washers from one end of the court to the other, parking his rum and diet cola on a stand my brother had built from scrap lumber and a discarded 12-inch floor tile. We stayed there—some combination of four to eight players and six or eight folks in the peanut gallery—until nearly 4 in the morning.
I love my niece, and I always speak of her with great pride because I feel lucky to share a few genes with her. And I love it that she appreciates her roots enough to be the first to show up at our family reunion every year. And I love it that her husband determinedly joins the washers match even when his foot is so tender from gout that he can barely wear his shoes.
But for all the expense of their toys, it's my brother—whose toys don't have to go far beyond the accouterments of a washer game—who shows me the difference between the men and the boys. I have no idea what my brother's financial situation is, but I'd be willing to bet it's not very different from mine. But he opens his home, he opens his heart, and he reminds us that paying the rent and the groceries is about all it takes to make life good.
I like the price of his toys.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Hospice revisited
The kids and I are looking forward with trepidation to the second round of hospice care in our lives. They were really too young at 8, 10, and 12 to be very much aware of the pain of watching my mother fade into a morphine-induced reality as breast cancer that metastasized into bone cancer slowly ate away her life.
This time, they cannot be present to see the pain their grandfather is beginning to suffer, but they understand and feel the reality of death, and I feel certain that his is not very far away. The prostate cancer he developed a decade or more ago has almost certainly metastasized into the bone, and his daughters expect hospice care to be soon on its way.
Looking back, I see a father-in-law who has always seemed to me to be something of an odd bird. His military career followed his family's history; his training in Baptist seminary may well have been his way of rejecting their tradition of alcoholism. The combination of discipline rooted in military order and alcoholism gave him a very strong reliance on knowing rules and making sure they are followed, a distaste for spontaneity, a strong need to feel loved, but an inability to show affection to those closest to him.
As a result, I heard from his son (my ex) for the first decade or more of our marriage that the father had never been present in the son's life, always too consumed with his job responsibilities as a military chaplain to take time to be a dad. Hence the son's youthful experimentation with alcohol, tobacco, stronger drugs, and sex, and maybe his lack of ability to be present in his own children's lives. Like Cat Stevens' "Cat's in the Cradle," the son did a fine job of following in the father's footsteps.
My personal experience with Granddad was a little confusing: he often welcomed me into his little corner of the house, but we frequently argued about one thing or another. I found the arguments stimulating; I never felt as if either of us won or lost, but we went away understanding and respecting the other's point of view. Ex was appalled at the very notion that I would argue with his dad; I thought it was a perfectly normal thing to do, and Granddad never made any attempt to stop it, so I rather assumed he appreciated the opportunity to state his point of view.
Ex's sister is a few months younger than I, and we graduated from the same university the same semester. One big difference was that I had had to pay for most of my last three years of school almost completely on my own, and Granddad had generously financed Sis's. The other difference was that Sis decided a few weeks before the end of our senior year that she didn't want the degree and walked out of school to go live as a hippie on a beach. One of her professors found her, got her back into school, and gave her a place to live since she had blown the last installment on her dorm room, so she actually graduated on time. I never heard a word out of Granddad about Sis's behavior; I was amazed that he continued to support her as if the incident had never happened. For a father who wasn't a dad, I thought his response was hugely forgiving and generous.
Years later, when Ex and I divorced, Sis made a point of letting me know she considered the issues in my marriage completely my fault and of wedging herself between me and him at every opportunity, even while we were at least nominally attempting to resolve our differences. I didn't want to cause problems with his family because they were, after all, still my children's kin, but I had a hard time believing that I would ever see any of them again.
That changed a couple of years ago when Granddad, then in his middle 80s, wrecked his car in the kind of accident that happens to lots of people when they are temporarily distracted. By this time, Ex had been remarried for several years, but neither Ex nor his wife seemed to be able to communicate to his two sisters what was going on with the accident. The sisters had not been particularly impressed with the new wife, but they were very upset that she was the only "reliable" source of information they had on the parents.
The two sisters invited me out for margaritas and asked me if I could bring myself to check in on the parents from time to time. I had been invited to their apartment for the family Christmas dinner shortly before then, and I knew the parents would be kind if not generous with me if I dropped in on them; after all, I'm about the only connection they really have with their grandchildren.
