I hate this

So, last night, on the local news, they noted that there had been an "assault" (really, an attempted rape, but the woman fought back and at least avoided being raped) at an apartment complex here. And they had the obligatory footage of some people saying, "I don't believe it could happen here" but there was also a couple who said, "This is it. We're moving out. This place has gotten really bad. There's lots of crime, lots of drug-dealing. We don't want to live here any more."

They didn't NAME the complex or give its address. They had a brief camera-flash of the complex's sign and the number (but not the street name). I don't pay attention to the complexes here in town...I used to live in one but moved out over 10 years ago. There have been several new ones built, and there are a number of smaller, run-down complexes (places I was told, "You probably don't want an apartment there" when I first moved here).

So I got to wondering: Isn't that name the name of the newish complex they build on land right next to my classroom building? (There was, in fact, a murder there shortly after it opened. But that was what they call a "domestic" - adult son went bonkers and killed his mom)

So I tried to find the name in the phone books. Couldn't find it. Thought, Well, damn, if it IS the complex next to me, I am not going to come up here at night to work any more. And I'm not going to come in crack of dawn on Saturdays when no one else is around. And I'm going to get the colleague I teach with after my night class to walk me to my car. (Granted....I'm a fairly big and tough woman, and if someone tried to attack me, provided he wasn't armed, I could probably drop him, but still - safety in numbers)

But this is what I hate. How there are people in the world who think it's OK to assault someone, who think it's OK to take a woman by force for whatever sick reason. (And yes, I know: If I were armed the chances of it happening would be a lot less likely. But I couldn't carry on my campus, so that's kind of a moot point.) I suppose it's always been so to a certain extent, but it bugs me that in peacetime, in a small town, I still have to look over my shoulder and do all that long list of things that is often published in College Orientation 101 on "How not to be raped." Even down to considering what kind of shoes I wear, whether I could run in them if necessary.

However, I did look the complex's address up online. They're on the other side of town, in an area that frankly is kind of known for drug dealing and other petty crimes. And this morning, the cop they interviewed on the news seemed to imply that this may have been a case, not of stranger rape, but of someone stalking the woman and planning the crime...I hope they catch the bastard and lock him up.

The other thing that frustrates me: Why NOT give the address of the complex? I suppose there's some kind of legal thing tied up in that, some kind of "The owner of the complex might take it as slander." But I do think people should be allowed to know where crimes are being committed in their town....when there was a "domestic" (between two men) a few months back, they prominently showed the sign for the street intersection near where the incident happened. But just the vague, "Hey, did you know there was an attempted rape in your town" doesn't help me much.

I mean, I still take precautions. I park as close to my building as I can for my night class. If I'm in early in the morning and am the only one here, I don't unlock the outside doors. But I hate that I have to do that.

Wow.

The other day, hunting around, I happened on the "State of the Profession" page on the Chronicle of Higher Ed webpage. I read what I could of it (I don't have a subscription for "premium content." My library on campus probably does, but right at that moment I didn't feel like calling over and asking if they had a password).

But this struck me.

I'm a full professor. At a four-year institution. All I can say is there must be some folks earning close to seven digits for the average "full professor" salary to be $130,803 a year.

IF I teach summers, I make about $5000 under HALF that for a year.

Granted, yes: I teach at a small, regional, state school with a teaching focus. And yes, I am in a low-cost-of-living part of the country: I probably paid less than a third of what I would on either coast for my house. And granted, yes, I can live pretty comfortably as a single woman with relatively few needs on $60K or a little less....I probably couldn't if I had kids or was trying to help support a spouse who was unemployed or attending school himself.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not really envious, but that now I see the source of the "overpaid professor" meme.

But, boy damn....I'd love to see the frequency distribution of professor's salaries.

(I actually made an object lesson of this in my stats class....and got a laugh out of the students who know that our pay is NOWHERE near that. I gave an example of how a median is sometimes better than a mean...and to be honest, I'd like to see the MEDIAN full-professor salary in the U.S.).

And yes, I get that law schools and med schools and such have to pay more in order to retain "good" people, but....for the average salary to be well over twice my annual salary, I'm pretty gobsmacked by that.

I also hope that VP Biden doesn't get ahold of that figure....according to this site, he believes we're all overpaid: "V.P. Joe Biden, a few months back, said that the reason tuitions are out of control is because of the high price of college faculty"

(I have not read all of that essay, it's pretty damn long, but what I've read rings true. And I have no idea if the Biden quote is accurate but I'm going to assume that the writer isn't misquoting).

One thing I will say that I thought about, which gives me some comfort: when the higher-ed bubble bursts, those of us who are fairly 'cheap' may actually be the ones who survive. When some of the gigantic state schools have crashed and burned, when some of the private schools have found themselves unsustainable...maybe those of us who have already cut to the bone and beyond will be able to survive...and maybe even later on, thrive, in a marketplace that's been somewhat gutted. Or maybe I'm just telling myself that.

I do know the only things I really have control over are (a) to teach my students the best I possibly can and to make myself as un-firable as possible (even with tenure, it's possible to RIF people during budget cuts) and (b) sock away any extra money against future bad times.

I may have spoken too soon

I've been fielding e-mails from someone re: the project they're required to do. I get the distinct feeling what this guy is asking me is, "Plz plan my project all out for me and tell me just how to do it and where to find all the sources, k thx."

I've been "playing dumb" (in the sense of giving minimal direction and guidance) but I'm afraid this is going to be my demanding student for the semester. I haven't even answered his most recent e-mail as my office hours are technically over and I have a headache and don't feel quite up to figuring out how to respond while keeping it clear that my help is at arm's length, that I'm not going to plan this guy's project for him. I'm not QUITE rude enough to e-mail back, "JFGI," but that's kind of how I feel based on the most recent request...

School has started

Boy damn, last week felt like it was about a month long. (And the week before that was a mountain of meetings. Many of which were kind of useless. We were made to sit through a forty five minute long talk on how to write a syllabus. EVERYTHING the "experts" suggested were things I already do, and some of the things they pointed out, I was like, "You'd have to be a real idiot to leave that off your syllabus, because it would open the door for students to lawyerball stuff")

But hopefully things will have settled down by next week.

I seem to have a critical mass of either non-trad students or international students this fall. And while either group can have their share of problem people, I generally tend to find that the non-trads tend to have their heads screwed on straighter (because they're older and most have been in the workforce, they tend to get that "I'm a special snowflake, unique and deserving of all the rules being bent just for meeee" attitude beaten out of them before they reach me). And the international students often come from more rigorous and less-self-esteem-enhancing schools than our local students. So maybe I'll have a calmer semester than I did this past spring.

Oh, I did learn something in the endless hours of meetings: if a student with a Disabilities Concern has unacceptable behavior in your class, you can call the Student Support office and ask them to have a meeting to put together a behavioral contract. (Or at least your request will be entertained. I never ever got that word earlier, and I put up with things at times that maybe I didn't have to. Like the guy who didn't trust his note-taker to take good notes, so he would stand up and photograph the chalkboard every time I wrote something. It was completely unsettling and more than once I scuttled fast to the side so I wouldn't be in the photo...because God only knows what he might do with them after the semester.). I don't know how far they'll accommodate the prof (this guy also used to mutter stuff under his breath in class, which was also unsettling, but maybe he had no control over that), but at least the fact that they're willing to listen to us...

I also have to say for ONCE I am not teaching an overload. We finally caved and hired adjuncts (a couple of our own Master's-level graduates) to take over some of the heavy lifting of the basic-classes labs. It's surprising how freeing it is to have one more afternoon open a week. And I guess I didn't realize how beaten down we all were by regularly carrying 14 or 15 hours, instead of the 12 that is supposed to be the maximum (And we get one contact hour for every 2-3 hours in lab....so 14 contact hours can mean 20 hours of instruction time, not counting grading, prep, lab clean-up, etc., depending on what you teach.) And yes, we (mostly) do all our own grading. (I wouldn't have it otherwise; most of  my lab reports include a short essay for the "discussion" and my exams tend to include essay sections, and I feel like I need to read and grade those, because I know what I expect).

And I think most people who teach college will tell you that grading is actually the toughest part.

I'm still trying to figure out how to schedule the "outside" stuff. Tuesdays I teach an early morning class and an afternoon class, so I plan to go home for lunch that day, but I think I'll bring my lunch on other days and plan to do research work (I have so much data stacked up that I need to enter into my databases, it's not funny) and I also want to do some background reading for a project to be begun this spring. I hope I can keep up my motivation for that, not having a couple of intro bio labs to deal with should help. 

Crazy.

If I were a state of California taxpayer, I'd be ticked.

Cal State schools are threatening to disallow admission of in-state grad students (because out of staters bring in more bucks in terms of tuition, and they "can't afford" to serve the in-staters any more. Or so it's claimed).

Um, wasn't the reason a state university system was set up, was to educate the residents of that state?

And at any rate: if I were a prof in a department and was told, "We don't care how qualified this person is, and how good they'd be, you can't bring them in because we won't make enough tuition or fees off of them," I'd be seriously considering another line of work. Or at least another university system. 

Alumni magazine thoughts...

I got the alumni magazine from my grad school the other day. I read a bit of it while waiting for dinner to cook.

I was struck by an article about a woman who provides dental-care for low-income children. That is commendable. But that wasn't what struck me about the article. What struck me were two comments she made:

First: when she was handing out free toothbrushes to children, a girl came back the next day to ask for another. Because, she said, her father took hers.

Now, I know there are probably different motives that could lead to a father taking his daughter's free toothbrush ("not wanting to take charity" being one). But I'm going to assume that he took it as he did not have one of his own.

