At loose ends

Came in this morning to a message from my arranged-class student: she's afraid she has the flu, needs to go to the doctor, also doesn't want to bring the flu (if that's what it is) here. So even though I was thinking this morning "What do I prepare to talk to her about?" now I don't have to.

I don't know. For no good reason I feel slightly anxious this morning: overtired, maybe. Or keeping a running mental tally of the low-level uncomfortable things I must do (go down to the tag agency to get my car's license-plate sticker for the year, call back the GI doc and start the ball rolling downhill towards me getting scoped this summer*, obtain the stuff for the potato casserole)

(*Nothing is wrong, I have no symptoms. But apparently my regular doctor is not down with the "use the simple and no-prep-required test unless you have a strong family history" thing. I am hoping maybe after the consult with the GI doc he'll kind of sigh and say "There's really no need for you to do it right now, here, we have another test that's simpler that will show if you need to have it done" but....I guess that's off the table. I am mainly apprehensive about lining someone up to drive me there and back, and if I could somehow finagle my insurance to pay, frankly, I'd just arrange for a night stay in the hospital and drive myself** down there and then back the day after the whole thing is over)

(**Probably driving after the overnight GI prep is not a good idea though, considering you are going to be operating on extremely low blood sugar)

So anyway. I have some unpleasant apprehension about that.

Also it's just still cold and grey out, and it's going to be cold this weekend, and Monday we may have snow or freezing rain or maybe just cold and I am ready to be done with this. The weather either needs to truly get bad enough so classes are cancelled for a day and then leave, or it needs to become a bit more temperate. I am not looking forward to, however, what I expect will be the transition: we'll go straight from highs in the 30s and 40s to highs in the 90s, with no pleasant weather in between.

Last night, I knit some more on the Hygge blanket and watched a couple more episodes of "Parks and Recreation." One of the ones was "Woman of the Year," where the plot point is that Leslie (the protagonist) is up for an award from a women's group in Indiana. And, because Leslie (like all the characters in the show) is a caricature and is at least slightly ridiculous: she invests this award with great import. She WANTS this award. No, she DESERVES this award.

And it goes to Ron Swanson - Ron, the guy who acts lazy because he is in favor of smaller government and government doing less (but, he has a government job himself). Ron, the manly man who drinks Scotch and eats mass quantities of beef and does woodworking and is at times skirting the edge of being a Sexist Boss....he wins the award.

And it eats Leslie up.

And Ron, who deep down is actually a good guy (I liked him a lot better after this episode), secretly plans to give the award over to Leslie instead - because he recognizes she's done the work to earn it - but he's going to let her twist in the wind for a bit because "She attaches too much importance to these things"

Ouch. I feel slightly called out. I am Leslie here. (Actually, I am kind of Leslie in a number of ways, which may be why I find the episodes where she especially gets dumped on painful to watch: it's kind of similar to something I said a long time back about how Fluttershy crying made me uncomfortable, more so than some of the other Ponies crying*)

(*Well, Applejack, maybe, too, but that's because she typically 'cries on the inside,' something I've never totally been able to master)

But yes, there are two bits of truth to what Ron said (I am going to heavily paraphrase; I don't have like a script or anything in front of me:)

1. Most awards are political/popularity contests. (I have SEEN that. Maybe not when I was up for one and didn't win, but I have seen cases where I figured someone else was up for an award and they had a LOCK on it because of what they did, and it went to some "lesser" person, but....that person was well-connected or something and so they got it. And yes, lots of things even now are popularity contests, and I kind of hate that, because I tend to lose popularity contests: I am a nice enough person and all, but I am not "flashy" and am not the sort of person people think of first for things)

And of course, Ron was right about that: the woman who headed up the women's group fundamentally said "We chose a man this year as our winner of Woman of the Year because when we choose a woman it's never deemed newsworthy, and we wanted it to be newsworthy" and yes, I have seen that sort of thing too. (I have railed about how sometimes when a man designs a knitting pattern, he is lauded and lionized, but if a woman were to design a similar pattern, she'd largely be ignored, because a man knitting is still deemed Unusual Enough in the knitting community. I would prefer the really technically clever and/or beautiful patterns be the ones lionized, regardless of designer.)

