The iPad, the girl out the window, and my future

So, for some time I've been wanting, but resisting, the latest piece of kit from M. Jobs and co.   I even ordered the new iPhone to keep me from buying an iPad. I justified the iPhone purchase by telling myself that work would pay for it, so it was "needed." (I should note that though it has not yet arrived, I have secured one of the hard to find "bumpers" for it).

Now, I will take a slight detour.  I currently have a job that I like and am good at.   I also really like the people I work with.  I don't want to do my current job forever--indeed it is one of those jobs that I should not do forever lest I be viewed as "stuck." At any rate a job has opened up that I don't think I want, but there are people who want me to apply for it. I am even led to believe that if I did apply, I would probably get it. It's more money, more responsibility, more pressure. It also takes me--I think--in the wrong direction. So, I decided not to apply. Then I got a call.  My boss got a call.  I was asked to rethink. I am supposed to be rethinking as I write.

So, being me, I cried a little and I processed a lot. And then I decide to buy an iPad after all. Do you follow that? I'm not sure I do either, but there was the compulsion. Being compelling.

So I stop by Best Buy and ask. Nope. They only have 3G ones. Don't want 3G. One data plan with AT&T is enough, thanks. So, this morning, I commence to calling.

Apple Store #1: get on the waiting list

Best Buy #2: we don't carry ipads

Apple store #2: how about a 3G?

Best Buy #2: How about a 3G?

...some time later...

Apple Store #5: we have a 64mb wifi

So, without much thinking (or any crying), I head out to points east and emerge with the biggest wifi iPad there is.

Honey goes off to the gym to let me play with it. I start to lose myself in app land. The worries of the moment recede.

Then the dogs begin to bark. I look up from Honey's desk (where iTunes lives) and see two kids walking in front of the house heading to our front door. I say (through the window), "I'm sorry, but I don't want to buy anything from you."

The older one immediately responds, "you are a racist."

I said something in protest, but she was gone. It burst my iPad bubble to be sure. And it made me mad. I did refrain from walking outside and giving her a piece of my mind. I don't have to take the lies in. But they do deflate.

What will I do next, job-wise? I don't know, though I suspect I'll stay where I am.

In the meantime, in case you're wondering, the iPad works fine for first draft blogging. (Final edits requires the MacBook Pro.  I did mention my official Apple fangirl status, right?)

The iPad may save me from something. I just don't know what yet.

Woo hoo

I got tenure.

A tale of flames and boxing

When I first started my current job, I took on a fight. I meant to take it on, but I didn't have any idea how outmatched I was. I got beaten up, knocked around, threatened, and told I was ruining civilization itself. In sum, I lost. Badly.

Recently, I encountered a problem to which I offered a simple solution. Here's the rub; the problem occurred in the same arena as my lost fight. I knew I was stepping close to the edges of that fight, but I had allies now, knew where the punches were likely to come from, and really wasn't starting up the fight again.

Last night, I found out that the old opponents, unbeknown to me, had stepped into the ring and started punching me. To say I was angry was an understatement.



Sigh. I miss Madeline Kahn.

Anyway, I was furious. Flames on the side of my face furious.

There is nothing, and I do mean nothing, I hate more than having my integrity questioned. Nothing.

It was being questioned. Beaten up, really.

I thought about what to do. I backed up and looked at what I wanted to have happen. The problem is not solved yet, but I pushed it out of the boxing ring and sent it down another road. I have back-up. I have firepower. I haven't yet used my fists or my guns, but they're loaded and ready. (Am I taking this metaphor too far? It's all rather martial, admittedly.)

Four years and a lost fight can make a difference in perspective, but I also think I've gotten pretty good at what I do. Late this afternoon, in another context entirely, a guy I'd been having a little trouble with of late, came up to me and said something really nice just because it occurred to him. I know external validation is fleeting. In that moment though, with this other issue on the road I prepared, I felt good.

Sometimes, if you're lucky, you figure out what you're good at and somebody lets you do it. Still and all, if someone can tell me how to protect my integrity from attacks, I'd be grateful. Bubble wrap? Plastic couch covers? Maybe it needs boxing gloves?

It's real--my integrity--even if not everyone can see it. That is also true of my invisible friend.

Hole punched me

I cried more than usual last week. I'm not a big crier, but sometimes things get to a stress level that my usual calm exterior breaks down.

Stress? Me stressed?

My tenure file was due on Friday. This event can cause stress for even the most sanguine academics. My effort was made more complicated by a number of factors.

