What Now?

Some further thoughts

I appreciate your thoughtful comments on my last post. As you may imagine, I've had some food for thought these past few days. It doesn't look like the relevant administrators will be able to make tomorrow's department meeting, but I still have a brief meeting with the head of school tomorrow mid-day, and then I presume that department members will do some brainstorming at our department meeting so that we have a proposal to give to the higher-ups.

I've particularly been thinking about nicoleandmaggie's comment about what it would take to make the department chair position worthwhile. (I was actually an economics as well as an English major as an undergrad, so this is already how I tend to think about such decisions, but I very much appreciated their phrasing the relevant questions so clearly!)

And here's what I've come up with: I would take on the chair position if I could also keep my current fifth-period equivalencies (so there's no issue of getting them back the year after) and teach only three classes instead of four, all with the proviso that my being in that position would not affect D's chances of being hired for the sabbatical replacement. (Obviously if she were hired someone else would have to do her evaluation, but that shouldn't be a big deal.)

Here's why I think this scenario could work for me: My sense is that chair duties tend to be episodic, as do the tasks of my other non-teaching duties, so having one fewer course -- since teaching/grading is the sustained, day-in-and-day-out work -- means that I think I would still have mental energy to write in the quieter periods. This scenario would mean that there was an additional course to be covered in the English department next year, and I don't know how the funding for these things works exactly; I mean, the total quantity of work being done would still be the same, because if someone else in the department took on my current fifth-period work, that person's current fifth-period work would presumably be done by someone else, just perhaps in another department (if it were a case of coaching or the like).

Now, whether the head of school would go for this or not, I don't know, but I feel good about it as a proposal. I don't know exactly what her agenda is tomorrow for our 15-minute conversation (and she was very clear about the time limit on it), but I anticipate that I'll get a chance to pitch this idea even if we don't get to really talk about it. But of course I'll wait to hear what she has to say, in case she's making an even better proposal!

Here's a confession: One reason that I am reluctant to take on the chair position is that I'm not at all convinced I'm a good leader. I mean, I did a great job a few years ago running a committee as part of our school's self-study, but that was a strictly focused, time-limited project in which committee folks were just as happy to have me running a tight ship because we all realized that it would make for less work for us all in the end. But department chair is another beast altogether; the English teachers at FGS tend not to be a dispassionate lot (as I think is the case for English teachers everywhere!), and I get queasy in the face of open conflict, and I tend to worry a lot about other people's feelings and to get my own feelings hurt. A gazillion years ago, I was president for a year of the English grad student union at my grad school, and quite frankly I didn't get much done and didn't enjoy the experience much at all because I was so paralyzed about making decisions that people wouldn't like. Now, I'm much older and wiser now, but I still get uneasy about any decision I make that doesn't immediately result in crowds rising to their feet in cheers and huzzahs. I know that some of my departmental colleagues (maybe just a couple of them) think I have an outsized ego, but in some ways it's disturbingly fragile, such that my sense of equilibrium gets up-ended when other folks disagree with me too sharply (and of course I'm probably in no way unusual in this!), which makes me doubt my own leadership abilities. My picture of leadership is someone who can dispassionately weigh all sides, think creatively beyond the very notion of "sides," and make a reasoned argument about the best course, all while navigating the sometimes difficult waters of conflicting personalities and personal agendas ... and I'm just not sure I can handle that task. But I don't know that anyone else in the department can either! And why am I so convinced that a leader must be dispassionate, when I myself am so moved by other people's passionate leadership (when it's balanced by a good dose of calm reason)?

I was thinking about all of this this morning as I was avoiding grading by browsing the internet. Last night I had commented on Sisyphus's post about rethinking writing, and I went back this morning to read the other interesting comments, and from there followed the conversation to another commenter's blog ... at which point, I'll confess, I got my feelings hurt a little by one of the comments made over there. Or, rather, I started to get my feelings hurt, and then I thought, "Wait a minute, does this even matter? Do I actually care what someone on the internet who is not a close friend thinks about a comment that I made on another blog? Is this actually worth any energy on my part? Um, no." And then I thought, "Hey, maybe this is personal progress! Maybe I'm finally becoming someone with a healthier ego who doesn't need to be loved and admired all the time by everyone!" Now, I have a long way to go on this road, but it did give me some hope that perhaps I would be able to get through a year of being chair without living with hurt feelings and emotional distress all the time. I'm sure I would have them some of the time, but I do anyway; the percentage would undoubtedly go up, not least because the department chair meetings are really contentious and seem very unpleasant, which is so strange in a school that is otherwise fairly pleasant and tranquil, but I don't think I would feel as distressed at those as I would about problems within the department, which of course will inevitably occur.

(A digression: One thing that really distresses me about being officially middle-aged is that I thought I would be an emotionally mature person by now, and the fact that I'm not at 45 makes me question very much whether I'm actually ever going to get there. And I'm sure that this realization strikes every single person at some point in middle age, but that doesn't make it any less distressing to me to be having that realization.)

I'm going right from the meeting with the head of school into another meeting with another administrator about one of my areas of responsibility, and so I have a proposal in my back pocket for that meeting as well; it's supposed to be a "brainstorming" meeting, but I have a hunch that I'm going to be presented in the moment with a minor crisis (the subect of which I can anticipate), so it seems best to be fore-armed.

Between those two meetings, teaching three classes, spending a period in our writing center, meeting with the literary staff of the magazine, having this department meeting where we brainstorm creative leadership options for next year, and then going to a last-minute brief all-faculty meeting where an "exciting announcement" is going to be made (I have a hunch what this is as well), I anticipate being pretty damned beat by the time Tuesday is over! I'm also getting a stack of papers to grade that day, but I herewith give myself permission not to do any grading tomorrow night if I feel like I need the time off.

sabbaticals and possibilities

FGS has a great sabbatical program for faculty, comparable to a lot of colleges -- a whole year off at half pay, or Jan. through June off at full pay. Only two teachers get a sabbatical each year, and it's competitive but with a selection process that seems to be based on seniority more than anything else. It often takes two or three submissions before one is finally granted a sabbatical, but that's mostly about the program's being limited to only two teachers a year.

