Findings

Don oíche úd i mBeithil,

beidh tagairt ar ghrian go brách
Don oíche úd i mBeithil,
go dtáinig an Briathar slán
Tá gríosghrua ar spéartha,
's an talamh 'na chlúdach bán
Féach íosagán sa chléibhín,
's an Mhaighdean in aoibhneas grá

Ar leacain lom an tsléibhe,
go nglacann na haoirí scáth
Nuair in oscailt gheal na spéire,
tá teachtaire Dé ar fáil

Céad glóir anois don Athair,
i bhFlaitheasa thuas go hard
Is feasta fós ar talamh,
d'fheara, dea-mhéin síocháin.

English translation (if you're willing to trust Wikipedia, but in this case, I am):

I sing of a night in Bethlehem

A night as bright as dawn

I sing of that night in Bethlehem

The night the Word was born

The skies are glowing gaily

The earth in white is dressed

See Jesus in the cradle

Drink deep in His mother's breast

And there on a lonely hillside

The shepherds bow down in fear

When the heavens open brightly

And God's message rings out so clear

Glory now to the Father

In all the heavens high

And peace to His friends on earth below

Is all the angels cry

This month I, fulfilling a wish I've held since probably fairly early in the pandemic, created a Spotify playlist with coworkers - in this case, the theme was "lesser-known holiday songs." I allowed two interpretations of "lesser-known": one was infrequently-played covers or other recordings of familiar songs (for example, one of my coworkers submitted Tracy Chapman's cover of "O Holy Night," which to me fit the bill, as it doesn't seem like any of the versions most likely to be played over a department-store PA system in November or December), and another was songs that themselves are lesser-known, such that anyone's recording would be fairly uncommon (I gave "Ríu Ríu Chíu" as an example when I explained the playlist theme).

I had thought that one of my three contributions (that being the per-person limit I imposed) would be Sufjan Stevens's cover of "O Come O Come Emmanuel," which is quirky in ways I really like and evokes memories for me of recent Decembers (it was excellent background music in 2019, the year I think I found it, when I spent many unexpected hours working on TRIO's APR and feeling very pensive and like I needed God's presence). But instead, I forget how, I stumbled across "Don Oíche Úd i mBeithil" and quickly realized that I liked it enough that it was going to be one of my new things that I listen to every Christmas season. "Merry Christmas Everyone," by Rend Collective, and Guster's excellent cover of the itself-rather-obscure "Mamacita, ¿Dónde Está Santa Claus?" joined "Don Oíche" on the playlist. Sufjan Stevens was unexpectedly out. 

Back in college and grad school, of course, I used to take Christmas Eve posts here to greet the year's new friends. This year, what with the job change, I would have quite a bit of greeting to do. 

I still wonder if this job is where my heart lies, professionally speaking; I miss student services and advising very much. I can see, off in the distance, a possible future where I learn to love this job, too. But it still feels like a fifty-fifty, and a question of how successful I can be at creating some sort of synthesis of the work I did and the work I now do. 

But I have good coworkers, some very good indeed. One unexpected, slightly poignant, but overall welcome surprise came one night when I was exercising, which I do in the basement because we have no real space elsewhere and I usually want to do it alone. But not necessarily permanently alone: I kind of felt like a few specific work colleagues, especially two women I've hung out with the most over lunch, might think the Jenny Ford workouts I was loading on YouTube were fun and easy, like I did. What if we started some kind of Zoom thing every some-certain-night of the week? Would that work, to exercise together while apart, with a video screen-shared? Would we do that, or would it be awkward to exercise with your coworkers? 

Hard to say; I don't know that I'd actually want to do it. But as I played it out in my head, some minutes later I noticed: my "real-life-imaginary" work friends in this scenario weren't the English department. When I've had a crackpot theory, a funny idea, a rant, something that in college I would have presented to friends, since not long into my Bristol career I've mentally pictured those conversations happening during the end-of-semester English-department gatherings that Mike used to organize. Eventually I knew that the mental conversations were my way of getting more time with people I wished I could be friends with in a truer way. I loved our English department, and to some extent still do. They're fun, smart, caring, praiseworthy people, whose praise I valued, whose friendship I awkwardly wished for but didn't quite know how to try to get. 

But more and more these days, those moments in my head happen with people in my new department as the audience instead. And whatever that turns out to mean or not mean long-term, right now it is something that I'm thankful for. 

Merry Christmas. 

