Looking Out the Window. Or Not.

At work next year, I will have a new office. Apparently it comes with this "coordinator" position in gender studies, despite the fact that the job isn't that much. The new office is in that sorta-new building, which was where I had most of my classes this past spring. Naturally, now that my office is in that building, all of my classes have been assigned rooms closer to my old office. At least I'll get out of the building from time to time. I can alternate off-gassing with asbestos!

In my old office, I had windows. Two rows of them, as a matter of fact. One row was way up high, twenty feet above my head. I could see if the sky was blue or gray. The other row was directly over my desk. In some weird idea of some half-high architect way back in the 1970s, this bank of windows was supposed to overlook a classroom. In the other two buildings like this one, they do. It isn't pleasant for anyone because the person in the office can hear the classroom below and the people in the classroom can hear the phones ringing in the offices above.

My building was not used for classrooms anymore. They had lowered the ceilings in the spaces that used to be classrooms and closed off the space between the classroom and my window. I had a view of a crawlspace.

My office was also triangular, with one of the triangle points squared off with the door and only the door. I found that charming, if a bit crowded.

Now I will be in a slightly larger, square office with nice, new furniture and that "new car" smell. They gave me more file cabinets, a slightly larger bookshelf (why do they think academics only need ONE bookshelf?), and more desk space that is conveniently arranged in a U. The whole set up makes me a little embarrassed at my good fortune.*

I even have a window. Floor to ceiling in size, and looking outside where I can see trees and grass and what passes for nature. Although, again, I wonder what structural anomaly required this configuration or what drugs the architect was huffing. Here is a picture of the window:

The wall on your right is the wall on which the window is located. The wall on the left runs perpendicular to the window. The edge of the window on the right is, in fact, the edge of the window. The edge of the window on the left is not.

To repeat: The left wall runs perpendicular to the window, but the left edge of the window is not the edge. Let's take a closer look, shall we?:

The window goes past the width of the room, so they created a tiny little sliver of a nook to accommodate this.

I haven't had a chance to get a good look in the office on the other side of that wall, but from what I can tell, she doesn't have a weird bump or outcrop in her wall. The wall between our offices is just that much thicker. Is there some sort of load-bearing I-beam in there? Or perhaps the air system (although our vents are in the ceiling)? I have no idea, but it seems they absolutely could not move that wall over by 2 feet in order to put this window fully into this office.

In any case, it is a nice office, and I have space in which to meet with students and enough wall space on which to hang my diplomas. I've always wanted to hang my diplomas on my office wall. I hope it will inspire the students with shock and awe!

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*There are one or two drawbacks, but I shouldn't talk about them as much as I am dying to talk about them. I have found that I actually have some limits on what I will write here.

Teaching Aids

This semester my classes met in a new building. Technically, it isn't a "new" building so much as an old one that had been gutted and remodeled. It had that "new car smell."

The building, of course, came with new furniture. On the first day of class, I noticed that the furniture came with tags, as you can see here:

That's an awfully fancy "do not remove" mattress tag, don't you think?

Upon closer inspection, you can read that it is not a "do not remove" mattress tag; but, instead, a proud proclamation of the furniture manufacturer:



In case you can't see, the tag says, "This product is a representative of the quality, dedication and craftsmanship of our inmate work force and staff at our MCE Upholstery Shop, located at the Maryland Correctional Institution -- Hagerstown." MCE stands for Maryland Correctional Enterprises.

The students never quite know what to make of this. The English composition professor who had the class before me wants one of her students to take this on for a research paper.

I think, "How nice that, when teaching about the convict labor system in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I have a prime example of its descendant right here in my classroom."

Insect Salad*

Apparently, the good folks at Giant don't think that I get enough protein in my diet, so they decided to add a little bit in for me:


Yum!

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*I was going to title this post "At Least It Wasn't Poo;" but, since many people have this blog linked through those neat RSS readers that show the title of the post, I figured that they might not want "poo" showing up on their blog page.

The Jerk from Christmas

[Be warned: This blog post is sponsored by the F-word.]

In good news, I am minus a neighbor.

Remember the jackass from last Christmas, the one who thought that screaming at his girlfriend and throwing her cell phone down the hall was a wonderful way to start the holiday? He continued to exhibit his tenuous grasp of civil behaviour through the winter and into the spring.

For example, one evening, when I came home from work, I ran into a guy trying to haul a large box out of the building. I held the door for him. As he worked his way out of the door, another guy approached us with much purpose and passion in his expression. He flung open the adjoining door.

"Fuck you, man! Fuck you!" he yelled at the first guy. "You don't muthafuckin' bring that muthafucka here, man! I told you to bring it to that muthafuckin' other place!"

"Fuck you, too, man!" replied the first guy. "Don't you start this shit!"

"Fuck you!" the second guy yelled. "Get that fucking thing outta here!"

I really didn't quite understand much of the exchange beyond that because they seemed to have substituted every possible conjugation of "fuck" for actual words. That, and I wanted to get as far away from them as soon as possible. The "concierge" at the desk in the lobby did nothing.

After I left the scene, I checked my mailbox, then headed for the elevator. A young woman was loading up one elevator with boxes and some Ikea grade furniture. People tend to do this when they move in or out. I let her go on ahead and caught the next elevator.

When the next elevator arrived, I got on. Just before the door closed, who should squeeze in but Mr. Fuck You, minus his shirt and showing his underwear. He was now on his phone yelling "that muthafucka! I fucking told him don't come fucking 'round here with that fucking shit and acting all crazy and shit!" He pause and I heard some emphatic noises on the other end of his line. "Well, fuck you, too!" he broke in over the noises. "Fuck that shit! No! I fucking said come and get his fucking ass."

He didn't push a floor button. As the elevator kept going up and up and up and he still didn't push a floor button, the sickening revelation came to me that this was the dude from Christmas. Sure enough, he barged off the elevator the second the doors opened, and "fucked" his way down the hall, stopping at the door where the Christmas incident had taken place. A buddy of his stood in the open door way.

"Go get that muthafucka," Mr. Fuck You yelled at the buddy. "He don't fucking know what he's doing." He threw in another "fuck," just for effect.

Back at the elevator, the woman with the Ikea furniture turned out to be moving onto our floor. She was unloading her things into a pile in the hallway while holding the elevator door open with her leg.

"Nice fucking welcome wagon we have for her," I thought. "Welcome to the fucking neighborhood!"

Since I would have to pass Mr. Fuck You and his buddy on the way to my own door, I stalled by being neighborly and holding the elevator door open for her. Mr. Fuck You and his buddy were still shouting "fuck" at one another, so I tiptoed past them, hoping to escape recognition as one of the "Sarah Palin muthafuckas" presumably calling the cops during the Christmas outburst (again: Sarah Palin?).

"This guy clearly has anger management issues," I later told the Gentleman Caller.

Inside my apartment, I noticed that my garbage was starting to overpower my Glade Vanilla scented air freshener. Also, I was a little curious and maybe even a bit concerned about the woman at the elevator. So, I gathered up the trash bag and headed back down the hallway, past the Fuck You apartment, to the garbage chute.

The woman was now moving her things from a pile outside of the elevators to a pile at her front door. Just as I had feared, her front door was the same as Mr. Fuck You's. This, incidentally, was not the same girl from Christmas. Nor, incidentally, did Mr. Fuck You lift a finger to help her or even acknowledge her presence. Maybe she was just helping the guy from the lobby. Maybe I was mistaken and she was moving in to the apartment directly across the hall.

In any case, I didn't see her again, but I did see Mr. Fuck You with other women. Never the same one, of course. He probably fancied himself the real ladies' man although he clearly hated women.

The last time that I saw him, I was again coming home from work. I was on the phone with Gentleman Caller, when I stepped off of the elevator to the loud crash of young men talking in fluent fuck.

"Shit," I thought, heck, I may have even said it into the phone.

"What's that?" asked Gentleman Caller, on the other end of the line.