(Supposedly Ron's comments were a slam at entertainment awards, and yeah, I can kinda see that, but I think in a larger sense his comments about not attaching importance to such things are correct and perhaps something a lot of us need to hear)

2. "You'll never be happy if you keep looking for outside validation." Intellectually I know this to be true. (I am happiest when I am working on a project that matters TO ME whether or not it matters to anyone else: sewing a quilt top, writing a manuscript over research I care about, researching some topic that interests me). Emotionally, I find it a lot harder. Again, I don't know if it's something "baked in" to my personality (a certain amount of personality, perhaps more than we realize, is genetic) or something I learned through the years: having parents who valued achievement, especially the kind of academic stuff that is largely meaningless in the "real world"*

(*Most jobs, they don't ask to see your transcripts. If you successfully graduated from whatever, that's good enough. As I said: my colleague talking about how a "weak pass" on his comps still counted as a "pass" whereas I would have hung forever onto, and worried over, the "weak" part of that statement)

And I was....well, I wasn't *quite* a "gifted child" in the traditional sense. I WAS tested for the fledgling gifted and talented program (called REACH, but I forget what that stood for) at my school, but I didn't quite make it. (A joke that is not very funny: "What is worse for your popularity in junior high than being in the gifted and talented program? Trying out for it, and not making it." And yes, that is absolutely true. I went from being harassed for being an "egghead" to being harassed for "being too dumb for REACH")

I later found out I was "kept back" in part because one of my teachers felt my handwriting (!!!) was too poor, and I needed to work on that instead (!!!!!) My handwriting is still bad to this day but of course it doesn't matter because I can type anything I need others to be able to read, and for grading marks on papers, I just tell students to come find me if they can't read what I've written. Most of them can read my printing okay....

I did get to participate in one of the "series" they did - it was deemed that I wrote well (in terms of grammar and content, not handwriting!) and I had an interest in history, so a group of us were picked to each interview an older resident in the town, someone who had grown up in the 20s-30s-or-40s there and to write up their "story" as part of a book (an early version of a "self published" thing, but still: a book that other people read). So I interviewed my lady at her home (the one thing I remember was her talking about the shock when "Gone with the Wind" played in the theater there and they had Clark Gable saying "damn"). It was fun. Though in retrospect: maybe it was better I didn't get pulled out of regular classes, it seemed a lot of the gifted and talented stuff was less academic and more "play" than what us loser-not-smart-enough-for-REACH types got.

Anyway. I was unpopular with my peers but my teachers seemed to like me (probably because I was compliant and worked hard) so they tended to give me the figurative pats on the head I desired. And I earned some academic honors. (Though some, really, weren't so great: I remember the end of seventh grade, the teachers conspired in my team so everyone got an 'award' for something. Mine was the "Extra Mile" award, which made me laugh bitterly when I learned years later that that was basically Jesus' advice to His followers as a way to shame the Romans: they could compel a man to carry their gear for a mile of distance, but the idea was, you went along, quietly and not-exactly-like-a-martyr carrying it for an EXTRA mile, because that apparently shamed them. Yeah.)

But yeah - I "learned" early on that earning academic honors felt good and it was something I could do, so I pushed for those. You know how some child psychologists now talk about not praising your kid for being "smart," or not praising them overly? I know why: you get used to it as a kid, and when you're an adult and get into a job where you basically have to assume that it no one is yelling at you that you're a "daft git," you are doing well, it is hard. Maybe some workplaces that's not the case but in academia, we do get annual evaluations, but unless you're told "shape up or ship out" in those, the feedback you get is....not something that feeds that howling void that tends to develop in the unpopular-but-kind-of-gifted-kid who learns to get their validation from their teachers.

(It's not for nothing I regularly joke about "wanting senpai to notice me." And yes, I get that "senpai" is really an older student - kind of, I guess, like a prefect in the British system - but the comparison still stands. And anyone who's a little older than I am or who has been blogging/tweeting/whatever longer, I do see them as sort of a 'senpai' at least if they aren't openly hostile to me. Or even someone who has more readers than I do, which is almost anybody with an online presence)

And the sad thing is? Now that I'm 50, I should have moved past that. And certainly, I should have found some way of "internally high-fiving" but I haven't - I still crave that external validation. Even if I realize it's silly, and yes, Ron Swanson is right: if you look for others' validation, you will never be happy. Sadly, I don't see it getting much better for many of us, not with the online dopamine-generating machine that social media is...