Spent a meeting with APO that turned nasty at the end. Had a wonderful long conversation with Tom, which was pretty darn incredible, the first of its kind since freshman year, and I missed those. Came back and read an APO member's nasty away message basically swearing at us and accusing us of various untrue things, which ruined the warm glow. Had an interesting long conversation with Meryl, where I've found out some ways she understands things better than I expected. Had an argument about personality with Glenn, which is hecka-annoying because he sounds philosophical but doesn't employ any form of logic.
Net result: wanting, again, to drop out of APO.
Like seriously, it's so not worth this crap. I've spent three semesters active, and if I drop now, I can have three semesters without it, equal to what I've put in.
The problem is, how do I go into service if I can't swallow the lite version? And what do I do with my life if service isn't it? I couldn't be happy as a professor, telling kids to live their dreams when I hadn't done it. That's not my dream. I love reading and discussing, enough to make it my major, but not enough to correct papers and decide that I know enough to tell others what's right.
And I don't want to write. And you can't do anything else as an English major besides teaching, writing, or office work.
I want to run a service organization, but if it's as difficult as running service for APO, I can't do it. I'll hate it. And if I have to get involved with the kind of crap that Wendy and Brenda are involved in, and be as detached, I don't want it. I'll hate it.
The problem is this: we don't need APO if we have good people. If we have good people, we can scrap the rules and go out and serve. Set up relationships with causes we really enjoy, call each other for help if we need a few other people. If we need a bit of a break, we're free to take one, and then we go back at it. No need for dues if we can share our supplies, toss each other five bucks for a project with the expectation that eventually we'll need a five as well.
But we're not good people all the time, so we make this brilliant rule system that's supposed to help us be good. And sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn't; we can ignore it or just find ways around it.
We've mistaken APO for something that, if we do everything right, can make our chapter into a body of serviceable people. But I haven't really seen that happen. What it does is take traits and amplify them. People who're equipped to help others are strengthened; they started good and became somewhat better. People who aren't, assuming they make it in, don't stay in. APO is not a creator; it's a tool.
(and, gracious, no wonder we're saved by faith alone.)
I said that you don't need APO if you have good people. It's also true, aggravatingly, that to have APO properly, you do need good people. The very thing that makes a good chapter will make the "chapter" part unnecessary. I've known that longer than this, but have never realized just how much so. But the problem is, the people who are good at service had to get like that somehow, and how did they do it if they didn't have experiences that helped in that regard? What if the rules really do plant a seed that later flowers? But will that help if we never see a bud ourselves?
I can't just take on faith that there isn't a better way. I'm so sick of rules that choke our service and our friendship, the two reasons people join. I'm so sick of being in a fraternity, which, though this one is so brilliant on paper, is such a bizarre concept. Like a glorified clique, except that it regularly goes and begs for members.
I want to serve. But this isn't working somehow. Would it work better if we were on our own? Could I learn so much without so many people? But what are they teaching me now?
On a related note, but much happier, I gave blood today for the first-ever time.
-Laurel
1.25.2006
1.23.2006
I went to bed just before 8 pm...
...so I'm up for a bit. I'm trying not to be concerned, since apparently in olden times (or so they claimed in AP psych), some people would go to sleep really early and then wake up in the middle of the night, have a couple hours called "the watch" where I guess they were awake and able to think really clearly, and then go back to sleep.
A very brief synopsis of my classes thus far, most of which I've only had once:
Text and Image - okay, but very artsy (which makes sense, inasmuch as half the class is made up of photography students); my boring Englishness is having a difficult adjustment. ...It's also at 8:20 in the morning. I foresee a periodic self-plying with chai when I'm having special trouble answering the question "why, again, am I going to this class?" Sad and weak, I know, but the fact remains that occasional chai-ing helped a lot with Tolhurst's class when I felt I could not deal with even one more day of mystical psycho-ladies; I can only hope it will help here. Also, whoever laid out the art building got paid way too well.
Recent American Writers - also too much art on the first day, but that was incidental. I like this class a lot. New literary love: Richard Wilbur.
Oceanography - if anyone besides B can make geology riveting, Otto can. I suppose being a professor for longer than my actual lifespan thus far would help that. ...Let's hope his tests in 106 aren't as bad as, according to rumor, every other class he teaches. Right.
Cognitive Processes - I take it back: if Otto spontaneously stumbled and busted his whatchamacallit (50 geek points to anyone catching the reference) and somebody had to take over his class and make it interesting, Dr. Dani could do it. Assuming she knows enough about geology and was willing to leave off fascinating us in psych classes. I totally want her on my thesis panel if there's anything even remotely psychological about it. Dang.
Fundamentals of Dance - For the sake of my GPA, I can only hope that Robert grades mainly on effort, but at least everyone is willing to look ridiculous together, and it helps that not everyone's good at dance. It is very nice to have Mellie Mae and Kathy in there with me, too.
I am all impatience for Bible study to start again.
Also: I joined swing and am still in folk dancing. This three-dance-groups-counting-my-class idea is something my brain genuinely likes, especially as I stand to get close to six hours of exercise per week from them, but my lower body is staging a sporadic revolt, so it will have to get back to you.
I guess there is a learning curve for the new classes and the six-hours-of-movement, for the last five days seem to have taken forever, and I tend to be happy enough in class, but less so outside of it. And I am failing quite spectacularly at the only New Year's resolution I made, but do not see the point of giving it up.
Anyway, my watch or whatever is over, and I'm going back to bed.
-Laurel
A very brief synopsis of my classes thus far, most of which I've only had once:
Text and Image - okay, but very artsy (which makes sense, inasmuch as half the class is made up of photography students); my boring Englishness is having a difficult adjustment. ...It's also at 8:20 in the morning. I foresee a periodic self-plying with chai when I'm having special trouble answering the question "why, again, am I going to this class?" Sad and weak, I know, but the fact remains that occasional chai-ing helped a lot with Tolhurst's class when I felt I could not deal with even one more day of mystical psycho-ladies; I can only hope it will help here. Also, whoever laid out the art building got paid way too well.
Recent American Writers - also too much art on the first day, but that was incidental. I like this class a lot. New literary love: Richard Wilbur.