All of which is to say that I could probably get a sabbatical in a year or two, if only I knew what I wanted to accomplish during such a sabbatical. I actually wrote up a full application this fall and then didn't submit it because it became clear to me that I would HATE to spend a half-year working on the article that I had said I would write. I think I would wake up each morning feeling totally bummed that I had to work on it, which is not how the sabbatical is supposed to feel at all. I'm still so trapped in an academia way of thinking that my application was all about what I would *produce*, but that isn't necessary here. I mean, some people do produce things, and other people do straightforward things like coursework, finishing up master's degrees, etc., but other people apply based on the experiences that they'd like to have or the new areas that they'd like to explore. Department Chair's application said that she wanted to explore screen-writing (something she's dabbled in) and to read all six volumes of the Norton Anthology of World Literature; other colleagues have used the time to travel, to work in their artistic fields, to learn new technologies, to do political activism, and in one case to start working on a documentary film. The sabbatical plans have to be in some way tangential to one's teaching at FGS, but the connection can be somewhat tenuous. Other than those folks who are just trying to finish degrees, the program really seems to be about following one's passions.

Which brings me face-to-face with my current passion-less-ness.

It frightens me a little that I actually don't have any ideas for what I'd like to do on a sabbatical, that my mind is so worn into the same old ruts that all I could think of was writing an academic article ... one that, quite frankly, I'm only half-heartedly interested in. I can think of things that might be useful, but that's not really the same thing at all!

At least I had the self-knowledge not to submit that proposal and to recognize that I need to do some self-exploration, some trying out of ideas, before I ask for time off.

But all of that is a subject for future thinking and blog-posting. No, what I wanted to mention here and now is that my department chair was granted a full-year sabbatical for next year.

I'm glad for her -- she'd really wanted one for this year but been denied and had been very cast down about it -- but even more, I'm curious about what effects this will have on the department. As long-time readers know, she and I have had a very rocky relationship over the years, but things have really settled down in the last couple of years, and in some ways life would be easier in the department if we all continued rolling along as usual instead of having a new person come in for one year. But maybe it will do us all good to have things shaken up a little.

The awkward thing is that several colleagues, within the department and in other departments, have said something to me about how of course I'll be the acting chair for next year. And, honestly, I really am the natural choice; my one sometimes difficult colleague probably won't want the job (in fact, the reason we have our current chair is because she was hired after he refused to step into the chair role a few years ago), and the other two full-time teachers in the department are pretty young (29 and 30) and are only in their second year at FGS, and all the rest of the teachers are part-time. So it's not a crazy assumption on my colleagues' part that I'll be asked to step into the role, but of course I can't go around making that assumption myself.

And the reality is that I'm not sure I want it anyway. Part of the way that I made my peace with the Department Chair is that I disengaged from the department in some ways -- accepted the fact that she wasn't going to get anything done, understood that our mutual life would be a series of agenda-less meetings and dropped ideas and plans that never went anywhere. I spent my first three years struggling against this, and then I decided it was easier all around to just stop caring and to focus my attention on my own classes, which were within my control. And that's actually worked out quite nicely, especially since the horrible Dead Poets Society teacher went off to another school and all the current teachers are self-motivated and hard-working and thoughtful, so everything's been going along quite nicely without my having to put an oar in at all. Sure, there are departmental matters that I'd liked to see changed, but I'm not sure I would have the authority to change them in a one-year acting position anyway. And taking on the role would involve changing my attitude back to one in which I think a lot about the department as a whole, and then when the current Chair comes back, would I just be frustrated all over again?

Or would she come back and I would remain chair? I think that's not her plan at all, but it might be the administration's thought. It's been clear for years that they don't think she's good at her job -- indeed, this seems to be the universal judgment, perhaps with her as the one exception and perhaps not -- but FGS is fairly conflict-avoidant, and so everyone's just been hoping that something will change. Maybe her sabbatical is that change?

But of course I couldn't count on that, so I'd have to keep an eye on what would happen to my job duties the year after. At FGS, most faculty teach four courses and have a fifth-period equivalent (with a few exceptions of folks who teach five courses). In addition to my four courses, I run our writing center and I co-advise a student magazine, which together count for a fifth-period equivalent. Being a chair is a fifth-period equivalent, so chairs don't usually have any other roles in addition to their courses. But I wouldn't want to give up my current roles for one year to be acting chair, because then someone else would take them over for the year, and it's not guaranteed that I would actually get them back! So would it be possible to keep ALL of those roles and only teach three courses and have all of that count for full-time? Would FGS be that flexible? Hard to know.

Anyway, of course I can't talk about any of this publicly because my standard response when people mention my being acting chair is "Oh, heavens, I have no idea what the administration will choose to do under these circumstances. I guess we'll all find out in spring." And, indeed, probably nothing will happen at all until spring, because we don't sign our contracts for next year until March. So there are no decisions to be made and really no point in thinking about any of this until then. (Except of course that I AM thinking about it.)

In the meantime, Department Chair is in a better mood than I've ever known her; she's got that pre-sabbatical glow, which is a lovely thing to see.

And I'd like to have that glow myself some day, so I'm keeping at the back of my mind the question "What would you do if you had basically nine months in which you could do anything you like and didn't have to produce anything that you didn't want to?" It's a challenging question, actually, one that I don't yet have an answer for but would like to.

That queasy feeling

Almost exactly two months ago, I had a lovely chat with the head of school about career possibilities in administration.

This morning, I remembered why I really might not want to pursue those options, or at least why I should definitely think carefully before wading into those waters.

We had a department meeting this morning with our high school chief administrator and second-in-command to talk about various options for senior electives -- no big deal, and it went fine. But as part of that conversation, we started talking about interdisciplinary course offerings, and suddenly there was a lot more tension in the room as people started complaining about how such curriculum innovations are talked about as a good idea but then not supported by the administration with resources.

And I was definitely part of the tension as well and was frustrated not only by the administration, for the above reasons, but also by everyone present in the room, for talking about interdisciplinarity as though it could only consist of team-teaching interdepartmentally, and also by one colleague in particular who has (by virtue of a new role she's playing) starting chiming in all the time about how technology is going to really change everything, but in this case without saying anything more specific, as though iPads or whatever were going to make us all magically interdisciplinary.

So basically I was just in a grumpy mood, which has mostly been true all day, and so really this morning's meeting was just one more opportunity for me to feel grumpy, although I tried to hide it.

