Day ended OK.

Yesterday ended better than it started. I think a big part of it was that I had all these odd-sized chunks of things I had to do - kind of like those stupid s or z shaped blocks in Tetris - and it was hard to see how I could fit everything in.

However, just for the record, here's what I did yesterday:

Wrote (and tested the problems for) three separate biostats take-home tests. (Three different forms to reduce the risk of collaboration. And yes, there are a couple people in that class that I am very careful to see that they get DIFFERENT forms).

Wrote the in-class portion of the test.

Prepped for, and taught my non-majors class. (Prep was minimal as the topic was Biomes, which I could probably teach in my sleep. And very possibly have, at some point in my life.)

Tried to help someone having a Computer Meltdown but didn't get very much done to help them.

Went and served lunch to students at the Wesley Center on campus.

Went and got the crickets for today's lab from the local pet shop. Went to the Wal-Mart and got the lettuce, plastic cups, and rubberbands needed for same. Managed to remember to tell both cashiers that I was using the departmental credit card and so it needed to be sales-tax exempt.

Gave a prospective student a tour of the building and talked about the department.

Went back and helped a second time with the Computer Meltdown, solved it this time.

Got my weekly allergy shots

Taught my evening class.

I even found time to wash my hair and do 30 minutes of piano practice in all that.

I will say that serving at the Wesley Center was shorter than anticipated: we didn't have very many students come in, there were four of it (it was my church's turn to serve; as there are really only three on-campus religious centers we, along with the other "mainline Protestant" churches (and I think the Catholics, too, in the absence of a Newman Center), join up with the Wesley Center. We serve lunch once a semester (they have weekly lunches). I usually volunteer to serve if I'm not in class, because I'm right on campus and can just walk over there. Anyway, the other ladies told me to go ahead and leave at 12:30 because there just were very few people coming in. (The lunch runs from 11 to about 1).

It took some time, yes, but it was kind of nice to do it. For one thing, it's nice to do something where people are actually grateful for what you do. One guy - it made me smile - one of the ladies asked him how he was doing, and he looked down at the plate she had just filled for him, grinned, and said, "I'm doing good, NOW." So I guess that improved his day a little bit. (We served lasagna, which seems to be a really popular choice: lasagna, garlic bread, salad, and cookies.)

We also stay and serve. I guess not all groups that serve do that - some drop off the food and have the students serve themselves. But I think it's nice to serve the students, for a couple of reasons: first, I often see people I have or have had in my classes, and it's sort of nice to be able to say "hi" outside of the classroom context. But more importantly, I think that in this largely self-serve culture we live in now, it's just good and pleasant sometimes to have someone do things for you - to do that little bit of help. True, it's not necessary, it's not essential, but it's nice. I think it would be nicer to come rushing in after class to get lunch and have a person fix a plate for you with what you want and hand it to you, rather than have a sign up saying, "Food is in the oven. Help yourself."

I admit it: sometimes when I go out to eat for lunch, it is not because it's faster or necessarily because the food is better than what I'd get at home. It's because it's nice, once in a while, to be able to sit down, look at a list of possibilities, have someone come and ask you what you want, have them bring it to you and then take the plates away for someone else to wash when the meal is done. Sure, eating out is expensive. Sure, not eating out is a way to economize. But sometimes it's nice to be served, rather than always serving yourself.

***

I decided I'm going to pretend I didn't get that announcement about the volunteer thing. For one thing, it's very likely to be raining on Saturday. And for another, I did an awful lot of "volunteering" last week in the service of the profession when I went up to Broken Arrow for those meetings. And I volunteered some yesterday, though I'm not sure how much a faith-based-group volunteer job would count at a public university.

Actually, I thought more about the academic culture (particularly in the sciences) and how it's a little odd, and how maybe it plays badly with some parts of my personality.

There are two things about it in particular that I think influence my periodic frustrations with the job.

First of all, there's very little encouragement given. You're kind of expected to assume that if someone's not beating you over the head and telling you you're an idiot, that means you're doing OK. I think this is actually part of the idea behind why praising your kids much is a bad idea: they come to expect it. All going up through school I heard how good my work was, how clever I was, so on and so forth. And then in the working world, you're kind of expected to continue to believe that your work is good and you are clever without any real outside verification of such.

And for people like me, that's just hard. I have a very hard time looking at anything I've done and declaring it 'good.' I'm a lot better at seeing the flaws than I am at seeing the positive parts of it.

And second, although a lot of lip-service in many areas of the working world (not just academia) is given to Taking Care of Ourselves and Wellness and all that rot, really, deep down, the expectation is that Taking Care of Ourselves is for those times when we're not actively working - vacations, maybe. Also, in academia, there is an odd little culture of martyrdom going on: it starts in grad school, where someone will say, "Oh, man. I was in the lab 30 hours this weekend!" and someone else will counter with "I worked 85 hours last week!" And while a lot of that is pretty heavily exaggerated (and the person MAY have been in lab 65 or 70 hours, but a big chunk of that was spent dinking around waiting for analyses to run or something), there's this general attitude that you are Sacrificing Your Life For Something Bigger, Namely Science.

And that does, to a certain extent, carry over into the professional world. At least in the sciences. (I don't know about other disciplines but I do know when trying to organize a committee meeting once, and I tried to get a Friday meeting time, one of the people in another department remarked, "I don't come in to campus at all on Fridays, ever, not for anything." My response was "Must be nice" and I hung up to call EVERYONE else back to try to find a new time...) There's also sort of an unwritten expectation that for uncoupled or coupled-but-childless people, they're going to be in a lot more hours than the people with kids. That they took the "more research" end of the tradeoff.

I also think because the expectations of Getting Stuff Done are so high, that I don't often step back and realize that I do get a lot done in a day; when I mention what I work on in a given day to friends outside academia, some of them are kind of amazed.

And so it all feeds on itself. And it feeds on the bad parts of my personality: the perfectionistic part, the part that's racked with guilt when she's not working, the part that says You Didn't Have Children So You Have To Make Your Life Contribution In Some Other Way, And Darnit, People Aren't Reading What Papers You've Written.

I think there's also the added stress that I know in the back of my head that my committee is going to be meeting some time in the next month to decide on Full Professor for me, and while this should be the "easy" committee (the one of my peers), I still can't help but feel that there's So Much Else I Could Have and Probably Should Have Done, and that maybe the decision won't be favorable because of that.

And now, I really must go and grade some homeworks...