Love

It was a long time ago now, about fifteen years, when I burned out of Alpha Phi Omega and went on whatever we called a leave of absence from it (was it "becoming an associate member"?), ultimately to quit altogether, to some extent probably to my own surprise as well as that of not a few others. I had been so into the fraternity, sophomore year, that my parents paid dues for lifetime-member status for me (not crazily expensive, don't worry) at some point as a Christmas gift, though I don't remember whether it was in that year or the part of my junior year where I hadn't quit yet. I'd leapt from pledge to secretary to Vice President of Service, gone through most of LEADS training, lived and breathed APO to a pretty large extent.

But the problems had begun when I became an officer. I came to realize that being a member of an organization and helping to lead that same organization are two very different experiences. Membership is fun and meaningful. Leadership is work, and much less fun. It's much easier to burn out of leadership than membership, or at minimum to become disillusioned. And that's what happened with me as far as APO, for reasons you could probably read about in this blog's archives (if you wanted to, and I'm not saying you should).

I remembered that "leadership is a different experience" lesson to some extent in InterVarsity and beyond, but I will say that the experience of leadership in a Christian organization usually felt different from that. I was on Good Shepherd's vestry for a few years, but though there was certainly small-scale drama, and though I put plenty of time into serving the church, it had the vast advantages of a commonly-shared, commonly-lived set of values and (I believe) the work of the Holy Spirit, and the whole thing just went better.

So I wasn't thinking about any of that when I took a job at work that's basically a leadership position. I was thinking about wanting to stay at Bristol. I was thinking about what it and its faculty and fellow staff and students stand for in my imagination and, well, my heart. I built a lot of warm colleagueships (is that a word?) over eight years, and I met a lot of students I liked. I like a lot of the differences between our community college and most four-year institutions. I knew we needed a good tutoring program, and I hoped I could help make sure the college had one. I didn't think it would be easy, per se, but it was a challenge I cared about and felt more or less up to.

Now I'm in a job where, instead of bringing happy tidings of grant funding and equal-footing faculty/staff collaboration, I have to make up rules and guidelines and say no to students, tutors, and faculty alike, maybe more often than I get to say yes. I have discovered just how different it is to tell a faculty member no about something they really care about - and let's face it: a lot of times, TRIO wasn't in the position to give a meaningful no to anything faculty wanted to do with their own courses, and/or wasn't something they really cared about, so I didn't have that problem very often before. I am the one now who's pulled into every awkward situation - every student who complains to administration that we didn't support them, every student who thinks they get to take their frustration out on a tutor or desk staffperson, every faculty member who doesn't submit a support request and then wants an embedded tutor the exact minute their Flex Start course begins, every tutor-faculty pairing who are convinced that they know their subject and are an expert team and all I can do is come in like a wrecking ball and destroy everything they've fought so hard to achieve; plus a good half of the awkward situations that my associate dean gets saddled with that are even remotely related, if she feels there are any ripple effects out to tutoring, which she typically does.

I've been in the job for three-and-a-half months, done a zillion things but accomplished what feels like fairly little progress, and can't even estimate the true feelings of my supervisor, who's unfailingly supportive and skilled in management and carefully very kind - but also, it must be said, an odd mix of gentle-and-understanding and candid-yet-hard-to-read and easily-disappointed.

There isn't really a mechanism here for going on associate-member status, and I don't really have anywhere else to go, even assuming I would dare and wouldn't melt into a guilty puddle.

I think I really do love the college as a whole, and the people who work there, and the people it serves. I stayed because of love; I think I chose a harder job out of not just necessity, but love. But like all love becomes, love is hard. I'm a little disoriented, and trying really hard to love, but love is hard.