Okay, that's sad. But. How much does a toothbrush cost? (Honestly, I don't remember: I bought a multipack a year or so back, and also, my dentist hands them out at the every-six-months checkup, so it's been a little while since I bought one). But I'm guessing they're under $5? Maybe $3?

While I suppose there are people out there for whom $3 is a really big deal...sometimes I wonder if some of what we are told is abject poverty where someone cannot get the basic necessities of life, is actually a difference in priorities. I know I have a lot of students who claim they are "too poor" to buy the textbooks listed for my class, but then they whip out a fancier newer cell phone than what I choose to have, and start texting on it. If you can afford the latest iPhone and a data plan and apps and many text messages, you can afford textbooks...maybe not both...but you have to decide what's more important. (Yes, I get that for some people a cell phone is a necessity. Well, I have one with a very basic plan that's like $25 a month. My cell phone does two things: It makes and receives calls, and it can receive and send texts. It has no apps, it has no camera, it has no games...)

I don't know but I admit I kind of object to someone claiming they need me to "find a cheaper textbook option" or not use a textbook at all, when they are spending money on something that I have chosen not to buy for myself....

I realize that sounds heartless, but you know, my mom grew up poor. Her family didn't take much assistance (towards the end of my grandmother's life, she did accept some of the "commodity food" that was given out, to make ends meet). But my mother's parents set their priorities: first priority, keep a roof over their heads. Second priority, see that the kids had nutritious food. Third priority, see that the kids were clean and equipped for school, and that they went to school. Toothbrushes and soap and that one good solid pair of shoes came before entertainment.... Growing up, my brother and I were considerably better off but still we got that same mentality taught to us: No, we won't take a vacation at Disneyland because the car needs to be fixed so your dad can get to work. No, we won't go out to eat every week because it's more economical to prepare food at home...

The other thing that struck me was the dentist's  comment that she sometimes saw children with sippy cups full of Mountain Dew, and whose breakfast was a bag of chips. This kind of thing makes me crazy. It's that kind of thing that will eventually lead the health fanatics like Bloomberg to ban sugar and salt and everything else: because some people can't take the responsibility to feed their kids properly. (Oh, I SUPPOSE some people are ignorant enough to think that Mountain Dew is equal in nutrition to milk...) And yes, again: maybe people can't afford better. But that's why we have WIC! I have a friend who was on WIC for a while (long story....her husband left her, she had some health issues...). Yes, it was a pain in the neck to figure out what was eligible and buy just those items - but she did it. And she and her kids got basic nutrition as a result.

Yes, all those things take effort. It takes effort to go and apply for aid if you need aid. It takes effort to look at your paycheck and go, "Dang, I only have $50 this week to spend on food for my family, how am I going to make that work?" But I'm starting to get tired of the people who seem to me not to want to put any effort in, and who just take the easiest road out. Because I know people who are faced with problems in life, and instead of sitting down and going "I need someone to fix this for me" they say, "Now what do I need to do to start getting this fixed?"

It strikes me that maybe the way out of poverty, or if not "poverty," having a lower socioeconomic status than you really want, is partly related to an ability to delay gratification (like: "No, we can't go to Disneyland this year because") or to prioritize things ("We need to buy you good sturdy school shoes. I'm sorry we can't get the fancy tennis shoes right now.")  But it seems that that's a hard lesson....and a lesson that may not be being reinforced in our culture like it should be.

Another thought on the "Mountain Dew in a sippy cup...." I remember seeing a young boy, maybe 18 months, whose parents gave him a Pepsi....and he freaked out after drinking it, got very hyper, they had to pick him up and carry him out of the restaurant because he got so disruptive. I wonder how many of our kids have caffeine (and possibly, high-sugar) habits as a result of heavy soda consumption, and that's affecting them in ways that might just be diagnosed as ADHD? When I was in charge of helping organize the meals for youth group, I PLEADED with people NOT to bring caffeinated pop, as some of the kids were clearly sensitive to caffeine but didn't have he self-control/ didn't want to look "weird" to the other kids by declining the caffeinated pop in favor of water or a caffeine-free alternative. There were always a few people whose behavior seemed worse to me on nights when they had caffeine as opposed to nights they did not. Now, I may be prejudiced in that, as I know I am quite sensitive to caffeine (I don't really get hyper, but I get shaky and anxious) and I also know my parents were very strict about no caffeinated pop for my brother or me until we were over 16 or so. But it does make me wonder what a couple of full-caffeine sodas a day might be doing to the brains and emotions of kids who are not fully grown yet.

I guess what I'm saying is that I was raised to be a responsible person, and it frustrates me to see people who are not responsible, and then in some cases, others are expected to pick up the slack/help out/put up with the consequences of bad behavior/whatever.

"Writing across the curriculum"

This is a new push on my campus. And I mostly agree with the idea. The more writing a student does in ALL areas, the better his or her writing is going to get. Provided, of course, the people teaching the students are capable writers themselves and that they take the time to grade well.

Unfortunately, a lot of our intro comp classes are heavily adjunct-taught. Which means there's a wide range of commitment: from people who work hard and bust their butts to teach the students to write, even though they are working under poor conditions (low pay, no benefits, large classes, and a student pool that really doesn't have much writing experience), and then there are others who just phone it in.

I have writing assignments in all the classes I teach, ranging from short "positional" papers in the non-majors class to a large research project in my majors classes. I also have critiques of journal articles that several of my upper-division classes do. Generally, the upper-division students are pretty good: they usually come to me after having one of the two real hard-ass people in the department who hammer on them until their writing improves. In those cases, I don't have to do too much other than not allow the students to get lazy.

Sometimes I get people in my upper-division classes who are getting me first, before either of the hard-asses. That makes my job a bit more involved. In some cases, I think it's laziness: students want to see what they can get away with. I've once in a while gotten a paper with text-speak in it, and I've really graded that down harshly: you need to be able to communicate in a way that is accepted by a majority of the population who will be reading what you write, and I'm sorry, but text-speak is NOT YET ACCEPTED in the vast majority of workplaces.

One thing I'm going to increase emphasis on this fall is: know your audience. Think about the audience for which you are writing. There are many styles of writing, even within scientific writing: you will write differently if you are writing a manuscript for a national journal than you would if you were writing a report for the local highway commission. You will write differently if you are writing for other scientists than you would if you were writing for the general public. You will write differently if you are writing up your own experimental research than you would if you are simply doing a review of the existing literature.

Also, in my non-majors class, I'm going to remind them about considering their audience. And that these are positional papers and not opinion papers: what is important is the quality of your argument and the quality of the sources with which you support that argument. I had a few instances this summer of students writing papers that essentially said, "I believe this is the correct opinion so I'm saying it" and they didn't bother to find sources. They got graded down quite a bit for that.

I did also have some very good writers; I hope they have not spoiled me for the fall, especially seeing as I had a class of 18 this summer and will have twice that this fall. One of the real frustrations I have is just the whole process of slogging through. (I know: English teachers have it much harder, because their students write more and the papers are longer). But it's so discouraging to get the fifth paper where the person doesn't get the difference between their/there/they're or something. I've threatened to have stamps made up explaining:

their/there/they're
your/you're
its/it's (I know that one is more subtle and easily missed, and occasionally I have to stop and go back and correct myself when I'm writing. But still.). 

Also, I want a stamp that explains that apostrophe-s is how you make a POSSESSIVE, not how you make a PLURAL. (I'd get the Bob The Angry Flower Poster that refers to that, but I'm afraid certain of TPTB would interpret it as "too mean and demeaning to the students," so I don't).

These are the largest things the students screw up. I have fewer problems with verb agreement (though sometimes people mess that up, especially if they have a long sentence with funky clauses in the middle of it, and they lose their place, and they forget what the subject was). I have a few problems with the totally wrong word being used. (Best example ever: the student who said "boneified" in a paper when they really meant bona fide).

I have LOTS of problems with plain old awkward writing. I tell the students, "Read your paper out loud to yourself. If it sounds ugly and clunky, rewrite the part that sounds ugly and clunky." But I don't know. Maybe some people can't "hear" clunkiness like I can?

I also occasionally get people who do sentence fragments. Or who do big giant run-on sentences with way too many clauses. I'm actually sometimes guilty of that but at least my run-on sentences stick to a single topic. (I jokingly blame my long, many-clause sentences on my part-German heritage).

I don't often get someone who "doesn't know what a sentence is" (one of our English profs claimed this was the case with some who came through his classes). But I do get people who can't spell, or who think that they can just put a word in the paper that they heard somewhere and never saw printed out, but that they kind of sort of think they know how to spell it, and how it's used. (I get some people who use badly wrong words in the hope of looking "smart.")

I don't worry so much about passive voice, though few of our students have that problem. I also don't harp as much - at least in the non-majors class - on split infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions. (Though I will say I've also seen it argued that both of those are outmoded rules, and that they are actually "ghosts" of people with backgrounds in some other language - Latin, maybe? - claiming things about English syntax that are not necessarily true. I don't know enough to be able to argue one way or another, but in my formal writing I do try not to split infinitives or end sentences with prepositions, just in case my reader is one of the old-school types who has a real problem with that. I admit in my grading I'm mostly happy if people can write coherently and have the important information in their paper, and what I view as smaller "stylistic" touches I'm less likely to note.)