"I'm on my floor, so take a guess," I said.

"Ah, your friend the wife-beater."

"Yep."

Mr. Fuck You's door was open, emitting a near visible cloud of pungent smoke. One of his buddies, shirtless, underwear showing, baseball hat perched backwards on his head, was leaning against the doorway. Mr. Fuck You, shirtless, underwear showing, sat on the floor just inside of the door, disassembling something. I didn't look too closely.

As I passed, Friend of Fuck You paused, mid-sentence and said -- I swear -- "how you doin'?"

You know the tone, too. That one that says, "hey baby, what's your sign, want a hotdog with that shake, I want to fuck you because you have a cunt, and you can't resist my dastardly charm."

I almost fell over laughing. What a perfect cliche': The words, the tone, the way he slipped it into the middle of his sentence so reflexively, without even registering anything about me except "female," and there, in the hall. Who cruises the halls at an apartment complex? Does that actually work? Or is he of the ilk that thinks, "hit on anything with a pulse because eventually someone is going to be desperate enough?" Yep, a couple of prize ponies right there.

Thanks to the stairwell, I didn't share a wall with the Fuck You household, so I did not get the benefit of his vast repertoire of profanity. I did, however, get the benefit of that near visible cloud of smoke. Oooh boy, did I get the benefit of that near visible cloud of smoke! The whole floor got the benefit of that near visible cloud of smoke. I don't think anyone would have passed a drug test while he was here because we all inhaled, even if we didn't actually smoke.

This didn't really bother me. In fact, I thought it was kinda funny (probably due to that near visible cloud of smoke). I've got nothing against pot, being related to a couple of 'heads and having some fond memories of second-hand highs from concerts back in the '80s. I don't smoke myself because it makes me aware of being stupid, but I don't begrudge anyone else their stupidity.

The neighbors, on the other hand, had a fit. One day when the cloud of smoke was actually visible, I ran into someone who lived at the far end of the hall. High and tight haircut, blue sweatshirt, erect posture, he carried himself like one of the many service people who live in our building. So, he may have had a real concern about failing a drug test from second-hand smoke.

"Do you smell that?" he said.

"Yep," I said. "Rather frequently, in fact."

"Where's it coming from?" he asked.

"Same place as usual," I said.

"It's pretty heavy," said the guy. "I'm going to report it."

"Good luck," I said.

He headed back to his apartment.

A few weeks later, we all received an official note under our doors from management. "It has been brought to our attention that the smell of marijuana smoke is heavy on your floor," the note said. "We would like to remind you that, per your lease, illegal activities in your apartment can lead to your eviction."

This they are concerned about. Smoke a joint in your apartment and management threatens to evict you. Threaten a woman in the hallway and management says they can't to anything about it; and you, the concerned neighbor, should mind your own business.

They must have nailed him because, the next week, he had an eviction notice on his door. Shortly thereafter, furniture appeared piled outside of his door. A day or two after that, he and a few of his friends -- again, all speaking in fluent fuck -- hauled the furniture away. Within the week, the smell coming from the apartment was of fresh paint, a telltale sign of an impending new occupant.

He's out there somewhere. When he starts abusing yet another woman, I hope his next neighbor has more courage than I and calls the police.

Contemplating My Mother

Today I am thinking about my mother in a more complicated way. She goes into surgery to have her shoulder replaced, the third joint replacement that she has had in five years. This is the second time that she has been in the hospital in the past month. The last time was for a MRSA that she picked up who knows where, possibly from yet an earlier visit to the hospital, possibly from contact with the general public in her docent position at the zoo.

Perhaps I tread constantly over the territory in which my mother was mean, petty, self-absorbed, and abusive because, in being mean, petty, self-absorbed and abusive she had power and strength. Now, despite her girth, she is quite fragile, living with constant pain and immobility, repeatedly in the hospital for one thing or another. I'm thinking about how long she has been fragile in ways that I really did not comprehend at the time.

I write a lot about my parents and the ways that they failed. They weren't the best parents, what with their rages and projections and general abdication of a lot of the responsibility of parenting. I've been trying to comprehend the breadth of the consequences of that type of parenting in order to understand how it set up the rules that led me to create the person that I have become right now. I've been trying to comprehend the breadth of the consequences so that I can forgive them or at least understand them somewhat separately from myself.

The rages and projections and abdications were never the entire story, however. They weren't the best of parents, but they also weren't the worst. At many crucial points they actually did try, and even sometimes succeeded. To write only of the times that they failed is dishonest, and doesn't quite allow me to get to the truth that, bad or good, I did love them. Yet, I cannot find the honest language, the right words to describe that love. I fall into the language of Hallmark, or of sentimentality, or a list of good things, all of which do not help me figure out a way to understand what I feel. I don't know how to understand it because it is so confused with obligation and guilt, and seems so incredibly remote while also too painfully close, in fact, so close that it is like a stab in my gut.

I've been thinking about how to approach that love -- or whatever you would call that emotion --through understanding and forgiveness. How do I circle around it or describe it? How do I enter and comprehend it in the same way that I can comprehend the anger? How do I do this and also leave aside guilt? Guilt frustrates the understanding. No. Guilt prevents the reconciliation of the anger and the sympathy.

I begin with this fragility. When I see my mother as fragile, I see her as a child. I want to protect her as I would want to protect a sick or hurt child. This image of her as a child is not a stretch of the imagination, either. She, in many ways, was always very much like a child and very much cultivated a childlike aspect. This drove my brothers and me nuts when we were teenagers, and we showed a tremendous amount of disrespect toward her because of it. We wanted a grown woman for a mother, not someone who frequently stammered and expressed herself in baby talk. This no longer makes us crazy, and she doesn't do it as much either. When she does, I now feel protective of her.

But I'm still not getting to what I mean. Let me try in another way.

My parents want me to come down to help after the surgery. I'll skip the next few paragraphs that say that a visit down there would be prohibitively expensive and would not fit in with my schedule. Also, I am a self-absorbed asshole and the worst daughter ever. Let's jump right into the the reasons that they want me to come down there.

They say that they want me to "help, but I would be the worst "help" in the world unless you define "help" as "being a pain in the ass." Pain in the ass, I can do. Help? Not so much. Seriously, there is very little that I could do; and, really, they don't want me there for "help." They just want me there. My mother gets very worried before every surgery, afraid that she won't survive it. She wants her children and grandchildren about her. Furthermore, she feels rejected that I didn't go down for Christmas and because I haven't yet followed through on my promise to visit later in the year. (See? Worst daughter ever.)

I try to think of this without guilt. Guilt is not useful. I try to think of this with compassion; but the compassion doesn't connect here. Here is sympathy for a scared woman. Instead, the compassion connects earlier. Not in my life, but in hers. It's for the little girl that she was, with her mother for a mother. The child who was criticized within an inch of her life, whose every movement was wrong, whose very existence was an affront and an inconvenience. The child that grew up understanding love as something so constrained by conditions that you could hardly recognize it as love. The child who constantly apologized for deigning to take up space in the world. The child who grew up desperately wanting approval and affection and some unfettered form of love, but who had been so perverted by her own upbringing that she had no idea of how to offer that love and screamed in rage and disappointment when she did not receive it. The child who had no idea how to be a woman and who hated herself. The child who became a woman who fears that she is very very alone.

My mother feels every bit as alienated from me as I feel from her. This much I can understand.

So, Good Things Continue to Happen

Good things continue to happen, despite the monumentally disappointing end to Lost. Even then, the series is over, so I only have one addiction on the screen, my beloved Mad Men, provided it doesn't go off the rails. In fact, if I could find a way to watch it on the intertubes the way that you could watch Lost the next day on ABC.com or Hulu or -- there was some other site that I found that was pretty good, but I can't remember it's name -- I'd probably ditch cable altogether. I can do it. I swear! I've done it before.

