Just showing up, for the win

The other day a colleague told me I need to lower my standards for success, insisting that sometimes just showing up should count as a win. I thought of that this morning when the cashier at a convenience store started complaining about an absent employee: "He's been on the job two days but it's more work than he expected so he called in and admitted that he's just too lazy to do the job." Compared to that dude, I'm definitely winning today.

Just showing up feels heroic after I've spent the last couple of months in frequent long stressful meetings related to faculty governance issues, after I struggled for three weeks to get 37 contributors to the comedy volume to respond to the copy-editors' queries, and after I've devoted way too many hours to dealing with the kind of student who thinks "Desk, News" is the correct way to cite the name of an author of an anonymous news article. But today just showing up was even more difficult because last night I helped the new honors director drive students 45 minutes away to see a performance of Julius Caesar at Ohio University and arrived back home around midnight. On a Tuesday. When I teach at 9 a.m. on Wednesday.

I'm not sure what possessed me to agree to this, but it was an experience both enlightening and exhausting. The production was clever, utilizing only six actors, some of whom played multiple roles very convincingly. Above the stark stage was a screen where projected images and video reinforced the play's action, so that the first act's explorations of power and persuasion played below blurred black-and-white images of mass crowd scenes devolving into violence. I had to close my eyes during Mark Antony's funeral oration because the video projected above him was making me dizzy, but the rousing demonstration of the use of political rhetoric to manipulate the masses made me wonder about the midterm election results. (I checked my phone during intermission. Mostly inconclusive.)

And then after the play the twelve of us walked down the main drinking street in Athens to find a cookie shop where we bought a dozen cookies and ate them while standing on the busy sidewalk and singing "Happy Birthday" to one of our students, despite the fact that we were surrounded by OU students who looked way too young to be as drunk as they appeared to be at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. I wonder how many of them will show up to class today. 

Well I did, and I'm glad for it. My students were alert and ready to work this morning, even the ones who went to the play with us last night. The discussions may not have been scintillating (I mean, how scintillating can you be while demonstrating the finer points of citation format?) but we got the job done. Most importantly, we showed up, and today that counts as winning.

But don't even ask me about tomorrow.