Sure enough, they greeted me warmly the first day I dropped by their apartment, and they have reprised that kindness every time I have dropped by since then. They have dutifully reported all of their latest medical information as if they thought I had the level of understanding of their younger daughter, who is head nurse in a specialty unit in a Galveston hospital; they have asked about their grandchildren; and we have generally discussed most of the conversational taboos, including politics and religion and even touching occasionally on money.
On that first trip, they asked me why I had suddenly dropped in after years of staying away; I candidly told them the girls had asked me to because, among other things, they were appalled to hear that the parents had been eating at Taco Bell. Without missing a beat, they replied in unison, "It's good!" I also told Granddad that I had always admired him for not killing Sis when she had walked out on a college education he had paid for; he just shrugged and said, "She's my daughter and I love her." Having had my share of problems with NOS (who is now living with me again), I reconnected immediately.
I have been amused to find how liberal Granddad really is, in spite of the conservative leanings of the daughters, and I've seen that some of the things that attracted me to my ex were his similar liberal leanings. I knew that Granddad had led "ecumenical" Protestant services in the military, and over the past couple of years I've begun to see a sense of Christianity that I had not recognized in him before: he stopped attending the large church his wife and younger daughter attended for years because of his distaste for "big box" churches where individuals get lost in the shuffle. He has been impatient with any profession of Christianity that marginalizes others; he clearly takes "be ye kind" to heart. He is struggling now with whether God had a reason for keeping him alive just beyond his 88th birthday and struggling with whether this is the time when he really should let go.
That decision may actually have been made for him. Like Mother in the last few months before her death, Granddad has started complaining of gastrointestinal problems; in fact, he has already reached a stage where he is unable to eat much in the way of solid food, and his weight has dropped precipitously in the last few weeks. He is already on a morphine-like pain patch and was asking for additional Tylenol 3 (with codeine) for pain that made sitting uncomfortable, although he is still able to navigate around the apartment under his own steam. I rather suspect his body is telling him he won't have the strength (and I suspect he doesn't have the ability to withstand pain) that Mother did, and he will likely slip away before the bone cancer has much chance to do its damage.
I think he realizes that, too. Although he was getting lots of interpretations about how much pain relief he can get right now, I stole a minute when nobody else was in the room with us to remind him that he is the only one who can feel his pain, and he can have as much medicine as he thinks he needs to cope with it. I know he could take too much too soon and reduce his life by days or weeks, but I have seen the pain of bone cancer, and I would never wish it on anybody.
Maybe a bright spot is that he is having a chance to make peace with his kids: although they have lived in the same town together for almost 20 years, Ex has only recently begun to make regular visits to the apartment, and the daughters have rented the apartment next door so they can be available to help with his care now and MeMe's after he is gone.
When I asked last week how the parents are getting along with changes the daughters are making in their lives, Granddad smiled and said, "I just say, 'yes, major!'" MeMe, on the other hand, showed me proudly around "the store" in a back bedroom where the daughters have sorted out all the combined canned goods from two households onto metal shelves to see what they have for meals until they whittle it down. I'm not sure how good the intrusion is in some ways, but in others I think it reassures her his death won't leave her alone.
My Number One Son, who shares his father's and grandfather's name, lives in town but rather hesitates to go to see him, but Darling Daughter will be in later this week and will be eager to squeeze in time with him, knowing this trip will likely be her last to see him alive. Soldier Son won't be able to come back from Germany before November, which will likely be too late, but last week I delivered a perfectly beautiful letter he had written out by hand and sent with love; his Granddad almost cried.
This afternoon when I popped in for a visit, Ex walked in shortly after I got there. To say our encounters over the decade and a half since our divorce have been strained would pretty much be an understatement, but today he was relaxed and friendly. NOS had said recently that Ex's "beer gut" may well be symptomatic of liver trouble, and I have to say it did look off balance against the gaunt appearance of his arms and legs. He blamed the hoarseness of his voice on sinus drainage, but I wonder if years of smoking are taking their toll on his lungs and throat. He had "unofficial" advice that the suspected kidney cancer he thought he had still appears to be a less-dangerous cyst, which is a good deal better than the alternative. But time is clearly taking a toll on him, too.
