* Earlier, I wrote a long rant in response to a comment I saw somewhere suggesting that colleges have become like a four-year stint at a country club. Maybe some colleges, I don't know. All I know is I work too hard and am too tired and too filled with angst over whether I'm doing the right thing by my students too much of the time to feel like a country-club counselor. (And I think most of our students: some of whom are first-generation college attendees, some of whom are working parents, some of whom are former military, would be offended at the idea they are pampered babies)
I don't think I'm going to post it. Because it's one of those issues where when people have made up their minds, their minds are MADE UP and nothing I can say will change it and it will only sound to them like whining. But I will observe that I'm tired of cracks about "overpaid professors" and "too fancy buildings" while I am weathering a 9% pay cut for "exigencies" (and a bigger one for the summer) and am having to dodge buckets put out to catch drips from the perpetually leaky roof every time it rains.
(According to the "Average Professor Salary" thing that came out this week - I think AAUP does it? I make the equivalent average salary of a new assistant professor in my field. I have 16 years of experience and am a full professor. And yeah, I get that my cost of living is lower than lots of people's because of where I am, but it especially makes the cracks about "overpaid" sting)
* To be honest, I don't even WANT more pay. More than anything, I want to be left alone: for one thing, to have less administrative work added to my week and for another to have fewer busybodies who have never lived my life telling me what a "waste" my career is. Or telling me how to do my job. Mostly the second, to be honest. I've even gone beyond wanting people to care about or respect what I do; I just want them to not be mouthing off about how stupid they think my career choice was.
And yes, I get "it tells you more about them than it tells you about you" but it's just wearing and takes away some of the morale I have left.
* I dunno. I look back at when I was in my late teens and early 20s and realize I had NO IDEA how petty my problems were then. I know there are some of my students who have big and genuine problems compared to what I dealt with. But I do wonder if some college students tend to blow things out of proportion because they have nothing to compare against? I will confess I periodically suffer from a slight lack of sympathy over the student who is worried about missing stuff in class because they have a skiing vacation or something that was already planned and paid for, or the student who is "tired" because her best friend is planning a wedding and she is the maid of honor, when I compare it to the student who is waiting for that call from the hospice about their dad, or the student who has a chronically ill child.
(And yes, all those things wear on me. The student with the skiing vacation because I think, "Gee, it would be nice to feel like it's okay to go and pick up and have fun in the middle of a semester" but also the student with the chronically ill child, but for different reasons. And yeah, it's not a pretty thing but I admit I am somewhat jealous of the people who feel entitled to just pick up, drop their responsibilities for a week and go have fun. I'm not even entirely sure how I'd define "fun" for myself right now; my definition of "fun" is so small and so thin....it's either getting to work on a sewing or knitting project or maybe getting out of town to shop at a grocery store that's NOT wal-mart, and that's not genuine fun.)\
* And yeah, every bit of budget/state news I'm seeing is various agencies "circling the wagons" and arguing how their needs are the most important needs of all. And while I get a lot of those needs are really important, it's exhausting and demoralizing.
* Dangit, I really should have gone to visit family over spring break. I can tell not taking a break was bad for me.
* I think I do suffer from a deficit of fun but I don't know how to work it into my life. (I've also said, in response to people who suggest the whole online-dating or similar thing, that I don't think I would have the TIME to give to a relationship, especially in its starting stages, not the time it would need)
* Another thing, while I'm feeling sorry for myself: I saw an ad for this the other day and grumbled that it was a reminder to me that the 1970s hated children. (NOTHING like that was available when I was a kid. If I was lucky, once in a while my mom would let me take a few dining room chairs and build my own blanket fort, but there was very little in the way of cute or fun room stuff when I was a kid. And I remember how hard I had to lobby my dad to get him to paint my bedroom pink, even!)
Though I will admit I'm not tremendously moved by any of those options. (My decorating mode when I was a kid was pretty much: stuffed animals everywhere.) And I guess I would have been annoyed if I had had parents who were always on me to keep my room House Beautiful perfect. (And I had friends who were not allowed to play with toys outside of their rooms lest they "mess up" the house, and they had to put everything away when they were done playing, even in their rooms. My parents were more, "As long as there are no old plates growing mold and the bed is fairly clean and you shut the door, we're not going to worry too much"
But still. I would have loved one of those round netting-canopy things.
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