Oceanography - if anyone besides B can make geology riveting, Otto can. I suppose being a professor for longer than my actual lifespan thus far would help that. ...Let's hope his tests in 106 aren't as bad as, according to rumor, every other class he teaches. Right.
Cognitive Processes - I take it back: if Otto spontaneously stumbled and busted his whatchamacallit (50 geek points to anyone catching the reference) and somebody had to take over his class and make it interesting, Dr. Dani could do it. Assuming she knows enough about geology and was willing to leave off fascinating us in psych classes. I totally want her on my thesis panel if there's anything even remotely psychological about it. Dang.
Fundamentals of Dance - For the sake of my GPA, I can only hope that Robert grades mainly on effort, but at least everyone is willing to look ridiculous together, and it helps that not everyone's good at dance. It is very nice to have Mellie Mae and Kathy in there with me, too.
I am all impatience for Bible study to start again.
Also: I joined swing and am still in folk dancing. This three-dance-groups-counting-my-class idea is something my brain genuinely likes, especially as I stand to get close to six hours of exercise per week from them, but my lower body is staging a sporadic revolt, so it will have to get back to you.
I guess there is a learning curve for the new classes and the six-hours-of-movement, for the last five days seem to have taken forever, and I tend to be happy enough in class, but less so outside of it. And I am failing quite spectacularly at the only New Year's resolution I made, but do not see the point of giving it up.
Anyway, my watch or whatever is over, and I'm going back to bed.
-Laurel
1.22.2006
Savages
Seriously, if this had happened last semester in conjunction with everything else that happened here last semester, I think I really would be trying to move out:
For the second time this year, I've woken up shortly before an explosion of commotion and violence so bad that I've had to get somebody. Last semester it was the girl next door; tonight I don't even know what exactly happened, but I actually called security (I've never done that before; it was interesting, to the degree that I can be detached about it), though just as I did, the town police got here.
Before the policeman came, there were all kinds of noise and shouting, and I think a guy's voice and a girl's, but I don't know that for sure--most prominent was a girl screaming as loud as she could that she was being hurt, for somebody, anybody to help, and that drowned out everything else in memory. It was her screams for help, so specific and like someone was actively wrenching her joints out of alignment, that led me to call security. The stuff next door had been angry sobs and stuff about the apparent blow, and I'd gotten the RA; this sounded like pure screeching terror.
To my surprise, and her very belligerent and uncooperative surprise, the screaming girl was the one at fault--and was so holleringly, profanely aggravating about it that she got arrested. I don't know how the policeman could tell that she was at fault. She was the only one I heard him address. Maybe hers was clearly a screaming drunken rant. But I think she actually had to be restrained, and when they took her out to the squad car, I could hear them shouting through my thin window. Minutes thereafter, I could still hear her screaming and howling from in the car, with the policeman outside it talking to the RD and security, laughing with a security guy about something.
Eventually I unbolted my door and walked down to the bathroom, and security was in the hall, and someone from Rescue Squad was leaving. The boy on security was actually a friend of mine from last spring's Spanish class, but it wasn't really a waving situation, though we did exchange subdued hellos. A mattress was lying against the wall. When I came back, Tom (whose voice I'd been pretty sure I could hear outside, too, talking to the policeman from, presumably, the doorway), the unfortunate RA on call, was keying into someone's room, and the people in the hall had quadrupled and were on both sides, and I had to pass by them with my best "I just live here" look.
(And where was the much-ballyhooed new AIM screen name for the dorm? It's not going to help much if it goes off at 1 AM, considering RAs are on call until 8 AM.)
And then I went back to staring out the window for the couple minutes before I turned the computer on for this, because it was better than being in the dark and crying, which was coming on if I didn't. I think the girl was even still howling. I don't know.
Holy cow, what is the virtue of living in an upperclass dorm? This never happened when I was a freshman (though I did almost get the RA when the girl next door got into the shouting phone fight that literally lasted three or four hours) and this didn't go on in the house-on-the-hill. Here, not only can people not seem to turn the showers off properly, not only do our displays regularly get torn down by drunks, and not only does music play on my floor at incredible decibel levels, but we've had two domestic-violence scenes in just over a semester. This crap didn't even happen when I was a freshman, that I ever knew.
But security coming gave the kind of safety that I didn't feel last semester with the thing next door, so I do feel okay with going back to bed. And a good thing, too: CPPC is tomorrow(/today) and I'm going to need all the presence of mind I can muster.
-Laurel
For the second time this year, I've woken up shortly before an explosion of commotion and violence so bad that I've had to get somebody. Last semester it was the girl next door; tonight I don't even know what exactly happened, but I actually called security (I've never done that before; it was interesting, to the degree that I can be detached about it), though just as I did, the town police got here.
Before the policeman came, there were all kinds of noise and shouting, and I think a guy's voice and a girl's, but I don't know that for sure--most prominent was a girl screaming as loud as she could that she was being hurt, for somebody, anybody to help, and that drowned out everything else in memory. It was her screams for help, so specific and like someone was actively wrenching her joints out of alignment, that led me to call security. The stuff next door had been angry sobs and stuff about the apparent blow, and I'd gotten the RA; this sounded like pure screeching terror.
To my surprise, and her very belligerent and uncooperative surprise, the screaming girl was the one at fault--and was so holleringly, profanely aggravating about it that she got arrested. I don't know how the policeman could tell that she was at fault. She was the only one I heard him address. Maybe hers was clearly a screaming drunken rant. But I think she actually had to be restrained, and when they took her out to the squad car, I could hear them shouting through my thin window. Minutes thereafter, I could still hear her screaming and howling from in the car, with the policeman outside it talking to the RD and security, laughing with a security guy about something.
Eventually I unbolted my door and walked down to the bathroom, and security was in the hall, and someone from Rescue Squad was leaving. The boy on security was actually a friend of mine from last spring's Spanish class, but it wasn't really a waving situation, though we did exchange subdued hellos. A mattress was lying against the wall. When I came back, Tom (whose voice I'd been pretty sure I could hear outside, too, talking to the policeman from, presumably, the doorway), the unfortunate RA on call, was keying into someone's room, and the people in the hall had quadrupled and were on both sides, and I had to pass by them with my best "I just live here" look.