And so we are looking at another round of hospice in our lives and the looming loss of another loved one. As SS said when things first started looking bad for Granddad a few months ago, "It's okay if we have to let him go now; the old boy has had a pretty good run."
My prayer now is that the end of it will be peaceful, loving, and as painless as possible.
This time, they cannot be present to see the pain their grandfather is beginning to suffer, but they understand and feel the reality of death, and I feel certain that his is not very far away. The prostate cancer he developed a decade or more ago has almost certainly metastasized into the bone, and his daughters expect hospice care to be soon on its way.
Looking back, I see a father-in-law who has always seemed to me to be something of an odd bird. His military career followed his family's history; his training in Baptist seminary may well have been his way of rejecting their tradition of alcoholism. The combination of discipline rooted in military order and alcoholism gave him a very strong reliance on knowing rules and making sure they are followed, a distaste for spontaneity, a strong need to feel loved, but an inability to show affection to those closest to him.
As a result, I heard from his son (my ex) for the first decade or more of our marriage that the father had never been present in the son's life, always too consumed with his job responsibilities as a military chaplain to take time to be a dad. Hence the son's youthful experimentation with alcohol, tobacco, stronger drugs, and sex, and maybe his lack of ability to be present in his own children's lives. Like Cat Stevens' "Cat's in the Cradle," the son did a fine job of following in the father's footsteps.
My personal experience with Granddad was a little confusing: he often welcomed me into his little corner of the house, but we frequently argued about one thing or another. I found the arguments stimulating; I never felt as if either of us won or lost, but we went away understanding and respecting the other's point of view. Ex was appalled at the very notion that I would argue with his dad; I thought it was a perfectly normal thing to do, and Granddad never made any attempt to stop it, so I rather assumed he appreciated the opportunity to state his point of view.
Ex's sister is a few months younger than I, and we graduated from the same university the same semester. One big difference was that I had had to pay for most of my last three years of school almost completely on my own, and Granddad had generously financed Sis's. The other difference was that Sis decided a few weeks before the end of our senior year that she didn't want the degree and walked out of school to go live as a hippie on a beach. One of her professors found her, got her back into school, and gave her a place to live since she had blown the last installment on her dorm room, so she actually graduated on time. I never heard a word out of Granddad about Sis's behavior; I was amazed that he continued to support her as if the incident had never happened. For a father who wasn't a dad, I thought his response was hugely forgiving and generous.
Years later, when Ex and I divorced, Sis made a point of letting me know she considered the issues in my marriage completely my fault and of wedging herself between me and him at every opportunity, even while we were at least nominally attempting to resolve our differences. I didn't want to cause problems with his family because they were, after all, still my children's kin, but I had a hard time believing that I would ever see any of them again.
That changed a couple of years ago when Granddad, then in his middle 80s, wrecked his car in the kind of accident that happens to lots of people when they are temporarily distracted. By this time, Ex had been remarried for several years, but neither Ex nor his wife seemed to be able to communicate to his two sisters what was going on with the accident. The sisters had not been particularly impressed with the new wife, but they were very upset that she was the only "reliable" source of information they had on the parents.
The two sisters invited me out for margaritas and asked me if I could bring myself to check in on the parents from time to time. I had been invited to their apartment for the family Christmas dinner shortly before then, and I knew the parents would be kind if not generous with me if I dropped in on them; after all, I'm about the only connection they really have with their grandchildren.
Sure enough, they greeted me warmly the first day I dropped by their apartment, and they have reprised that kindness every time I have dropped by since then. They have dutifully reported all of their latest medical information as if they thought I had the level of understanding of their younger daughter, who is head nurse in a specialty unit in a Galveston hospital; they have asked about their grandchildren; and we have generally discussed most of the conversational taboos, including politics and religion and even touching occasionally on money.
On that first trip, they asked me why I had suddenly dropped in after years of staying away; I candidly told them the girls had asked me to because, among other things, they were appalled to hear that the parents had been eating at Taco Bell. Without missing a beat, they replied in unison, "It's good!" I also told Granddad that I had always admired him for not killing Sis when she had walked out on a college education he had paid for; he just shrugged and said, "She's my daughter and I love her." Having had my share of problems with NOS (who is now living with me again), I reconnected immediately.