The rickety state of the economy, especially the part that directly affects my life from paycheck-to-paycheck and leads to furloughs and layoffs (for staff only, but still) and who knows what disasters in the future, makes me look around to see where I can cut corners. Cable is one place, using the phenomenally inefficient central air system in my apartment is another. Hence, I am sitting in my apartment with the humidity at a saturation point. At least the air itself is not hot, yet. That's o.k. The humidity is good for the skin.

I'm still lucky. I have a job. The same can't be said for some of our staff, who will be laid off. That's right, choose the least expensive and most vulnerable employees and cut them, not the massively overpaid vice presidents of vice presidents hired by our crook of a former president. We also only have four furlough days, although the school decided to assign them to us. We don't get to pick which days because then the students would be aware that budget cuts impact the faculty and therefore the quality of the education that they are paying for. I'm rather in Roxie's camp on this one, that these efforts to "protect the student" just makes the impact of cuts invisible and promotes the "Excellence Without Money" mentality.

Seriously, Roxie and Historiann, make t-shirts! Or pins, at least. There is a market. I tell my colleagues about the slogan and they all want a t-shirt. In fact, I was speaking with one woman -- someone about whom I was suspicious because of her connection to the Nemesis, but she seems o.k. now -- who took a position in which she was supposed to bring outside speakers to campus. She was told to do it with no money whatsoever. She couldn't draw on faculty, like I did, and was explicitly told "no" when she tried. She finally stepped down from the job and went back to teaching because she had been put in an impossible position. "Excellence without money," I said. She knew.

The dreary weather is getting to me. I meant this to be a post about good things, not depressing things. Good things do continue to happen.

As I wrote in the comments on my third to last post, I received two out of three readers reports on my book proposal. Both were absolutely glowing. Furthermore, the press had included the article that I revised earlier this year, just as a sample of what I can do on the subject. I think they let the readers assume that it was a chapter. In any case, the readers praised the article to high heaven.

"Is this me they are writing about," I thought, at first. Then, "Hell, yeah it's me!"

This is a spectacular idea, I know. I'm so afraid someone else is going to do it before I get done, it's such a good idea. Still, when other people validate the good thoughts, and when they want to help you see that good thought come to fruition, well, very little can surpass the feeling.

In fact, just the act of researching and thinking about and writing this project is like nothing that I've done before. My dissertation became the thing that I had to do to get the PhD. Sure, I was interested in the topic, but the end was the point, not the means. I was in a profoundly ambivalent place at that point in my career, and decided that, if I didn't get the PhD, then the previous too-damn-many years of my life would have been wasted. So, I finished the dissertation.

Turning it into a book would have been impossible if I had become bogged down in revisions before I had sent it to the publisher -- or even if I had looked at it before I sent it to the publisher. No one believes me, but I just printed the damn thing out, boxed it up, and sent it in. That they wanted to publish it still amazes me; but, of course, some revisions were necessary. I could never have done them if I hadn't already had the contract because I was so incredibly over and done with the subject. Seriously, I hardly think about it anymore, and if someone wanted me to speak on it, I'd be at a loss.

Then, there was the tourist book, which I'm more proud of than I should be. The function of that book was to maintain my sense of self as an intelligent, capable historian and writer. I know it has tons of flaws, including in the research, but that has more to do with the form of a tourist book than with my abilities. Still, I wasn't obsessed by it. It wasn't a puzzle that I was trying to solve, or a person I was trying to understand. It was just a shallow story. With pictures!

This book? This book is mine. This book is what my work should have been all along, but I had to go through a few things before I could comprehend what I want to say in this book. This subject is a puzzle, this topic is a series of ever larger questions, this story is a means of inhabiting and understanding another life and then explaining it as a way of inhabiting, understanding, and explaining an entirely alien time. It is a compulsion, a need, a calling that I cannot yet fully articulate.

Then, on the heels of the readers' reports, my proposal for a paper was accepted for a conference later this year -- in England! I've never been overseas. In fact, I've never been further out of the country than about a mile across each border, if that much. Fortunately, I just got my passport renewed. The new one will now get a stamp.*

In spite of my bitching and moaning, in spite of the furloughs, and the student loans, and everything else, I'm having one of those moments in which I feel like I'm living my real life, and that more of that real life is on its way.

Now, I have to quit the rambling warm-up for the day and get down to business.

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*An expired passport without a stamp is a sad sad thing indeed, let me tell you.

The Price of the Road Not Taken

Curiosity didn't kill this cat, it just made her feel like a big dope.

As you have probably figured out from reading this blog, I don't go anywhere in a straight line. I take detours, and roads not taken, and wander aimlessly off the path to satisfy my curiosity. I like to think this makes me a more interesting person. Others tend to think it makes me flaky or aimless or lacking direction. Whatever.

In any case, one of those little detours took me to an expensive library school, which was stupid for a couple of reasons, more for the "expensive" part than anything else. In fact, if I have a regret about it, that would be the fact that I chose and expensive private school (which was so NOT worth the money) rather than a cheaper state school. I think I had something to prove to myself, like that, at some point in my life, I actually could go to an expensive, private, northeastern school. Live and learn.

This little detour put me in debt. Heavily in debt. Something that the PhD did not do, incidentally. When I was broke and living on $15/hour, I consolidated all of the loans. That lowered the amount that I had to pay each month. From what I can tell on SM's* website, the consolidation was actually two consolidations -- one subsidized, one unsubsidized -- both with 6.25% interest rates.

Since June 2006, I have dutifully been paying SM the equivalent of a car payment** each month. Pay. Pay. Pay. Pay. Pay. Every month for the past 47 months. I don't even have to think about it because I set up my bank account to pay SM automatically every month, and SM stopped sending paper statements, either by their policy or my request I can't remember. In any case, the paper statements just said, "pay this amount," and nothing else, like how much I still owed and what last month's payment actually paid. All information that I would have liked to have known, and can find on the website, but which didn't change anything in any direction anyway.

From June 2006 until right now, I hadn't really thought about the loan at all except to joke about it. The thing was just there to be paid, right up until I die, and there isn't anything to do about it. It serves as a financial reminder that the road not taken often has a toll booth, and I set it up so that I don't have to be reminded of it too often, kind of like an E-Z Pass.

For some reason, however, I became curious as to how much I had left to pay on it. I figured that, given the amount that I pay every month, even with interest, I should have knocked out a good chunk. In the past year and a half, I've started seriously saving for the first time in my life. That is, I've been saving for something other than yet another degree. I put about as much into savings each month as I put into the student loan and have saved up a nice, comfortable chunk that won't buy me a house or even allow me to purchase a car in full. Hell, it won't even keep me afloat for a year of unemployment if necessary; but it does buy me some peace of mind from month to month, knowing that I have a cushion in case of some unexpected expense.

The point here being that, if I can save up that much in a 16 months, how much of my loan must be knocked out with the same payments for 47 months? I figured that I should have made some headway, right? Imagine my surprise when I pulled up my account and discovered that the loan itself had been paid down only a couple of thousand dollars. Not even half of what I had paid. Not even a quarter.

Children, if you are reading this, this is the reason that you should work hard at math and figure out how percentages work long before you are 42 years old.***

Now, the way the SM website works, you can see your loan history, which showed me taking out the loans, then consolidating them. You can also see your payment history, which showed me dutifully paying the same amount every month for 47 months. With that payment history, however, they show how much of that payment went to the loan and how much went to the interest. For some unknown reason, possibly because I only recently began to understand the concept of percentage, I had assumed that the payment was split equally between the interest and the loan.

Nope. More goes to the interest than to the loan. In fact, early on, almost all of the payment went to the interest. On the history, I see a trend that shows that less of the payment is going to the interest and more to the loan over time. While I don't entirely understand the reason that it is not a consistent decline -- some months the amount going to the interest jumps up above the previous month, and down in the following month -- I do understand that the reason for this is that the slowly declining amount due on the loan means that the amount of interest also declines. This past month, more went to the loan than to interest, so I hope that is going to remain the trend and that the loan amount itself is going to start to decline at a faster rate.

