The thirty-percent solution

My computer screen told me "You're thirty percent there," and I thought: Now you're diagnosing my mental state? 

A colleague told a room full of academics, "We've been given an IKEA box with a cinnamon roll instead of an Allen wrench," and the scary thing is, we all knew what he meant.

A person whose clothes reeked of weed walked up to me and I immediately started sneezing. "You must be allergic to my essential oils," he said. That's one possibility.

An administrator urged a bunch of us to "take ownership of our spaces," but how will the seventy percent of me that isn't even here take ownership of anything? 

 Three weeks before classes start, thirty percent is about as good as it gets, especially when I'm sneezing all over this cinnamon roll.

Random bullets of where has the summer gone?

I need to mow this morning, which is actually great news after weeks of drought that painted lawns brown and prevented growth. I'm trying to remember the last time I mowed but it must have been before the Fourth of July weekend. Summer wildflowers are doing well along the roadside--chicory, Joe Pye Weed, ironweed, Queen Anne's lace, jewelweed--but grass has been enjoying a midsummer hiatus. A few days of rain and suddenly it's back in the business of growing.

And I'm back in the business of griping. Don't even get me started. I'm tired of hearing myself complain, but if I keep bottling up all the complaint-worthy issues, they wake me up at 3 a.m. to dance a tarantella in my brainpan. So I'll keep my complaints to myself except for this persistent pet peeve: I'm tired of asking for support on a project only to have new projects piled on my back. The only solution, I'm afraid, is to mess up so spectacularly and publicly that no one will ever again ask me to do anything.

Every time I see tarantella, I think of Verena Tarrant, the impressionable young thing whose life is manipulated by various domineering characters in Henry James's novel The Bostonians. Does it hold up, I wonder? It's been a while.

With August looming in the offing, I need to put some time into fall course preparations. I've been tasked with helping faculty write more effective syllabi, but at the moment my fall syllabi are Frankenstein's monsters of incompatible ideas poorly stitched together with lots of gaps showing. There are not enough weeks in the semester to accomplish everything I need to do in the capstone class, and I keep waffling about the assignment structure in the African American Lit class. More papers = more plagiarism and AI; fewer papers = more exams = more struggles to read students' handwriting. Focus on improving pedagogy or reducing pain? The eternal question.

The dark side of the fellowship of suffering

A bunch of us were discussing how hard it is to keep doing our jobs when it feels as if the ground is slipping beneath us and I brought up Stephen Crane's short story "The Open Boat." Here we have four men--a ship's captain, a cook, a journalist, and an oiler who works in the engine room--who would move in very different circles on dry land, but throw them together in a tiny dinghy tossed on rough seas and surrounded by sharks and they form a tight community working together toward a common goal--survival. 

We've done this before, I remind my colleagues. When Covid forced us to quickly pivot to online teaching in March of 2020, it felt like an impossible task but somehow we all pulled together and survived. It wasn't the most rewarding teaching experience of our lives, but we made it to shore.

But then I remember that in Crane's story, not everyone makes it to shore. Sure, the four men are all working together, but they endure 30 hours in a small dinghy, wet and miserable and unfed, only to swamp near shore and take a serious dunking that threatens all their lives and kills the strongest man among them.

So sure, we're enduring rough seas and working together toward the goal of survival, but we're also wet and cranky and hungry for hope and we fear that some of us won't make it to shore. If the strongest man in the open boat can be crushed by the waves, what can protect me?

Where are the life jackets? Who will call off the sharks?

Crowdstrike, the IT crowd, and key lime yogurt

If a colleague hadn't given me a small container of key lime yogurt yesterday, I probably would have dissolved in a sniveling lump on the floor of my campus office. Sometimes a small gesture can help us endure a big disaster.

At first I thought it was a small disaster. After a week of long and exhausting meetings, I hadn't intended to go to campus at all on Friday, preferring to stay home and do a smattering of work on my college-owned laptop computer. I needed to write a draft of an important document and circulate it among committee members, and I was working against a tight deadline--but when I turned on the laptop Friday morning, I saw the dreaded blue screen of death.

So I used my phone to alert our IT help desk and I headed for campus. By the time I arrived, I'd received a message Windows users all over the world would recognize: Crowdstrike had struck and all our campus computers were collateral damage.