One of the bigger issues I have with some of the research papers - and this may be partly a laziness issue, and an unwillingness to dig as deeply - but a lot of times I get students putting in all kinds of irrelevant information. Meaning, "I found an article on my topic but it's not really on my topic but I need a citation so I'm going to use it any way rather than searching more." So I will get a long discourse on leafcutter ants in a paper that's really over one of the local ant species or something. And I find that some of the students are a little stymied or upset when I grade them down on that and tell them the information is "superfluous." I'm not sure best how to counteract that. I know that writing is a very experience-oriented thing, and knowing what information is "right" for a paper, versus what is unnecessary or "too much" or "too off topic" is something you kind of have to just learn for yourself by working. I don't know.

I will say I think my colleague who threw a hissy a couple years ago over some plagiarized papers in his class - and stopped doing them - is having to start doing so again because of this new WATC project. I have to admit I'm kind of gratified by that, in a schadenfreude type of way, because he kind of smugly told me one day, shortly after he decided to stop doing papers, that he was "glad" I still did papers in my classes, because "The students still get writing experience without my having to offer it." Seriously, man, seriously?

Entitled couponers

I often wondered, once a bit of light was shone on "extreme couponing," what would happen in my little town if a couponer got in one of the (few) open lines at a store and gummed up the works.

Well, I saw it yesterday. I had to run to Walgreen's for a few things...mainly a birthday card for a woman at church who is celebrating her 90th. Got my stuff, got in line, realized it wasn't moving.

The woman at the head of the line had  a few items and a stack of coupons, and she was arguing with the cashier. The argument centered around three things, apparently:

1. She wanted to be able to use four coupons on an item; the cashier told her store policy was to allow two (also, it's possible two of the coupons were duplicates).

2. She wanted to apply a coupon for hairspray to a bottle of shampoo, with the argument that the same company made them, so why did it matter?

3. She believed she was due money back because her (multiple for each items) coupon values should exceed the sales price.

And she wasn't nice about it, either. On the rare occasions when I've used coupons, if something went wrong (like, I hadn't read carefully and it was for an item other than what I had), my reaction is "Oh, sorry! Never mind, just ring the thing up at the stated price." I wouldn't think of harassing the checkout person - who usually is in a fairly low-authority job. But this woman did.

The checkout person called the manager, but apparently he either wasn't in or wasn't leaving his office because he never showed. The woman continued to argue: she was DUE these things. It was her RIGHT.

I stood there, feeling sad that I would grow old watching this argument. Under other circumstances, I might have gone and put back the items I was planning to buy and just left, but I really wanted to get that card out.

Finally the person at the cosmetics counter opened her register and the rest of us who were waiting trooped over there. The woman with the coupons was STILL arguing with the cashier after I had paid and was walking out the door.

Look: I have no problem with couponing. I don't do it because I don't take a newspaper (and our local paper stinks, anyway) and also most of the items I've seen on offer for coupons are things I don't buy (convenience foods, kid's cereals....). And I feel like my time is worth more than the thirty cents or whatever I might get back. But I get that some people treat it as a hobby, or as a way of "supplementing" family income without having to work outside the home. And good for them.

But please, please, couponers: don't be a jerk about it. If the store has policies limiting coupon use, don't berate the cashier, who probably didn't make those policies. Don't try to get money off on stuff you don't have coupons for. And try your best NOT to tie up the lines so everyone else behind you is greatly delayed.

I don't know. I see an awful lot of people in my daily life who believe they are "special" to the exclusion of everyone else. It makes living in community harder.

The lone giraffe

I left yesterday afternoon from "home" and got home (the home where I live) today. It's too far to travel to see family; I wish they lived closer or I did. I find myself a little lonely; I have TCM on in the other room just for the sound of another "living" being)

(But not TOO much closer, not like on the same block...I don't know if I could take all of us being all up in each other's business all the time. I find I get overwhelmed too easily by too much stuff going on. And at big family gatherings, I find I wind up just clamming up and not voicing my desires in re: what restaurant to go to or what to do, because not being part of a couple's united front, I usually get voted down, and it just adds to the time it takes to plan anything. My family is not so good at making decisions...)

I will say as one of the few of the "younger" generation who is not coupled....it's a little different. A little strange. I realize now that I don't count for as much, in a way. I guess that's OK. Still, it's aggravating when I'm hungry and tired and just want LUNCH and it's 1:30 pm and people are still discussing what to do - and it's not my house so I can't just stalk into the kitchen and make a peanut butter sandwich or something.

I don't know. It's been a while since being single hit me this hard. ("The lone giraffe" is how I used to describe it - meaning, that spare giraffe left behind after the Ark departs, because it didn't have a mate). Part of it is, I really don't feel like I have a template to base my life on. All my childhood, I grew up seeing television shows and movies and reading books about families...mostly a mom and a dad and a couple (or more, if you're talking the Waltons) of kids. It was kind of understood that grown-ups were married and had kids. I don't know what one is supposed to do as a single, especially a single without prospects. (The sitcoms now will feed you plenty stories of singles who have friends-with-benefits and such). I admit it, not having been more social, not having tried harder, is one of my bigger regrets. Part of it was that I was awkward and uncomfortable and I always thought I was unattractive and weird and that guys wouldn't like me...

But I got busy in college, planning ahead for my eventual career. And where I was at the time, and what I was involved in....the social opportunities were not appealing to me - go to the bars, or join a sorority (not that I would have been likely to get in one), or be part of the casual "hook up" culture that repulsed me so much. In retrospect I probably should have worked harder to seek out the Christian groups on campus, but the one I tried going to a meeting of...well, they were very theologically conservative, and as a biologist, I didn't feel like having to explain again and again how it really was possible to accept evolution and still believe in God.

By the time I was in grad school, most of my colleagues were married. And of course now, the guys in my age group are mostly multiply-divorced guys. Not that that's such a huge red flag (though a guy who has been through three divorces in twelve years, yeah, that's kind of a red flag), but one guy I started out hanging around with, I soon realized he wanted a woman in his life mostly to be a stepmom to his kids and a housekeeper for him. And while I would have nothing against being a stepmom, and I have nothing against pitching in on housework...I don't want that to be the primary reason someone's interested in me.

So, I don't know. What do people who are in their 40s and 50s do on holidays? I don't think I'm going to be able to travel home for Thanksgiving this year because of how my schedule goes. I don't like the chirpy "brave" suggestions that some magazines make, about rounding up a group of similarly-situationed friends and having Thanksgiving together....I really only know one other person who is unattached without close-by family, and I'm not sure I'd be up for cooking a big dinner with him. Or spending an entire afternoon with him.

For that matter, I'm not wild about the suggestion of going and working in a soup kitchen or somewhere on the holiday. For one thing, I know lots of local families that do that...it would just remind me more of my aloneness to be one of the few singles there. And also, the local place has turned away volunteers on holidays before - because there are too many. That's a good thing, but I think it would kind of hurt to show up with that as your only plan for the day and to be told, "Sorry, we don't need you."

The question is how to find a way to "do" the day without risking falling into self-pity. I know one year when I thought my travel plans were going to fall through that I figured I'd just make a big thermos of soup and stay in bed reading most of the day. (But that borders on self-pity).

The bigger fear that all of this is a stalking horse for, is what do single people do after their parents are gone, if their siblings live too far away/are too involved with their own lives? Do they just get used to making a turkey sandwich for Thanksgiving or going and working at the soup kitchen on Christmas? How long does it take a person to get used to having no presents to open on Christmas morning? (Yes, I realize, it's childish, but - I like having at least one present to open that is NOT something I bought for myself).

I don't know. I do great during working hours, during busy times - in fact, I often find I wish I was around people LESS than I am some days - but during the quiet times, the long weekends or the holiday times, if I don't travel to visit family, I can get kind of lonely and stir-crazy. Yes, I have friends - but most of my friends are part of a larger family and I don't like intruding on family time (I'm sure some of them would say it wasn't intruding....but then again, sometimes even in my extended families I feel at times like an intrusion). Or I have other friends who are kind of flaky about planning and schedules and who do stuff like say "We should get together!" but then can never settle on a time, or who back out at the last moment. And there's only so many times I can be thrown on my own devices before I stop asking those friends. (Am I the only person with flaky friends? It seems there are a lot of people in my life who just can't be on time/keep appointments/not change plans at the last minute).

I know this is one of the ways in which I am selfish: I want my time alone when I want it, and yet, I also want people to interact with. I'm just not very good at going about it.

What I miss

I think about summers when I was a kid, and summers now. And there are some things I miss, that I probably didn't fully appreciate when I was a kid.

One thing: Where I grew up, it got down into the fifties, or at least the lower sixties, every night. You could open your windows at bedtime and it would be cool enough to sleep. (This was also in the era before "boom cars" - my neighborhood was pretty quiet). Here, where I live now, we get a stretch (starting about now) where 80 is the low at night. And that just feels all kinds of wrong to me, and it makes me sad.

Also, along with the getting cool at night, every morning when you got up when I was a kid, the world felt fresh and new. There was usually dew and sometimes even fog, and the air smelled good. We'd get breezes overnight that would sweep away any funk of the previous day. Here, where I am now, we get persistent high pressure during the summer, and even though the dewpoint is very high it seems very dry out...and when I walk out of the house at seven in the morning to go to work, I can still smell the exhaust from the truck route a couple streets over, and the stale grease from the Dairy Queen, and if a skunk got hit out on the road, I smell that too...the world seems kind of tired, like it didn't get renewed overnight.

(It's entirely possible the "world made new"/"same sad old funky world" is mostly a construct of my mind, and is the difference between being 8 and being 43.)