I also understand, after poking about the website, that I cannot pay down that original loan amount. Ever. Any payment that you send goes straight to the interest, which never goes down until you pay the whole damn thing off. So, you can't send more money in the hopes of pushing that original loan amount down in order to lower the overall amount of interest because that extra money just goes to the interest. Essentially, you are taking out two loans when you take out one: the first is the actual loan, the one that goes to the school, and the second is the one that goes to SM for lending you the money. They take their cut first.

I'm going to guess that, if I won the lottery and could pay the whole amount tomorrow, including interest, they would charge me for bilking them out of the continued collection of interest for the next -- jeez, how long? They don't exactly have a schedule that shows how long this will all take until the whole thing is paid off, assuming that I keep paying at this rate.

Yeah, I just figured this out. Remember, it took me to this age to finally learn how to work out percentages. I'm not protesting it because this is how finance works. I'm just processing it. I'm also astounded at how little I know about finance. I suppose if you are shockingly unable to do math, operate on the principle of "don't spend more money than you make," even when you fail at it, and only think in terms of "how much will I have to pay each month" when considering debt, then you end up quite ignorant of how money works.

I'm not any worse off than I was before I decided to take a closer look, except for gathering even more evidence that I am decidedly the most mathematically incompetent person on the face of the earth. I will still be paying this damn thing off until the day I die, and even a little beyond. Of course, then, I can leave it in my will to my worst enemy!****


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*SM: hee! I just realized that the loan company's name resembles S&M, which is sort of what it feels like!

**The amount is the equivalent of the payments on my last car purchase in 1999, which I paid off in 2004.

***Really, I just figured out how to work out percentages this year, after 42 years of learning, re-learning, re-re-learning, and failing every time. It was as if the information went into my head, and I understood it while it was being explained to me; but two seconds later, when I tried to do the same thing, I couldn't. It was as if the information had just slid out of my head. Again and again and again, and the way to figure percentages just wouldn't stick. Hell, even the abstract concept wouldn't stick. Then, suddenly, this last year, something clicked and I understood. I'd work percentages just for the hell of it because I finally could.

****I don't think you can actually do that.

Now that the Demoralization Has Passed

Now that the grades are in and readers think my book proposal is pretty damn good, I feel considerably less demoralized. I handed all the grade anxieties over to the powers that be, knowing that, really, I did all that I reasonably could. The self-flagellation -- at least on this issue -- has ended for the next three months! I might even figure out what triggers it, and head it off at the pass by the next grading season.

At this point, before I'm cleared out of the office and on to other things, I have this surge of teaching creativity about what I can do better next year. This year, it actually comes with less hatred of myself as a teacher (last written post notwithstanding), and more realization of improving what is already pretty good. These are the problems that can be solved.

The first solvable problem that I noticed appeared in grading papers this past month. I realized that students can describe the hell out of things. They can describe the ugly outfit that one person was wearing. They can describe that show on t.v. last night. They can describe that image on the projector screen. They can describe a museum. They can describe an exhibit. They can describe a reading. They can describe the ideas in the reading (or at least regurgitate them). They are describing fools! What they cannot do is apply the ideas that they describe to anything else that they describe.

For instance, I have them go to a museum exhibit and read a selection from a book addressing some of the problems of presenting history in museums. They then must apply the ideas in that selection and analyze the exhibit. They must also do a little basic research on the subject of the exhibit in order to be a little more educated about that subject and thereby better able to analyze. After all, how can you tell if an exhibit does a good or poor job of including African Americans if you don't know about the history of African Americans in relation to that exhibit's subject?

Now, they can all tell me in great detail about the exhibit. They can tell me (regurgitate) the ideas in the reading. They can even tell me all about what they read in their research. What they seem unable to do is put all three of those together.

Why, after all, should they be able to put those together? Nothing in their lives has prepared them to do that. They aren't required to take the freshman composition classes, including the one that involves research and rhetoric, before or even concurrently with their history classes. Most of their grade schooling seems to have been focused on the descriptive. At least, that is what they have retained; and very little of what they read, when they read, involves a model of analysis.

Here they are, dumped in a humanities class, required to express themselves in writing and required to analyze information in writing with absolutely no tools to do so. I can do nothing about the curricular problem of allowing them to take a humanities class without having required them to take a writing class. That's part of the whole "education as processed product" mentality that takes bigger movements than myself to change. I can, however, get them through this assignment, and maybe show them the way toward writing and applying ideas and analyzing information.

To solve this problem, I first decided that I have to exert some control on some of the variables. I will choose the exhibits and I will give them a list of things that they can choose from to read about the subject. I won't give them the readings. They will have to find them in the library -- sort of a scavenger hunt -- but there will be no "I couldn't find anything to read on my topic." There will also be no wallowing around in Google for the first three hits on an overly general search string (or word). I want to control all of these variables for a later class discussion.

Next, I will restructure the assignment so that they turn in all of their description at the mid-point of the semester. Describe everything! Research and describe! Visit and describe! Read and describe! Go for it! Then, at the mid-point, we will have a long discussion about how to apply the ideas and research in order to analyze the exhibit. The variable control becomes crowd control, and allows them to share ideas and perceptions.

After the discussion, they will have to write the actual paper. My hope is that they also learn a little more about the process of research and writing. "See," I can say at that mid-point. "You have collected all of your information. Now, let's see you put it all together in a different way, into something new, something original." Ideally, this assignment should have more steps if I really want to teach them about research and writing, but I'm only one person and there are up to 140 of them. We also do have to cover some actual history.

I did that step organization with my online classes, too. After I learned that they cannot write a well-supported essay to save their lives, I structured the unit assignments so that they wrote a detailed outline in the first two and essays in the second. The detailed outline was supposed to allow them to identify a thesis, and then to amass evidence without worrying too much about an argument. Let me tell you, those who got that far and turned in that last assignment showed some great improvement. They gave me that little moment of light when you can see that something somewhere clicked into place and they learned how to do something.

The others....well, they leave me demoralized (but that has been covered).

Still, I noticed that, even at their best, they had a difficult time granting a concession to the opposing side of an argument. My colleagues in other departments have told me that they have the same problem. We all agreed that the students seem to either be unable to imagine another side of an argument or they cannot imagine that another side has any credence. We blame modern public discourse.

Anyway, the next time I think that I will give them two opposing theses on the first outline assignment. That way, I can force them to amass the evidence to support the thesis that they choose; but, since they already know that there is an opposing side, and what it is, they know what they have to address. On the subsequent assignments, they are on their own.

This is what I mean by "hand holding." Again, there is only one of me and 140 of them, so there is only so much time that I can humanly put into this hand-holding, and only so much time that I can put into it and not become demoralized through exhaustion and neglect of my own research and writing.

Along the same lines in handholding, I have decided that I need to just take the class time and address their lack of comfort on computers. Next year, we will have a computer lab day. Early in the semester, like week 1 or 2 (whenever I can get the space), I'm going to take them into the lab and make them physically go to the places and do the things that they have to do in order to survive in the class. No more "I didn't know that you had announcements online," or "I can't find the study guides" or "I don't know how to attach a document," or "I don't know where to submit the assignment," or all of the five million little excuses that I've heard despite having shown them all of these things. This time, we will do it together. Kinetic learning, I think they call it.

Also, quizzes on relevant portions of the syllabus as the semester progresses. I mean, really! We have to put together this multi-volume document. Use it! Maybe the quizzes will train them for other teachers by forcing them to think "oh, yeah, this thing they gave us on the first day of class? It actually has useful information in it so I don't have to e-mail the teacher ten times each week!"

This past year, I've also taken to heart some of the blog discussions from last year about late papers. I had tried to be draconian: "No late papers!!!" That was more headache than it was worth, and I usually crumbled under a good sob story, which wasn't fair to anyone else, and sometimes people with legitimate sob stories actually pay attention to the policy and get cut out of the pushover teacher benefit. So, I made everyone turn everything in online. They had a due date and a cut off date, after which time they could not submit anything. Because of the late penalty of a letter grade per day, turning in a paper after the cut off date would be an exercise in futility. With this policy, I could keep track of the late papers, keep track of just how late they were, and not hear (as many) sob stories.* The ones that I did tend to hear included the requisite emergency features of death, birth, pain, crime, or natural disaster (which we had), and I had a provision in the syllabus for those.