The IT crowd promised to work its way around campus fixing one computer after the other and they very kindly thanked me for my patience, which was generous. I promise that I tried to be patient, but I had a deadline. IT arrived in my office around 9:30 a.m. "It's a simple fix," they said, but in my case that wasn't true. They had to take the laptop back to the IT office and left me another laptop to use while I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

I got some work done, true, but by noonish I was feeling peckish and cranky. I hadn't planned to be on campus so long so I hadn't packed a lunch, and I didn't want to leave my office lest the IT crowd returned with my laptop. I was scavenging in the English Department fridge and found a jug of lemonade left over from some departmental event. Lemonade for lunch! Better than nothing, I suppose. 

Then a colleague came in and offered to share her key lime yogurt. Score!

Key lime yogurt has gotten me through tough times before. Fifteen years ago when chemotherapy destroyed my tastebuds, key lime yogurt was one of the few food items that didn't taste like glue. And so I accepted my colleague's gift as a lifeline. 

Key lime yogurt couldn't solve the problems Crowdstrike caused to airlines, hospitals, or even my campus IT crowd, who returned my computer soon after lunch and moved on to repair many more, but it got me through a tough moment and helped me do my job.

"Your computer is a little screwy," the IT guys said, but this was no surprise to me--for months it's been groaning as if it's giving birth to baby computers. My computer caused a whole host of IT guys to try one thing after another and scratch their heads when nothing helped, until finally something did help and now my laptop is working without groaning. Score!

This would be a good time to finally buy myself a home computer, but I'd planned to do that after I get my car paid off, which should happen next week, barring catastrophes. My usual poor timing means that I was crippled by the Crowdstrike strike, but fortunately I could count on a hard-working IT crowd to come to my rescue.

And let's not forget the colleague carrying key lime yogurt. If we all pull together, we can get through just about anything.

Free ticket on the Crazy Train

Yesterday I came out of a very productive, encouraging, and even therapeutic five-hour meeting to find myself among people walking around stunned and bleeding.

Not literally bleeding, of course. No lives have shed in the making of these decisions, but our ongoing budget crisis has resulted in yet another round of cuts that will leave every department feeling battered, bruised, and hopeless.

It's a little disorienting to spend five hours with a select group of faculty and staff members imagining ways to improve campus conditions only to come out and find that we're once again being cut off at the knees, metaphorically speaking. In theory, we can do great things! In practice, people who are accustomed to doing great things will have to pick up new tasks to cover for the people whose jobs are being cut so they'll barely have time to do the things they didn't sign up for, much less the great things they could otherwise do. If that makes any sense.

Frankly, none of this makes much sense, but not making sense seems to be our modus operandi these days. Because of the grant I'm administering, I will continue to devote long hours to helping faculty and staff develop grandiose plans toward improving a sense of communal purpose, even while decisions are being made that will devastate our community and hamper our ability to achieve those purposes. My work right now feels like an immense waste of time, but I have to act as if it will make a difference. In other words, I've been issued a one-way ticket on the Crazy Train and I can only hope it doesn't end in a crash. 

So, um, let's enjoy the wild ride while we can? Nah, I've got nothing. 

Crawdads in your Crocs and other hazards

When a creek creature nibbled on my grandson's toe yesterday the boy found a crawdad in his Crocs, and I guess I'm glad it wasn't a crocodile. Crocodiles are not known to live in our creek, fortunately, and the crawdad's nibble didn't even leave a mark. 

In their weekend visit to Grandma and Grampa Camp, the grandkids have similarly failed to see any live bears, although they had lunch with some taxidermied grizzlies at the Bear's Den outside Cambridge, Ohio. The restaurant was a great place to meet my son-in-law for the official handoff of the young imps, and I enjoyed introducing them to great locally raised beef, crispy sweet potato fries, and what may well be the best mac&cheese I've ever eaten. Plus bears, of course. You can't ignore the bears.

The kids have been rebuilding the dam that got washed away by spring floods, at a spot in the creek that's mostly dry right now. We found some places to splash on our creek walk and also located crawdads and a cave and another dry creek bed. In the afternoon when the temperature rose toward triple digits, we stayed indoors and made candy sushi, a sticky mess that's fun to assemble but so sweet it makes my teeth hurt.