Another thing I miss - not so much the freedom of a summer-off-school., because frankly, the freedom got a little boring after a while - but the way you could go out in the morning and the world felt bright and new. I don't get out in the mornings much, other than to head over to work. I get some inkling of that old feeling on the rare days off from school when I either head out to do field research early, or I head off to do something like early grocery shopping. The sun's just coming up and there's a feeling of POSSIBILITY. I guess that's what I remember as a child: waking up, getting dressed, eating breakfast, and then having a full day in which to do exciting things.

I went to a day camp for a couple years when I was a kid (I started going mainly because the person who was my BFF at the time was going). We'd show up early in the morning, just as the fog was starting to dissipate. I remember the activities: tennis first, then crafts, then swimming, then a rest period or sometimes organized games like capture the flag. Once a week (as I remember) they did away with that schedule and we either played big games all morning or took a field trip. (Usually the field-trip days were all days and we either packed lunches or had a box lunch). Now that I look back on it, I'm glad I had that experience. I was never that great of a tennis player, and the crafts weren't that exciting (the older girls got all the good colors of plastic lacing, and besides, I never got the hang of making lanyards). But I did conquer my fear of deep water in the swimming part, and actually got to be a pretty good swimmer. And also, just hanging out with friends and drinking "bug juice" (and making gross jokes about why it was called "bug juice") and running around the buildings of the big old prep school that I later attended for high school...

Another thing I miss from childhood summers: the weather was variable. Here, it gets hot, stays hot, and doesn't rain, usually from June until late September. When I was a kid, we'd have maybe a week or two of really hot days mid-August, but the rest of the time it bounced between the 70s and low 80s, and there was even the occasional day when a cold front came across the lake and cooled it down into the 60s. And some days were overcast, some days it rained. It didn't feel like every day was a carbon copy of the others, which is how it sometimes feels here, and I find that's not very good for my psyche. I find myself scanning the weather maps, hoping for a cold front (though they rarely bring any temperature relief) or any small chance of rain.

I'm sure part of the weather I experienced as a kid was due to it being a historically cool decade (the 1970s). I remember a few years in my late teenaged years when it got pretty dang hot - one summer we were flying back from vacation and there was some concern if we'd be able to take off on our connecting flight from Chicago to Cleveland because it was so hot....I think there was a report of a plane having a blowout on one of the landing gear that was blamed on the heat.

I wish we'd get another "historically cool" decade during what remains of my lifetime. (Though at this point I'd settle for the coming winter to be cold enough to kill off a few of the bugs).

Getting it off my chest.

I'm still thinking about what happened in Colorado. A lot of the Monday-morning quarterbacking makes me kind of sick, the idea that more gun laws, no, fewer gun laws, no, banning costumes at movies, no, rounding up "quiet" people and subjecting them to psych evaluations, no, whatever other thing....could have prevented it. I think I have two conclusions:

1. There's bad stuff that happens that can't be prevented. We can increasingly give up liberties, we can hide in our houses - but that won't stop bad stuff from happening. Granted, there are things you can do to lessen the risk of bad stuff happening to you - not walking alone late at night in a bad part of town springs to mind - but there comes a point where you have to live your life and just accept that there's a minute risk that something bad will happen.

By all means: get the "bad guys" off the streets. Allow people to protect themselves. But there's a point at which we're going to have to accept that bad stuff sometimes happens.

2. We're all looking for an explanation. We want to know why. I suppose on some level we want to know that because we think if we know "why," we can avoid something like this happening again. Look at how the news media jumps to (wrong) conclusions about the person's affiliation. People try to find some commonality. I was very put off on Sunday when one of the men in my Sunday school class remarked, "So often these shooters seem to be described as "highly intelligent and highly educated." " I realize I'm sensitive to that because I'm highly educated and arguably highly intelligent. I made some comment about that education doesn't necessarily grow a conscience, but at the same time I think blaming intelligence or education for this sort of thing is incredibly wrong-headed.

I think a lot of these violent crimes boil down to something very simple, and something that is unfortunately (in lesser degrees of severity of course) an epidemic in our society: not seeing the other people around you as fully human.

The only way I can imagine someone being able to kill civilian strangers (I exempt wartime situations here; that's sort of a form of self defense, or at least defense of one's country or way of life) is to dehumanize them to the point where they are like the enemies in a video game.

I've also commented in the past that I'm not a fan of separate hate-crimes legislation, because I believe any kind of crime against another human shows some level of hatred toward them. You can't beat up someone and steal their wallet without having hate in your heart on some level - whether it's a hatred born of feeling that life has wronged you and you are entitled to someone else's money, or a momentary hatred of the individual walking down the street because they refused to give up their wallet when asked, or whatever. It doesn't matter if that person is the same or different race from you, or sexual orientation, or gender, or religion, or whatever. There's still hate there.

The thing that fills me with sadness and dismay is the realization how common lesser forms of this hatred are. Look at a lot of the political commentary on places like Twitter - short bursts, often saying something horrible about the "other side." I've seen people actually wish death (or so it seems, if the statement is interpreted literally) on someone who opposes something they support. (And so often what is going on in the world canNOT be boiled down to 140 characters).

Or you see how people treat each other on the highways or in the grocery store or where ever. People shoving in front of others in line, people weaving in and out of traffic and cutting other people off. Recently I had someone cut me off on the highway and then give me the finger because I wasn't going quite fast enough to suit them. (I was driving at the speed limit). And while a lot of that is just anger and frustration, and I get that - still, it's so easy to see that person in the other car as less than human.

One thing a pastor once suggested struck me: that that person who is driving a little fast and a little recklessly, maybe they just got word their child was in the hospital and they were rushing to see him or see her. Or by a similar token, maybe the person driving slowly and cautiously just had a warning light come on on their dashboard, and they were trying to get to a place to pull off and see what was wrong without causing too much danger. There are sometimes extenuating circumstances.

I see this kind of behavior a lot at the grocery store. People yelling at cashiers, people pushing in front of other customers, people doing things like talking on their cell phones and nearly running into other people because they literally do not "see" them. And while I realize it's a long stretch from a person being selfish on a cell phone to a person harming other people....it seems in our culture right now selfishness is growing, that there are some people who seem to encourage "not seeing" the other person...or rejecting them as somehow "less" because of their beliefs or attitudes, or whatever.

I've decided that I'm going to try my best to, if I criticize, criticize POSITIONS or ATTITUDES and not turn it into an ad hominem attack. There's too much of that already and it does make me repulsed when I see, for example, the woman screaming at a person in the Wal-mart because that person got the last whatever off the shelf when the woman really wanted it. I'm tired of the ugliness winning.

What would you do?

(No, this isn't about the theater shooting. All I have to say about that is how sad it is, how awful for the families of the dead and injured, and how fed up I always get at the Monday-morning quarterbacking about gun control/stopping showing violent movies/"introverts and loners are ticking time bombs"/etc.)

I had to run over to the next largest town last night: I have to use a special kind of antiperspirant (because my underarms are delicate flowers that get upset if I use a scented, non hypoallergenic kind). Of course, my small town doesn't sell the brand I have to use. And yes, I can order it online - but I'm going on a trip in about a week and wasn't at all sure that it would arrive in time, and I was close enough to being out that I could see running out just before I left.

So I figured, heck, I'll run over there, go get my antiperspirant, go to the big bookstore, do some grocery shopping, grab dinner out. I went to one of those "casual dining places" - a sort of sandwich shop. Places that are fairly family-friendly, and I'd seen families in there before when I ate there. Generally happy families, happy kids, the place has a "play zone" where the kids can hang out.

Well. Last night, as I had just been served my food, a mother and three kids came in. Two were tween/early teen girls and were perfectly well behaved, they seemed happy about the treat of dinner out. The third was a boy of somewhere between seven and nine. Who was throwing a fit:

"NO I DON'T WANT TO EAT HERE! I DON'T WANT ANYTHING TO EAT! I JUST WANT TO GO HOME! I JUST WANT TO GO HOME! I JUST WANT TO GO HOME!"

Screaming and sobbing as his mom dragged him up to the counter where you order (his sisters looked mortified and told their mom what they wanted and went to find a table).

The kid continued to scream and cry and throw a tantrum. EVERYONE in the restaurant could hear him. He didn't shut up. His mom spoke quietly to him but I could not hear what she said.

He continued to fuss through part of their meal, finally he curled up on the floor and grumbled.

Okay: dismissing any kind of issue-beyond-his-control (he did not SEEM like someone on the Autism spectrum, and yes, I've known a few kids who were), what's a mom to do?

I know what I'd do if it were me and it was just me and him. I'd look at him the moment he started screaming (even before getting to the counter) and say, "Okay, we are going home. But you are obviously not feeling well so as soon as we go home you are going to BED and you will not be watching any television or playing any video games or reading any comic books (...or whatever), and I do not expect you to get out of bed before 6 am tomorrow." (It was a little bit after 6 pm at that point). And I'd do it. I would enforce the "you're going to bed because you obviously don't feel well" because (a) I don't want the kid to learn that he can get just what he wants (I assumed part of his upset was that maybe there was something on tv he wanted to see that he was missing) by screaming, and also (b) reinforce the idea that throwing a fit in public is not normal behavior.

But I don't know what I'd do if I had two other children with me, kids who were well-behaved and enjoying themselves. The girls were not old enough to be left for any length of time (or at least, I thought so), so the mom couldn't take the boy and say, "Okay, we are going OUTSIDE until you settle down." And it was 105 degrees out so she couldn't make him go sit in the car. If it were me? I'd hate to tell my daughters, "Sorry, your brother's being a pill, we're going to go home and eat peanut butter sandwiches" because that seems like caving to the little kid's behavior - teaching him that he can get what he wants by making a scene, and he can make his sisters' lives miserable by doing so.