Turnitin.com also became a real boon. I took a cue from the gender studies teacher, and followed her policy. I make them upload their own papers, and count a letter grade off if they don't. That way, they can see what is or is not original in their own papers, and they can learn and improve from the program rather than have me punish them after the fact. If they don't learn and improve, well, there should no surprises when I tell them they have a 0 because their similarity report returned an 80% (which, of course, happened).

Finally, one of the things that I tried this year was to not take everything so damn personally. That's a real problem for me, obviously, and I was not wholly successful at it. I become less successful as I become more fatigued, which a prior post or two illustrated. Still, I think I did much better by not taking their weaknesses as failures on my part or intentional insults directed at me.

For example, I used to take lack of attendance as a comment on my teaching or a sign of disrespect to me as a professional. I learned to tell myself that poor attendance was neither, but, instead, just a sign that they are overburdened or that they don't have the self-discipline to do what they have to do to attend class.

In fact, I only took two instances of poor attendance personally. One was a student who rarely showed, and when this student did s/he was clearly contemptuous and texting. I tried to control it, but as long as s/he stayed in the back of the class, and didn't disturb others or call attention to her/himself, I let it slide. S/he wasn't a drain on the morale or the education of the rest of the class S/he just didn't want to be there even when s/he was there, so s/he mentally checked out. I was able to keep that from getting me too worked up because that was clearly her/his choice.

Another was a student who did not show up to class except to get the syllabus and take the two tests. That pissed me off because the student wanted to take an online class without having to do the work of an online class. That showed disrespect to me and to every other student in both online and classroom classes. (Then, this student insisted that s/he attended every class, but cam in late. I may be a bit flakey and have a hard time connecting names to faces, but I ain't that stupid!) I suppose there is nothing to do about that type of situation. Someone always wants to game the system.

Anyway, that was a significant amount of psychological energy saved in not taking so much so personally. I was able to be a more helpful grader, was able to approach the tedious tasks of teaching with greater creativity, and I was able to hold off feelings of complete failure and inadequacy until the last month or so (I think). Still, I'm going to have to work harder at that, and at not sitting around paranoid that some administrator is going to hold me responsible for those who simply have not decided that they are ready to commit to the work of college.

Now that I think about it, most of my feelings of inadequacy come from the online classes. They wear me out, and I feel the least confidence or interest in the platform. I know that I can rock a regular classroom, but my strengths as a teacher are there, not online. Again, I could be a better online teacher, but I would have to have fewer students. Far fewer students. Maybe I should just accept my limitations online and be done with the frustration?

Anyway, I think I had a pretty good year teaching overall and despite the bitching. Plus, I put on an overwhelming number of butt-kicking, highly attended programs -- 10 in all, I think, with attendance above 40 for the majority, and only one with attendance below 20. That's pretty good for a commuter campus.

Next year, less flagellation, fewer but just as good programs, and more writing. LOTS more writing.

Meanwhile, onward to a summer of research, writing, good health, and my Gentleman Caller!



*I just don't have the emotional energy for most of the sob stories. I'm willing to hear an honest-to-god problem and sympathize, but the comedy of Murphy's law errors that make up the bulk of the excuses wear me out.

This Is How I Feel Today

This is how I feel today (I had to add the gray in myself -- also, I am in my jammies, not work clothes* -- yet. Perhaps there should be a little cloud over my head and perhaps an empty wine bottle in the background.): Ink has the avatar link (hee! Rhyme!).

UPDATE: As of about 4 pm, I feel this way:

Read the comments to see why!**

*Yes, I do dress like that. I have that exact outfit, I swear.

** I do not dress like that and do not own any outfit resembling that, I just thought it was both happy and powerful (with the cape and the lightening bolt), so chose it. Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind wearing a black cape, especially in winter.

I Feel Like A Failure (Again!)

One of the things that I hate about this time of year is the grading. Not simply the grading itself, which is universally felt as drudgery, but the feeling that I have somehow failed these students if they fail. I know that some of this is internalized messages about "if the student fails, the teacher has failed." That's really unfair on the teacher, since we can only do so much. We can give them every opportunity to succeed. They just have to be willing to take those opportunities.

But still.

The case that has me putting on my hair shirt this time is, of course, an online class. I teach two every semester. Two different courses (let's call them A and U), too -- what we would call "preps" if they were regular classes. In general, my online classes do not do as well as my classroom classes. In general, A students do not do as well as B students, despite the fact that they tend to self-select into A, where as U is the universal requirement. This is true for both online and regular classes. I also think that I tend to teach A better than all of my other classes because it is more specialized. In any case, the class that has me putting on the hair shirt is A, online.

This semester, my requirements for the online course included weekly quizzes over every textbook chapter, four "unit" assignments (each essentially the equivalent of a take-home essay test), a paper that is a written analysis of a museum exhibit, a running bibliography, and an annotated bibliography. I did not give a mid-term or a final because the logistics of that became a nightmare and I was on the hit list at the testing center. That was the reason that I included the two bibliography assignments, to make up for the lack of exams.

I may have overdone it on the bibliography assignment, which was a bit of an experiment this semester. I adapted it from an assignment that I had in library school. For each chapter, they were required to conduct a search on a particular subject from that chapter and compile a bibliography of five sources. They did not have to read these sources, just find them using the school library's databases. Then, they would write out those five sources in bibliographic form, and write a narrative describing how they found them. I was looking for their use of databases and search terms. The purpose was to get them familiar with the databases and with the various ways to find things in a database. I came up with it as I discovered that most students think research is "I put this term into Google and these were the first five hits."

So, they do that for each chapter of the text for a total of 13 chapters. Then, for the annotated bibliography, they choose five of those sources, read them, and summarize them. I even gave a template and examples for the way to do an annotation. The purpose of this was to expose them to something scholarly, and to get them to read about something -- anything -- in greater depth. That may have been too much for them. They are essentially freshman-level.

The length of the running bibliography and the depth of the annotated bibliography may have demoralized them, I think. I think also that I should have had them turn in the running bibliography each week, or more frequently than mid-term (for chapters covered to that point) and final (for chapters covered after).

Still, over half of the class did not turn in the mid-term version; and, of those who turned in the final, only two did any annotation. It was clear some of them tried to throw the whole thing together in the past week; but most of them put in a good faith effort on what they did turn in.

I feel like I inadvertently set them up for failure with this assignment.*

That's part one of my feeling of failure. Part two comes when I scan across the grade book. Starting with about week 8, the number of people taking the quizzes begins dropping off. On the unit assignments, not one time did I have everyone turn in their assignments. On units 3 and 4, only 50% turned in assignments. Only 60% turned in a museum assignment (and don't get me started on what passed for a "revision"). Seven out of 18 turned in mid-term bibliographies, and 6 out of 18 turned in final bibliographies (and only 2 did annotated bibliographies). It's not just the bibliography assignment, it's the whole semester.

What am I doing wrong? I respond to e-mails and questions in the open discussion board. Is it because I am a slow grader? Possibly. Am I expected to e-mail them when they don't check into class for a while? I'm not entirely sure how that is supposed to work because, if they aren't checking into class, they aren't going to check their class e-mail. I can't MAKE them do the work.

I worry about this for two reasons. First, I feel more and more helpless in this online mess. Online can work, but it requires a huge chunk of time to work, and fewer students because they require so much more individual attention. I am overwhelmed with students, online and otherwise.

Online has also become sort of the "cure all" for all institutional ills. Need more space? Go online! Or hybrid! Need more students? Open an online section! I often feel that the people who make these decisions have never taught online. On top of that,they want more and more control over the content of these online classes with this "Common Course" thing that they are trying to shove at us. I can't help but feel that it is not really education going on -- at least not at the rate and in the quantities that they demand.