I have been amused to find how liberal Granddad really is, in spite of the conservative leanings of the daughters, and I've seen that some of the things that attracted me to my ex were his similar liberal leanings. I knew that Granddad had led "ecumenical" Protestant services in the military, and over the past couple of years I've begun to see a sense of Christianity that I had not recognized in him before: he stopped attending the large church his wife and younger daughter attended for years because of his distaste for "big box" churches where individuals get lost in the shuffle. He has been impatient with any profession of Christianity that marginalizes others; he clearly takes "be ye kind" to heart. He is struggling now with whether God had a reason for keeping him alive just beyond his 88th birthday and struggling with whether this is the time when he really should let go.
That decision may actually have been made for him. Like Mother in the last few months before her death, Granddad has started complaining of gastrointestinal problems; in fact, he has already reached a stage where he is unable to eat much in the way of solid food, and his weight has dropped precipitously in the last few weeks. He is already on a morphine-like pain patch and was asking for additional Tylenol 3 (with codeine) for pain that made sitting uncomfortable, although he is still able to navigate around the apartment under his own steam. I rather suspect his body is telling him he won't have the strength (and I suspect he doesn't have the ability to withstand pain) that Mother did, and he will likely slip away before the bone cancer has much chance to do its damage.
I think he realizes that, too. Although he was getting lots of interpretations about how much pain relief he can get right now, I stole a minute when nobody else was in the room with us to remind him that he is the only one who can feel his pain, and he can have as much medicine as he thinks he needs to cope with it. I know he could take too much too soon and reduce his life by days or weeks, but I have seen the pain of bone cancer, and I would never wish it on anybody.
Maybe a bright spot is that he is having a chance to make peace with his kids: although they have lived in the same town together for almost 20 years, Ex has only recently begun to make regular visits to the apartment, and the daughters have rented the apartment next door so they can be available to help with his care now and MeMe's after he is gone.
When I asked last week how the parents are getting along with changes the daughters are making in their lives, Granddad smiled and said, "I just say, 'yes, major!'" MeMe, on the other hand, showed me proudly around "the store" in a back bedroom where the daughters have sorted out all the combined canned goods from two households onto metal shelves to see what they have for meals until they whittle it down. I'm not sure how good the intrusion is in some ways, but in others I think it reassures her his death won't leave her alone.
My Number One Son, who shares his father's and grandfather's name, lives in town but rather hesitates to go to see him, but Darling Daughter will be in later this week and will be eager to squeeze in time with him, knowing this trip will likely be her last to see him alive. Soldier Son won't be able to come back from Germany before November, which will likely be too late, but last week I delivered a perfectly beautiful letter he had written out by hand and sent with love; his Granddad almost cried.
This afternoon when I popped in for a visit, Ex walked in shortly after I got there. To say our encounters over the decade and a half since our divorce have been strained would pretty much be an understatement, but today he was relaxed and friendly. NOS had said recently that Ex's "beer gut" may well be symptomatic of liver trouble, and I have to say it did look off balance against the gaunt appearance of his arms and legs. He blamed the hoarseness of his voice on sinus drainage, but I wonder if years of smoking are taking their toll on his lungs and throat. He had "unofficial" advice that the suspected kidney cancer he thought he had still appears to be a less-dangerous cyst, which is a good deal better than the alternative. But time is clearly taking a toll on him, too.
And so we are looking at another round of hospice in our lives and the looming loss of another loved one. As SS said when things first started looking bad for Granddad a few months ago, "It's okay if we have to let him go now; the old boy has had a pretty good run."
My prayer now is that the end of it will be peaceful, loving, and as painless as possible.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Movin' on—slowly
Having a night to sleep on my frustrations from yesterday didn't exactly alleviate them; in fact, I woke up at around 4:30 this morning and couldn't clear my brain enough to go back to sleep. I was sort of glad that I had to get up anyway around 7 to get ready for Day Camp training, where I got to go see lots of happy faces and people who really seem to appreciate me. By the time I left the camp around 1, I was at least beginning to feel better.
After I got home and cleaned up, I ran back up to the office to tie up a couple of loose ends from yesterday. Oddly, the very short note in my inbox from the department head helped me feel better: he's out of the office next week, too, so I can click "finish up newsletter" off my list until he gets back.