I Am Not At All Sure of When I Will Do Any of the Following

• Make muffins with the blueberries that E.'s mom sent us over a week ago (still good, though; I checked)
• Put the blueberries in the freezer because I've finally accepted that I'm not going to make the muffins until some random weekend or at 8:15 PM some random night
• Get the haircut I have been trying to get for about the past month
• Get L. the haircut we ought to get her, not least because it is starting to get dangerously in the way during some of her bathroom breaks, and do you know what I don't feel like cleaning out of her hair if I can help it?
• Actually get my tutor-training curriculum (due earlyish next month) finished drafted out of the early outline stage
• Start getting caught up on the student-advising database records for my previous program that I left undone, saying I would do them sometime (assuming what's left of the program is actually submitting an annual report this year, which I am hoping they totally won't if they're not getting funded again until 2025 or later, but it would be like that byzantine grant to expect us to waste a gazillion hours on it anyway) 
• Start an exercise regimen (alone, thank you, or at least alone among others if I decide that part of the point of having been vaccinated against Covid months ago is to be able to go waste about 15% of my monthly discretionary funding on a seldom-used subscription to a public gym)
• Find the cloth mask given me by my college
• Borrow Ember's End from the library system connected to my college, because the odds don't look good for its soon being acquired by the library system in my state of residence
• Reread the first several books in the Queen's Thief series so that I can have more than a vague recollection of their contents when I eventually go on and read the other ones
• Read the pile of books connected to my job, because somehow I got hired with practically no knowledge of one of the forms of tutoring I'm supposed to be overseeing, yea, even training people in
• Start figuring out when we are moving out of here, in greater detail than "ideally before M. [so, I haven't previously mentioned here that we had a second daughter in 2019, but we totally did] turns three"
• Resume any meaningful semblance of a social life, even via Zoom (remember when I lived in Binghamton and blogged about doing CyberCafe trivia most Mondays? So: Cyber Trivia came back over Zoom late last year [on Thursdays this time], even though Cyber Cafe West had closed a couple of years ago. I started playing again early this year [not every week, but probably the majority of them], and it was genuinely great. I had a fun threeish months there with Charles, Suzi, and other friends of theirs. Then Jeff, Cyber Trivia's creator and only-ever question-writer and host, developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and died within something like a couple of weeks of diagnosis. The trivia league, bereft of its central figure, hasn't met since, at least that I know of)
• Clean the rest of the fridge shelves

Thank you.

Overmastered

If the above title is true, the thing that overmastered me was wanting to stay at the college where I've been working. I didn't end up in either a faculty or an advising position, but in a tutoring-coordination one. In a world where my previous program didn't go insane and then go belly-up, would I have even interviewed for it? Maybe, since I've long found this particular position interesting, and since my frustration with our grant-regulation noncompliance might have boiled over if I'd still discovered how extensive it was. And so far - after exactly one day fully on the job - I'm glad I did.

In any case, even as I interviewed for two separate grant positions last fall at another college, even as I did the finalist interview for one of those positions and felt like it had gone well, I think part of me still hoped that somehow I could stay where I was, with students I like, with colleagues I really like. I don't remember being very disappointed when that college failed its search.

After spending almost eight years very seldom friending any current coworkers on Facebook as a matter of personal policy (for retired ones I was more open to it), it may have been the pandemic that finally got to me: this April or May I set myself a deadline. No matter how this most recent position interview turns out, I thought, whether I'm cutting my final positional ties with the English department or not, I am finally giving up and friending the English department, and anyone else I want to besides. 

And I got the position, and I did lots of friending, and I have not yet been utterly disappointed by anyone's publicly-online persona, though I'd hardly dare take any bets on some of their perceptions of my own.

My former director probably was annoyed about my leaving, despite putting a good face on it. At any rate, after some congratulations during the meeting when I told him I was taking the new position (and some genuine thanks to him from me, since all the intraprogram complications since 2018 meant that I'd had little choice but to ask him to be my managerial reference for the new job, and he had agreed to do it, thereby helping to seal his own staffing-problem fate), I don't know if we ever saw each other in any program-related meeting after that. Past that day, even on my last day, I got no goodbye, no token expression of thanks, no involvement from him in the sendoff organized for my retiring colleague and me, no offboarding from the program to speak of (he gave me one item to make sure I did once I told him what my last day would be, but that was it). I doubt my colleague did, either (she announced her impending retirement probably a couple of months before it happened, and her last day came two weeks before mine). Given his personality as a manager, the extent to which he's been disengaged lately, and how essentially dead in the water the program is, I wasn't expecting much, and I don't think I'm bitter. But I will say that it was even less from him than I had anticipated, and I do wish there'd been something.

But though it's early days, the new assistant dean seems like she may become my best supervisor yet. She's smart, straightforward, and kind of intriguing. She seems fair-minded, and (though this is more of a neutral quality, I find it interesting) has a sort of calm outward manner overlaying more intense depths, a combination that reminds me of an English-department colleague who also happens, like her, to have spent a lot of her childhood on a farm. 

And though I'm sad to lose most of my reasons to professionally hang out with the English department, I'm happy about the prospect of the library-and-tutoring team, whose members seem likeable; and it's also a definite plus to still be semi-collaborating on Writing Center matters with one of the English faculty members I like most (at least until he rotates off at the end of next year). As for the advising staff, despite the mild reservations I expressed in the previous post, overall I did like them, and can at least hope that I wasn't too insufferable a presence on their Teams channel; it'll still be nice to see them in collegewide contexts, and it wouldn't be an awful idea for me to request an occasional few minutes to talk tutoring and learning-community matters at their staff meetings.

So, altogether, this seems about as good a resolution as I could have asked for. I'm grateful, and interested to see where it all goes next.