Perhaps I would have said to him, gotten really in his face, "You will be quiet RIGHT NOW. Any further outburst from you, each outburst earns you a day of being banned from television/videogames/internet/whatever else you like to do" and I would enforce that. Maybe even do like my mom used to do and make the punished kid do housework and gardening alongside of me.

But, gah, what an awful situation. I started out being annoyed by the mom ("Why doesn't she take that brat outdoors?") and then feeling bad for her ("She can't just leave, what about her two daughters? It would be unjust to deprive them of a treat just because their brother is being a baby"). I shot the mom a sympathetic look but I have to admit the kid's screaming kind of ruined my dinner.

And people ask me if I'm "sad" because I never had kids...

Friday flip-off

Or Thursday, whatever. Thursday is my Friday in summers because we have a four day week.

But this week I want to administer a hearty go-soak-your-head to administrators who want to micromanage every aspect of our lives - down to, apparently, our e-mail signatures - we're now told what font to use and what information to include, and we MUST have the campus logo. And yet, there are some big problems (for example, campus buildings losing power in the late afternoon because of insufficient capacity for power demand) that won't be addressed, or "there's no money for that."

I can guess why we've been dictated what to have in our signatures, though, and that leads to my second, my go-fall-off-a-log: the people who felt the need to put information of a personal/political nature in their signature files, and thus make everyone else have to read it when they sent out an e-mail. I know of several people who had Bible verses in their signature lines, and while that doesn't bother me, I know people who would be greatly bothered by it. (Also, the fact that we are a state school raises some questions...) I guess I'd include a go-pound-sand for the people who are so hair-trigger offended by stuff that they called someone up and complained to them, and so rather than calling the person in question and asking them to remove the verse, the someone decided instead that we ALL will have ALL UNIFORM signatures.

The problem is I'm unsure of how to append the logo image. My chair has offered to help me do it but gah...neither she nor I should have to be dealing with this.

it makes me think of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

Heh.

I'm teaching two summer classes. One is a majors-oriented class for upper-level students. My class this summer is small but mostly diligent, they ask interesting questions, they work hard.

I'm also teaching the non-majors class again (after a year off to teach the intro majors class, which I have to say I enjoyed teaching and hope I get to do again). These guys are mostly incoming freshmen. VERY incoming freshmen, as in, this summer is their first semester on a college campus.

They're very immature but it's kind of a fun immaturity. They're not jaded yet and most of them still have enough fear of the professor (me) that they treat me with a certain level of respect - they may joke around and harass each other before class, but when I start talking, they (mostly) shut up and pay attention.

Lab gets kind of crazy. And you know, I like teaching labs because that's where you see more of a person's personality, I think: if they're a whiner it tends to come out more in lab, if they're chronically clumsy, you see that. And even with having all these students together in lab for four hours every week, I still pretty much like them. Like I said, they're immature and a few of them do whine a bit - but it's almost a good-natured whining, like "I know it's expected that I complain about the workload but you know I don't really mind it." Or at least they seem to understand why they have to do the stuff they're expected to do.

Also, after having the awful, super-sense-of-entitlement student I had this spring - the guy who would buttonhole me after lecture EVERY DAY and tell me about his pathetic life and how much it sucked to be him, while I was calmly saying "I have another class I need to go and teach, I cannot discuss now, come to my office hours" (and he bitched me out - or at least, I assume it's him - on my evaluations for "not being available." Yeah, not being available when you want me to be). So I'm kind of inoculated against the sort of garden-variety shenanigans that these students pull.

Anyway. I guess my TA is not. I have a lab TA and she's excellent but she's not as patient as I am. (Well, she's also probably 20 years younger; I think age can teach you a lot of patience). One of the students - actually, one of the more vocal guys, who I kind of like because though he complains about stuff he's at least funny about it, and he's polite and respectful to me - seems to get under her skin. (Like I said: I think my age and prior experience has inoculated me against being bugged by his goofiness, it seems very mild by comparison to some things I've dealt with).

Anyway, the lab yesterday included measuring blood pressures before and after exercise. The idea is, you get a baseline pre-exercise (though the bps are not taken in ideal conditions- it's not quiet enough and no one follows the "put your feet flat on the floor and lay your arm on the table" directions). Then the student has to go and run for 2 minutes. Normally, we make them run in place in the lab, but in the summer - we're the only class in the building at that time so I told the students it was OK to run in the halls, or to run out the back door of the room, run around the building, and come back in the front.

So the guy was picked by his group to be the "exercise subject" (well: one of the other people in the group had a walking cast on her foot, and the guy in question plays intramural soccer). He griped about it, good naturedly of course, and got ready to run out the back door. As he was heading out, my TA yelled out,

"RUN, FORREST! RUN!"

It was totally unexpected and everyone else in the class burst out laughing. (I couldn't help it; I laughed too).

The good thing is the student wasn't at all insulted by it. You do have to be a little careful what you say to people in class and sometimes a joke or an innocent comment can really blow up, but this guy is jovial enough that it didn't bug him. (I think the fact that the class is a pretty cohesive group - they really all pretty much like each other - helped. I've had classes that were split into factions or where there were two people who REALLY disliked each other, and keeping the drama/insults to a minimum can be a challenge).

Is it just me? (a question)

Am I just being cranky, or is "Betting on America" a really *awful* campaign slogan?

To me, it sounds like giving up. It sounds like the person I know whose 401k tanked and who said, "I guess 'winning the lottery' is my new retirement plan."

I dunno. While I tend to be somewhat laissez-faire about gambling as an entertainment, it's a truly lousy way to plan your future. (I know too many people who have planned on "winning big" and who wound up losing more than they - or their families - could stand to lose).

Childish, but it made me feel better

As some of you know, I make an effort to work out for an hour a day, four to five days a week. (I am still fat. There is no justice in the world). I do this because I am healthier when I am working out, I feel better, and usually doctors shut up about the weight-loss pills when I give them the stink-eye and say, "I work out an hour a day and strive to eat a healthful diet." (If they don't shut up, or accuse me of lying, I fire them.  One of the reasons the "healthcare reform" concerns me is that if I have less choice of doctors, I may wind up having to see someone who constantly hounds me until I give in and wind up destroying my heart valves or something by taking whatever kind of synthetic speed they're pushing for "weight loss" these days)

Anyway, to keep from being bored to craziness by it (an hour on the equivalent of a treadmill is no fun), I listen to music or to the radio. Yesterday afternoon I was listening to Dennis Prager, whom I rather like listening to, but I LOATHE the ads the radio station plays. About 90% of them are about...guess what...weight loss.

One of them strikes me as particularly egregious. It's for Hoodia, which is an extract of an African milkweed plant (I looked it up. Incidentally, many milkweeds are toxic, that is why so few animals eat them). The guy pushing the stuff talked about how the hoodia made him forget to eat...he boasted about how he went to bed one night and realized he had "forgotten" to eat at all that day. (That just seems very disordered-eating to me. It's one thing to carefully control portion size, as I do, and consider what you eat to be sure you're getting the essential nutrients....but to miss a day's nourishment and be happy about it? That seems very screwed up.)

And I hit the breaking point. I said out loud, "Your ad is bad and you should feel bad." (reference, for those unfamiliar with the meme). And you know? It made me feel a lot better.

Childish, but it made me feel better.

I may be using that same line on political ads as this campaign season ramps up.

Celebrating freedom

Yeah, yeah, I know: in some areas especially, it's under assault. (I'm looking at you, Mayor Bloomberg.)

But still, we have an awful lot of freedom in this nation (and at this point in time) that people in other places and at other times do not have.

I particularly think of women in Muslim-dominated countries, as I am a woman myself. Here in America, I enjoy the freedom of being employed, owning my own house, owning and driving my own car, being able to go shopping without a man to 'chaperone' me. I can dress however I want provided I conform to minimal laws concerning not disturbing the peace by being extremely immodest. I will not be arrested for wearing a short skirt or a low-cut top.

I also have freedom of conscience. I can go to whatever house of worship best fits my conception of God, or I can choose to go to none at all. There is no state religion (no matter what some may claim) that is compelling me to worship in a particular way or even worship at all. I can give money to any religious group I believe in, or not give money to any at all.

I do not have to show papers if I cross a state border. I do not have to have proof of why I am traveling somewhere and whether that travel is "essential." I can go alone if I choose, or I can take along any person I wish. If I am stopped on the street and asked to show identification, I can demand to be told why.

I can spend my take-home pay however I choose. No one will question me if I buy loads of books and only buy a new car when my old one is worn out. No one will question me over WHICH books I buy. And while there are plenty busybodies who would presume to tell me what foods I should or should not buy, or what entertainment I should or should not engage in, there still are no laws allowing them to enforce that - or preventing me from telling them to go pound sand.

(I can still find incandescent bulbs in some stores and buy them.)

If I disagree with the government and what it's doing, I can write about it here. No one from the government can come and arrest me for that. Likewise, if a group of people and I decided that there was something wrong, we could go and stand in a public place and talk about it, and no one could arrest us for that. Every four years I get to vote for who I think makes the best president (well, of the choices we have...) and every two years I get to vote for representatives. And I get to vote on a variety of "state questions" as well. Had I lived as a woman one hundred years ago in this nation, I could not do that.

Regardless of what some people say, I do not fear the police breaking down my door in the middle of the night. And there are places in the world where that was a real possibility for some people. (Probably still is, in some parts of the world).

If I were accused of a crime, I would have a right to a 'speedy' trial. And the right to have my case heard by and decided upon by twelve other citizens. And I would have the right to have a professional to represent me and present my case.

