Monday morning thoughts

We have a tenure follow-up process that is slowly grinding to life now. The idea is, every three years, you are assessed by a jury of your peers, who write a letter telling you if you are proficient or deficient in the three areas (teaching, scholarship, service) that are important.

One of the goals of the process is to find areas where the person Needs Improvement. And I think, honestly, everyone is going to be told they need to improve something. (We are told "this process is developmental and not punitive" but).

And this plays into a lot of issues I have. I am a perfectionist. I feel terrible shame when I do something less than ideally. So much so, that sometimes if I'm not that great at something, I refuse to do it (see: not participating in any piano recitals after that first one). And also, I feel like, "I'm tired all the time, my house is a messy wreck, I say to myself on a regular basis 'you should give away all your fabric and yarn because you never have the time or energy to do anything with it' and yet I'm NOT GOOD ENOUGH AT WORK?!?!!" And as I've said in the past, I feel like, if I'm working as hard as I should and I'm still "not good enough," why am I still employed?

And yeah, I know. One of my colleagues kind of rolled his eyes at me and told me I "just have to play the game" but it's a painful game for me.

Being told I Need Improvement reminds me of grade school days. In the early days, we didn't get letter grades (I think sixth or seventh grade was the first year for that?). Instead, the categories were Outstanding, Satisfactory, and Needs Improvement. I rarely got Needs Improvement, except on things like penmanship or (rarely) gym type things. But I was given to believe that getting a Needs Improvement was a big bad deal, and that you deserved, at the very least, to be kept in at recess or not go out to play after school while you worked on that thing. So hearing that I "need improvement" in some area makes me feel like, I don't know, I need to give up fifteen more minutes per week of doing what I want to do and work on that thing.

Also, I wonder: if you are told you Need Improvement in one area, what happens the next go-round? Are you found to have slipped in some other area? Or is it a constant treadmill of doing more and more and more and more until you can't any more? (This is why I said the "doing the best you can" is a fool's game: you need to hold something back so you don't have to kill yourself to improve)

And yeah, I know: this is all "my stuff" and like my colleague says, I just have to play the game. But sometimes it feels like the job is all I've got going in my life, I've given up an awful lot for the job, and it pains me to hear that in some way I'm not good enough.

I have three meetings today. First is at 8 am. Last is at 7 pm. This is not going to be a good Monday.

***

I guess this week is Mardi Gras? Makes me think back to grad school, when we'd have a lot of students absent those couple of days. Yup, many of the (I don't think I'm over-assuming here) more-privileged students from the Chicago 'burbs used to drive down from Illinois to New Orleans to party. They'd come back, bleary, on Thursday, proudly wearing their beads. (Signalling. Always with the status-signalling: "I am wealthy enough to take a short trip like this and I feel I can afford the time to do it, now look at my beads, beadless person")

Someday I would like to go to the parade in one of the smaller towns - I know some Lousiana and even East Texas towns do Mardi Gras, and some of them promote it as a "family friendly" version and that would be a lot more my style than the more-crowded, more-debauched "traditional" version.

(Where I came from, the Fat Tuesday tradition was, depending on your origins, Paczki Day or Pancake Day. Paczkis - a type of donut - if you were Polish/Slavic, pancakes if you were British Isles, especially if your family was still nominally Anglican/Episcopalian.)

Of course, on the following day, you'd see students with either dots or crosses of ash on their foreheads, but I saw that as different from the Mardi Gras kids with their beads. (The two groups did not seem to intersect)

***

I've been occasionally rewatching some of the older episodes of "The Simpsons" as FXX shows them.

I know a lot has been made about how "the early seasons were better" but really, they are. Some of the storylines are quite poignant, and in some cases raise some philosophical questions. They had one of my favorites - the one about Bart's soul - on the other night. (Bart, claiming to Milhouse that he doesn't believe in souls, is goaded by Milhouse to sell him his. Bart does, and things start going wrong - the cat and dog won't come near him, Marge feels "something is missing" when she hugs Bart goodnight. Gradually Bart suspects that he DID have a soul, and somehow, he managed to sell it to Milhouse. And now he wants it back.

Eventually, Bart has a moment of faith and he actually prays: "Are you there, God? It's me, Bart Simpson. I know I never paid too much attention at church, but I could really use some of that good stuff now. I'm...afraid. I'm afraid some weirdo's got my soul and I don't know what they're doing to it! I just want it back. Please? [starts crying] Oh, I hope you can hear this."

There's just something kind of poignant about that. The whole "I could really use some of that good stuff now" and "Oh, I hope you can hear this."  (I think also Lisa makes some comment about how some faith traditions believe you're not born with a soul; that you earn it by suffering and prayer in this life? Perhaps this is a nod to her (later) adoption of Buddhism?)

For all of the attention it got in its early days (and I remember all of this; I was in my early 20s when it first debuted) for being crude and rude and featuring a dysfunctional family, especially in the early seasons there were a lot of nuggets of heartfelt emotion and actual philosophy - and arguably, religion is at least sometimes portrayed positively. (Ned Flanders, as ridiculous as he is shown as being in some cases, is fundamentally a good guy who understands the concept of loving one's neighbor).