To wit:

+This was my first file of this type. Normally people submit what's called a "retention file" first. I didn't have to because I just got my job permanently summer before last and because you don't have to submit a file your first year.

+My file qualifies as weird. Most faculty teach. I do too, but my day-to-day effort focuses more on administration.

+If I don't get tenure, I lose my job.

No pressure. None at all.

The mofo required a 5 inch notebook. Priced one of those lately? They're not cheap. $30 not cheap.

Also, Avery needs to try a lot harder. Don't sell 12-tab dividers when the template doesn't work with Word for Mac. I managed to find some 5-tab dividers in the office. Someone had left a sheet in the box that had all the labels pulled off. I formatted carefully, printed and discovered that I had printed on a used, no-label sheet. Um-Hmm. Would you put a used-up sheet back into the label box? Neither would I. Did we have any more 5-tab labels? Nope. Did I need to reformat for 8-tab labels? Yep. Total time making, printing and applying the labels? Well over two hours.

If Avery lodged itself firmly on my office product shit list, Swingline became my office product hero. How? Well, they make this wondrous thing:



Behold the bit of magnificence, friends and neighbors, that is Swingline's electric three hole punch. A friend secreted it away from a neighboring department. After using it to punch for a while (and having several co-workers come by to try it), I asked our office folks to order us one. I heart Swingline. Honey asked, when I was raving about it, "who punches holes any more?" I do and think my office deserves the brilliance and efficiency of the Swingline 525.

Here's the completed product:



Thick, huh?



Look at those labels. They look nice, despite Avery's stupidity, inanity.

My normal bag didn't seem even close to capable of holding the five inches of hole-punched me for delivery to the dean's office. Fortunately, I had gotten a bag for travel that was up to the task.



My green bean machine was ready to carry me for the delivery.



I won't know anything until the end of the semester.

The thing is called a PIF. That's sort of how I feel now that it lives in the dean's office. Like all the air's been released.

piffffffff

The crying, thankfully, has subsided somewhat.

On the wall

When I was younger, I would often go into my mother's office. She has always kept Hershey's Kisses in a jar and I'd have one or two. Because of what she does, I had occasion to spend a lot of time at her workplace as a child and teenager. Occasionally, I would also go to my father's office. He didn't have kisses, but inevitably had a better view. Hers was always a ground floor office and his was a high rise office. Sweeping vistas are ingrained in the American consciousness, even if the vista in question is of other high-rise buildings.

I always admired their degrees on the wall. I read them and then re-read them. They went to the same college, so the bachelors' degrees looked the same, but their advanced degrees differed and I found their language and appearance very appealing. There was a deep commitment to education as an idea in my family, but the material culture of education also appealed deeply to me. The degrees themselves, the regalia, the places. The verdant landscapes in otherwise normal contexts.

Really, I wanted those pieces of paper. I have some of them now. Four, if you want to know. One of them has a typo. Two of them are framed. I really have no idea where the fourth one is. The "highest" one, as they say, had been sitting in its frame in a closet. I had never put it on a wall anywhere. I had it on top of a bookshelf at home for a while, but then our roof leaked and our office ceiling collapsed and, as I hauled ceiling and insulation out to the trash can, I put it away in the closet to keep it from forming some undeniable bond with the wet insulation.

This weekend, we cleaned out that closet so the house can be re-floored. I found that highest degree in the closet.

This morning, I brought it in to work. The frame had some smudges on it, so I cleaned it a little. I took down a picture I had taken some years ago of a cyclist whose name I don't know and hung the degree on my wall. I like the language on it more than any of the ones my parents have, "The Regents of the University of California on the recommendation of the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate, Los Angeles Division have conferred upon [insert name here]" Isn't that great? So florid.

It continues, "...who, by conducting original research has demonstrated thorough knowledge of [insert field here]" So, original research demonstrates thorough knowledge. Good to know. Now, with all of that, you still don't know what degree it is. Way to bury the lead, UC. Good things come to those who bother to read the whole thing. The degree comes next.

..."The Degree of Doctor of Philosophy." There it is. Whew. Took a while. "with all the rights and privileges thereto pertaining." I'm not sure what rights it gives me, but it is a privilege (most of the time) to be an Associate Professor for the same state the issued the piece of paper I'm currently discussing.

"Given at Los Angeles This Twenty Sixth Day of March in the Year Nineteen Hundred and Ninety Nine." Note the lack of "of our Lord" language. Secularity is SO rampant in, well, secular institutions. Rightly so. It's signed, by among others, the ousted former governor of the state. There's also a gold seal.