When I got home, I went to work on some housekeeping to get ready for an assortment of expected guests next week: Darling Daughter and Prince Charming are coming in, and for at least one overnight, they'll have along a friend of theirs from LA. Number One Son also promised space to a friend whose family went to Africa last summer on a mission trip, and I have visions of all four of them landing here at the same time. I'll never get the house clean enough for all of this, but at least I kept my mind of the office.
Once I had the upstairs game room cleaned enough for NOS to vacuum, dust, and clean the carpet, I drifted downstairs with visions of catching up on the news and maybe just vegging for a while, but before I had hit the bottom step, both dogs perked up, all ready to go outside.
It occurred to me that they hadn't had their usual playtime with NOS, and if I was going to veg anyway, I might as well play with them. I set the oven buzzer for about 10 minutes, refilled my tea glass, and headed outside.
For the first few minutes, my little barker provided most of the action, racing after the ball and doing a better-than-average job of getting it back right at my feet instead of just flinging it across the patio. Bubba mostly just watched, surprising me from time to time with one of his twisting jumps to catch a fly ball. For some reason, Bubba has always been much more genteel than Baby about given the ball back; when he first started to play with me, I typically sat on the brick steps, and he'd set the ball precisely into a little niche where he could be sure it wouldn't roll away. The few times I'd sat in a lawn chair before my trip to Lubbock, he was great about setting the ball neatly next to my chair so I could reach it before it rolled away.
Tonight I was sitting in a lounge chair, so he decided the logical place to put the ball was in the chair with me. I was already pretty dirty from my cleaning efforts, so having a slightly muddy ball in the chair with me was silly but not terrible.
Then he decided it needed to be in my lap, only to get it there, he set it on my legs near my knees and let it roll. In fact, the whole fetch game seemed to be more fun if he could snag the ball and get it back on my lap, preferably making a whole new mud trail down my legs on the way.
By the time we quit playing about an hour later, I had mud streaks from my ankles to my rib cage, and I had a large, goofy-looking dog grinning at me and wanting to wash my face as if he were really proud of his kindergarten art.
I have to go back out to the camp in the morning, so taking a second bath seemed kind of silly. I wiped down all my exposed body parts with a wet washcloth then stripped off my dirty clothes and tossed them in the hamper.
Except for a little reading, I accomplished nearly nothing else for the rest of the evening, but I was glad I had had time for my little mudbath. Bubba is a lot bigger dog than I ever wanted, but that affectionate grin isn't going to let go of me. And Baby can be a little stinker, but she's pretty much all right with me, too.
It'll get better. I just have to keep on keeping on.
After I got home and cleaned up, I ran back up to the office to tie up a couple of loose ends from yesterday. Oddly, the very short note in my inbox from the department head helped me feel better: he's out of the office next week, too, so I can click "finish up newsletter" off my list until he gets back.
When I got home, I went to work on some housekeeping to get ready for an assortment of expected guests next week: Darling Daughter and Prince Charming are coming in, and for at least one overnight, they'll have along a friend of theirs from LA. Number One Son also promised space to a friend whose family went to Africa last summer on a mission trip, and I have visions of all four of them landing here at the same time. I'll never get the house clean enough for all of this, but at least I kept my mind of the office.
Once I had the upstairs game room cleaned enough for NOS to vacuum, dust, and clean the carpet, I drifted downstairs with visions of catching up on the news and maybe just vegging for a while, but before I had hit the bottom step, both dogs perked up, all ready to go outside.
It occurred to me that they hadn't had their usual playtime with NOS, and if I was going to veg anyway, I might as well play with them. I set the oven buzzer for about 10 minutes, refilled my tea glass, and headed outside.
For the first few minutes, my little barker provided most of the action, racing after the ball and doing a better-than-average job of getting it back right at my feet instead of just flinging it across the patio. Bubba mostly just watched, surprising me from time to time with one of his twisting jumps to catch a fly ball. For some reason, Bubba has always been much more genteel than Baby about given the ball back; when he first started to play with me, I typically sat on the brick steps, and he'd set the ball precisely into a little niche where he could be sure it wouldn't roll away. The few times I'd sat in a lawn chair before my trip to Lubbock, he was great about setting the ball neatly next to my chair so I could reach it before it rolled away.
Tonight I was sitting in a lounge chair, so he decided the logical place to put the ball was in the chair with me. I was already pretty dirty from my cleaning efforts, so having a slightly muddy ball in the chair with me was silly but not terrible.