But also afterward I felt that sickness in the pit of my stomach and that shortness of breath that I always feel after a contentious meeting, particularly one in which I have spoken up strongly. In this case, I was worried that I had offended the chief administrator -- which made me unhappy not because of his position but because he's someone I like and respect -- and that I had spoken too much and not circumspectly enough. I checked in with other departmental colleagues afterward, none of whom seemed to think that the meeting had been any big deal, but I kept fretting and fretting. And afterward, when I had a spare hour during which I could have been grading or getting ahead in some respect, instead I sat down and hammered out a carefully worded email to everyone who had been at the meeting, following up to make an important point (important to me, anyway) that I felt strongly had been misrepresented in the meeting. And I've fretted about that email as well. Altogether I've spent a lot of mental energy on this meeting and its aftermath, and I've felt queasy the whole dang day about it.

... and at some point today I remembered that I used to feel that sickness in the pit of my stomach pretty much all the time, especially when I was running a (very small, budget-less) program at St. Martyr's. There's something about open conflict and about certain leadership roles that makes me feel queasy and nervous, and while I've continued to feel that all day long, the experience has reminded me how very thankful I am that I'm not normally in these situations anymore.

And I think I'd like to stay out of those situations insofar as possible! Which, I think, means not taking up some of the administrative positions that the head of school so helpfully outlined for me in August. Even though I think about the real possibility of getting bored and restless if I remain in the classroom exclusively, it's also worth remembering the real likelihood that working in administrative roles outside of the classroom will more frequently have me dealing with that sick-to-my-stomach nervousness. Food for thought.

I'm teaching Jane Eyre right now and was struck by Jane's metaphor for that same sick feeling once the adrenaline of speaking up dies down:

"A ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my mind when I accused and menaced Mrs. Reed [or spoke up too forcefully in a contentious meeting]: the same ridge, black and blasted after the flames are dead, would have represented as meetly my subsequent condition, when half-an-hour's silence and reflection had shown me the madness of my conduct" (Ch. 4)

Indeed.

Thinking about introversion, high sensitivity, and social anxiety

I've just now finished Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, which has been my main vacation reading. Cain defines introversion very broadly for the purposes of the book, thinking not only about the extroversion-introversion scale but also about highly sensitive types and about shyness/social anxiety, attributes that are often related but not completely correlated. The book has given me real food for thought, especially as the school year is about to get going.

First (because everything is all about me), it's given me some ways to articulate my changing sense of my own personality over the last few years and especially about my need for regular downtime, away from other people and stimulation -- a need that I have not always recognized but that I want to be more deliberate about fulfilling. As I was reading Cain's book, I started thinking that perhaps I was an introvert after all, although by the time I finished I had decided against this characterization; but of course these labels refer to the extremes of a scale rather than to two completely separate groups, and I do think that I'm further toward introversion than I have sometimes acknowledged. The one time in my life that I took the Myers-Briggs test, back in 1999 or 2000, I was almost in the middle on the extroversion-introversion scale, although I was slightly to the extroversion side. And I still think that's accurate -- at the time, I tested as an ENFJ, and that description still seems pretty spot-on to me, more than the INFJ description does -- but I think that, after receiving that "diagnosis," I adopted the label of "extroversion" without paying enough attention to the ways in which that label doesn't always fit me. A regular feature of ENFJ descriptions, for eample, is that "Because they are so tuned in to emotion, engaging with other people can sometimes become overwhelming for the ENFJ. More than other Extroverted types, they need time alone, away from the demands of serving and caring for others." (From this site.)

So I think if I had to characterize myself now, I'd say that I'm a mild extrovert with some social anxiety. I'm socially adept in structured situations, especially the classroom -- where I know the rules! -- but quite awkward in less structured environments. So, for example, during the week at Bard, I was outgoing and cheerful and talkative and friendly during class sessions but weird and awkward and inward-turned at the various social occasions, one of which I skipped altogether; at the opening reception, before the class sessions had begun, I got myself a glass of wine, walked around the room once, and then panicked and sat down on a bench in the corner and kept myself busy reading every scrap of paper in the program folder, even the stuff I didn't care about, so that I wouldn't so obviously have no one to talk to -- not my bravest moment! And I found going into the dining center quite difficult every single time, although I'd be fine once I was at a table where I knew someone. And the social event that I skipped was partly because I didn't want more social awkwardness but also because I needed some downtime after a full day of intense workshops.

Not that labels matter so much -- much more important to know oneself and act according to one's own best interests. So I need to make sure that I have enough downtime, especially important in a career that demands a lot of extroversion. (When I first switched to HS teaching, I was wiped out at the end of every day, not just from teaching four classes but from being socially on all.the.time! I have since learned to modulate in this arena, but I still don't often want to talk when I get home because I've drained my conversational reserves by 4:00.)

And I need to push myself through some of my social anxieties but also recognize that I'm just never going to be a person who shines in some social situations, and that's okay -- and actually, this is pretty much what I already do, going to programs like the Bard week even though I know ahead of time that meals will be stressful for me but that the class work will make it worthwhile. And I usually wind up making a friend or two at such programs. So that's all fine.

In part because I've been reading this book, and in part because we've had such a difficult year and are beginning to recover from it, D. and I have spent a lot of time this week talking about how we each think and interact with each other and the rest of the world. She tends to think aloud, whereas I tend to mull things over by myself and then announce decisions I've come to (sometimes about topics that I hadn't indicated at all that I was even thinking about), a classic extroversion/introversion difference. Neither of us is good at big parties, but she enjoys a dinner party, whereas I'd rather get together with one friend over coffee. We both need a lot of alone time as well as some together time. She's much better at talking with strangers in a meaningful way, while I'm much better at small talk with the neighbors. Again, we needn't rush to label these things, but it is worth our knowing especially our own and the other's more introverted or extroverted ways of thinking and communicating, the differences in which have led to some communication difficulties between us at times. Also, with an eye toward the year ahead, when she'll be home alone writing while I'll be at school interacting, she needs to seek out regular social interactions; we can't fall into the same pattern that we have at other points in our life together, when I come home tired of talking while she's been at home alone all day and is eager for conversation.

