Syndicate and Hague

It’s been a while since I’ve written something that was sans-argument/critique. But today I just need help with writer’s block.

This semester has been kind of rough for me. There was a 3-week long sustained peak to a crisis that is external to me, my job, and school, but drained me of a lot of my mental/emotional energy right at the beginning of the semester and I’m still paying for it. Trying to keep all the plates spinning.

One of the spinning plates that I let drop was a bio I’m supposed to write about myself for the Culture & Teaching site. I promised it to Thom by the end of January - and now it’s March. It’s not like I didn’t work on it. I did. But the paper was a void of white space and everything I wrote was craptastic.

Contrary to popular belief, I hate officially bragging about myself or making myself sound important. If I do that, it’s usually self-deprecating or so ridiculous and over the top (I’m going to take over the world) it begs a joke to be made at my expense.

Actually sitting down and crafting something about me? Sigh. It’s really hard.

Maybe you could tell me if any of this is interesting/what you’d want to read more of if you were looking at joining a PhD program…yes/no? Eh. We’ll see what comes of this.

I’m going to write it in Saraspeak right now, because I want to get ideas down.

For my entire professional and educational life, I’ve been treading this weird line between technology, composition and social justice. I was an English BA, and if I’d bothered to file the paperwork for it my minor would have been Political Science. I interned and wrote for newspapers during college, but my two student jobs had me designing my first website , creating databases, maintaining a computer lab, and helping with the very early brainstorming about online writing labs at the U. This was all 1997-99.

So then I move to NYC with vague ideas about what I wanted to do, wound up working on print communications and a website redesign at NYU. I did that for a while and decided to say to hell with practicality, I want to study poetry. And so I got my MFA and it was so awesome. I taught composition and literature. I wrote massive amounts. I loved teaching. I miss teaching. Those were two wonderful, wonderful years. At the same time, though, news of my technical knowledge spread and one of my jobs wound up being print design and web design. I also took freelance jobs editing and proofreading and tutoring. Ran the MFA reading series. Poetry editor for our journal. I’m really hyperactive.

Back to Minnesota. More freelancing, proofreading, editing. Then a totally random communications job where I did lots of print, ran the website, and sold graves. (Seriously. I’m actually quite good with grieving families. It was a weird thing to discover about myself.)

While I was working, I was applying for adjunct jobs every chance I got. It is so hard to find work at colleges. I saw the pile of applications when I dropped mine off one time and I just wanted to collapse. However, as luck would have it, I actually scored an interview at the U and got to teach comp here as an adjunct.

It was awesome, but fleeting, as those jobs often are. But then I wound up in my current job - back running webstuff again. Got an adjunct job at St. Kate’s for a semester, which was fun.

Then I got intellectually stuck. I always have an idea for what’s next, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do next. When I looked at PhD programs, I kept coming back to the curriculum & instruction program. But I was pretty torn. Even though a lot of the tech opportunities in my life have been accidental, I really enjoy them. I also know that focusing only on tech won’t make me happy or sustain me. I am obsessed with politics and culture, with social justice. Sometimes I think that’s what made me love teaching composition, and what made me a good teacher - I think learning to write well is one of the most empowering things we can do. Being able to argue well is not a gift, it’s a skill, and it can be learned and crafted.

See why this is so hard? This is long as hell.

Anyway, so when I discovered I could maybe do both the learning technologies track (fulfilling my tech needs) and the culture and teaching side (fulfilling my critical needs), everything clicked.

So here I am. And it’s pretty awesome. The CAT teachers are really interested in what I know technically, and the LT teachers are supportive of me taking ideas in critical directions. It’s also hard. When you’re trying to merge worlds and philosophies, and there isn’t anyone quite modeling how you perceive things, it can be kind of frustrating. Not all frustration is bad, though.