(And where was the much-ballyhooed new AIM screen name for the dorm? It's not going to help much if it goes off at 1 AM, considering RAs are on call until 8 AM.)
And then I went back to staring out the window for the couple minutes before I turned the computer on for this, because it was better than being in the dark and crying, which was coming on if I didn't. I think the girl was even still howling. I don't know.
Holy cow, what is the virtue of living in an upperclass dorm? This never happened when I was a freshman (though I did almost get the RA when the girl next door got into the shouting phone fight that literally lasted three or four hours) and this didn't go on in the house-on-the-hill. Here, not only can people not seem to turn the showers off properly, not only do our displays regularly get torn down by drunks, and not only does music play on my floor at incredible decibel levels, but we've had two domestic-violence scenes in just over a semester. This crap didn't even happen when I was a freshman, that I ever knew.
But security coming gave the kind of safety that I didn't feel last semester with the thing next door, so I do feel okay with going back to bed. And a good thing, too: CPPC is tomorrow(/today) and I'm going to need all the presence of mind I can muster.
-Laurel
1.13.2006
Observation
So Lily Jo and I, between yesterday and today, have gone to Leaf & Bean twice (once ourselves, once with Erik), once to Great Northern Pizza (with Erik), once to Wal-Mart (to buy yarn), and once to Greece Ridge Mall (for Lily to buy jeans). Today was definitely seized.
Only I didn't get any jeans, which I thought about doing. Once again, if anyone knows where to find jeans for nerds, someplace besides Wal-Mart (I'm hoping to not support blatant worker exploitation, if that's possible anymore), please let me know. K-Mart almost works, except they design jeans for Steve Urkel. I don't want them rising significantly above my navel. My torso is simply not that long.
'Course, give them long enough and maybe Wegmans'll come out with a brand. ::giggles:: I bet theirs would be good, though!
Spazzing like heck about the thing with Brenda. We both did such dumb things. I wish she'd just forget I existed; it would make both our lives less stressful. It's creepy checking my e-mail, waiting to see what she does with this newest; I feel like I rang her doorbell and ran, only I'm not giggling.
Okay, enough; I'm out.
-Laurel
Only I didn't get any jeans, which I thought about doing. Once again, if anyone knows where to find jeans for nerds, someplace besides Wal-Mart (I'm hoping to not support blatant worker exploitation, if that's possible anymore), please let me know. K-Mart almost works, except they design jeans for Steve Urkel. I don't want them rising significantly above my navel. My torso is simply not that long.
'Course, give them long enough and maybe Wegmans'll come out with a brand. ::giggles:: I bet theirs would be good, though!
Spazzing like heck about the thing with Brenda. We both did such dumb things. I wish she'd just forget I existed; it would make both our lives less stressful. It's creepy checking my e-mail, waiting to see what she does with this newest; I feel like I rang her doorbell and ran, only I'm not giggling.
Okay, enough; I'm out.
-Laurel
1.11.2006
A link and more
So, inevitably, I realized that maybe I'd better explain to Brenda that I didn't start the fire (it was always burnin', since '05 was turnin'?), since she seems to be mad at me primarily for breaking the news to the campus that there's an issue going on. I think she doesn't realize that, like, 60% of the student body has known this pretty much since the first week of school, and that it's mostly because our RA friends all complained about it.
Only I didn't really say that last part. But I was polite, and formal, and proofread the thing like nine times. Not that that helped me with the petition, which also exhibited those three qualities, so I may well be doomed anyway. But whatever, at this point.
Today I went back to the Red Cross, did lots more stuff than before, and discovered that some of the staff was assuming that I, like most of the kids they get working, had committed some misdemeanor that had led to a community service sentence. So:
New Game: I'll give a crazy prize to the person who leaves, as a comment, the most creative and/or entertaining imaginary scenario in which I commit a crime and get sentenced to a single day of community service. One comment per player; make it a good one. Mind the character limit in the comment box, too; goodness knows what it is, but if you can't shorten your story, post it in two chunks, on the loophole that "one comment" does not necessarily mean "one post."
To go back to Red-Cross-ness, I also made friends with an autistic girl. She gave me half a cinnamon roll; it (the gesture) (but also the cinnamon roll) was sweet. Oddly enough, I appear to have Terri to thank for that, as the girl graduated in the same year as her, and from the same high school, and that began the conversation. She's the same kind of lucid autistic that Henry-who-pulled-my-braid was in elementary school.
I also--dumdadada!--went to Starry Nites (coffee shop more or less next to Writers & Books) this morning, finally, when I got into the city about fifteen minutes earlier than I expected. It is so named, as it happens, for the giant mural replication of Starry Night (hurrah!) on the back wall of the dining-room part. It was nice, and the cashier-lady even opened ten minutes early so I could get a chai. (They serve wine there. At a coffee shop. Is that weird to anybody else?) Apparently there's a basementy-type area where they have standup comedy, too, but I didn't see a door leading there or anything.
In conclusion, I post the following link, where you can look up the #1 song in both the US and the UK on the day you were born:
http://www.thisdayinmusic.com/member/birthdayno1.php
Mine was lame, but I've heard stories where people's end up suiting them in funny (or creepy) ways. The closest I've found was the twins' birthday, which also happens to be their mother's birthday; their song was "Say, Say, Say." Like, look, it's in threes. ...Well, I don't care that you don't think that's funny. Julian of Norwich would so be obsessing about that if she were here right now, instead of about 600 years dead. :-P
Aaaand nobody gets it, 'cause the people who were in Tolhurst's class with me don't read my blog. Well, never mind.
Okay, I totally ought to be in bed right now, considering the severe lack of sleep last night. Not that I will be yet, I'm sure.
Lily Jo comes tomorrow!
-Laurel
(Ooh! Weird song-coincidence update! My dad's was "Oh Mein Papa"!)
Only I didn't really say that last part. But I was polite, and formal, and proofread the thing like nine times. Not that that helped me with the petition, which also exhibited those three qualities, so I may well be doomed anyway. But whatever, at this point.