But this is not all about me, me, me. I was reading Cain's book in large part because I've been thinking over the past year about student personalities as they relate to class participation and learning. Last year I had two particularly large and talkative classes, and in a lot of ways those lively classes were really fun, but by their very excessiveness they highlighted some problems that I've seen repeatedly:

• Many students who talk a lot don't always have valuable or important things to say and are sometimes talking just to hear themselves speak and because they've been socialized toward certain modes of class participation. I got very tired of hearing students repeat what other students had already said, and we also had some problems (particularly in the younger class) of rampant digressions, such that I was often trying to rein folks in and keep us on topic, and it often took us much longer to work through a topic than it seemed like it should. I love the energy of these talkative kids, but that energy isn't always matched by thoughtful reflection.
• Some quieter students have really valuable contributions to make but either can't elbow their way into conversation or clearly don't think it's worth the cost to do so. Or sometimes they forced themselves to speak up in class but weren't really listened to by their classmates because they spoke less emphatically.
• And some students just check out and use a talkative class as an excuse not to do any thinking or work for themselves.

So I read Quiet to help me think about ways of engaging different types of students in the work of a class. And I came away from this reading ever more committed to trying out the Bard pedagogy that I first experienced this summer. I think it's crucial to create some environments in which everyone speaks but has gotten to carefully craft their contribution ahead of time and in which there's no fighting for the floor. We'll have more traditional free-for-all discussions as well -- both skill sets are important, after all -- but quieter students will know that there are regularly opportunities more suited for their gifts, and the check-out-of-class-mentally students will know that there will be frequent times when they have to engage whether they want to or not ... although I recognize that there's only so much to be done about students who are wilfully not taking advantage of their educational opportunities. My HS class this summer featured a lot of kids who wrote the blandest, most boring things possible during our "written discussions" -- the term I'm adopting for our Bard-style writing-then-talking experiences -- so obviously if one is intent on not thinking, one can manage to do so. But fortunately these kids are a distinct minority at FGS. Anyway, nothing really new here from my post right when I got back from Bard, but I have re-committed to this pedagogy as I head into the new school year; it's going to be a different enough way of running class from the FGS norm that I think such commitment from me is necessary so that I don't drift away it back to a class dynamic that is more familiar and thus more comfortable.

And I also want to make much more explicit with my students that class participation grades are aboutquality rather than quantity of comment! In fact, last year I toyed with the idea of dropping participation grades altogether, but then decided that class contributions were in fact an important part of student learning and something that therefore deserved to be part of the overall grade. But I want to stop writing on students' term comments that they should speak up more in class and instead find ways of talking about the quality of their ideas as expressed in writing and speaking.

Back to Cain's book itself: I would definitely recommend it, although with the usual caveat that it's longer than it really needs to be. With almost every chapter, I'd think "Yep, got it" ... and there would still be several pages left in the chapter. But it was engagingly written, had helpful things to say, and avoided oversimplification (or at least acknowledged when a particular statement was an oversimplification). I also found useful the chapter on cultural differences and particularly on Asian cultures and introversion; FGS has a large Asian population (about 40% of our upper school students board on campus, and many of those students are international, often from Asian countries), and Cain didn't say anything momentous that I hadn't already observed myself, but I still found it useful to read her interviews and research. I also enjoyed the historical chapters on the development of the Extrovert Ideal in American culture. Overall, it was a well-researched book; Cain is trained as a lawyer, not a psychologist, but she's spent years as a consultant on negotiating and on helping introverts work well in a largely extroverted culture, and she had clearly read extensively in psychological research and interviewed many specialists. And it's a book that I willingly read from beginning to end during my vacation week, so that speaks well to its merit!

 

Re-post: The background work of my brain

I'm re-posting here a blog post from the old iteration of my blog. I wrote this on Monday, May 30, 2005, back when we still lived in Small City and I was teaching at St. Martyr's -- in other words, a lifetime ago! -- and I'm republishing it because it's something I need to remind myself of far more frequently than I do.

D. and I were at a church party this evening that was in part about honoring the folks who spearheaded our parish’s recent capital campaign (and Lord save me from ever having to do that job). One of the honorees is a woman in her 60s who serves on the vestry with me and who was one of D.’s and my sponsors at our Holy Union blessing. In thanking everyone for the applause she’d just received, she said that it had been difficult work (and that’s an understatement — this fundraising campaign brought out some real ugliness in the parish, unfortunately) but that she only took on projects that she thought would bring her closer to God, and that this campaign had done so at every turn.

I’ve heard this woman make such statements before, but it really struck me this time. I have to confess (as I did to D. on the way home from the party) that I rarely think about what will bring me closer to God when deciding what projects to undertake, what decisions to make, etc. And here she and I are, both serving on the vestry, and while I get fed up with it at every turn, it’s bringing her closer to God.

D. repeated an observation that she’s made more than once, that our brains are always engaged in background tasks; if we ask ourselves a particular question at least once every day, the brain starts to gather information on that question automatically throughout each day. This woman from my parish clearly asks herself at least once a day how that day’s work could bring her closer to God; and, big surprise, she apparently finds answers to this question regularly.

In response to D.’s observation, I thought for a moment about what question I ask myself at least once a day, what my brain’s background work is. And here’s what I came up with: professional competence. Yes, several times a day, I assess my own and others’ professional competence as it has been or might be revealed in interactions, memos, expressed ideas, casual or formal conversation, etc. Gee, no wonder I feel competitive with other people; no wonder I’m often dismayed by others’ perceived incompetence or fretting about my own potential incompetence; no wonder I vacillate between smugness and insecurity. Ick, ick, blech.

It was kind of a shock to realize this about myself and to think about what it means for my life that this is what my brain is chugging away at in the background all the time. I don’t think it makes me a bad person, but I bet it doesn’t make me the happiest person I could be. I’m going to try to be aware of this background work and to spend some time thinking about what I’d like this background work to be instead. What daily question could my brain be asking instead that would bring me more peace than the ongoing assessment of professional competence?

And I want to save a few of the comments too:

From D. herself: Two of my favorite questions to ask myself frequently enough to work their way into my brain's "background tasks" are "What am I thankful for right now?" and "How am I experiencing God's presence in this moment/in these people around me?"