Then he decided it needed to be in my lap, only to get it there, he set it on my legs near my knees and let it roll. In fact, the whole fetch game seemed to be more fun if he could snag the ball and get it back on my lap, preferably making a whole new mud trail down my legs on the way.
By the time we quit playing about an hour later, I had mud streaks from my ankles to my rib cage, and I had a large, goofy-looking dog grinning at me and wanting to wash my face as if he were really proud of his kindergarten art.
I have to go back out to the camp in the morning, so taking a second bath seemed kind of silly. I wiped down all my exposed body parts with a wet washcloth then stripped off my dirty clothes and tossed them in the hamper.
Except for a little reading, I accomplished nearly nothing else for the rest of the evening, but I was glad I had had time for my little mudbath. Bubba is a lot bigger dog than I ever wanted, but that affectionate grin isn't going to let go of me. And Baby can be a little stinker, but she's pretty much all right with me, too.
It'll get better. I just have to keep on keeping on.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Sucky Friday
I know all the "good" blogs seem to be upbeat and cheerful all the time, and I'd just love to be that way, but today I'm having a sucky Friday and I'm not too darned cheerful about it. Rats.
It started off pretty good: I got caught up on reading a couple of papers for students who need feedback before handing them off to their research advisers, then I got to the office early enough to check off my to-do list and still get home by quitting time. Or so I thought.
The first item on the list was finishing up the summer edition of the department's newsletter so I can get it off to press. I had sent the department head a draft of the issue so he could see what I had in it, check a story that I wasn't sure about because the notes his secretary had sent me had been cryptic, and send me his "column." That hadn't arrived yet, but I still needed to convert the color pictures to black and white and run the spell-checker, so I was still clicking along pretty well.
Shortly after I got the pictures cleaned up, a student worker dropped off my daily mail. No column from the department head (he's out of town this week, but he'll get it to me by email), but a copy of the publication that had pretty clearly been printed by the secretary, who had spotted a handful of typos, straightened up the part of the story where her notes had not been clear, and circled a large block of type and scrawled "WRONG" across it in red all-caps. Just to be sure I got the message, she attached copies of her previous notes for the part marked "wrong."
I was fine with most of her corrections; I hadn't yet run the spell-checker, which caught everything she caught and several additional typos, and I needed to have the correction on the part that hadn't originally been clear to me. (She also hadn't attached the notes on that part, presumably because she realized they weren't clear.)
But I was at first perplexed and then torqued about the part she had marked "wrong": I checked against her notes three times through to be sure, but what I had written was not wrong at all. The story listed students who had graduated summa, magna, and cum laude; her notes had them as cum, magna, and summa. The only thing "wrong" was that I had reversed the order from her awards-ceremony script to a more journalistic style.
If this were the first time she had jumped on a chance to point out my errors or if she had a record of excellent writing, I might have felt differently. But she is a poor writer (her spelling is always perfect; her grammar often isn't, her style is lousy, and her sense of taste and decorum is dead) with maybe a BBA who no doubt earns more than I do, despite my faculty position and my master's degree.
When I first saw her message, I thought I must have mistyped the names; the list was long and complicated, and although I had asked specifically for the PowerPoint file from the ceremony, she had instead sent me a pdf that didn't allow me to cut and paste. My knee-jerk reaction had been to write back, "Thanks for your comments. You could have saved me from retyping all the names if you had sent me the PowerPoint I asked for instead of the pdf." I have had enough problems with her that I copied the department head; she has a tendency to lie, and I want my butt covered if she does it again.
A few minutes later, I got an email from the boss that said, "You need to be nicer."
I replied, "I was not too happy about getting the newsletter back with a big portion of text circled and marked 'WRONG,' especially since it wasn't. Sorry 'bout that."
His response was, "You make enemies for life."
I told him quite honestly, "In this case, I think that ship has already sailed. And I'm on the short end of life."
I may have just dropped the last straw around there, but I'm really ticked off, anyway. In search of some other numbers recently, I found out that at least one of our secretaries earns substantially more than I do; I haven't heard anything for three weeks from the place where I have done a lot of consulting lately; another of my consulting jobs (which I had hoped to parlay into more work, but maybe not now) has given me four different sets of instruction about how to bill it; and I generally haven't felt very good since I got back from Lubbock, where I think the dry air was good for me.