My fellow CAT students are freakin awesome. The rapport many of the students have with each other, and the ways in which they approach the world, remind me of my peers in my poetry program. Really insightful and smart and funny. I can’t tell you how much I love going to a bar and listening to people hash out a debate about - say - the representation of Hmong kids in Gran Torino. These are people who have an acute sense of the need for social justice in education and for us to take a critical lens to a world many take for granted as is.

The faculty are also freakin awesome. They’re really supportive and committed to us. They each have refined specialties and I’m so excited to spend the next several years with them in some way, shape, or form.

(By the way, I could also write nice things about the LT folks, but this is for the CAT site, so I thought I’d focus on them).

Anyway. I don’t know what to do with this. Also, now I’m sad about the Regents scholarship again. I desperately don’t want to put school on hiatus and/or slow it down…

Back in the day when I had a black and white screen computer and a 2400 baud modem … you know, like 1997 … I really had no idea things would be the way they are right now. The ways in which our lives are publicly consumable–sometimes intentionally, sometimes not so–is a little strange.

I noticed this weird trend after the 10 year high school reunion I had no desire or reason to attend. It was 2005 and suddenly all these people I went to high school with were looking at my Friendster account. I’ll interject here that it’s not like I disliked any of them, nor do I harbor real resentment against the vast, vast majority of people I spent my childhood/teenage years with. I knew a lot of decent people, and a number of people who I really enjoyed spending my time with.

The thing is, as an adult, I’ve made very conscious choices about who my friends are and should be. I’ve little curiosity about what my former classmates are up to–excluding those whose friendships were important to me or the few who continue to be my good friends. I’ll admit, when I was living in New York, my friend Megan and I decided to create rumors about ourselves and see if they spread and it’s entirely possible the rumors that she was a stripper with implants and I was a dominatrix actually made their way into conversation…but I’d kind of forgotten we did that until I saw all those pictures of the folks I went to school with.

I was listening to RadioLab with Megan (not the Megan from the above paragraph, my wonderful girlfriend Megan) and it was about deception. A part of the hour was about this guy who decided to stop lying. He recounted a story about an evening he spent with people he didn’t really care for and then was invited out again–but didn’t want to go. He said he couldn’t make it (which was true that time), but when they asked what date was good for him, he said something to the extent of: I don’t have time for the friends I have…and this isn’t worth it.

Heh. Harsh, I suppose, but also true. I’ve used that in the past with people I’ve dated. You can call it mean, but it’s true–I have a lot of friends. People I don’t get to see nearly enough, and the only way I can really maintain new friendships is to be able to bring people together–which means there needs to be some hope that someone I see as a potential new friend would have good group interaction with the people I already love and make time for.

I was thinking about this quite explicitly last week, too, after my women and money class (yes, I am feeling rather empowered). The woman leading the class was talking about making time and financial decisions, specifically about how when she had four young children they were late to everything and she was always crabby. She decided she couldn’t do everything they’d been doing and had to make some decisions about that. People were upset with her because she wasn’t as available as she had been–one woman in class asked if her friends/others ever got over it. She said: they had to.

With the changes that have happened in my life this year, and with the changes that will start in the fall, I’m in one of those places. I’ve been on my own for so long, and completely uncommitted to anyone’s needs but my own, that people have gotten used to me being almost immediately available if something fun comes along. That’s just not the case anymore and it’s an adjustment for all involved. This isn’t to say that I’ve become some sort of homebody or anything, but that my life is structured differently. I’m really, really enjoying the difference and the way my life is changing and I know that in the end people will get used to scheduling things with me differently and I’ll somehow find time to hone the balance of work+relationship+school+friends as well as any human can.

I guess this has been a digression from the original paragraph, but it’s all tied together somehow. I guess I don’t really understand this need to reconnect with people I hardly know. I’m not adamantly against it or anything, I just don’t know how anyone has time for it. And I guess I feel differently about people I was friends with in college or graduate school. Those were years when I chose my environment… Maybe I’m just kind of a jerk. I can live with that too.