Sure, there are problems in our nation. Some of the problems are rooted in the people we have chosen in the past number of years as our representatives; some of the problems may be that a lot of us seem to want to get something for nothing. And yet, despite those problems, we still have a lot of greatness and freedom beyond what many countries can even dream of.

Did I hear this right?

Item on the radio news: Starting next year, every car to be sold in Europe must be equipped with a Breathalyzer.

So, I assume: you're gonna have to blow every time you plan on driving somewhere?

I can totally see the nanny staters here being all over this. And that offends me. I don't even drink, so why treat me as a potential DUI? And even beyond the whole ethical thing of suddenly treating everyone like potential lawbreakers even when they would never do anything so witless as driving drunk, there's another issue:

What happens if the technology fails? What happens if John Q. Employee gets into his car at 7 am on Monday morning after having drunk nothing stronger than Coffea arabica and the car won't start up, because the breathalyzer is crapped out? Sure, John's wife Jane could probably drive him to work as long as her car's breathalyzer was working, but what about Single John or Single Jane - or one-car families?

I really don't like this idea. Therefore, I expect we'll see it here within ten years.

A little nonsense, now and then

I know how Willie Wonka ended that phrase, but today I'm gonna say, "Can keep your head from exploding." (I've put myself on a news fast. Because everything I see is either someone "spiking the football" or lots of handwringing about how the Obesity Police (and the Smoking Police, and the Too Many Medications police, and the Doesn't Exercise Enough Police) are on their way.

So I'm watching a lot of Cartoon Network. One of my favorite shows (either on there or really, at all) is Regular Show. Yes, it's rude and crude and kids emulating the characters could get in a lot of trouble. But it's the kind of stupid that makes me laugh - there is annoying stupid and there's funny stupid, and Regular Show is definitely funny stupid.

Well, in one episode, Mordecai and Rigby made a fake band - while hopped up on soda, they ordered t-shirts. And then decided they had to be a real band, because walking around in fake band t-shirts was lame. So, they formed "Mordecai and the Rigbys." Oh, there's more to it, lip-synching and their future selves and Mordecai having a rare instance of clarity and doing-the-right-thing. (And getting stood up yet again by Margaret).

But, the song they sang? Has been turned into a "real" music video. I love this greatly, because it reminds me of every self-consciously arty music video I saw in the late 80s and early 90s. (I also love the little allusions to the show: note the "My Mom" on Muscle Man's drum kit).

You can kind of tell

One thing I've learned in teaching, is that you can often tell what kind of a student a person will be by their ability to follow instructions, level of attention to detail, and little stuff they do. Not always, because there are some brilliant people who are just big messes on the life-management front, but, by and large, someone who is conscientious in some ways is conscientious in lots of things.

Like my students. I have them write short papers (this is part of a writing-across-the-curriculum thing which is set to expand - wharrrgarblll - to EVERY! class on campus. Yes, even the phys ed classes. Yes, even the absolutely dead-basic non majors classes. Though now that I think of it? I already have all of my students write papers, so nothing will change for me.)

Anyway. When they hand in the papers, some of them have them stapled. Nine times out of ten, the paper that comes in to me already stapled and with a cover sheet (like most of them do) is going to be a better than average paper. Other students hand me a wad of pages, not stapled, and go, "I couldn't find a stapler."

Um, yeah. Every computer lab on campus is supposed to have one. Every secretary has one in her office. And ministaplers - several of my more conscientious students actually CARRY them in their backpacks - cost about a buck fifty.

But no, they expect me to staple their papers for them. (And I do. Because it's too much of a PITA to deal with them otherwise). I could refuse to grade papers that were not stapled, I know some profs do, but you have to choose your battles in life and I don't want to deal with the level of butthurt refusing an unstapled paper would cause. And in many cases, the unstapled papers are incomplete. I had several this round that scored less than 50% because the students didn't bother to look up citations. (Of the stapled papers? They ALL had citations and literature citeds.)

One guy even said to me: "The topic seemed like something kind of futuristic, you know? So I didn't look for resources."

I gave him the Jackie Chan my-brain-is-full-of-**** look (reference for those unfamiliar)

I didn't SAY anything, but I sure said what I wanted to say in my grading of the paper. (For the record: the question was on citizen DNA banks for crime solving. One of the best students in the class came to me the day before it was due and said, "I know you don't like us using direct quotations, but I'd really like to quote the Fourth Amendment in mine, is that OK?" I grinned at her (okay, I don't like to reveal my politics too much but sometimes maybe I do) and told her in that case it was completely appropriate to quote. So there are ways of arguing the topic with sources! (some people who supported the idea also found valid sources. So they're out there. I think "futuristic" dude was just being lazy and seeing what he could get away with.)

But, again and again, I see that people who pay attention to detail, who listen to the instructions and try to follow them, and who ask questions when they don't know for sure, succeed and people who decide they're just going to seat-of-the-pants it, don't always.

Two thoughts

On today's decision:

1. "Oh ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffudge."

2. I'm seeing some spectacularly ugly and unseemly spiking-the-football going on. THAT is why I hate so much of politics. It's not enough to "win," you must "win" and then say ugly things about the people who disagree with you.


I'm afraid that if things continue as planned, there will be a couple states winding up bankrupted by the required expansion of Medicare. That's the main thing I'm wrapping my head around right now. (I can't even think what this may mean for Catholic hospitals or for how I get my own insurance/healthcare). I'm concerned that states will either have to severely cut other things (road maintenance, education) or else steeply raise taxes.

Thoughts on the bus

Doubtless you've heard or seen the news story about the 13 year old boys who drove a 68 year old bus monitor to tears with their rude comments.

It was interesting to follow the story and how people responded to it as it developed. Early on, people were tossing around stuff like "This is what our culture has become" and "These kids are dead inside" and "How uninvolved must their parents be, for them to be able to do this?"

And I admit, the comment about sticking a knife in her belly was pretty horrifying. (And I thought the kids were GIRLS at first, but then again, that might be my experience speaking).

My reaction was a little different: "These kids are 13. Thirteen is a BRUTAL age to be. Thirteen year olds can be so mindlessly cruel it will amaze you."

I remember being 13. I remember the hatefulness I got from my classmates - and I remember, to my shame, doling out some hatefulness myself, mostly to kids less-popular than I was. That's one of the things I will never understand as an adult, and about which I fully expect to be sternly questioned On The Other Side. I don't KNOW why I did it. I look at it know and I'm horrified by it: how could I be so nasty to another kid, especially when I knew what it was like to be called rude names and be belittled myself?

I guess the only explanation is that 13 year olds can be really, really immature. They know what to say to hurt someone's feelings, but they've not yet developed the tact or compassion to not want to say it. And they want to be accepted by their peers, sometimes at almost any cost.

That said, I don't remember being that openly cruel to an adult. Oh, my classmates and I tried to goof on substitutes when we had them, and probably contributed to the early burnout of some substitute teachers (and again: why did I do that? I suppose it was because I felt taking part might win me a few moments of acceptance from the "pack," and might temporarily deflect the teasing away from me). But regular people - bus drivers and hall monitors and teachers, generally I was pretty respectful of them.

I do think the whole pack mentality was another thing that came into play in this incident. It's a pretty powerful feeling as a teen (and sometimes even as an adult) to want to fit in with the group and be part of the "pack." And it can drive you to do things you wouldn't ordinarily do - things that, in the quiet of your own room later, you (even as a teen) smack your forehead and go, "Why was I so STUPID?"

All of that said: what those boys did was wrong and cruel. (Though my own grandma, if they had done it to her? She was a pretty tough lady and I bet she would have figured out a way to make those boys regret what they had said and even cry "uncle"). It's really ugly to hear what they're doing to the lady, and it made me cringe and recoil.

However, I don't think - unlike some commentators I've heard - that these kids should be sent to Juvie. That will only teach them to be meaner and more violent. I suspect in a way, some of them have already suffered the best discipline they could have: the public embarrassment of being revealed in their cruelty, of people saying things like, "What kind of a coward bullies a 68 year old lady?" And it sounds like, in at least one case, the parents are going to make sure the kid thinks twice before doing something like this again.

I do think putting the kids off the bus - I don't know how much more of their school year remains, but put them off the bus for the rest of the year, and maybe the first half of the next year - so they can think about what they did might be a valid idea. Yes, the parents are taxpayers and they pay for the bus service. But I think these things should STILL be viewed as a privilege and not a right, and by behaving badly, the boys violated their privilege.

Or make them get up and publicly apologize to the lady, and talk about how what they did was wrong.

I don't think these kids are "lost," unlike what some commentators are saying. I think they do have the capacity to become "lost," if no one intervenes and teaches them, or if they face no consequences of what they did - but from what I've seen, that may not be the case here. It's possible for people who are pretty nasty teenagers to grow up to be decent adults if they are molded a bit and are shown some discipline.

The other thing: I don't think they were that much worse than kids were 30 years ago when I was that age. Riding the bus when I was a kid was brutal and I have blocked much of that time out of my memory - stuff like getting your lunch and homework stolen, or being refused a seat, or being called really awful, dreadful names or having ugly things said to your face: that's kind of part and parcel of the bus ride for middle schoolers, and it's been that way for a long time. Would the nasty kids on my bus have bullied a grandmotherly bus monitor? Some of them might have; some of them were pretty rude to the driver. Which is why I'm not quite so quick to say that these kids' action is a symptom of society suddenly becoming much worse or more violent. I don't know if thirteen year olds in the 1920s or 1870s or 1730s were as rude and unpleasant as they were in the 1980s, but I know thirteen year olds were pretty awful when I was one myself....I could be pretty awful as a 13 year old. So I don't think it's that "everything is suddenly worse," I think it's more "For all our talk of anti-bullying efforts, there still will be bullies." They may just turn on different people...