Among the other jobs I had to do was printing out notes for the handful of students in my summer course, and halfway into that, the printer jammed royally and took me 20 minutes to get it going again. My friend in the office next door came out to lend a hand, and as usual, she also lent her wise and patient ear. She at least reminded me that somebody around there appreciates me, and she inadvertently reminded me that my mentor, who had said something early in the week that sounded as if he had lost faith in me, had also recanted yesterday and let me know he's still sort of on my side, too.
But it's still been a pretty darn sucky Friday.
It started off pretty good: I got caught up on reading a couple of papers for students who need feedback before handing them off to their research advisers, then I got to the office early enough to check off my to-do list and still get home by quitting time. Or so I thought.
The first item on the list was finishing up the summer edition of the department's newsletter so I can get it off to press. I had sent the department head a draft of the issue so he could see what I had in it, check a story that I wasn't sure about because the notes his secretary had sent me had been cryptic, and send me his "column." That hadn't arrived yet, but I still needed to convert the color pictures to black and white and run the spell-checker, so I was still clicking along pretty well.
Shortly after I got the pictures cleaned up, a student worker dropped off my daily mail. No column from the department head (he's out of town this week, but he'll get it to me by email), but a copy of the publication that had pretty clearly been printed by the secretary, who had spotted a handful of typos, straightened up the part of the story where her notes had not been clear, and circled a large block of type and scrawled "WRONG" across it in red all-caps. Just to be sure I got the message, she attached copies of her previous notes for the part marked "wrong."
I was fine with most of her corrections; I hadn't yet run the spell-checker, which caught everything she caught and several additional typos, and I needed to have the correction on the part that hadn't originally been clear to me. (She also hadn't attached the notes on that part, presumably because she realized they weren't clear.)
But I was at first perplexed and then torqued about the part she had marked "wrong": I checked against her notes three times through to be sure, but what I had written was not wrong at all. The story listed students who had graduated summa, magna, and cum laude; her notes had them as cum, magna, and summa. The only thing "wrong" was that I had reversed the order from her awards-ceremony script to a more journalistic style.
If this were the first time she had jumped on a chance to point out my errors or if she had a record of excellent writing, I might have felt differently. But she is a poor writer (her spelling is always perfect; her grammar often isn't, her style is lousy, and her sense of taste and decorum is dead) with maybe a BBA who no doubt earns more than I do, despite my faculty position and my master's degree.
When I first saw her message, I thought I must have mistyped the names; the list was long and complicated, and although I had asked specifically for the PowerPoint file from the ceremony, she had instead sent me a pdf that didn't allow me to cut and paste. My knee-jerk reaction had been to write back, "Thanks for your comments. You could have saved me from retyping all the names if you had sent me the PowerPoint I asked for instead of the pdf." I have had enough problems with her that I copied the department head; she has a tendency to lie, and I want my butt covered if she does it again.
A few minutes later, I got an email from the boss that said, "You need to be nicer."
I replied, "I was not too happy about getting the newsletter back with a big portion of text circled and marked 'WRONG,' especially since it wasn't. Sorry 'bout that."
His response was, "You make enemies for life."
I told him quite honestly, "In this case, I think that ship has already sailed. And I'm on the short end of life."
I may have just dropped the last straw around there, but I'm really ticked off, anyway. In search of some other numbers recently, I found out that at least one of our secretaries earns substantially more than I do; I haven't heard anything for three weeks from the place where I have done a lot of consulting lately; another of my consulting jobs (which I had hoped to parlay into more work, but maybe not now) has given me four different sets of instruction about how to bill it; and I generally haven't felt very good since I got back from Lubbock, where I think the dry air was good for me.
Among the other jobs I had to do was printing out notes for the handful of students in my summer course, and halfway into that, the printer jammed royally and took me 20 minutes to get it going again. My friend in the office next door came out to lend a hand, and as usual, she also lent her wise and patient ear. She at least reminded me that somebody around there appreciates me, and she inadvertently reminded me that my mentor, who had said something early in the week that sounded as if he had lost faith in me, had also recanted yesterday and let me know he's still sort of on my side, too.
But it's still been a pretty darn sucky Friday.
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