Today I went back to the Red Cross, did lots more stuff than before, and discovered that some of the staff was assuming that I, like most of the kids they get working, had committed some misdemeanor that had led to a community service sentence. So:
New Game: I'll give a crazy prize to the person who leaves, as a comment, the most creative and/or entertaining imaginary scenario in which I commit a crime and get sentenced to a single day of community service. One comment per player; make it a good one. Mind the character limit in the comment box, too; goodness knows what it is, but if you can't shorten your story, post it in two chunks, on the loophole that "one comment" does not necessarily mean "one post."
To go back to Red-Cross-ness, I also made friends with an autistic girl. She gave me half a cinnamon roll; it (the gesture) (but also the cinnamon roll) was sweet. Oddly enough, I appear to have Terri to thank for that, as the girl graduated in the same year as her, and from the same high school, and that began the conversation. She's the same kind of lucid autistic that Henry-who-pulled-my-braid was in elementary school.
I also--dumdadada!--went to Starry Nites (coffee shop more or less next to Writers & Books) this morning, finally, when I got into the city about fifteen minutes earlier than I expected. It is so named, as it happens, for the giant mural replication of Starry Night (hurrah!) on the back wall of the dining-room part. It was nice, and the cashier-lady even opened ten minutes early so I could get a chai. (They serve wine there. At a coffee shop. Is that weird to anybody else?) Apparently there's a basementy-type area where they have standup comedy, too, but I didn't see a door leading there or anything.
In conclusion, I post the following link, where you can look up the #1 song in both the US and the UK on the day you were born:
http://www.thisdayinmusic.com/member/birthdayno1.php
Mine was lame, but I've heard stories where people's end up suiting them in funny (or creepy) ways. The closest I've found was the twins' birthday, which also happens to be their mother's birthday; their song was "Say, Say, Say." Like, look, it's in threes. ...Well, I don't care that you don't think that's funny. Julian of Norwich would so be obsessing about that if she were here right now, instead of about 600 years dead. :-P
Aaaand nobody gets it, 'cause the people who were in Tolhurst's class with me don't read my blog. Well, never mind.
Okay, I totally ought to be in bed right now, considering the severe lack of sleep last night. Not that I will be yet, I'm sure.
Lily Jo comes tomorrow!
-Laurel
(Ooh! Weird song-coincidence update! My dad's was "Oh Mein Papa"!)
1.10.2006
Same thing, different day
"I'm standing up, which is how one speaks in opposition in a civilized world...I find this administration smug and patronizing and under the impression that those who disagree with them are less than they are, and with colder hearts."
-Ainsley Hayes, West Wing
"I don’t know. It may have been unbelievably stupid. It may have been unthinkably stupid. I don’t know."
-Jed Bartlett, West Wing
So Brenda e-mailed me again today.
Basically, her e-mail is a summary of what Tom told me in his, which is that she's tactfully, but obviously, angry that I didn't meet with her to discuss the RA wages before I petitioned; and she feels I don't understand the problem.
And she says herself that wants me to meet with her, and maybe with the vice-president of students.
Believe me when I say that I continue to have no intention of doing either. I have no further questions or arguments, and I intend to explain in my e-mail reply everything that she could possibly want to know. A meeting would be purposeless, unless she wants to tell me face-to-face how badly she thinks I screwed up. Besides, I would cry, and that would make it even worse.
I'm by turns furious, remorseful, and frightened. I read her arguments as she phrased them to me, and they do not refute my own. At best it's an impasse; what I wrote in the petition is at least as valid as her reply. What we are having is an ideological disagreement--whether people doing more work should, or should not, receive compensation--and if she cannot attack my document, I am still shocked that she would settle for attacking Tom and me, particularly Tom. I may well have had it coming; he did not.
Clearly, every step I took to try to come off as nonaggressive failed miserably. I am sorry my writing was not better, but I did not go off half-cocked, as it may have looked. I sank hours into those wretched pieces of paper, read them over many times, and obsessed over every detail of the signing process. I must have failed, and therefore have to learn better writing. But I tried to make it clear that I wasn't inciting a riot, and wasn't attacking her personally. It was polite debate, not war.
But if she sees it as aggressive, then it makes no difference what I call it, or how good a defense I have of my actions. How can I say now that I did anything but ruin things? I succeeded in putting forth an argument, but totally failed to influence the reaction.
And it is a total loss: by making her feel like I was doing something behind her back, which I did not intend but took as inevitable (it honestly, truly never occurred to me to talk to her first--what I would have done if Tom had suggested it, I don't know), I have destroyed any chances for communication between her and the RAs, which was my ultimate goal. As I mentioned the last time I wrote about this, she was welcome to disprove me. But I had assumed she would be open about it; if she had nothing to be ashamed of, why not address Senate, or something, and meet concerns head-on? She must know, as I have certainly been reminded, that actions deliberately taken can look very different from what they really are. Why didn't she realize that that was also true of what she'd done? Why isn't she at least glad I respect her employees enough to argue their case; why didn't she tell me she thought I meant well, though I may have been wrong?
I think she thinks of me as a naive, arrogant kid who had no idea what a PR problem this could cause, but I have run PR as well, and I do know what I have done. She was trying not to have people argue the issue, and took it out on me when I made that impossible. But she doesn't understand: that was already impossible. People signing my petition said as much; so many of them came to the document already as displeased as I was. Senate's been grumbling because it's also coming to the surface that the rumor that Res-Life makes more from the meal plans than AVI does is probably true. Nobody this semester was going to be impressed with Res-Life. They don't exactly run warm and fuzzy public relations, and they have never believed in answering to the student body. I maintain, as useless and finger-pointing as the assertion is, that I did not create this problem; I reflected it.
Now she's made it clear to Tom that nothing's going to change, and she's got her new RAs to replace the ones that graduated--ones that agree voluntarily to what the old ones took issue with. I have ruined the RAs' chances by accidentally doing something stupid, and I am sorrier for that than anything I intend to apologize to Brenda for.
She is in administration, as I have begun to want to be, though I'd be in community service. But I can't understand her, nor Wendy. If I can't figure out where this gap between leader and led comes from and what to do about it, I have no business trying to go into their field.
