Committees vs. cancer

Colleagues have been commiserating with me over the number of committee meetings I attend, but really, I would rather spend the afternoon at a committee meeting than in some of the places I spent my afternoons last semester--radiation, chemotherapy, various rest rooms....

Given a choice between committee meetings and cancer treatment, I'll take meetings every time. Here's why:

At committee meetings I don't have to take off my clothes. I may feel vulnerable in other ways, but at least I can keep my clothes on.

I may feel bored half to death, but a committee meeting is unlikely to produce any actual life-threatening complications

The side effects of committee meetings may be annoying (boredom, annoyance, more committee meetings) but they are generally not incapacitating.

I've mastered the lingo of committee meetings, but the language of cancer treatment still sometimes stymies me. I can't always tell my neutrophils from my neutropenia, nor do I really want to.

Statistics that get bandied about at committee meetings are often quite important (retention rates, endowment figures, faculty salaries as a percentage of budget), but they can be handled in the abstract. When my oncologist tosses a statistic at me, on the other hand, we're talking about my mortality.

At committee meetings it is possible to get stuff done: results are visible and measurable and sometimes quite satisfying, and the lack of results can stimulate us to approach the problem another way. With cancer treatment, results are often invisible and ambiguous, and even positive results may be only temporary. It's impossible to know whether the work is done; eliminate the problem in one place and it might just crop up in another.

Which, when you come to think of it, is not at all unlike committee work. But hey, at least I get to keep my clothes on.