Two main ones:
1. I finished "my part" (and then some) of the teaching-lab/prep room deep clean and reorganization today. I scrubbed down all the countertops, put away every bit of glassware we had had out, unplugged the drying oven....
And it occurs to me: I want to make a couple posters to put up in there. My original thought was to "repurpose" old Soviet-style imagery and put my own captions over it, but I suspect the "optics" of that could be misinterpreted in the Brave New World in which we dwell, so instead I might either use that "online warning sign generator" (if I can find it again) or see if I can locate some 1950s-American-industrial-style imagery and use that.
Poster 1 will be:
NO FOOD OR DRINK IN THIS ROOM EVER
Because, according to OSHA law, it is forbidden. And also, it's just bad practice: we work with acids and lye and cyanide compounds in that room and you really don't want to set your ham sandwich down where any of those have been.
The thing that amazes me? I often get our Safety (think: Industrial Hygiene) majors in one of my classes where we use the chemicals, and they are often the worst offenders! Which kind of breaks my brain because many of them, their career will be, in the future, measuring/enforcing compliance with the very rules they break.
Poster 2 will be some variant of (I am pretty sure I talked about this before on here)
YOUR MOTHER DOES NOT WORK HERE*, CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF. WASH AND PUT AWAY GLASSWARE.
(*AND EVEN IF SHE DID, YOU ARE AN ADULT AND IT IS NOT HER JOB TO CLEAN YOUR MESSES)
The original version of this (without the glassware bit because it was a map room) hung in the map room at the campus where my dad taught when I was a kid/teen. I think he put up the signs: he was departmental chair. The addendum - the asterisked bit - was something one of the women grad students (he had several; I *think* it might have been Barb, she and her family wound up being family friends later on) added to the sign and I thought it an improvement.
If I want to go with 'classic American industrial imagery' I suppose I could use Rosie the Riveter on that one, even though she would be more like grandmother age (for me) or great-grandmother (for my students).
Shoot, if I knew someone who did graphic design and I had a few bucks to throw around, I'd hire them to do it for me. But I don't have the bucks to pay someone and I don't really know anyone in graphic design, so I'll try to do it myself.
So now the ball for putting the rest of the stuff away (there's not much and it's all 100% his stuff) is in my colleague's court, even if he did "injure his arm slightly" and "can't lift stuff."
And eventually the guy in my department who is good with hand tools is going to make me a pegboard for hanging up my sampling frames.
2. A lot has been discussed about the....for lack of a better term, increase in sharp elbows/incivility. Like refusing service. And, I don't know. I get disagreeing with someone on grounds of policy, I get resisting policies you think are bad....but then making cracks about how someone looks or similar, for me, that kind of....I don't know, it feels to me like it's getting on a needlessly low level. Yes, I get that people have done that FOREVER and perhaps some of my revulsion for it is that I was one of those kids who had cracks made about how she looked, like, from age 9 or so until I was well into high school, and every time I see someone doing something like that about a public figure it does bring up a little bit of that for me.
But also, the whole incivility/sharp elbows thing. It does make me worry a little bit: what if we end up with a 100% sharp-elbows world? Where even private citizens get harassed vocally? Where it goes beyond politics to just be 100% harshness, all the time, for everyone, and you have to be big and loud and a little coarse to get by in this world?
I guess my concern is: I'm not a sharp-elbows person. I can't do that. As I've said before, I'm fundamentally Fluttershy in a human suit and if I go to a place and people start screaming at each other, I run away. I don't even like the grocery store when it's very busy. And I wonder, as (what seems to me) we spiral down into a world where it's literally every person for themselves....what happens to people like me, who really can't defend ourselves by getting loud and big and coarse, and who really have no one to defend us? (Long-term single, no kids, not that many nearby friends).
Confession: just as Charlie Brown once commented that he would lie awake at night wishing to hear the words, "But WE love you, Charlie Brown!" I kind of wish sometime I would hear the words, "But *I* will stick up for you if you're not strong enough to stick up for yourself!" But that doesn't seem to be an option enabled in this life for me.
Hence the idea of being a hermit or a virtual hermit. (Virtual at best; I must still go out into the world to teach)
I guess we just start ordering everything we can online, and we become more and more hermits.
(Which wouldn't be so bad if it were the Monty Python's "hermit sketch" type of hermits, where we had chatty hermit neighbors we could go out and see on our daily walks, but....I don't think it works that way).
I dunno. I get very tired of human behavior. I don't know if people are getting worse or if I'm just noticing it more but more and more I have little desire to really know what's going on in the outside world.
And this also coupled with a feeling of fundamentally what was futility this afternoon. I came back from lunch at home, sat down at my desk, looked at the three classes' worth of material (An ecology book where I'm up to the chapter on population regulation, my copy of "Intuitive Biostatistics" and I will say I finally learned from it "why do you do logarithms on some data" - it was never clearly explained before, and a copy of "Environmental Geopolitics" for Policy and Law), and I just felt a certain...despair. That what I'm doing doesn't really matter and even if universities and higher ed survive the next ten years, relatively few people CARE about what I'm teaching, and so it's like "Why am I trying to upgrade my teaching, it's sort of useless?" but at the same time I feel like I can't just go home and enjoy my summer because I feel like I need to have something to show for it on my Faculty Development Plan come fall....and it's not a fun or happy headspace to be in.
I dunno. I got such a dose of optimism and idealism as a student, the idea that I could make the world a better place, that it's really hard to cope with the adult realization that what I do for a living isn't really THAT meaningful and that I probably really need to see it mainly as an means to an end (a paycheck, so I keep a roof over my head and food on the table) than as any kind of source of meaning or way of making things better. I don't know.
It doesn't help that it feels like it's about eight thousand degrees outside, and it's not a whole lot cooler in my office. (I suppose I could work at home, but I'm not sure I'd be that disciplined)
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