I don't know what to do, whether I'm right, or what to tell her. God help me; save me from my own stupidity.
-Laurel
-Ainsley Hayes, West Wing
"I don’t know. It may have been unbelievably stupid. It may have been unthinkably stupid. I don’t know."
-Jed Bartlett, West Wing
So Brenda e-mailed me again today.
Basically, her e-mail is a summary of what Tom told me in his, which is that she's tactfully, but obviously, angry that I didn't meet with her to discuss the RA wages before I petitioned; and she feels I don't understand the problem.
And she says herself that wants me to meet with her, and maybe with the vice-president of students.
Believe me when I say that I continue to have no intention of doing either. I have no further questions or arguments, and I intend to explain in my e-mail reply everything that she could possibly want to know. A meeting would be purposeless, unless she wants to tell me face-to-face how badly she thinks I screwed up. Besides, I would cry, and that would make it even worse.
I'm by turns furious, remorseful, and frightened. I read her arguments as she phrased them to me, and they do not refute my own. At best it's an impasse; what I wrote in the petition is at least as valid as her reply. What we are having is an ideological disagreement--whether people doing more work should, or should not, receive compensation--and if she cannot attack my document, I am still shocked that she would settle for attacking Tom and me, particularly Tom. I may well have had it coming; he did not.
Clearly, every step I took to try to come off as nonaggressive failed miserably. I am sorry my writing was not better, but I did not go off half-cocked, as it may have looked. I sank hours into those wretched pieces of paper, read them over many times, and obsessed over every detail of the signing process. I must have failed, and therefore have to learn better writing. But I tried to make it clear that I wasn't inciting a riot, and wasn't attacking her personally. It was polite debate, not war.
But if she sees it as aggressive, then it makes no difference what I call it, or how good a defense I have of my actions. How can I say now that I did anything but ruin things? I succeeded in putting forth an argument, but totally failed to influence the reaction.
And it is a total loss: by making her feel like I was doing something behind her back, which I did not intend but took as inevitable (it honestly, truly never occurred to me to talk to her first--what I would have done if Tom had suggested it, I don't know), I have destroyed any chances for communication between her and the RAs, which was my ultimate goal. As I mentioned the last time I wrote about this, she was welcome to disprove me. But I had assumed she would be open about it; if she had nothing to be ashamed of, why not address Senate, or something, and meet concerns head-on? She must know, as I have certainly been reminded, that actions deliberately taken can look very different from what they really are. Why didn't she realize that that was also true of what she'd done? Why isn't she at least glad I respect her employees enough to argue their case; why didn't she tell me she thought I meant well, though I may have been wrong?
I think she thinks of me as a naive, arrogant kid who had no idea what a PR problem this could cause, but I have run PR as well, and I do know what I have done. She was trying not to have people argue the issue, and took it out on me when I made that impossible. But she doesn't understand: that was already impossible. People signing my petition said as much; so many of them came to the document already as displeased as I was. Senate's been grumbling because it's also coming to the surface that the rumor that Res-Life makes more from the meal plans than AVI does is probably true. Nobody this semester was going to be impressed with Res-Life. They don't exactly run warm and fuzzy public relations, and they have never believed in answering to the student body. I maintain, as useless and finger-pointing as the assertion is, that I did not create this problem; I reflected it.
Now she's made it clear to Tom that nothing's going to change, and she's got her new RAs to replace the ones that graduated--ones that agree voluntarily to what the old ones took issue with. I have ruined the RAs' chances by accidentally doing something stupid, and I am sorrier for that than anything I intend to apologize to Brenda for.
She is in administration, as I have begun to want to be, though I'd be in community service. But I can't understand her, nor Wendy. If I can't figure out where this gap between leader and led comes from and what to do about it, I have no business trying to go into their field.
I don't know what to do, whether I'm right, or what to tell her. God help me; save me from my own stupidity.
-Laurel
1.08.2006
I was going to hold off on posting 'til everyone came back to read them, but...
Linkage anyway.
Extreme nerdiness. I started to list who particularly needed to see this, but stopped when it made up half my readership. So just go and look.
This one is fun whether you like math and science or not. It's mostly for the homestars (yes, I've decided to give that a shot as my term for everyone here), 'cause we don't get FoxTrot in the D&C. Anyone else who doesn't, it's also for you.
Weekend was pretty all right. Saw friends of my parents, and then Lily Jo this morning. :) My knitting is still truly pitiful. Turns out you can't really knit at Cornell hockey games, 'cause there's almost zero personal space. I tried between periods of the game, but that effectively stopped when a lady behind me said, "You look like a beginner!" just as I failed for like the half-dozenth time to get so much as the first stitch right, and proceeded to tell me about teaching her daughter to knit, and how she looked just like that, all close and tight. I know she meant well. ...My brother was scandalized that anyone would knit at a hockey game, but he told me at the end of it that he'd seen someone else doing it. So ha-ha.
This week: couple of Red Cross stints, a lot of room-organizing/item-donating(?), and hopefully Lily Jo coming to visit.
-Laurel
Extreme nerdiness. I started to list who particularly needed to see this, but stopped when it made up half my readership. So just go and look.
This one is fun whether you like math and science or not. It's mostly for the homestars (yes, I've decided to give that a shot as my term for everyone here), 'cause we don't get FoxTrot in the D&C. Anyone else who doesn't, it's also for you.
Weekend was pretty all right. Saw friends of my parents, and then Lily Jo this morning. :) My knitting is still truly pitiful. Turns out you can't really knit at Cornell hockey games, 'cause there's almost zero personal space. I tried between periods of the game, but that effectively stopped when a lady behind me said, "You look like a beginner!" just as I failed for like the half-dozenth time to get so much as the first stitch right, and proceeded to tell me about teaching her daughter to knit, and how she looked just like that, all close and tight. I know she meant well. ...My brother was scandalized that anyone would knit at a hockey game, but he told me at the end of it that he'd seen someone else doing it. So ha-ha.
This week: couple of Red Cross stints, a lot of room-organizing/item-donating(?), and hopefully Lily Jo coming to visit.