O RLY

I dealt today with one of those Smugtrons. You know the kind: the people who think they're better than everyone else by virtue of the purity of their diet, or how small the carbon emissions of their car are, or what extreme lengths they go to to buy all "sustainable" products.

This was someone claiming that her body was "really, really smart" because it "told" her not to like things bad for her (I think processed sugar was an example).

Because I am in large part a lady, and also in large part not interested in getting involved in an argument where at least one parties' positions are purely emotionally held, I refrained from chirpily telling her, "Oh, then broccoli must be really bad for me, because I hate it! My body's so smart, I never eat it! I should listen to my body more....oh, hey, it's telling me I need a cupcake."

But yeah. I really get tired of people with the holier than thou attitude.

my dad

It's Father's Day.

I was thinking about all the stuff I've learned from my dad over the years. I was one of the lucky ones; I had an involved dad who took part in the parenting, and who was concerned that his kids grew up to be good citizens. (I'm also lucky in that I still have my dad, and yes, I called him today).

He taught me how to read maps when I was a kid...as a result, I'm rarely lost.

He showed me how to manage money and not spend wastefully....as a result, I have zero debt.

He told me "I know you can do this" even when I suffered a serious reverse the first time I was in grad school....and as a result, I picked myself back up, started again, and eventually was successful.

He never thought I could do less than a boy could when it came to math or science, and on the other hand, he never expected me to get special dispensation because of my gender...and as a result, I grew up tough enough to say, "Yeah? That's your opinion" when someone makes a sexist comment to me.

He took me to church...which formed a lifelong habit for me that has enriched my life and made me a better person.

He listened to me cry when I was a little kid and the other kids at school were mean to me...and helped me to know that I wasn't a reject, that sometimes people are just jerks to other people.

He often said, "Do the right thing even if it makes you unpopular"....and I hope I will have the strength to do that if it ever comes to it for me.

He modeled honesty and hard work and kindness...and I hope to live up to that myself.

I love my dad; I think he knows that. I'm grateful that I got the chance to know him as an adult as well as knowing him as "Daddy" when I was a kid. Some of my friends were not so lucky.

Summer labs

It is surprising how different the summer and regular-semester students are.

It was our first lab, "Scientific Measurement." While I did have to show a few people which side of the ruler was metric (ack), I didn't have anyone shutting down and going, "I don't need to know this crap. I'm going to run my own business. I don't need to care about metric."

That kind of attitude frustrates me because there have been several occasions in my life where knowing "outside" information - that is, outside my basic field of study - has really helped me greatly. Most stuff you learn will not be wasted.

This group, though some of them may not have known which scale was metric (which surprises me a little, but then again, I was part of the "Metric by 1985!" generation, and maybe the educators have since given up on metric), once they figured out what they had to do, they did it without complaint.

One guy actually said, "Oh! I get it now! I never got it before!" when I showed him how you went from one decimal unit to another - like, centimeters to meters, or meters to kilometers. And he showed me that in fact he DID get it, by doing the rest of the questions correctly and showing me how he got his answers.

I don't know. Is there some kind of nativist sentiment against metric I don't know about? As a scientist, I use it all the time and have a decent handle on roughly what a meter is, a kilogram is, a liter is, etc., in terms of "how big" it would be. I often have to get after even my upper-division students because they want to measure things in feet and inches, and some of the formulas we use don't WORK with data in feet and inches. (If they do report the data in feet and inches, I make everyone in the class do the conversion with the data. For one thing, it's handy to know how to do it, for another, it might give a little positive peer pressure to the people NOT to do the measurement that way next time.)

I will say I don't have problems with the English or Imperial or whatever you call it system being used alongside metric, for some applications. - apparently some countries have effectively banned that system, but there are cases where it's useful. I still think of buying fabric in terms of yards and fractions of yards, and I do quilt cutting using inches. And in a lot of case, rejiggering a pattern to make it metric either would not work, or would not work smoothly. But I'm not sure I see why people can't think in and use both systems.

But metric is pretty much expected in the sciences! You don't have to like it, but that's the way it is.

You know what?

I'd be not at all opposed to imposing the death penalty on serial child molesters.

Yes, I'm talking about the Penn State scandal, but I'm also talking about several ugly cases in the news here locally. One guy was arrested, bonded out after giving a sob story to the judge...and then molested another kid (allegedly) while he was out on bond. (He's pleading not guilty, but it looks like a pretty clear case from what I've seen).

This summer's teaching

I didn't teach last summer, and I had forgotten how fun it could be.

On the one hand, it's a crazy-fast pace: we are traveling at twice the rate of the regular semester, which means you have to be fairly organized to remember to be on top of things like doing necessary lab-prep work, or having tests ready in time, that kind of thing.

I am in the classroom 18 hours a week, if the lab classes go the full four hours budgeted for them. (They do not always do so). That's more than during the regular semester most semesters, and I'm teaching a smaller number of courses.

However, we don't have classes on Friday...they instituted some kind of budget-saving measure so offices are not open Fridays. (The amount of time total they are open over the course of the week is about the same; the expectation is they open a couple hours earlier and close a couple hours later M-Th). I assume it's to save electricity because I've noticed when I come in to work on Fridays that it's a lot hotter in the building - they turn the airconditioning to a higher temperature when we're not having classes.

It is kind of nice having Fridays off. I can come in and catch up on grading or prepwork, or do research work, and not worry about someone NEEDING me for something. Or, I don't have to plan to head off to class and teach. (Teaching takes more energy than you'd think. I'm usually pretty tired after class). And yet, I still have Saturday for errands or just living my own life.

I don't think the four-day-a-week schedule could work in the regular semester but it's really nice for summer.

I also like my summer students. I still shake my head over the fact that one of my Physics profs (I took Physics in the summer at a local community college - it transferred to my university, it was cheap for me to do, and it meant I didn't wind up taking Physics and Organic Chem together, something numerous people had warned me off of) claimed that he "knew" why people were taking the class in the summer - that it was because they could not pass in the regular semester and thought summer would be easier.

(And from that, I got a big lesson in What Not To Do When Teaching A Class: never, ever assume a class is stupid or slackerish, and never tell them you think they are even if you kind of think they are. It's just really ugly and offputting, and it makes the diligent students angry).

Because, I find my summer students tend to be more motivated. By and large, they are taking summer classes because they want to graduate early - or because they can make more room in their semester schedule for things like internships or higher-level specialized classes. Or they're incoming freshmen who want to get a head start on their distribution classes.

Oh, once in a while I have someone who can't hack it, or is a blow-off, or acts like a jerk to the other students, but mostly the students I get in the summer are good students and nice people and I really enjoy having them. (The money is nice too. Secondary, but nice to have. I could survive without a summer paycheck but having one means I have more flexibility and don't have to budget so tightly during the year).

This semester I have one upper-division and one lower-division (nonmajors) class. The upper division class is small - 8 people - but they let it run because two people need it to graduate this summer. (Normally, classes with enrollments below 10 are cancelled). I know it's not economically feasible to run such small classes, but I really love teaching them: you can give more attention to each student, you can get to know who they are better. And I feel more comfortable and relaxed and able to joke around with them and go off on tangents if someone asks an interesting question or stuff. Also, in a small class, it's really hard for a student to "hide" and not pull their weight in lab or discussion. And I also think there is some positive energy that goes on: someone has to be a real jerk to be able to fight off the "positive peer pressure" of a group fo committed students in the class, and continue to be apathetic and rude.

The lower-division class I have is about 20, and it's harder to get a handle on them. A lot of them are absolutely new freshmen, and they're scared to death. I try to be reassuring - if someone is a diligent student and they give a darn about learning and they're working, I'm not going to go after them for some tiny little infraction (A guy brought coffee to class and asked me if it was okay for him to have it. I said sure, as long as he didn't leave a mess). With the nonmajors class I do have to be a little careful; I find more than any other class I teach this is the place where I get the 'too cool for school' people who don't want to work and don't want to discuss and don't care about the material, and it's hard to keep them from checking out. (And sometimes I wonder: is it really my JOB to knock myself out to keep them from checking out, or is it more my job to teach for the people who do care?) So far, this crew looks pretty much okay but I will have to go through a full lab period with them to see for sure. (You learn more about how a person is when they are working in lab....some people who are not so hot in the lecture part of class are really good with the lab stuff, and some people who seem pretty smart in lecture turn out to be really apathetic about actually doing stuff in lab.)

But so far, so good.

Hobby farm daydreaming

My mom gets a couple of magazines I don't get, and when I was up visiting my parents I spent some time reading the back issues.

One of them is "Grit." Yes, Grit still publishes, they're just not in that newspaper format any more. (I remember even when I was a kid, they still advertised in the back of comic books: the idea was, I guess, that kids sold Grit door to door. I hated selling anything and I was smart enough to know that a farming magazine would be met with bewilderment or disdain in the bedroom community where we lived).

Grit is a very practical magazine. They talk about how to build stuff or repair stuff or how to can food or grow food....they have features on different livestock breeds. And they do have some fun stories on people's reminiscences about growing up on the farm. It's a nice magazine, I feel like I can learn stuff from it.

I admit it: I still hold some dreams of someday owning something like a hobby farm. I know I couldn't do it now, not as a college professor, because some days I can barely manage to feed MYSELF, let alone find time to feed chickens or goats or something. But it's an appealing idea.

