78uuu lumière des étoiles

Dusty:Starlight:Culture



more from the trenches
2006-04-24   10:52 p.m.

Oh dear. Here I am!

I've taken to saying "Oh dear" lately, since Nic's student teacher (or trainee or whatever it is you call someone training in speech therapy) has been saying it lately around her, and Nic has been saying it around me. So I've lifted it by proxy, but still - it's suddenly a "thing" we do - unintentionally, cause intentionally copying your friends' latest expressions would be dorky, I think. But still: it's kind of cute, that mirroring language thing we all do to one another when we spend loads of time together and start to become familial, even though we aren't technically family. But Nic is the sister I'd choose if I could choose to have one, so it's fine with me if we keep using the same verbal pauses or copy each other's catch phrases and expressions. Aw.

I saw Avail last night at Maxwell's. I almost didn't: a very full day on Sunday (and a week of total melt down at the university) found me sleepy in my jammies and reading a book early Sunday evening. Then the phone rang - a call from my friend John.

John: "I'm here. Where are you?"
Me: "You're where? I'm home."
John: "Why?"
Me (annoyed): "Huh? What do you mean 'why'? And where are you?"
John: "Don't you have tickets to see Avail?"
Me (more annoyed and confused): "Yeh-es...on the 23rd...(looking at the calendar)...holy crap!"

Don't you hate it when that happens? How sweet that my friends are there to both witness and compensate for my pre-mid-life, pre-senior senior moments, and not bust me about it too bad after they happen. I would have been mighty sad if I woke up this morning, saw the date, and then realized that I missed the Avail show because I can't keep the days straight lately. Thank god for John. And cell phones. Hooray!

The band was great - hadn't seen them in seven or eight years - as was the crowd: whole hordes of old, now-corporate or otherwise responsible peeps like us, and screaming, frenzied kiddies beating the crap out of each other ("dancing", for those of us unfamiliar with those kinds of shows) and climbing on each others' backs to try to get at the stage and/or microphone to sing along with the band. I loved every sweaty, sold-out second of it - and I loved that we elderly fans hung back and watched the kids doing what we used to do. It was cathartic, in a way...ack, did that sound as cliche as it felt? Well it was that - cathartic - cause I changed out of my jammies and made it to the damn show, cause I had such a great time screaming along to the songs, and cause I held my own on the floor while nineteen year olds went soaring over my head.

It would have been easy for me to say "oh well, (or "oh dear"?) John, guess I'm gonna miss this one", write off the $20 ticket, and get my work done at home, fretting about the week ahead. But I didn't, thus proving to myself that I still connect to some earlier version of me - one that had the energy to go to shows like that every weekend once upon a time, one that seemed immune to the energy-zapping politics of big institutions or the worry over too little sleep.

I think sometimes what drives nostalgia or the act of clinging to youth (or whatever it is people do when they wistfully think of days gone by) is some belief that at one time we - as individuals or as a culture - had more integrity and tenacity than we do after a few years of working, parenting, marriage, mortgage payments, doomed economies or bad politics distract us from who we thought we would become or what we thought the world would be like. Remember that girl, or boy, we say to ourselves - remember how you thought you'd change the world? What follows that usually, is either a chuckle over "how naive" one was or a struggle over "how far" one has gotten away from the optimism that characterizes youth.

Sure, sometimes that integrity and tenacity most of us start out with as we approach bona fide adulthood is the product of ignorance; lordy knows I've seen some ugly and down right unethical things in the last five years at work that I never thought existed - things that I assumed were unfortunate exceptions rather than rule.

I see the same sort of attitude in so many students, young people who want to go into social work, psychology, politics or teaching, students who tell me "I want to do something about [the environment/homelessness/war/classism/etc.] besides just complain" and really mean it, students who don't seem to have any idea what they're in for as they enter the work force and all of its horrible potential to turn us into bitter, resentful and jaded souls who forget what it was that even drew us to our jobs in the first place. I see myself and so many other people in them - I see who Steve and I "were" when we went into teaching and didn't anticipate how union issues, budget cuts or administrators' egos could exhaust us so much that some days, we couldn't actually teach; I see who John and Danielle were when they never imagined an ultra-conservative presidential administration, because of some archaic and contradictory attitude about stem-cell research, would cut funding to their bio labs, ruining years of their work and stalling their progress and discoveries.

But how do you tell students about that? How, without sounding like some crotchety old person who idealizes some golden age that never existed? You don't; I can't. It's something my students will or will not develop the capacity to deal with on their own. But what I can do is wish and hope for them - that they'll find some outlet or some reconnection to these hopeful and excited selves, should those inevitable real-world nasties set in and make them question everything. I guess I hope they find their Avail show.

Their inner-Avail-show? Oh dear.

Oh dear! There it is again. I'm unbelievably fried.

The latest, on the Jersey-Uni melt down (Jersey-wide, btw; read about it here)? More layoffs, more forced retirements, more cuts to tutoring, financial aid and work-study programs, and the biggest gem: A proposed 50% cut in part-time faculty. So with half the teachers but the same (or higher) enrollment projections for the next fiscal year, it wasn't hard to figure out what came next (today): a proposal to cut class offerings next semester, while raising class size from 30 to 55 students (for literature and social sciences), and from 23 to 35 (for writing). Um....no. Besides just "...no", that's IMPOSSIBLE. So that will be voted down. I mean really: 55 students, one Shakespeare professor? Said Shakespeare professor teaching four sections of the course, and managing 220 students single handedly? (Oh - TA and Grad assistant funding was also slashed.) And developmental writing? With no tutoring and 35 students per class, we should expect nothing but total failure on all end. So what's the solution? We'll see. I can't possibly imagine what they'll come up with next - unless it's what we joked about over coffee today: a request that faculty sell various "expendable" organs, using the cash to fund class expenses to demonstrate their loyalty to the university. Because clearly, the university has been loyal to us.

Well as a system or institution, no, it hasn't, but as a body of people, it has been - to me, and I guess I can only speak for myself. But speak I will: I've never felt so supported in my probationary state as a non-tenured, full time faculty member before; three of my bosses, included the big boss and a dean, are doing extremely creative things to make sure I can keep my new job. That's good, because nearly everyone around me who has a job like mine seems to be losing theirs. I know that part of this has to do with the fact that a full-time line, no matter who is in it, is a very bad thing for a department to lose, but I also know that it's not typical for your bosses to sit with you for two hours after everyone else has gone home, trying to construct a contingency plan should your line get cut. If it wasn't for them, I'd be a big old jiggly, depressed, quivery mess - more so than I've already been in these last few weeks over the fear that all I have right now will go up in smoke at the final budgetary meeting in July. It sort of helps that we're all in similar precarious positions - we can commiserate and truly empathize with one another at work. But beyond work and work-environments, it's the people you surround yourself with whom you seek refuge in; I count myself both lucky and smart that I've been able to make good decisions with friendships and relationships and have people I can rely so much on. Oh dear - it's so late. And we have another emergency meeting tomorrow morning. No kidding! To bed with me.

xoxox