Also, I really really do not think that the people who gravitate toward online classes know what they are getting into. Some people can do the work, but others should consider that, if they don't have time to go to class, maybe they don't have time to spend on class. If their writing skills are weak, they are going to have to face that and work on it. A lot -- at least in my classes. I can't do anything about that. What other assignments can I give that allow them to demonstrate their understanding of the material and don't require me to teach them a new software program? Many of them are not as computer savvy as you would expect. Even then, at some point they are going to have to write and to put in the time. That's the nature of the beast. That's the nature of education.

I'd be open to more creative assignments, that's for sure. Ones that might even be fun. I'll take suggestions. Our teaching/learning center sure doesn't help in that regard.

All of which leads to my second worry that other people will judge only me as being the failure. High student failure rates indicate something is going wrong. As half of the equation here (the students being the other half), that doesn't say much for me as a motivator. Again, maybe I'm just overwhelmed and wouldn't be so demoralized if I had only one class online. Maybe I'm just not a good online teacher. Maybe I just need help in figuring out how to be a better motivator. I don't know; but I do know that saying, "they made their choices and chose not to do the work" is not going to be an acceptable explanation higher up -- nor does it help me feel any better about the job I'm doing. When half of your class fails, you certainly feel like you failed at something along the way.

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*When I realized that they were overwhelmed, I altered the assignment, in addition to extending the deadline to the last possible moment. Any annotation would be considered extra credit. That way, they could focus on the first part, which was worth more points and would probably have more impact on their research skills.

Grading Dilemma

I have a grading dilemma that I entirely did not anticipate.

My students have to write a paper. They turn in a rough draft around mid-term. I comment on it, then I assign it a grade. The grade is a temporary grade to let them know how they are doing on the assignment at this point. Some papers are actually really good and those students don't have to revise (reward for putting effort into the draft and not just turning in junk). Some are happy with a C and don't revise by choice. Others just need to turn in a dang draft. Most, however, do go for the revision.

I also have a late paper policy. They lose a letter grade for each day their paper is late. Since submission is online, I can track this.

Here is the dilemma. I have students who are turning in their second draft so late that, even if they get a perfect score on the second draft, they will get a lower score than they were making on their first draft. For instance, if a person wanted to revise to raise a score of 80, but turned in the revised paper four days late, then the best possible score that person can have is a 60. So, now they are penalized for revising!

Am I being a bitch? Should I just be nice and let the first draft score stand? Should I just say "well, they can do the math and figure this out for themselves" and then warn them about this potentiality next semester? Is there a way to revise these policies to not have students end up in this situation?

On the Value of Not Being In LOVE With My Job

I wrote this post over the weekend, scheduled it to appear, then unscheduled it because I worried about what people would think of me not LOVEing teaching. In some ways, being a teacher is like being a mother, especially if you are a woman, because the cultural expectations of women and of teachers are beyond reasonable human abilities and because so many people bring so much baggage into the classroom in regard to female authority figures.

In any case, yesterday Professor Zero put up a post, "On Not Liking Teaching," which resonated with me and gave me the courage to post this one. So, here it is:

For the past three years, my teaching has had me worried. I haven't been worried about the quality, although there is always room for improvement. I have been worried about my fitness.

You see, I just don't LOVE teaching. It's great work, the hours fit my temperament, I work with really good people (with about 3 exceptions, and I don't have to deal with them regularly), but I wonder at my constitutional ability to be a teacher, especially at a community college. Dealing with people tends to wear me out, so dealing with students leaves me exhausted. My students need lots and lots of hand holding, and it drives me nuts more often than I like to admit. By this time of year, I'm miserable, on edge, feeling like a total failure, and hating the world.

This year, however, I brought up the problem in analysis, and the first thing that the analyst made me address was that fact that I don't LOVE teaching. That I don't LOVE my job. That was actually a rather difficult admission because I know how many people do LOVE teaching and would be more than happy to have my job. I felt that I didn't have a right to not LOVE my job because I am so damn lucky to have it. How dare I not LOVE it? Aren't teachers supposed to LOVE teaching -- it makes up for the pay, right?

I still have those feelings.

You see, I didn't get into this line of work because I LOVE teaching. I got into it because I LOVE history. I LOVE entering that alien world of the past and trying to figure out what people did and why they did it. I LOVE the mystery of it. I LOVE the puzzle of it. I LOVE using the evidence to create a narrative. Teaching is just a good means of making a living involved with something that I LOVE and that allows me the time me to pursue research into my own questions and ideas.

I've tried to avoid teaching in order to do the research on its own or to find tandem work that I did LOVE, but those paths didn't work. So, here I am teaching, and I am much happier with this life than I was with any of those perhaps because teaching allows for much more creativity in the job and in the space for original research than those other paths. I am much more satisfied (despite my bitching). Yet, teaching is still just a job to me, and not a job that I LOVE. That fact disturbed me, more so because it made me feel like a failure.

Then, I began to realize that you don't have to LOVE your job.* You just have to do it well. LOVE seemed to involve a commitment of my self, of my emotions, of my life that I really wasn't willing to offer. That was the source of my aversion to the people who kept insisting that teachers should show more "compassion" and "concern" for students. ("What does that mean?" I wondered. "How much more do they want? I can't teach 150 independent studies in order to show compassion for 150 individual complicated lives!") None of this was, of course, in evaluations or in any critique of my teaching. Instead, it seemed more of a cultural pressure intensified by these teaching/learning classes that our faculty are required to take.

That demand on my emotions was the source of my fears that I wasn't a good teacher if I wasn't working on teaching at least 60 hours each week. That was the source of my fear that I was a bad and terrible person for being annoyed by my students and feeling overwhelmed by their needs and problems. That was the source of my guilt when I became angry with my students. If being a good teacher meant that you had to LOVE teaching, then I was a miserable failure.

If being a teacher was a job without the requirement of emotional commitment, however, then I could figure out how to do it better without feeling like a failure as an educator and a person.

Don't get me wrong, I do like teaching. If I hated it I would absolutely find something else to do as I have done before. You can be satisfied and not LOVE your job -- heck, you might not even have to like it, just tolerate it. If you hate it, however, you will be nothing but miserable; and you will find no reason to do it any better than the minimum amount necessary to keep you from being fired. That's not the case here at all, no matter how much I rant and rave.

I'm lucky enough that do like my job. I want to do far more than the minimum amount to keep my contract renewed. I care if the students learn about history (and what that means is a topic for another post), if they can write a coherent sentence, if they know where to find reliable information, and if they can start to think critically about some of the world. I really do want them to leave the class and not hate history. I think the job is important and worth doing. Furthermore, as I wrote above, I'm at a good campus, with good colleagues and fascinating students, I get to talk about history all day, and I get to indulge my love of performing. I am also always trying to do it better in one way or another; but the better, I am learning, doesn't have to involve total emotional commitment that LOVE seems to require.

Teaching is a job, but a job worth doing well and one that I like doing well even if I don't LOVE it. Once I admitted all of this to myself, I actually found that I could deal with a lot of problems that made me question my fitness as a teacher. By approaching those problems as puzzles, I could simply solve them and take satisfaction in that. Doing a good job is much easier when you aren't beating yourself up because you don't LOVE it. The problems are outside of yourself, fixable, not inherent failings.

Therefore, I am becoming a better teacher by NOT loving teaching.


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*Does anyone give a damn if stockbrokers LOVE their jobs, or attorneys, or policemen, or plumbers? Hell, no one cares if the cashier at the grocery store LOVES her job. They just care that they get through the line quickly and get the correct change.

Not A Post About Mother's Day

Today is Mother's Day. I just figured that out.