-Laurel
1.05.2006
Public Service Announcement (the Second; the first entry with such a title was from when I got lost/hit on in the city)
Watching the news tonight and noting the newest few soldiers killed overseas, I finally decided to find the online casualty list to make sure everyone I haven't heard from since high school was okay, and that Amy's siblings were. So far, so good on both counts; the two Rochester names aren't familiar. If you're looking on behalf of a specific area, like I was, a good place is here:
http://icasualties.org/oif/Statecity.aspx
If, God forbid, you think you recognize someone, then dossier-type pictures of the soldiers (where available) and details of the death are on the CNN site here.
...This is going to sound like a stupid question, but I don't keep track of these things: are there military bases in California and Texas? They're the states with the highest death rates, so it stands to reason that there're a lot of CA and TX kids over there.
Please, there's so much hurt in the world; go do something nice for someone. On Christmas night, the gathered relatives, including my cousin just home this summer from Iraq (who was, well, mostly not in a state to be holding intelligent conversation, but all the same...), talked for over an hour about politics and war and fixing things, and they went round arguing (not bitterly, but persistently) 'til I couldn't stand the division and the pessimism and I went to another room.
I want so badly for us all to be rebuilders of walls and cities, revolutionaries like Isaiah 58's, but to do anything close, we ought to do everything earnestly, putting as much effort into doing it well as possible. Our education system is good and so is Iraq's, I'm told, but look at the mess both countries are in. We have skill knowledge, but we know so little about people different from us; all this talk over all these years and we're farther some, but still I keep running into people who get so annoyed with difference, not because it's expressly against their morals, but simply because they think it's inconvenient to the accomplishment of whatever goal they're focused on. Sometimes it's me doing it.
If we do have all this potential, we need to start plugging into it hardcore. Soak up all the knowledge you can. Be skilled, be smart, be as open-minded as you can. Ask if it's really wrong or if it's just inconvenient. We can't give up just because the hippies didn't get it right. We do need to detach from consumerism, and we do need to love people, but we've got to have head as well as heart. We have to go by a better way.
-Laurel
http://icasualties.org/oif/Statecity.aspx
If, God forbid, you think you recognize someone, then dossier-type pictures of the soldiers (where available) and details of the death are on the CNN site here.
...This is going to sound like a stupid question, but I don't keep track of these things: are there military bases in California and Texas? They're the states with the highest death rates, so it stands to reason that there're a lot of CA and TX kids over there.
Please, there's so much hurt in the world; go do something nice for someone. On Christmas night, the gathered relatives, including my cousin just home this summer from Iraq (who was, well, mostly not in a state to be holding intelligent conversation, but all the same...), talked for over an hour about politics and war and fixing things, and they went round arguing (not bitterly, but persistently) 'til I couldn't stand the division and the pessimism and I went to another room.
I want so badly for us all to be rebuilders of walls and cities, revolutionaries like Isaiah 58's, but to do anything close, we ought to do everything earnestly, putting as much effort into doing it well as possible. Our education system is good and so is Iraq's, I'm told, but look at the mess both countries are in. We have skill knowledge, but we know so little about people different from us; all this talk over all these years and we're farther some, but still I keep running into people who get so annoyed with difference, not because it's expressly against their morals, but simply because they think it's inconvenient to the accomplishment of whatever goal they're focused on. Sometimes it's me doing it.
If we do have all this potential, we need to start plugging into it hardcore. Soak up all the knowledge you can. Be skilled, be smart, be as open-minded as you can. Ask if it's really wrong or if it's just inconvenient. We can't give up just because the hippies didn't get it right. We do need to detach from consumerism, and we do need to love people, but we've got to have head as well as heart. We have to go by a better way.
-Laurel
1.04.2006
Wahh.
Started trying to knit. With help from both knitting books, finally figured out how to cast on. With help from Mom, managed to knit a row.
Couldn't figure out how to start knitting the next row (just wasn't working somehow), so I tried to get her to help me. While trying to start it off, she dropped, like, five consecutive stitches, and we couldn't figure out how to fix it, so we had to unravel it all. An hour of work ('cause I am t3h dumb) and nothing to show for it.
Drat.
-Laurel
Couldn't figure out how to start knitting the next row (just wasn't working somehow), so I tried to get her to help me. While trying to start it off, she dropped, like, five consecutive stitches, and we couldn't figure out how to fix it, so we had to unravel it all. An hour of work ('cause I am t3h dumb) and nothing to show for it.
Drat.
-Laurel
1.03.2006
Oh, wow. Oh, ruddy wow. Oh, you need to see this.
Oh my gosh. This is totally ridiculous. And so funny. Look inside it.
Star Trek cookbook(?!)
[Thanks to the good guy at the LibraryThing blog; thank goodness that this wasn't on my suggestion page.]
-Laurel
Star Trek cookbook(?!)
[Thanks to the good guy at the LibraryThing blog; thank goodness that this wasn't on my suggestion page.]
-Laurel
Late entry
I realize that it's a little past when I should be putting my two cents into this fray, but looking over online stuff, as I have this morning, and coming across it, I really want to comment.
This "war on Christmas" thing. I lament Christian-phobia as much as anybody, but I really think everybody's panicking waaaay too much about this "happy holidays" thing. Like, even Bill O'Reilly, whose columns I do not tend to agree with, gave a very sensible and well-written defense of why this issue is really not important. But he neglected, as everyone seems to, to mention the thing that makes this forehead-slappingly simple for me. Why does everybody assume that "happy holidays" is secularism trying to take down Christ, instead of a recognition from the general population that there are, in fact, Jews in this country, who happen to have a festival during the same month as Christmas? Don't they deserve a little well-wishing, too? There are, as Devin and Casey have demonstrated, also more pagans around than you might expect. And it's always tricky trying to figure out who considers Kwanzaa a significant holiday and who does not. So all of a sudden people are caught between trying to be inclusive and catching backlash from people who don't want inclusiveness to be a front for what's really resentment.