It looks nice on the wall, I have to say. It perches right above a picture of a starling eating watermelon and next to my Union Pacific Las Vegas poster. I don't know why I didn't hang it there before. I wanted it for so long and then I got it. It belongs in my office with its first floor view. Come by and read it, if you want.

Narrating life

I have for some time suspected that the folks who have always had mobile phones interact with the world differently than I do.

When I suggested last semester, for example, that it was possible to live without a cell phone, one of my students became incensed. I mean red faced, angry, and very loud. The idea of living that way was such an anathema to him that the very idea made him enraged.

I was in line at Starbucks last week, fairly early in the morning and the young woman ahead of me said (into her phone): "I just got up. I'm at Starbucks and am going to have a frappucino."

While there's nothing wrong with that per se, it struck me as odd. Why not go to Starbucks and have the frappucino and JUST NOT TELL ANYONE?

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "In silence we must wrap much of our life, because it is too fine for speech, because also we cannot explain it to others, and because somewhat we cannot yet understand." The woman in Starbucks and many of her generation believe just the opposite. Don't wrap up lives in silence. Narrate them. Tell everyone you know everything you're doing every moment of every day.

This afternoon, I passed a young woman on campus who said into her phone, "I'm really thirsty. Should I get something to drink?" I wanted to stop her, hold her by both shoulders and say, "Yes you should get something to drink if you're thirsty. The more important thing, though, is to be able to make that decision on you own without your phone."

Here's the thing. My academic field has taught me to believe that the stories we tell have great meaning about who we are as individuals and who we are as a culture. To borrow from another academic field, I also think, in this context, about phonemes. Those are the smallest discreet sound changes that indicate shifts in meaning. Change the c in cat to an h and you have the new sound and a new meaning. Folklorists have a similar idea. One way to look at stories, is to look for something called motifs. Motifs are the plot or character elements in a story that are unique. The glass slippers in Cinderella are a motif.

These non-stories aren't really stories at all, then. They're non-motifs strung together to fill the silence. Is there meaning? I can't say.

So here's my advice to the cell phone over-users. Go forth and live. No need to narrate while doing so.

Motivation

Finding jobs during my summers in college was a challenge to which I was not up. I have never been good at finding jobs, truth be told. They tend to find me.

Teresa says that when you stop trying for things, they happen. Maybe, but in college, I needed summer jobs and I had a hard time finding them. I should note, in a fit of sibling bitter pique, that my brother never seemed to need a summer job, for some reason. But that's a story for another time. One particularly low moment involved my going to an interview. I didn't know what the job was, but they had advertised in the local paper for "college students." It turned out to be an "opportunity" for selling encyclopedias door to door. It seems quaint now, the notion of encyclopedia BOOKS sold door-to-door, doesn't it?

The encyclopedias in question, by the way, were not your big names. No World Book, no Britannica.

Britannica aside: We had a very old set of Britannicas in our basement. I didn't do well on my report on the moon in 4th grade when I noted (using the EB) that someday people might get to the moon. It was neat set, though, as my great-grandfather had read most of it and annotated a lot of it. I met him once when he was very old and I was very young. Mostly, I remember his large hands. I've always been glad to be able to get a little glimpse at how he interacted with the world. Small careful pencil marks.

At any rate, in the door-to-door interview I was asked how many sets of encyclopedias I thought I could sell in a week. I thought about it and replied, "one." That seemed about right to me. He was appalled and said something to the effect that if I could only sell one set, this was probably not the right job for me. I agreed with a depth of feeling not usually expressed in employment situations and vacated the premises post haste.

I spent part of that summer delivering pizzas and another part back at college taking summer school classes. Neither was great, but there were no sales involved.

I thought about all of this last night when, during the course of a discussion in the class I'm teaching this term, I mentioned how motivated people are by inconsistent rewards. Very much like some experiments done on pigeons, if we're rewarded but there's no real pattern to the reward, we'll persist in believing the reward could come again at any time. Las Vegas thrives on our motivation in this manner.

One of my students raised her hand and went into a five minute monologue about selling and being taught by Anthony Robbins and The Secret and how all you had to do was believe and things would come true. At the end of her moment, I mumbled something about how well motivational speakers and authors know psychology and changed the subject. After class it did occur to me that perhaps I had missed my calling all those years ago. If I had only BELIEVED in my ability to sell, I may have been able to--I don't know--sell TWO encyclopedia sets a week.

An aside, I seem to have lost my calendar after class last night. I'm, sure were I better motivated that would not have happened.