I'm not sure what to think of Mother's Day, probably because I am not one nor care to be one. Mostly, I'm not sure what to think of Mother's Day because the concept seems so divorced from reality. I know that it started as a day to protest war by politicizing motherhood, but the commodification and sentimentalization of Mother's Day since World War I seems to have done more harm than good to everyone -- mothers, perhaps, the most of all. Who wants to live in the shadow of that monster of an angel, the Perfect Mother?

I think, oddly, of Betty Draper on Mad Men. Not so much her as the reactions to her that I read on such blogs as What Alan's Watching and Tom and Lorenzo. I don't personally like the character; yet, at the same time, I also find her and the reactions to her fascinating. While the writers have her make decisions that fit her character -- she, for instance, did not leave Don in the first season after she found out that he was spying on her psychotherapy, instead using that knowledge to manipulate him -- most people who comment on the show project their own experiences as a mother or as a child onto her. People who respond to her with sympathy identify with her as a trapped woman who hasn't bought into the romanticism of motherhood. People who loathe her respond to her as children who were raised by an unhappy mother.

I fall into the latter category.

I think also of a post that I wrote a few months back (which I'm looking for in order to link). I had made mention of unconditional love in the post and a couple of commenters, one who identified herself as a mother, objected to that. When the spoke up, I had to agree. I wrote from the voice of a hurt child. They chimed in with the voice of adults.

Of course unconditional love is impossible. It is, in fact, one of those ephemeral tools used to pummel women into submission with feelings of inadequacy (Professor Zero has a quote that sums up that process in terms of power and powerlessness). Who on earth can love someone unconditionally? Love is, to some degree, a bargain. You love someone as long as they are lovable, and someone love you as long as you are lovable. The condition is in the definition of "lovable."

At what point does a person become unlovable? When they kill a thousand people? When they torture animals? When they beat you? When they make you hate yourself? When they become self-destructive? When they are simply unpleasant? When they don't make all As? When they have no interest in joining the marching band? When they don't clean up their room? Everyone has their limits.

Somewhere along the line I picked up the message that I was inherently unlovable, and it started there with silly things like those last four items -- and the beating one. It started with a parent screaming (in frustration I now can see), "I hate you I hate you I hate you!" That was the reason that I wrote -- and still write -- with the voice of a child wanting unconditional love. Really, what that child wanted was fewer specific conditions on being loved.

What the adult wants -- what I want right now -- is not to feel so confused about what I feel for my parents. I have a sick little exercise in which I imagine them as dead, then explore what I feel. I do that hoping that, in this imagined grief, I can sort out the lovable things about them from the unlovable things. I do that so that I can appreciate and love them without reservation now, not after they are gone. I hope that the exercise does some good before it becomes reality.

There is something horribly perverse in that, isn't there? Who does that?

I actually haven't seen them since their visit in the fall. That visit went pretty well, and I felt somewhat peaceful afterward. I worry that, if I visit them, that peace will be destroyed. Sadly, that's why I don't visit my grandmother ever. She was a mean, controlling, abusive, old battle ax. (I'm actually like her in a lot of ways, which is another story for another time.) Some time ago I made my peace with her. If I see her again, that peace will be gone.

That's horribly perverse, too, isn't it?

There is a connection to be made here, isn't there? Abuse is inherited, and only really insightful people who pay attention can slow down or stop that inheritance. My mother was neither, beyond knowing that she did not want to be like her own mother. My mother had a hard time not abusing her children because she had no idea how a non-abusive mother behaved.

I'm not sure exactly where my father fits into that narrative, but he had a remote father and some patriarchal ideas about gender and marriage that my mother failed to meet. Of course, they were both kids when they got married, so they had no means of articulating any of their frustration. The result was that a violent and angry energy engulfed their marriage and their family.

I'm trying to figure all of this out before they die, when it is too late. I've figured out that I feel a profound sense of alienation in regard to my family. I feel almost no connection to my brothers because of that alienation, although I do feel connection through that alienation toward my parents. I just feel some invisible wall between us.

When we get together at Christmas, we play roles, or check out mentally even when physically present. Connection? Intimacy? I don't even know what that would look like because this alienation and disconnection were always there in one way or another.

I worry about this now, in middle age, because that sort of alienation and disconnection has infected every other human interaction in my life and I see it affecting my teaching, too -- although I haven't yet written about that because I can't yet fully articulate it.

Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh, yeah: unconditional love and Mother's Day and such. I think.

As I've been saying, the voice that I use when I write about this subject is that of the hurt child. That voice has served its purpose. It has allowed me to accept the fact that it was and is hurt, that bad things and disrespectful things were done to me, and that I adopted a lot of bad ideas and have behaved badly according to them. In doing so, I feel less and less that I am betraying my parents by accepting this fact, which has alleviated some guilt.

Of course, while I don't feel that I'm betraying them, they do. My dad still insists that I am betraying them simply by being in analysis. My mom, who was always so hostile toward therapy, thinks that anything that keeps me from sinking into a depressive funk is good, and then she doesn't think about it. If she did, then she might feel that I'm betraying her; but she chooses not to think about it. I love her for that.

That's what I am trying to get to: love. How do I love them? I mean, they have done things that put them on both sides of MY line between lovable and unlovable. I can see them both, and I think that I may actually, on occasion, forgive them for the unlovable stuff because I can see that I can fix it all myself and because I see it less as them being bad and more as them feeling helpless and unlovable themselves. I can also see the lovable stuff beyond the mere fact that they kept me alive and gave me a lot of privilege.

So, how do I love them? Seriously, what does that look like? How does that behave? What does that even feel like? I think I feel it, but it is remote. When I try to get close to it, I feel danger, very much like when I think about visiting. Part of me feels drawn there, but most of me feels an instinctual fear.

I suppose figuring that out is the next step.

A$$hole of the Week

Maybe it's PMS, maybe it's the time of the semester, maybe it's the time of year; but I have to get this rant off of my bitchy, pissed-off chest.

At work, I occasionally participate in these community engagement discussions about random subjects, usually connected to politics in some way or another. I'm not a particularly political person, and I don't particularly follow politics. My blood pressure can't handle it. This group tends toward the left, although not too left because my occasional comments are probably reinforcing the stereotype of the radical commie professor indoctrinating the students.

In this group there is the one dude who just hit my last nerve this week. He's pissed me off before. Once, a year ago, when I facilitated a discussion on Catherine Clinton's Mrs. Lincoln, and opened the discussion by giving some background about the field of women's history. The women in the group were fairly receptive, and I wanted to engage their interest. It wasn't necessarily a feminist interest, but they were more than a little curious as to how women lived and functioned in the world in the past, and they all had a tremendous sympathy for Mary Lincoln.

That's not the way that the discussion went. Our Asshole of the Week derailed the discussion with the typical opposition cry of, "why does it have to be 'women's history' or 'black history'? Isn't it all just 'history'?" Like I wrote at the time, I've heard this before. Anyone who specializes in anything that challenges the Whig view of traditional political and military history gets that question. I know that it is really a dismissal of the fields and, indeed, a dismissal of the people whom the field covers. Still, I try to engage it as a serious question, and developed an analogy that I deployed at this point in the conversation.

"Medical doctors specialize," I replied. "You have cardiothoracic surgeons, oncologists, pediatricians, dentists..."

"Yeah," he said, "but they are still all 'doctors'."

"And we are still all historians," I said.

"The why don't you call yourselves that?" he said. When I said, "we do," he waved his hand dismissively, as if brushing me away. He was not someone who might have a real curiosity about how the historical profession works. He knows it all, and we people with PhDs in non-technical subjects (unlike his own very technical subject) who work in academia instead of the private sector, know nothing. He made that pretty clear through the next hour. Only people who do big, important things qualify as valid historical subjects, in his point of view. The rest of us are just wasting....something, time, money, paper, whatever. We are an affront to him.

When I told this story of "they are all still 'doctors'" to the Gentleman Caller, the Gentleman caller said, "I hope he remembers that when he goes to a podiatrist for prostate cancer. After all, they are all 'doctors'!"