And I can see how that might happen, but come on. If our conduct is not proving to this country that Christianity makes a unique difference in people's lives, then all the signage and verbage in the world is not going to help us, and all our insistence on being put first is going to come off as arrogant. Which, incidentally, I think it is. If more of us would focus on things like learning more about God, and serving other people, if we would just play off each other's goodness, then how store workers are faring in life would be our primary concern for them (are they being paid enough? Do they have people with whom to spend whatever holiday they choose to observe?), and the way they greet us the least. Let's stop trying to figure out how loved we are and focus on better loving everyone else. Let the nitpicking fall by the wayside.
-Laurel
This "war on Christmas" thing. I lament Christian-phobia as much as anybody, but I really think everybody's panicking waaaay too much about this "happy holidays" thing. Like, even Bill O'Reilly, whose columns I do not tend to agree with, gave a very sensible and well-written defense of why this issue is really not important. But he neglected, as everyone seems to, to mention the thing that makes this forehead-slappingly simple for me. Why does everybody assume that "happy holidays" is secularism trying to take down Christ, instead of a recognition from the general population that there are, in fact, Jews in this country, who happen to have a festival during the same month as Christmas? Don't they deserve a little well-wishing, too? There are, as Devin and Casey have demonstrated, also more pagans around than you might expect. And it's always tricky trying to figure out who considers Kwanzaa a significant holiday and who does not. So all of a sudden people are caught between trying to be inclusive and catching backlash from people who don't want inclusiveness to be a front for what's really resentment.
And I can see how that might happen, but come on. If our conduct is not proving to this country that Christianity makes a unique difference in people's lives, then all the signage and verbage in the world is not going to help us, and all our insistence on being put first is going to come off as arrogant. Which, incidentally, I think it is. If more of us would focus on things like learning more about God, and serving other people, if we would just play off each other's goodness, then how store workers are faring in life would be our primary concern for them (are they being paid enough? Do they have people with whom to spend whatever holiday they choose to observe?), and the way they greet us the least. Let's stop trying to figure out how loved we are and focus on better loving everyone else. Let the nitpicking fall by the wayside.
-Laurel
1.02.2006
"Oswald Mandias" indeed!
Despite the occasionally-R-rated language and the general PG-13 for content, everybody who hasn't done so yet officially needs to read Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair. It's sheer-literary-geekness-meets-science-fiction (complete with time travel and some pretty sweet plot maneuvering within Jane Eyre). I was impressed, and I think all of you would be. Go read.
Well, with one exception. If you haven't, go read Jane Eyre first. Knowing the plot from readers' experience isn't absolutely necessary, but a lot of the fun of a sizeable chunk of Eyre Affair will be watered down if you don't.
I think I actually got the suggestion off of LibraryThing; the first time I've listened to them. ...Ruddy crud, you know who really has to read it? Dr. Grove, that's who.
And the book series--Eyre is the first in a series--has a website. Now I want a SpecOps-27 t-shirt. Dang.
-Laurel
Well, with one exception. If you haven't, go read Jane Eyre first. Knowing the plot from readers' experience isn't absolutely necessary, but a lot of the fun of a sizeable chunk of Eyre Affair will be watered down if you don't.
I think I actually got the suggestion off of LibraryThing; the first time I've listened to them. ...Ruddy crud, you know who really has to read it? Dr. Grove, that's who.
And the book series--Eyre is the first in a series--has a website. Now I want a SpecOps-27 t-shirt. Dang.
-Laurel
Readread!
Dave-ruddy-Barry, with a very funny rendition of his annual summary of the year gone by.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/13517336.htm
-Laurel
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/13517336.htm
-Laurel
1.01.2006
-note to self-
Finished Strawberry Girl, Lois Lenski, today. The second New Year's in a row I've worked on the Newbery Project; last year I was at the twins' and it was The Tale of Desperaux.
I can't update the Newbery page on my school site 'cause I can't get into the FTP server. Tim knows how to get in through DOS, but I don't. Maybe I can get him to send me directions. I know my way around DOS enough that I think I could get it.
My mom made pork and sauerkraut for dinner, which's supposed to be good luck on New Year's in some random European country. One of my parents put all this barbecue sauce in the kraut, though, so it wasn't so lucky for me. ::giggles:: I don't like it.
Reading Strawberry Girl made me want strawberry jam so much that I took the jar Mom made this summer out of the fridge and ate some off a spoon. Someday I'll make my own, but not for a long time yet.
It's hard, after 100-something pages of typed Floridian-accented dialogue, not to go off in a drawl now. :-D
-Laurel
I can't update the Newbery page on my school site 'cause I can't get into the FTP server. Tim knows how to get in through DOS, but I don't. Maybe I can get him to send me directions. I know my way around DOS enough that I think I could get it.
My mom made pork and sauerkraut for dinner, which's supposed to be good luck on New Year's in some random European country. One of my parents put all this barbecue sauce in the kraut, though, so it wasn't so lucky for me. ::giggles:: I don't like it.
Reading Strawberry Girl made me want strawberry jam so much that I took the jar Mom made this summer out of the fridge and ate some off a spoon. Someday I'll make my own, but not for a long time yet.
It's hard, after 100-something pages of typed Floridian-accented dialogue, not to go off in a drawl now. :-D
-Laurel
"And it's been a long December, and there's reason to believe/Maybe this year will be better than the last..."
Bunny posted that up on her away, and now I'm humming the song.
So, in review, much of 2005 was utterly crazy, often in rather a bad way. I'm not really sure what the best part was. I want to say it was DC, but we were there during the heat wave that sickened all those Boy Scouts (oh it was hot there), and I remember my family driving me mad for some of that, so maybe that's only in retrospect. ...It may well have been, instead, a tie (or something) between Bible study and folk dancing, because both of those were such consistently amazing things, with so many moments. The Abbott's saga (with Aneya, Bethie, and sometimes Daf) is also way up there. Maple stuff with Chris and John (and, yeah, the rest of the class) was all kinds of good times, and Pollywogg Holler was quite the experience--twice.
