Boy, it sure takes very little to make you happy, said my colleague. All I did was tell her how excited I was to see that our Interim President's photo had been added to the Wall of Presidents in the library, which delighted me for two reasons: (1) It's good to see more than one female face among the rows of dour men; and (2) The new photo fills a gap that had destroyed the symmetry of the display. Of course that symmetry will be thrown out of whack as soon as we hire our next President, but we have to take our pleasures where we can find them, especially in the midst of an ever-deepening campus budget crisis.
I've been told that I'm being too negative, that I need to keep my chin up and look on the bright side and seek out the silver linings and a whole mess of other cliches, so here are a few more things that are making me happy right now:
A colleague asked to borrow an assignment from me and then put a footnote on the assignment to give me credit. I've shared assignments with many colleagues over 23 years of teaching but I think this is the first time I've been given written credit. (The class is called The Ethical Author.)
Speaking of giving credit where credit is due, I sat down with a cup of tea yesterday afternoon and cracked open R.F. Kuang's novel Yellowface, intending to read a few chapters before dinner, but as of this morning I've finished it. Couldn't put it down. Can't stop thinking about it. It's very funny in a horrifying way and deals with the problem of credit for creative work; the narrator is a white woman who appropriates (um, steals) a manuscript written by a dead Asian friend and then profits by putting on her friend's skin, as it were. The novel involves some biting satire on identity politics and literary tokenism, but I was most impressed by Kuang's ability to make me care about a character who is, at heart, reprehensible--and make me laugh about it.
Despite the persistent rain, wind, and winter bleakness, I had no trouble getting out of my driveway this morning. High waters threatened our driveway yesterday but the creek fell before doing any damage; low temperatures threatened to sequester us behind a wall of snow and ice last night but didn't fall quite low enough to turn the rain to snow. The wind, though, is something else. When I got to campus this morning, the flags outside my office were snapping so sharply that they sounded like gunshots, which was a little disconcerting.
Still, I'm here, and no one is shooting at me, and I'm getting good work done, and I'm looking forward to the start of classes tomorrow. And if I start getting blue again, I can hike on over to the library and take a look at that Wall of Presidents and remind myself that every once in a while, we can make a little bit of progress.
But just a little. No point in getting all giddy about it.
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