the biggest thing

I had to set a boundary yesterday.

I kind of hate having to do this; part of it is I fear being perceived as "mean" or "inaccessible" (which brings up all kinds of bad memories from May 2012). But I had to do it.

I had a student e-mail me at 8:43 pm (that was the timestamp, at any rate) Monday asking me for a 2:30 pm Tuesday appointment.

I do not hold Tuesday afternoon office hours, for the simple reason that that's when piano lessons fall, and also it's the day I do the few little errands I can't do on the weekend because there are some places that truly do hold banker's hours.

Also, I had already mentally planned out Tuesday afternoon: run home around 2 pm, clean up my house (because of piano lesson - the teacher comes to my house so I feel I have to, at a minimum, have the floors swept and the accumulated mail gone and the bathroom in tolerable condition), run to the post office, run to the bank (that didn't happen but whatever), do the rest of my day's practice....and I knew holding a 2:30 pm appointment would get me out of here around 3 pm, too late to do all of those things, or at least, to do them with any kind of comfort.

And I really debated: Am I being a monster for telling the student no? (This is how much the "student centered' modern campus has altered my way of thinking). Should I just suck it up and either have my piano teacher come to a pit of a house, or not be appropriately ready for the lesson (granted, I've been practicing an hour or close to it every day, but still - I'm obsessive enough that not practicing "enough" on the day of the lesson has a reverse Dumbo's Feather effect on me and I tend to play badly).

(ETA: And I admit, I blamed myself: "Look. If you had taken Sunday afternoon and cleaned house LIKE YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO instead of going all 'oh, I'm too TIRED to, I can do it Tuesday' you wouldn't be in this mess.")

And then I thought: You know, I had less than 24 hours to plan on fitting this into my schedule. I have a rule about paperwork/administrative tasks: no one is allowed to hand me something that has sat on their desk for three weeks and then tell me "You have to complete this in the next five hours" and I also generally say I require 24 hours at least for that kind of thing. And for things like letters of recommendation, you better give me at least five business days, preferably more.

So I decided my time was still my time, even if the university has technically bought 173 hours of it per month (according to my pay stub) and if I had plans, I already had plans.

So I took a deep breath, and even though it made me feel slightly ill to do so, I announced to both my classes that I needed a 24 hour minimum time to schedule "outside of office hours" appointments.

(For what it's worth: I hold 10 hours of office hours per week, a minimum of one per day. That's what's mandated. I'm also here every day from 7 am to 8 am, which is unofficial, because we're "not allowed" to have office hours that early in the day)

And the person in question came up and scheduled a new appointment with me for a time I could meet.
(I had e-mailed them back saying, "Sorry, I can't do that time" but they had not read their e-mail).

But yeah. I have a hard time with that. I have a hard time reclaiming my time when it's "just" my time. I wouldn't have had a problem with it if I had had a dentist appointment or a Library Committee meeting or somewhere I "had" to be.

I don't know why it's hard for me to say "No, I can't do that then" when I'm asked on short notice to do something and I have plans - granted, plans I could alter, but still, plans. I don't know why I put myself out sometimes and then feel vaguely resentful about it. There have been evenings when meetings have been called where the ONE thing I wanted more than anything was to go home and just read a book, but instead of saying, "No, I really can't meet then," I suck it up and go to the darn meeting, even if it's the third fourteen-hour day I've had that week and the second meeting in the day.

(Part of the problem, I am sure, is the fact that because of how I think I tend to assume requests made of me are requests made because the person making them thinks they are reasonable and expects me to say yes; I don't seem to have a possible setting in my brain that goes, "Go ahead and ask for a pony, you probably won't get it but you might." Instead, I might ask for an ice-cream cone, but only if we are going by a shop that sells ice cream and there's a lot of time in the schedule and I haven't had a treat in a while). Perhaps part of my feeling of "I seldom really get what I want" is that I'm not good at ASKING.