In the evening when the news came through about the shooting in Pennsylvania, we were all sitting on the sofa reading. The grandkids had discovered the stack of Calvin and Hobbes books downstairs and they were working their way through them one after another, their quiet reading only interrupted by occasional giggles and snorts of laughter. They were blissfully unaware of the violent events taking place in the outside world, which is fine for now. Someday they'll have to negotiate all the dangers and disasters the world can toss their way, but just for today, let them immerse themselves in a world of books and sushi and nearly-dry creek beds, where the worst danger they face might come from a crawdad in their Crocs.  

 

The black bear seems tiny compared to the grizzly.

Candy sushi. The only fish involved are Swedish.

Jump!

He's been getting stone-skipping lessons from the master.

Making room for Mr. Epiphany

You do all the work to apply for a grant to fund some faculty and staff development activities in the summer and then the grant gets approved (which is great because nothing's happening on campus right now without outside funding) and so you get to work setting up the details and everything is going smoothly until it isn't--a key contact is out of the office with Lyme Disease, the online system for catering campus events won't recognize your credentials, the books the group needs to discuss at the first meeting get hung up in a supply-chain snafu and won't arrive until after the meeting date--and you have to scramble to adapt to changing circumstances and you come perilously close to throwing in the towel entirely until an early-morning epiphany disrupts your sleep, and while epiphanies that arrive at 2 a.m. often aren't worth the paper they're scribbled on, this one actually smooths out the biggest barrier to successful completion of the project, because while wondering whether you ought to stand at the photocopier and scan the first 80 or so pages of the book and send it to participants so they can be prepared to discuss it next week, Mr. Early-Morning Epiphany asks a simple question: Have you checked Ohiolink?  

So first thing in the morning you check Ohiolink and see that the missing book is available as an ebook that can be downloaded for free by anyone with a college ID. So you send out the link to participants and give them their reading assignment and thank your lucky stars that Mr. Early-Morning Epiphany isn't suffering from Lyme Disease.

You may be sleepy, but at least you're happy. How happy? This happy:

(I'm using this photo in a PowerPoint presentation next week. Maybe at some point I'll write about why.)

Freedom to be unbusy

This week we celebrate freedom, including the freedom to eat strawberry shortcake for breakfast, have fun with grandkids, and cheer on our favorite baseball team. Watching the bees busily pollinating flowers in my daughter's front garden reminds me of just how un-busy I'm being, which is perfectly fine. Let someone else work for a while. I'm taking it easy.

Ready to catch home runs

"I'm a koala!"

If cats could read...

 

A midsummer night's scream

July is not the time to be obsessing about fall classes but I made the mistake of looking at the course schedule and now instead of relaxing I'm wrestling with numbers. 

The good news is that my fall classes have healthy enrollments, but this is also the bad news, entailing math problems such as this one: nine capstone students making presentations to the college community outside of class time, 15-20 minutes per presentation plus time for introductions, transitions, and questions, four English faculty members whose schedules must be consulted so they can attend the presentations, an unknown number of unknown factors (students who say too much or too little, students who don't complete the project and have nothing to present, power outages or technical difficulties or fires or floods), all these factors add up to--what?

Nine is not a massive number but it's more than we normally have in the senior capstone class. Last time I taught the capstone, I had six students and managed the presentations in one long session with a break in the middle, but no one is going to sit through nine full-length presentations one after the other. That means breaking the festivities up into two sessions that somehow fit the schedules of everyone who needs to attend. And what if all nine students attract large cheering sections to their presentations? We're gonna need a bigger boat.

So then I had to look at the enrollment in my African American Literature class, an upper-level class that normally attracts about a dozen students. Eighteen! Crammed into a noisy interior room with no windows and too many desks, a room that always makes me want to lie down on the floor in a fetal position and whimper. 

Individual presentations will be difficult with 18 students so I'll have to shift to some sort of group presentation--or steal my colleague's group discussion-leader assignment. And then I'll have to add more time for responding to students' drafts or else assign fewer papers in the class. Preparing that syllabus is going to require a lot more than just changing some readings and altering dates.

If everything goes according to plan, this will be the last time I'll be teaching either one of those classes before I retire, so I want to make them especially good. At the moment, though, I'm being assaulted by intransigent numbers and traumatic memories set in that horrible classroom. A midsummer night's scream! I need someone to provide the formula for success so I can get some rest.