From Rev. Dr. Mom: Really interesting post...I hadn't thought about it this way before, but I like the idea of being intentional about asking yourself questions to frame the "background work" going on....and I especially like the two questions D posed in the comments. Someone dear to me taught me many years ago to try to focus on what I have and not what I lack, and being grateful to God and seeing God's presence around me are important elements of that.

From Bane/Ursula: A nice one is: "What strikes me as interesting or likeable about the person in front of me right now?" When my brain gets stuck in comparative and competitive modes, that's the one I turn to!

And from New Kid on the Hallway: Oh, WN, I so totally do the competive/comparative thing about professional competence too! I suppose for me a question that I could start asking myself is, What can I learn from this person? or even, What else might be going on here BESIDES professional competence stuff? Just to try to think about the whole person. It's a fascinating question - I hadn't even realized I was doing it.

Hospitality success!

Well, despite my qualms, it all went swimmingly!

... once she arrived, that is. Beforehand, I was cleaning and cleaning and cleaning some more. Seriously, I didn't leave the house for two days except to take oodles of trash and recycling out. Not that I was cleaning all that time -- sometimes I was avoiding awareness of all of the cleaning still to be done, by taking a nap or noodling around online or talking on the phone or in some other way trying to hide from the cleaning. But I couldn't really do anything fun until the house was clean, but I couldn't pull myself together and get it all clean until the pressure of the deadline was upon me.

During this afternoon's stint of cleaning, I was musing on Dame Eleanor's wisdom about house-cleaning services. Not affordable right now, unfortunately, since D. and I are once again entering the realm of single-income households, but that is so my dream for the future. Among other bonuses, I think it would do a world of good for D's and my relationship, since cleaning is always a bone of contention between us (as I think it is for many couples); the problem is that I feel so much more at peace in a clean house but am not committed to keeping it at that level of cleanliness, and D. actually feels no better in a clean house than a messy house, which means she has no intrinsic motivation to keep things clean. So between the two of us, the house is always pretty much a disaster. I know that a house-cleaning service doesn't make everything all better and that one has to clear away the clutter beforehand, but I do think that the built-in deadline for having the clutter cleared away at least once a month would do me a world of good.

But that's for the future; in the meantime, I have a (mostly) clean house, and it's feeling so good that I'm once again determined to keep it at this level of cleanliness. I was completely wiped out before my friend arrived, but then I had about half an hour of downtime before she showed up, so I put Ella Fitzgerald on the stereo, lay down on the couch, and read for half an hour, and it was just so lovely -- definitely a good way to live (sans the exhaustion, of course, although the reality is that I do need to recalibrate the amount of cleaning I do on a regular basis, so that I don't have to do these marathon sessions).

So I actually was nice and relaxed when my friend arrived, and we had a great time. We hung out in the backyard and drank wine and ate the yummy and ridiculously easy food I'd gotten (not quite take-out, as Dame Eleanor suggested, but close to it), and everything was great. So this was a lovely success, and I had a good evening, and I'm determined to have folks over more often, working through the anxiety I tend to have around offering hospitality.

Of course, I pretty much haven't gotten anything else accomplished this week, so I have to hit the ground running tomorrow morning. But at least I'll wake up without the threat of cleaning hanging over me, and I'll be able to settle happily into work in my fabulously clean living room. Sadly, the study is not yet all cleaned up; that's the next cleaning project ... but not for tomorrow!

Hospitality as anxiety

The only time in my life that I have felt comfortable inviting people over was in college, when either we were all in comparable dorm rooms or, my last two years of college, when I and a roommate were just off campus in an apartment, which was inherently nicer than the dorm rooms that most of my friends were still living in.

Before that, in high school, I lived in the cheapest house available in my very good school district -- a savvy decision by my newly divorced mom, but it meant that my friends' houses were usually nicer than ours. My discomfort at having people over at that point was mostly about class anxiety, not just about how nice our house was or wasn't but also about the hospitality that we could offer. My mother has very definite ideas about the right way to do everything, and sometimes that way gelled with what "everyone" was doing and sometimes it didn't, and she wouldn't budge. She's the same way still, and she's incredibly anxious about having people over, always worrying about whether she's doing things (i.e., food, entertainment, environment) the right way.

Post-college, my anxieties about offering hospitality started ratcheting upward. Was my apartment clean enough? Nicely decorated enough? What kind of food should one offer anyway? By the time I was in my second grad program, out in Grad School City, I hardly ever had anyone over, even though I actually had a pretty nice apartment that I managed to keep fairly clean and neat (at least by my current standards) most of the time. But by then I had discovered cultural (as opposed to strictly economic) class, and it was clear to me that I simply didn't know the right way to offer hospitality to others. Grad school friends seemed to offer food and drink so simply to others, but I didn't know the right way to do it, and I felt enough competition within my grad program that I just opted out of having anyone over. I actually loved my grad program, all told, but I mostly dealt with my fellow students on campus rather than on any of our home turfs.

Once I moved to Small City for my first job, my hospitality anxieties got worse and worse, mostly because we bought a house, which raised the stakes, and my own sense of what was right and proper got more and more fixed into "something other than what I'm actually doing." Our house was a total fixer-upper, and when we first moved in I had no problem inviting some new colleagues over, since obviously our house was not the way it would eventually be. But once we'd lived there a few months and had settled in, I stopped feeling comfortable with having folks over, because now it would be clear that we were just slobs with poor decorating sense.

Similarly, when we first moved up to Adventure City, we had a great party when we'd been living in the apartment for about three weeks -- after all, who is settled in at that point? But after that, I got too anxious to have people over, because our house was always a mess, D. always fixes too much food (in a way that goes beyond hospitable into belabored and oppressive, I fear), and somehow I worry that we're just not doing it right.

In our new house in Adventure City -- not so new anymore, actually, since we've been here three years -- we've had people over fewer than five times, and I've been a basket-case every time. There are any number of reasons for this, but certainly two key reasons are that the house is always a disaster area and the thought of serving people food makes me almost physically ill with nervousness.

... which brings me to this week. I'm having a friend over on Wednesday night. For dinner. Yes, this invitation was a decision that is necessarily bringing up my worst anxieties. But this is a dear colleague who is moving on to a new school, and the thought of not seeing her each day during the school year is so awful to contemplate that we've both been avoiding contemplating it by saying, "Oh, but we'll just see each other outside of school instead." But we've meant to get together every summer that we've worked together, and we've only done so once -- last year, at our city's version of Shakespeare in the Park, which is to say NOT in my home -- so obviously I'm going to have to pull it together hospitality-wise if we're going to continue to hang out together now that we aren't working together. So last week we made plans for this Wednesday so that the final party of the year wouldn't turn into the sob-fest that it would otherwise be.

