Awkward questions, unsatisfying answers

I was just killing time while waiting for a pork loin to roast so I uncharacteristically accepted a call from a political pollster. We got off on the wrong foot from the first question: "Do you think things in Ohio are getting better or getting worse?" 

"Define things," I said, and after some back-and-forth she said, "I'll put you down as undecided." That happened a lot.

Some questions just can't be immediately resolved to both parties' satisfaction, like the one I get from people who can't understand why I live where I live: "No cell service? No TV? Bad internet? Then why would anyone want to live there?"

"Well, trilliums, for one thing," I might say, but in my experience, a person who can't imagine living without broadband internet access is not going to be impressed by proximity to trilliums.

Trillium is my favorite wildflower and sycamore my favorite tree, but I rarely have good answers for other questions about favorite things. Favorite color? (Depends on the context.) Favorite book? (Too many to narrow down.) Favorite band? (I can never remember names of bands.) Why should I have to commit to one favorite anyway? Why not spread the love around?

Yesterday a colleague asked a question I've been getting a lot lately: "Any idea when you'll retire?" Impossible to say. When will the costs of doing good work here outweigh the benefits? When will the energy I receive from my students fail to compensate for the energy I expend in teaching them? When will the endless meetings and assessment activities pound my brain so thoroughly into mush that I can no longer think clearly? But the question that also haunts me is this: What happens to my tenure line when I do retire? The last time a faculty member in my department retired, the tenure line disappeared, possibly forever. It would be disheartening if I retired after 20+ years of teaching here only to be replaced by two adjuncts and a trained monkey.

Good thing I don't have to answer these questions today in all this heat. The questions I'm prepared to answer definitively today are fairly simple: What are you doing after Writing Wednesday? (Going out to lunch with a colleague.) Anything happening this evening? (Just a little bit of mowing before I'm caught up and then I'll listen to the Indians game on the radio.) How's the garden doing? (Lots of tomatoes too green to pick, a squash plant that looks like it could colonize the county, and plenty of nice fresh basil, but my second and last rosemary plant shriveled up.)

From this very limited perspective, it looks like things in Ohio are getting better by the minute, but that could change any time so I wouldn't want to commit to a definitive answer.