Yesterday morning I woke up with a tune in my head. It wasn’t a song I knew, but I kept hearing this repeating melody. I briefly thought about a gentleman who needs to stop by the office, but the tune returned, along with another one.
On Sunday night I went to concert, and I’m pretty sure that’s what allowed me to wake up groggy with a song in my head vs. waking up groggy and thinking about work. This might lend support to the suggestion I was making that finding balance requires having enough of “everything else” to beat back the day-to-day “stuff” that takes up a lot of my headspace. Both bands were high energy and I spent most of the show with a smile on my face and wanting to shake my ass (I’m not usually the ass-shaking type). The opening act was a brass band from Chicago. The main act, Galactic, was a funk, jazz, soul, rock mix from New Orleans. I saw Galactic once before when I was a student here. On more than one occasion, I found myself thinking, “yes, I need to do more of this” or “how do I find a way to spend more time going to shows and living life?”
Before the show, I went to a downtown bar for dinner. I usually avoid downtown when the students are here. I have no problem admitting that I’m a grumpy old man around them. As they drive recklessly past me in sports cars that cost considerably more than my salary (I’m looking at you white Mercedes slot-caring in and out of lanes and doing 60 in a 25), I tend to view the students as out of touch and privileged. Many of them, like students of almost every generation, live in their tiny bubble in which every minor personal drama rises to the level of a world catastrophe (says the blogger who writes about lots of daily and minor inconveniences).
Within a few minutes of sitting down at the bar, the bartender, a tallish young guy with close-cut blond hair, asked me if I knew what I’d like to drink. After a brief exchange about what IPAs they had, he handed me my beer and a menu. I sat there for a while doing what people alone at a bar do: looking busy by checking my phone, pretending to be interested in the sports scores on the TV, and clandestinely watching the people around me as though I might be peering over a newspaper or wearing fake glasses and a mustache. I sat there for a while. I wanted to order a burger, but couldn’t get either of the bartenders to make eye contact. They weren’t busy, they just weren’t personable. They spent more time towards the back of the bar talking with the other staff than they did with the five or six customers at the bar. In fairness, I didn’t try very hard to get the bartender’s attention. I didn’t raise my hand or make any type of “yo bro” head nod… but I did try to make eye contact. I looked at them, and was prepared to signal that I’m ready to order should they look at me any of the dozen times they walked past. We spent the next half hour like this – me observing, them oblivious.
Shortly after I placed my order, a young woman came in and sat a few seats away from me. She worked there and came in early to grab a bite before her shift – the garden cheese steak, an option I had been considering. She chatted up her colleague, the bartender. She complained about an assignment she has due in the way students seem incredulous about almost everything. It was seven o’clock, the assignment (a three-page paper on a book she hadn’t read) was due at midnight, and her shift started at eight. She asked her professor for an extension until morning but was denied. The tone in her voice made clear how unfair and unreasonable she thought her professor was being. She was up until midnight the night before cleaning her house. It’s being shown (I assume by the owner for a sale) and because her roommates don’t do anything, she had to do all of the cleaning. Then she was up until three doing homework. The bartender said, “don’t ever make excuses for other people’s laziness.” A little later, their conversation turned to a coworker who had walked out on a shift during St. Patrick’s Day. The bartender said something to the effect of, “I wouldn’t ever let that person back. You screw me over like that, and you’re done.” What caught my attention most was the certainty with which each of these students expressed themselves – the malicious intent or personal nature in which they saw these situations – as though the professor is being unjust to only you or the person leaving their shift is doing so as a personal attack or affront. I couldn’t help but think there was a lack of personal accountability on the young woman’s part and a lack of empathy on the bartender’s part. This, in turn, made me think of Dismissive Johnny and his rigid world view.
After having the tune in my head and trying to write a bit about my experiences and observations, I took a brief break to get ready for work. During that time, mostly in the shower, I tried to remember what life was like for me when I was a student. I don’t doubt that I was self-absorbed (again… blogger who writes about how his toast being burnt in the morning is emblematic of a world conspiracy to ruin his toast for the remainder of his waking days). I don’t think I would have ever expected, much less asked for, the professor to give me an extension. I was more of a “own my failures” type of student and it showed on my less-than-stellar transcript. I also don’t think I had the confidence or assertiveness of the bartender. What I could relate to was the occasional all-nighters and the sometimes frenetic pace of college. Yes, sometimes the workload was overwhelming. Which got me wondering why that’s such a common experience and why all of that stops when we enter the real world? I’m not ever up until three in the morning working on anything (other than heartburn or insomnia). Is college harder than adult life, and if so, why? It’s almost as if we’ve designed the experience as some sort of obstacle course… make it over these hurdles, jump through those hoops, low crawl here, and climb that wall and then you’re ready for real life…
Sure, real life (work, family, bills) is a juggling act, but the more I thought about it, the more I struggled to find an appropriate comparison. If anything, college is about meeting the demands of your classes and completing lots of assignments and readings (and maybe learning a thing or two in the process) where as real life is partially about learning to say no… learning to set limits… learning to turn down some of the assignments. Real life, which involves a certain amount of fake it ’till you make it gumption, also involves real conversations and negotiations. This student, if she decides to do her assignment will very much half-ass it (she hasn’t even started the book). And maybe her professor will see that she half-assed it. Maybe her professor will be pissed because he or she is also pressed for time and now has to grade a bunch of crappy papers from students who couldn’t be bothered to do better or students who didn’t think twice that they might be wasting someone else’s time. To me, real life is about those conversations. Why do so many professors act as though they’re class is the only one and why do so many students try to pull fast ones by writing fake papers about books they haven’t read? I don’t think either person wants to waste the other person’s time, yet that’s the perception they both might have and they’re forced to do this dance because there’s this construct called college which has assignments and grades and power dynamics and occasional attempts at learning.
On the days that I think I’d like to pursue writing and a different (perhaps more leisurely) life (going to more concerts, traveling more, visiting museums and beaches and sidewalk cafes), I think about going back to school. I sometimes think about pursuing my MFA in writing, and then I think about all of the bullshit that’s involved in school. I’m not sure I’d want to try to teach kids who don’t want to be there. I’m not sure I want to try to read books that I’m not interested in reading or on a time frame that’s not working for the way my brain wants to process those books. I think I’d bristle at the notion of jumping through hoops to get a few more letters after my name. I don’t doubt that I would learn lots of things or that I’d find new spaces for creativity…. but so much of higher education seems caught up in the limitations of time. You have these set weeks to learn this material, after which you’ll get a grade… and none of that seems to be about genuine learning… or perhaps more accurately, learning can also take place outside of all of that – which makes the whole process transactional.
This wasn’t the path I had intended to walk down when I started this post a day ago. While happy to have wandered a bit, I’m going to go back to humming a tune in my head and getting ready for another day at work.