But all of this was one thing in the planning and is another in the reality. I've been making half-hearted stabs at cleaning all day, but it's such an overwhelming task that I feel I don't make much progress at it. That is, I successfully clean one corner of the living room, or tackle the bathroom, and I'm feeling pretty good, but then I stand back and look at the rest of the house and despair. And I've made plans for a simple but (one hopes) tasty dinner, but I also know my track record of screwing up even the simplest of food when the pressure is on. And D is out of town at the moment, so it's all on me; in a way, that's easier, because this friend and D don't really know each other, but it also means that I have to juggle conversation and food preparation, which is going to be a strain, even given the simple food I have planned.

The good thing is that this friend knows about how terribly anxious I am at the thought of having people over and that this invitation is a big step for me, so I'm not trying to pull off a flawless performance, just to keep it together. My plan had originally been for us to hang out in the back yard -- which is easier to keep pulled together than the house itself -- but it's been cool and rainy enough that this probably isn't going to happen, which on the one hand is too bad but on the other hand means that I'm now not worrying about having the back yard in perfect shape as well as the house itself. And she has a total phobia about cats, which means that she's probably feeling as anxious about coming over as I am about having her over. (Part of the backyard plan was that she would thus be away from the cats, so now I have to work at keeping them away from her. And those of us who know cats know that her phobia means that they'll probably make a beeline for her all evening.)

She's coming over between 4 and 5 on Wednesday, and I have A LOT of work to do beforehand in cleaning and prepping food. I really do want this to be fun, not just because a fun evening is preferable to a bad evening but because I want to be a hospitable person who has an active friendship network, and I know that my social anxiety makes that almost impossible right now.

Wish me luck!

"Miss Committee"

This is what a friend (from both work and church) has taken to calling me, and he's quite right, and it must stop. I'm on four five [remembered another one] different school committees, which tend not to meet that often and are mostly not too burdensome, with the exception of the admissions committee, for which I wound up reading almost 100 applications for new students. Exhausting! All the more so, I'm afraid, because I underestimated how long it would take and thus wound up reading most of them in just a few days this week -- I haven't been this wiped out in a long time. Plus, as director of a program on campus, I have an hour-long evening service obligation every Thursday night -- not a committee, strictly speaking, but another regular item on my school calendar. But this schedule is do-able ...

... until I put the school committees together with the church committees -- I'm on the adult education committee and the steering committee for the Open and Affirming (ONA) process in the congregation (i.e., making explicit that we're gay-friendly) -- at which point things go from "busy" to "what the hell was I thinking?"

I got myself over-committed because (1) I'm still a sucker for the "honor" of being nominated and elected for things; and some of this IS an honor, but an onorous honor (say that three times fast), and I just need to let the gold stars go; and (2) some (although not all) of these committees are things I care about and think are important and want done well, which is just one short step from thinking that I therefore need to be on them; and (3) I agreed to these committees over time, without always knowing what was going to be involved or how it would fit into my schedule. For example, I cheerfully said "yes" to being on the ONA steering committee, knowing that it was an important process, pleased to have been asked so soon in my time at the congregation, and figuring that, as an ad hoc committee, it would meet a few times and then be done. So imagine my dismay when it turns out that the damn thing is meeting every other week for two hours each time and with no clear end point in sight! That's just crazy.

All of this came to a head this month, when in one two-week period of freakishly bad timing almost every single committee met, such that I had an evening obligation three nights in a row on top of afternoon meetings, all as the trimester was coming to an end. I finally just bailed on the ONA committee meeting (letting them know the day before, of course); I simply could not attend all of those committee meetings and still stay on top of my job.

So my new resolution is to make my friend's teasing moniker for me no longer appropriate. That can't happen right away, but the school committees are all just for this school year (and in fact the admissions committee work will be over as of Tuesday, I think), and next year I'm going to limit my involvement to the curriculum committee (which only meets 4 times a year, is actually fairly interesting, and lets me get my departmental service out of the way pretty easily and with minimal effort). On the church front, I was just elected to the adult ed. committee, which has a three-year term (!), but it meets only monthly and only during the academic year, and it's a pretty fun group of people that does its work fairly efficiently, so I'm happy to stay involved in it.

But the ONA committee, which is too big and fractious and unfocused and generally nightmarish? I'm getting off of that one as soon as seems possible! I feel obligated to stay on it until we have the congregational vote to become ONA, which should happen either at the end of the spring or the beginning of fall, and the committee will be on hiaitus during the summer, so it's not too dreadful, although the thought of those biweekly meetings is wearing me out. But here's where I must draw the line: after the church goes ONA (which is essentially a foregone conclusion -- one of the reasons I was willing to go ahead and join the church last fall), then there's supposed to be an implementation committee to guide how we live that welcome out as a congregation, and the expectation is that those of us on the steering committee will form the core of the implementation committee. And this is important work, and I'm the only gay person with gumption on the steering committee, so I worry about what will happen if I'm not on the implementation committee ... but I have to learn to say "no" and recognize that things will be fine even if I'm not there. Or maybe they won't actually be fine, but that doesn't mean I should have done something different. Plus, I had enough of being a "professional lesbian" at St. Martyr's, and I vowed not to take on that role again; I have to remind myself of this when I find myself starting to feel guilty about the thought of saying "no" to this new committee. (So please remind me of all of this next fall when the new committee forms!)

Fortunately, one of the things that has stayed with me this week from last weekend's writing retreat is the conviction that, if I'm going to be serious as a writer and commit to writing this biography, then I need to protect time for writing. It was really frustrating this week to have no time for writing (or for much of anything else) because the admissions committee work was so burdensome, and I want to remember that frustration the next time someone asks me to do something.

I hope that, if I frame the question primarily as saying "yes" to writing rather than saying "no" to committees and other committments, I will have an easier time sticking to my guns and eliminating the guilt I inevitably feel for not contributing when I might have.