But on the whole, sophomore year, which made up half of 2005, was far too fast-paced and was so stressful I was nearly torn in two. Junior year has not been "all sweetness and light" (both Drs. McDonough and Myers use that term quite a bit, I think, heh) by any means, but it has treated me rather more kindly. IV has been more amazing than I ever thought possible. I wish I'd known, freshman year, what the term "intervarsity" meant; having places like Bev and Harold's to go to would have meant so much to me. It was such an honest mistake that I feel like it must have been for a reason, but I've yet to learn for certain where Roger, Jerry, Michael, and everyone in BASIC fit into the pattern (I get this sudden memory of walking into the BASIC Bible study, the only girl...it stayed that way for weeks on end). Maybe the key lies in the differences in what I would have done with my time; certainly my friendship circle would have been somewhat different. Would John and I have been less pasted to each other, and would that have been a good thing or a bad?
Definitely, Heather dying was the worst thing this year. I say that even though Hurricane Katrina apparently was this cataclysmically horrendous thing; my dark secret for the year is that I essentially missed the whole Katrina to-do, at least in every way that counts. I have no idea what I was doing at the time. I might've been OGing for some of it, but mostly I was being a student who doesn't watch TV, and I never saw any of the footage, never looked at photos, never shared in the mass American horror and panic and pity and outpouring of love. Meryl found time to watch 24-hour news and send Tim tearful IM messages demanding that APO do something, but the one day I tried to watch CNN about it, the cable was down at school and the networks were doing other things. I did help run the donation table, but really that was the extent of it. Weird, huh? I was also pretty well in the dark about the Paris riots. I knew they were going on, but was more or less clueless. ...I miss reading the Democrat and Chronicle over my cereal every morning, and my parents having the news on every night.
But it's 2006, and so far the first piece of news I got in it was pretty exciting: Mom and I're going to, over spring break, visit Lily Jo in Spain, where she'll be studying abroad. Hurrah for finally seeing Spain, even if it won't be Barcelona! Hurrah for probably being able to drink the water! Hurrah for not having to live on chicken and rice for two weeks, like in Peru! Hurrah for signs all in Spanish again! Hurrah for all the sunblock I'll have to use!
Okay, resolutions. Not going to make the exhaustive list I did last year (not that I did so well with any of them anyway), but really do want to try to follow through on the James thing to not talk so much and to not be so angry. I spent a lot of this semester quite frustrated, despite some effort to the contrary. So anger equals no. Not really interested in taking up yoga, but I'm going to have to find a way to calm down when I need to. Karate would have been nice, had it not been cancelled. ::snorts::
I'm also rooting for getting into the honors house for senior year (c'mooooon), and for people at some point this semester coming to visit, 'cause school is totally a wonderful place, and I want to share the joy. If only my room weren't so much smaller than last year's. Ah, well.
Okay, that's all for now, 'cause church is in, like, less than eight hours, so I need some sleep.
-Laurel
So, in review, much of 2005 was utterly crazy, often in rather a bad way. I'm not really sure what the best part was. I want to say it was DC, but we were there during the heat wave that sickened all those Boy Scouts (oh it was hot there), and I remember my family driving me mad for some of that, so maybe that's only in retrospect. ...It may well have been, instead, a tie (or something) between Bible study and folk dancing, because both of those were such consistently amazing things, with so many moments. The Abbott's saga (with Aneya, Bethie, and sometimes Daf) is also way up there. Maple stuff with Chris and John (and, yeah, the rest of the class) was all kinds of good times, and Pollywogg Holler was quite the experience--twice.
But on the whole, sophomore year, which made up half of 2005, was far too fast-paced and was so stressful I was nearly torn in two. Junior year has not been "all sweetness and light" (both Drs. McDonough and Myers use that term quite a bit, I think, heh) by any means, but it has treated me rather more kindly. IV has been more amazing than I ever thought possible. I wish I'd known, freshman year, what the term "intervarsity" meant; having places like Bev and Harold's to go to would have meant so much to me. It was such an honest mistake that I feel like it must have been for a reason, but I've yet to learn for certain where Roger, Jerry, Michael, and everyone in BASIC fit into the pattern (I get this sudden memory of walking into the BASIC Bible study, the only girl...it stayed that way for weeks on end). Maybe the key lies in the differences in what I would have done with my time; certainly my friendship circle would have been somewhat different. Would John and I have been less pasted to each other, and would that have been a good thing or a bad?
Definitely, Heather dying was the worst thing this year. I say that even though Hurricane Katrina apparently was this cataclysmically horrendous thing; my dark secret for the year is that I essentially missed the whole Katrina to-do, at least in every way that counts. I have no idea what I was doing at the time. I might've been OGing for some of it, but mostly I was being a student who doesn't watch TV, and I never saw any of the footage, never looked at photos, never shared in the mass American horror and panic and pity and outpouring of love. Meryl found time to watch 24-hour news and send Tim tearful IM messages demanding that APO do something, but the one day I tried to watch CNN about it, the cable was down at school and the networks were doing other things. I did help run the donation table, but really that was the extent of it. Weird, huh? I was also pretty well in the dark about the Paris riots. I knew they were going on, but was more or less clueless. ...I miss reading the Democrat and Chronicle over my cereal every morning, and my parents having the news on every night.
But it's 2006, and so far the first piece of news I got in it was pretty exciting: Mom and I're going to, over spring break, visit Lily Jo in Spain, where she'll be studying abroad. Hurrah for finally seeing Spain, even if it won't be Barcelona! Hurrah for probably being able to drink the water! Hurrah for not having to live on chicken and rice for two weeks, like in Peru! Hurrah for signs all in Spanish again! Hurrah for all the sunblock I'll have to use!
Okay, resolutions. Not going to make the exhaustive list I did last year (not that I did so well with any of them anyway), but really do want to try to follow through on the James thing to not talk so much and to not be so angry. I spent a lot of this semester quite frustrated, despite some effort to the contrary. So anger equals no. Not really interested in taking up yoga, but I'm going to have to find a way to calm down when I need to. Karate would have been nice, had it not been cancelled. ::snorts::
I'm also rooting for getting into the honors house for senior year (c'mooooon), and for people at some point this semester coming to visit, 'cause school is totally a wonderful place, and I want to share the joy. If only my room weren't so much smaller than last year's. Ah, well.
Okay, that's all for now, 'cause church is in, like, less than eight hours, so I need some sleep.
-Laurel