Oh, I know, in reality, that farming is really hard work and it's probably not feasible for a single person to try to run even a small farm all on their lonesome - too much work, too many chances for stuff to go wrong. And the whole economic-insecurity thing would be scary: I like having a regular paycheck I can depend on.

But there's also something attractive about it. The immediacy - the fact that you can see what effect your work is having as you do it (whether it's weeding or canning or something like that). I like the idea of growing at least some of my own food. (I have a tiny garden and grew beets and green beans this spring, and I have tomato plants but they've not made fruit yet. And I keep thinking someday I'll try growing sweet potatoes). If I had more space in my back yard, I'd put in raspberry canes or grapes, even if I'd have to remember to cover them as they were setting fruit to keep the birds out.

I also like the idea of earning my bread by MAKING something...something tangible, something people could hold in their hands, whether that something is soap or tomatoes or lavender or whatever. Don't get me wrong: I still love teaching, it's just some days it really does feel like I'm just pushing invisible imaginary things around and there's nothing that feels very "real" about it.

I think I may also (rightly or wrongly) think that success in having a hobby farm is, to a greater degree, the result of one's own hard work. In teaching, if you get a difficult class, or you wind up with an administrator who has problems with your discipline, or if the school's budget gets cut...you can see your job go from "wonderful" to "awful" in a short time. (Of course, with farming, drought, insects, natural disasters....all of those are beyond your control).

The other magazine is called "Mary Jane's Farm." This magazine has some good stories and good information, but....how do I put it? Sometimes it gets a bit precious for my tastes. There's a lot of talk about organic gardening/organic produce and while some of the reasons and justifications are true, others of them border on "woo." For example: I choose organic salad greens because I figure there's enough pesticide residue (at least, based on what I've read) possible on the conventional ones that it's worth it to ME to spend a bit more and seek out the organic ones. And I tend to think the "cage free chicken" eggs taste better...but I'm not going to say that everyone has to do this. And sometimes the "organic lifestyle" folks get a little evangelical about it, like "if everyone did this one thing, IT WOULD SAVE THE WORLD" and of course things are more complicated than that.

(Also, I wonder: is the state of the art of organic farming such that it's even possible to produce all food using standard organic methods? I mean, I might occasionally buy a box of cookies made from organic flour...but I wonder if all the flour used in the world or even the U.S. could be produced using small-scale methods? I kind of think that small-scale farming, like what my great-grandparents did, kind of wouldn't be capable of producing enough to meet demand. But I could be wrong; I haven't tried to calculate it out).

All the "woo" and evangelism aside, though, one idea in both magazines I like is this: that there are a lot of people out there (apparently) who ARE doing small-scale specialty farming, and they're providing a product to people who want it. (And in some cases, the product is considerably better than the conventionally produced kind). I've said before that I enjoy shopping at farmer's markets and small businesses and u-pick farms and places like that....it's more fun than going to a giant brightly-lit supermarket for food. (Though I admit I can do without the "oh, aren't we so much better than the hoi polloi" I see from some farmer's market/natural-foods-store attendees.)

So, I don't know. If I had a hobby farm, what would I raise? What would I raise for market, what would I raise just for myself? I think if I had enough land and space I'd want to raise chickens for the eggs. (This provided I had a good way of protecting them from predators, and also sealing up the feed so I didn't get rats....one problem with some "city chickens' is that the feed can attract rodents). I might have goats, though it would be for milk rather than meat. (Then again: there's apparently a growing market for goat meat, and while I might not be up to slaughtering and butchering my own...the animals could be sold). No, I've never had goat's milk and of course I'd have to try to to see if I liked it. (This is all in the realm of daydream for me right now).

In terms of crops....where I live, a lot of the things I like don't do so well. It's mostly too hot and too dry (unless you have a good well) for berries. And often tomatoes are a disappointment: it gets so hot the plants won't set fruit.

But herbs seem to do well. If I had a decent market for herbs, either as culinary herbs (I know in some areas, fancy restaurants buy their herbs from small farmers) or something like lavender that is used in scent. I admit I like the idea of running a lavender farm, as impossibly unprofitable that might be in real life.

Or maybe I'd learn how to keep bees. (Or do that in addition to having the herb farm...then I could sell lavender honey and stuff like that; in some specialty markets you can get really good prices for "fancy" honeys).

Again, I think a lot of this falls into the realm of "If I weren't teaching, I'd want a career where I felt like I was 'making' something." And at any rate, as I said: it's probably not realistic. I don't live near enough a really wealthy area that doesn't already have a market saturated with specialty food sales or such.

But it's nice to daydream about.

Poetry break

Sometimes you hear what you need when you most need it. One of the hymns we sang yesterday was "Dear Lord and Father of mankind" by Whittier. (Thank goodness my particular congregation hasn't decided to use the "updated" hymnals....where all language has been made gender-neutral and "less warlike," some of the new wordings are really clunky and unpleasant to sing).

Whittier is a poet I don't know too much about. I know he was an abolitionist in New England and was generally considered to be a "good man." I also think some of the critics derided his verse as not sufficiently deep or simplistic. I don't know; in some ways I am a simple woman and I have to say I like this poem.

The hymn version of it (at least the version we sing) does not use all the stanzas in the poem, but here is the complete poem:

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
forgive our foolish ways!
Re-clothe us in our rightful mind,
in purer lives thy service find,
in deeper reverence, praise;
in deeper reverence, praise.

In simple trust like theirs who heard,
beside the Syrian sea,
the gracious calling of the Lord,
let us, like them, without a word,
rise up and follow thee;
rise up and follow thee.

O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
where Jesus knelt to share with thee
the silence of eternity
interpreted by love!
interpreted by love!

Drop thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease;
take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace;
the beauty of thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
thy coolness and thy balm;
let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm;
O still, small voice of calm.

I particularly needed the "Take from our souls the strain and stress, and let our ordered lives confess, the beauty of thy peace" part of it, yesterday. 

Not happy news

The minister of my church is leaving.

The reason for this is understandable: he and his wife have a special-needs child, they cannot find the kind of help they really ideally need for their child here, and he has been offered a position somewhere in a city that is much larger, and probably has more cutting edge research done on the child's particular need.

But it's sad. I think this is the fourth minister (counting the "interim" we had on two occasions only once) in the 12 years I've been here. I know, in some denominations, ministers get moved around by the church hierarchy (I think the Methodists do it that way?) and sometimes ministers only stay four or five years at a given church.

But every other Disciples church I've belonged to had relative stability....ministers staying more than 10 years, in some cases, more than 20 years.

And I anticipate difficulty calling a new minister. We are a small congregation, and money is ALWAYS a problem. I don't know if we can offer a competitive salary...especially considering that this can be a hard part of the country to attract people to.

Almost worse than their plans to leave....I mean, I will miss them, I liked them, but I completely understand their reasons for leaving....is what I expect will be the reactions/comments of the other congregants. I saw this last time a minister left:

"What have we done that is so wrong that God is punishing us this way?"
"This is going to be the end of us. We'll just have to close our doors and fold." (And I admit, I worry about this too).
Or people will start talking about how they didn't really like this minister's style of preaching, or that they found  him pushy in some way, or something. And I HATE that. I understand why people do it - they are justifying the leaving, they are trying to make themselves feel better over it by saying, "It really wasn't that good of a situation after all" but I just HATE it because it feels like talking behind someone's back.

And there will be the ongoing comment of "We need to get new members, the 'right' kind of new members" (meaning: people who can pledge money to the church. I remember there was actually some criticism in the past when we got new members who didn't have a lot of money. That's just WRONG. Wrong in so many ways.) And I expect there will be an "every member needs to evangelize" thing....and I'm sorry, but that's just not one of my gifts. I can do many things but tracking down people I don't know and asking them to come to church is just not something I can do. And among my friends...as I've told people many times, either they already have a church affiliation, or they are actually hostile to the idea of religion, and I'm not going to make it less likely for them to ever come around to the idea of considering faith by being "pushy" to them.

So, I don't know. I hate this. I've been through this now three times....once, we had to search for a new minister after the congregational split. Then the person we found, as good as he was, left...again, for personal reasons. (He and his wife divorced, he felt that he could not stay in the same town, and he felt that her career was less "portable" than his, so it was best for him to leave). And now this.

(In the Disciples denomination, each congregation forms a search committee and vets potential ministers and calls the minister itself...there's not really a bishopric or anything to help or to send a minister. We have a regional ministry that can provide guidance, but most of the call is up to us.)

I will say if this does end the congregation, if we break up and disperse? I might take a couple months off from church. I've put a lot of effort and a lot of volunteer hours and a lot of contributions into this congregation...and to think of it not surviving really hurts, and also on some level feels like that nothing I could do was good enough.

And again, some of the things people say in the wake of a minister leaving? Reminds me of why Christians are so often a poor advertisement for Christ. I don't want to hear all of the handwringing and the recriminations and everything....I just want to move forward, and there are often people who want to stick back and replay everything that happened.

I suppose I'll eventually look for a new place (if it does come to pass that we break up). I don't know. I've never had to "church shop" before....try to find a new denomination that fits my faith. I've always just gone to the Disciples church in the town where I lived and that was that. I suppose the Presbyterians are the next closest group....but then again, there's an Episcopal congregation that I know a couple people in, and the rector seems to be highly thought of. The next nearest Disciples' church is an hour's round trip, and I just don't think I can do that.

I really hope I'm "borrowing trouble" on this and I won't have to think about that. But it tends to be my nature to consider the worst possible path, and plan for that...so I HAVE a plan, so I'm ready for the worst if it happens.