As I wrote last weekend, the part of the writing retreat that was clearly good for other folks but that I felt I didn't need was the stuff about gender, about being convinced that one's voice was important, that one had the right to write instead of cleaning the house, etc. Yep, got it, all over that. But this week it occurred to me that perhaps this tendency to volunteer for things, to join committees and take on tasks, is a gendered phenomenon, another way of being a "good girl," not by being quiet and docile and those other things that I'm not, but by being helpful and useful and thus well-loved.

This "good girl" behavior is also, of course, a way to get immediate feedback to my words, rather than that longer, slower, more solitary work of writing. Because I'm actually quite good at the committee work I volunteer for, I get all of the satisfaction of making good points and making them well and seeing people nod and agree, and then I get to feel smart and powerful. So I think I need to wean myself off of needing excessive response (especially since teachers already get such responses in the classroom, and then there are the departmental and faculty meetings that I have to go to anyway; how much more immediate response do I really need?) so that I can settle into expressing myself without an immediate audience.

(And yes, I did just write all of this on my blog so that I can have an immediate audience and get a response -- clearly I'm a work in progress!)

Oh, right, it's the new year

I said "Merry Christmas" to you all back on the day and then disappeared for a couple of weeks, mostly because I was sort of wallowing in a blue Christmas. It was in most respects a disappointing winter break, with the big highlight that I finally got over the cold that was dogging me in December. But then we ended on a much brighter note, spending the New Year's weekend with friends and having just a lovely time, including teaching them to play mahjongg and then having quite the mahjongg marathon. So the break ended very well, a helpful boost as I headed back to school on Jan. 3. And now we're totally back in the swing of things, and despite the tiring week (how do I so quickly lose my stamina for teaching when I've been doing this job for years?), my mood has stayed at its New Year's high without dipping back into its Christmas lows, so 2011 is off to a fine start indeed.

Because I was feeling grumbly and down over the break, I didn't feel up to reviewing 2010 and making resolutions for 2011. Now that I'm my relatively cheerful self again, I went back and reread my New Year's post from last year (and realized that I had a couple of very down days during last year's winter break as well which kept me from doing a 2009 review -- maybe this is just a regular facet of the break that I need to accept?), and I think I did fairly well at living into my 2010 resolution of "reaching out," although I still am far from where I'd like to be in this regard.

Looking back over 2010 has reminded me that several highlights of the year are things that I hadn't exactly planned or at least wouldn't have anticipated in January 2010 -- joining a church, losing 25 pounds, learning to play mahjongg -- and so for the last week my thought was that I simply wouldn't make a resolution or declare a theme for 2011, because none of these things was directly a result of last year's resolution, and clearly a lot of stuff just happens in life without my having carefully planned it in January.

But then yesterday, as I was chaperoning an annual fieldtrip with our 9th-graders, a friend and fellow chaperone suggested that I hang out with her and have a little afternoon adventure after our fieldtrip obligations were done ... and the sad thing was how long it took me to wrap my head around this possibility and agree to it. There was no real reason not to do as she suggested, but it hadn't been my original plan for the day, and so my initial impulse was to say, "Oh, that would be fun, but no." Fortunately, I had a couple of hours to think about it during the fieldtip, and by the time I had to make a decision, I had realized that I could in fact embrace this sudden opportunity and finish off the first week back at school with an unexpected treat. Yes, it involved leaving my car at school and taking the commuter train back home from the city, and D. will have to take me to school at some point this weekend to get my car back ... but so what? These are not complicated logistics, and yet such considerations often dissuade me from doing otherwise fun things. Also in the past week, there arose a possibility for an interesting school-related situation, and in late December I also had a writing-related impulse (on both counts, about which more later), neither of I had planned, and I'm trying not to close down options prematurely in both cases; I think that far too often I do the equivalent of saying, "No, that would be fun, but the commute home would be too complicated." I'll never be a really spontaneous person, but maybe in the attempt to avoid bother and fuss, I say "no" too often to things that would actually make my life richer?

So I think my theme for the year is going to be "accept some fuss and bother in order to experience good things." Or, as less of a mouthful, "be open to possibilities."

"Oh, and what's-her-name"

This weekend, from Friday evening through mid-day Sunday, was my new congregation's first-ever church retreat.

By mid-day Saturday, I'd reached my limit and headed home.

The problem mostly lies with me. I had signed up to go, thinking that this would be a great way to get to know folks at my church. It's a big church, and there are all sorts of folks I know by sight but not by name, and there are any number of folks who know doubt recognize me but don't remember my name. So when this retreat came up, I thought, "Hey, what a great way to get to know some people!" But of course what I wasn't bearing in mind is that it's perhaps not a particularly good way for ME to get to know folks. I'm so terrible at coffee hour and mixer sort of chit-chat that I avoid these things, and when I have to do them they simply exhaust me. So why I thought I could plunge myself into 42 hours of this and be happy is beyond me, a stunning moment of lack of self-knowledge.

Of course, the answer is that I didn't think about it. I had been on one church retreat, years ago, and had a great time, but what I didn't really think about until it was too late is that that particular retreat was specifically for the 20s/30s group, and it was held after I'd been an active member of that group for a year -- no wonder I had fun at it! But it was about deepening relationships that already existed, not forming new ones.

And that same emphasis was clearly at play in this retreat, but I didn't realize that in time. So almost all of the folks who went on the retreat (really only about 15% of the congregation's population) were people who had been members for years and years. And I hope they're having a lovely time in deepening their relationships, which clearly is what many of them were looking forward to. But the retreat was not at all set up for new folks to build relationships in the first place, and perhaps I should have anticipated that. And maybe all of the other new folks had enough sense not to say they'd go away for an entire weekend, two hours from home, with people they didn't really know.