Then, a couple of months ago, our Asshole of the Week facilitated a discussion of an excerpt from a book that had a thesis that went something to the effect of "if we all just trusted our instincts and acted on them then we would all be safer from crime."

Really.

The excerpt focused on the example of a woman who, while carrying her groceries, was accosted on the sidewalk outside of her apartment by a man who forced himself into her apartment, raped her, and was probably about to kill her before she escaped. In the interview with the author, the author actually coerced the woman into saying that it was her own failure to act on her instinct from the beginning that placed her in that situation.

Yes, he blamed the victim and got the victim to blame herself.

While every woman and even some of the men in the room had a problem with the argument, our Asshole of the Week agreed. When I pointed out that the selection seemed to blame the victim, he waved his hand at me in dismissal. The book had a chapter on how women should say "no" and mean it, he said. "Yeah," I said, "and what about the men who won't take 'no' for an answer." He shrug and said, "well, too bad."

Both of these scenarios pissed me off; but for some reason, this week, I took it way to personally and actually felt violence toward this man.

The discussion focused on philanthropy, with readings from Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates. The Carnegie selection included a quote in which he actually endorsed (at least on paper) an income tax. The Gates selection included a portion in which he admitted that the private sector does not respond to public need (unless it will make them a profit) and that philanthropists should listen to the needs of the people that they hope to serve.

I had no intention of attending this discussion since I have a ton of other work to do, not the least of which was preparing for my class that evening. The woman who organizes these discussions is a friend, and she asked me if I could attend to give some historical background. I agreed, but warned her that I know nothing about Carnegie or philanthropy or anything like that, and most of what I know would more likely be in the grain of Howard Zinn rather than "wasn't Carnegie wonderful for giving away so much cash for so much good."

Our Asshole of the Week took the discussion in this direction (and I do quote): "stop punishing the rich for being wealthy. People out there out of jealousy just want to punish the rich by taxing them." In other words, the Have-nots are angry at the Haves for being Haves and take out that anger through taxation.

A woman across the table, a bulldog of an attorney in the juvenile courts (seriously, don't fuck with her!), saw my hackles go up and insisted that I say what I was thinking. I didn't really want to participate because I didn't really have the time to soften my gut reaction, and I didn't want to make my friend look bad, and I felt that my role in the room was to be an educator and provide background commentary, not jump out and say what was on my mind which was, "you hypocritical idiot!"

I tried to point out that, first of all, taxes are not punishment. They are part of your responsibility as a citizen in a society. As a woman across the room put it, "they are the price of civilization." The majority go for such things -- which are expensive to run -- as roads, libraries, schools, including the very one that we were all sitting in that was getting 12% of its budget cut on top of an already proposed 10% cut. The very institution in which he was sitting was giving its employees pay cuts via furloughs. Someone else in the room pointed out that several of us, not just the teachers in the room, were paid from public money.

Damnit. I mentioned public schools.

"The public schools aren't doing their jobs!" he said. Then he went on a rant about how standardized testing shows that, even in the wealthiest of school districts are doing poorly, therefore more money won't do anything, and that the private sector would do a much better job at education. If you are in the education field, you have been subjected to some version of this rant that usually comes down to an attack on teachers and a defense of standardized testing.

Well, that was the day that the College Inc. story was in the news and blogs (and blogs ). I used that in my argument, including the part where these institutions receive a large share of public money via student loans. The attorney backed me up because she had dealt with such institutions in the past and knew their dubious record. Fortunately, other people in the room were ready for a pile on from different angles, so I didn't have to force myself to control my "tone." My tone would have been dripping with contempt and disdain and would have turned into this sort of an apoplectic attack:

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Dear Mr. Old White Man:

How dare you? How dare you defend less taxation on the Rich? How dare you speak of it as "punishment"? How dare you dismiss all publicly funded institutions as being incompetent and controlled by politics? How dare you insist that we rely on the kindness of the hearts of the Rich in order to operate? How dare you do that here, in our college, that is funded by the public -- by taxes?

Are these Rich jumping in to donate the $12 million that has already been cut from our school's budget? Are they jumping in to donated the additional $14.5 million that we are facing being cut? Are they donating the toilet paper that a local library that has had to reduce such things in its budget cuts? Are they donating the dollars to keep those libraries from cutting their journal subscriptions, book purchases, hours of operation? Are they donating the funds to the youth organization that keeps teenage kids off the streets and engaged in civic improvement? Are they filling potholes? Are they donating a dime toward operations? Are they donating a dime that doesn't have some assumption of control over the institution to which they are donating it? How, in fact, does that assumption of control not stifle the innovation of the institutions receiving the donations?

How dare you sit in this building on a public campus and say that publicly funded institutions and the people who use them are punishing the wealthy by taxing them in order to keep the county and its services running? How dare you say this to three people sitting within ten feet of you who are facing their third year without a cost of living increase in their pay, and now a pay cut (and we are well aware that we are the lucky ones)? How dare you say this when one of those three is most vulnerable to a lay off? How dare you say this to yet another person who not only serves as a public defender but who also cannot afford to retire right now? How dare you say this when the students outside the door of this room will soon be paying much higher tuition and receiving fewer services and sitting in larger classes -- not classrooms, but with more students? How are WE not being punished? How are WE being punished LESS than the Rich?

How dare you say that to a room full of people on some sort of public assistance like, say, Social Security and Medicare? Are you willing to give that up yourself, mister?

Didn't you, after all, drive here on publicly funded roads? You didn't have to pay a toll on any stretch, and you passed construction at least once. Didn't you park in our garage, without having to pay a dime, while people who work at and attend this school do pay every semester? Didn't you walk from the garage to the building on publicly funded sidewalks? Don't you go home and use publicly regulated utilities that ensure that your water is drinkable and that your lights do, in fact, turn on when you flip the switch on? Don't you put your garbage on the corner where it will be picked up? Don't you do the same with your recycling? (Or do you recycle?) Don't you attend arts and culture events -- like this very one at this very college -- that receive grants and funding from the county, state, and federal governments?

How dare you sit in the middle of this economy in which the un-punished private sector ran everything so effectively that we are now in something akin to the Great Depression, then suggest that the private sector knows how to run everything best? Where did all of those businesses, those rich people, run for rescue?

How dare you expect the poorest, the ones struggling to try to make ends meet, to have the hope of not a better future but of a survivable future, to shoulder this burden alone? How dare you suggest that we expect the people who will use more of these resources than anyone else, who have managed to convince the schools that they should not educate but train students for the needs of the "business community," who will use our schools, our expertise, our students, our citizens, our roads, our utilities, our environment, our arts, our culture, our police force, our fire departments, our ambulances, our hospitals, our political system (where do you think the corruption in politics comes from?), and who expect them to respond to their needs faster and better than to anyone else's -- how dare you expect them not to have to pay for that proportionally? How dare you suggest that their taxes are punishment while ours are a duty?

You have some gall, mister, and you clearly know so very little about how a society and a republic functions. As one of the other people in the room said, you are naive and foolish. I take that personally in this case, mister, because you are hitting me at home, at where I make a living, and where the people whom I work with and for make a living. On top of that, you use what we have to offer and you don't think that the Rich -- and aren't we really talking about YOU here? -- should have to pay for it.

I'm not sure that I can forgive you for that opinion, to agree to disagree, or even to respect it, not unless you demonstrate that you are, in fact, giving away money in the kind of amounts that you think are sufficient for running a tax-free society. Not unless you can prove that you are, in fact, doing something constructive and productive for our community, rather than simply using it's resources and expecting to be taxed less while receiving more.

In the meantime, please, let me know how it works out with that podiatrist. Will you be paying for that with private insurance or Medicare?

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ETA: I just realized that 4 out of my 5 most recent posts are bitching posts. You think I'm a little stressed out? Or just generally unpleasant?

ETA 2: By the way, I'm hoping to put this bitching tendency to good use by putting in my request to be appointed as an at-large union rep for my campus. I hope that my blood pressure can handle it.