All of this was brought home to me in the following pair of incidents:

• I drove up to the retreat site on Friday night with an FGS colleague, we'll call him Jay, who has been a member of this church for well over 20 years. (Jay's wife was coming late to the retreat, so they're driving back home together.) The drive up was actually one of the best parts of the weekend, because by the end we were a little punch-drunk with fatigue, and when I missed a turn and we had to do a country-style U-turn, which involved a dirt road through the woods, the whole weekend seemed like a huge, funny adventure. And when the GPS guided us down a road that was, it turned out, blocked off by a huge cement barrier, we started laughing so hard that we were gasping for breath. As we were recovering enough to start thinking about what to do next, we realized a car had pulled up behind us. Fearing that they wanted to enter the driveway we were blocking, I turned around and headed back the other way, only to discover that the other car contained two of the congregation's ministers! (They're both part-time ministers associated with the parish, one of them temporarily as a sabbatical replacement.) They had similarly been led astray by their GPS, and so the two cars set off together, led by the other driver who actually knew the area fairly well. When we arrived a few minutes later at the retreat center site, both of the ministers reintroduced themselves to me, and we had some laughs about "we once were lost but now are found" as we headed into the evening worship service that was half-over by that point. It was actually a great way to start the weekend -- nothing as bonding as getting lost together! -- but then in the coffee hour sort of gathering after the worship service, I couldn't quite bring myself to crash any conversations, and I wanted to be careful not to cling to Jay, so I headed back to my room, thinking I'd gather my socializing energies over night and start fresh in the morning.

• I started Saturday morning with a three-mile walk around the lake with a whole group of folks, but the conversation beforehand was awkward -- folks who knew each other talked, and I stood there looking out of place -- and then we wound up straggling into a bunch of twosomes and threesomes, so I did the entire walk talking with Jay, despite my best intentions not to monopolize him. (But he actually sought me out, so I'm not fretting about that.) At breakfast there was the socially awkward chit-chat, but I was really making an effort to be outgoing, and everyone else was clearly making a social effort as well. But I was pretty much socially exhausted by the time breakfast ended at 9:30! After that was the morning worship service, which was led by the minister who is at the congregation as a sabbatical replacement but who has long-standing ties to the church and whose husband has been a member there for years and years. Let's call her Linda. She stood up and made a few opening comments, chiefly retelling the story of getting misled into the concrete barrier by the GPS last night, but just as she was getting really frustrated, there was the other car that contained none other than Jay, and wasn't that just such an apt metaphor! Ha ha ha, what an amusing story! As folks were laughing, Jay called out, "and WN!" And Linda said, "Oh, right, and ... I'm sorry, what was her name? Oh, WN, yes, is she here?" I waved my hand, but she was quickly glancing over the gathered group and didn't see and just went on with what she was saying. I can't tell you the last time I felt so completely erased. I hate to make too much of an off-hand anecdote, but this has now become for me the central metaphor for the entire weekend, which was clearly all about relationships among long-time members without even recognizing the existence of new members. I certainly don't blame her for not remembering my name -- that would make me the vilest of hypocrites, since I can never remember anyone's name! -- but, honestly, she could have (a) asked Jay beforehand what my name was, or (b) told the story without naming names, or (c) just not told the story. But for her to tell the story as though Jay were alone in the car and I didn't even exist -- well, it hurt. I sat there during the worship service (which was itself pretty bad -- clearly the retreat leaders took the attitude that I hate, which is that retreat worship is somehow more fun if it's sloppily done) feeling completely invisible in the midst of a crowd, which is one of the lonelier feelings.

And then, after worship, there was small group conversation; mine was led by a 79-year-old man, a long-retired FGS teacher who referred to me as "the kid from FGS," which amused me mightily and reminded me that I'm not unknown to everyone, but he was a terrible conversation-leader, and the hour stretched on and on painfully. And since my bed the night before had been terrible and my room absolutely frigid, I'd slept almost not at all -- actually sitting up at one point in the night and wondering, "should I just pack up and drive home right now so that I can get some sleep?" -- and I was having terrible back pain, which just made the whole thing worse. After the small groups, we had an hour of free time, and after hanging about for a few minutes to see if anyone invited me to do anything, I struck out on my own and did the three-mile lake walk again by myself to have some quiet time to think.

When I found myself crying over the "Oh, and what's her name" incident, I decided that I just wasn't up for another 24 hours of all of this, on top of another night in that awful bed, and that I would head home after lunch. I had gone into the weekend promising myself that I was allowed to leave if I wasn't enjoying myself, so I invoked that promise! Before lunch, I stripped my bed and packed all of my stuff so that I could just throw it into the car the minute lunch was over.

Of course, once I'd done all of that, lunch was actually pretty pleasant. Another woman was futzing around a little in the cabin, and I waited for her so that we could walk over to lunch together, and then she made a point of sitting with me to eat, and the lunch table was a slightly more relaxed version of the breakfast table in terms of getting-to-know-you conversation, so then I felt a little guilty about leaving. After all, people clearly were making an effort to include the new person in conversation, so why was I being so curmudgeonly and difficult and princess-y? But the thought of my packed-up belongings and already-stripped bed helped me maintain my resolve, and so after lunch I told a couple of people from my small group that I hadn't been feeling well all day -- not a lie, really, since I'd had such a bad night -- and had decided to head home. They looked skeptical but sympathetic and said they would make my apologies to the rest of the small group. And then I got the heck out of Dodge.

It was a much longer trip home than it had been coming up with Jay, but at least there were beautiful fall colors everywhere, and I knew I was on my way home. (Sadly, there was no D waiting for me at home, since she's out of town on business for a whole week.) When I got home, I immediately took two ibuprofin, put on my pajamas, crawled into my very comfortable bed, and napped for two hours, and I'm feeling much better now.

I'm glad I left when I did, and I'm glad I stayed through lunch, because I left knowing that the folks in the congregation weren't mean and ignoring me; it's just that it was a weekend clearly geared toward people who'd known each other for a couple of decades. And honestly, even if it hadn't been, I should know myself well enough by now to know that the best way for me to get to know folks is by working with them on something -- talking in a group about a book, or setting up for the homeless shelter, or in general trying to achieve some common end. If the encounter is just social, I freeze up. I've put my name in for the Adult Education Committee, a term that starts in January, and I think that will probably be a much better way for me to get to know folks.

So in the end, I'm feeling grumpy about Linda, which really doesn't matter much because she'll be off to another parish in a couple of months, and I'm still feeling like the congregation I've joined is a fine place, but I'm recognizing that it will take awhile before I feel fully a part of things. And I'm okay with not rushing that process and with maybe just showing up on Sunday mornings for awhile and not having friends in the congregation. But it's also okay that I took care of myself and came home when I did. So now I'll spend Sunday grading papers -- not fun, but I'll feel much better about the week ahead if I do it -- and not going to church, of which I've had enough for the moment.