One of my favorite things about working on a college campus is the everydayness of the weirdness: the cross-country team screaming out the names of the buildings they’re passing, streakers, “beard auctions,” cryptic chalk messages on the sidewalks, kids playing Quidditch on the soccer fields, oversized plastic letters in the trees out front of my building. You can’t spell “another day of work” without W-T-F.
I didn’t exactly spend the day dreading tonight’s townhouse-association board meeting, but I wasn’t looking forward to it, either. Our first meeting since November, it would be a long one: the draft agenda was two pages long, single-spaced. On the plus side, the guy who runs our newly-hired property-management company was going to attend to help us deal with some knottier issues.
Turns out, I shouldn’t have worried. The meeting still lasted two hours, give or take, but we blazed through the agenda, handling all of the key items, discussing as needed several minor items, and tabling a whole bunch of stuff until future meetings. We actually got stuff done! And enjoyed each others’ company! And learned a lot of great stuff from the management-company rep! And ate pistachios and drank beer!
What a difference it makes to have a professional on hand to address the issues that, a year ago, we would have chalked up to dunno and then gone on to research – and to have a board that is constituted by people who want to serve on the board and that doesn’t include anyone who wants to obstruct the board’s activities just because he can.
I’m not quite ecstatic about this, but I’m pretty happy about it – and about the fact that we scheduled our next meeting for two months out. My term’s up in October, and you know what? These next nine months on the board might actually be pleasant.
Like many other jobs, mine involves a lot of work that disappears into various other projects, never to be seen again. Unlike many other jobs (or at least like pretty much every other job I’ve ever had), once in a while the work I contribute to a project comes back with dollar figures attached. Today was one of those days: the National Science Foundation awarded a $336,000 grant to Carleton for the purchase of a very specialized scientific instrument that our physicists, geologists, and chemists (and their students) will be able to use for their research and teaching.
Not to be cliché about it, but days like today make all the other days worthwhile.
For some reason, Julia wrote up a little nameplate for her lab the other day. She’s really gonna regret putting her second assistant down at the bottom when Genevieve gets that big grant.
The other day, I received an email from a “promotional services” company asking me to hire them to handle the College’s “recognition” needs. Even if I had the interest in or the authority to do such a thing, I wouldn’t hire this firm, for their email said, “Recognition doesn’t cost, it PAYS! Now more than ever, it’s crucial you keep your name in front of your donors at all times!” and offered this impressively poor sample – with photos pulled directly off the front page of the College website – of their product. It cracks me up every time I look at it.
On Facebook the other day, I read a rather brilliant post by a rather brilliant member of the faculty in which she described trying to choose a “theme” for 2010 – the “theme” being a more general but still effective way to focus one’s energy than the usual set of resolutions. I’d been toying with a short list of resolutions, but honestly they’ve lost their charm. Read more fiction? Do one drawing a day? Be more patient with the girls? All (and suchlike) are less things that merit some sort of firm “resolution” and more like things I ought to do just to be a decent person.
But a theme! This, I could get behind. I mused about her examples (and several examples offered by others who had adopted similar “themes”) and about a possible theme for my own 2010. Then, this afternoon, a lightning bolt leapt from the radio while I was listening to “Car Talk” and struck me in the head: “monotasking” – defined online as “the carrying out of one task at a time; single-tasking.” Inevitably, there are zillions of resources on the web about monotasking, such as “6 Reasons Monotasking Will Help You Get More Done Than Multitasking,” some of which I’ll peruse (one at a time).
This afternoon’s epiphany perfectly complements a line from a novel that I have been repeating in my head since reading it: “Now we’re doing what we’re doing now” (uttered [as it happens] by the cold-blooded criminal Parker, in Richard Stark’s thriller Firebreak). I hope this mantra helps me do a bunch of good things: focusing on the girls when I’m with them (even if they’re each doing and wanting something different), taking up and completing discrete tasks on the job(s), checking Facebook and Twitter and email less frequently, enjoying a meal in its own right rather than a chance to read something and email and eat simultaneously. I might even be able to go several consecutive wakeful hours without using my iPod Touch.
Beyond those rewards, though, I also hope that monotasking will help me feel less pulled-apart and frazzled and frayed and disgruntled and dissatisfied – adjectives that certainly applied to 2009. Now I’m doing what I’m doing now. Next I’ll do something else.
This pretty little bench (ignored since the students went home, a month ago) would have been a nice spot to sit and watch the snow fly – if you had a polar-weight sleeping bag and lots of warm drinks. By now, about 15 hours after taking this picture, the bench is probably just the core of a massive drift, and those seven little ridges of snow are gone forever. Oh well. See you on January 4, bench!
Today was the day when the last few students – the ones who couldn’t figure out how to take their exams earlier, mostly – went home for Carleton’s long Winter Recess, which runs all the way until January 2. Most of the students won’t be back until January, which will be okay, next week, when the janitors will have had a few days to clean up and, with any luck, we will have some snow to cover the wet, sticky leaves.
Today, though, it was just depressing to see campus empty out. The gray sky and 99% humidity didn’t help, but it was mostly the people. Many faculty and quite a few staff – like the librarians – looked almost as worn out as the students, who were even more haggard and ill-kempt than usual. Even the noontime buzz at the snack bar was subdued – a downer rather than the usual upper. The thousands of just-returned books at the library’s circulation desk looked like flotsam, and the lone student worker who was trying to check them all back in looked like a man lost at sea, or at least an underpaid factotum. My bike missed all the chums that are usually locked to the rack out front of my building.
Perhaps the most significant sign of the shift from full-on Fall Term madness to hollowed-out Winter Recess sedation was the number of couples whom I saw walking around hand-in-hand. For whatever reason – college culture? generational changes? H1N1? – it’s rare to see two students holding hands, but today I saw quite a few couples walking slowly from place to place, staving off the six weeks of separation with a few more minutes of interlocked fingers.
The graphic designer and visual artist Milton Glaser, drawing while talking about why drawing matters to him. My favorite line comes at about 2:08: “Now while people have what they need perhaps for their professional life, what they don’t have is a fundamental instrument for understanding the reality of that life.”
MILTON GLASER DRAWS & LECTURES from C. Coy on Vimeo.
One of my coworkers fell ill this week. She’s already on the mend, but both girls were immensely interested in and worried about her. Being inclined to create “cowds” (as Vivi says) for any and every occasion, they both got right to work on making get well cards for her.
Julia’s card was pretty and relatively conventional (though I did have to pare back her 1,000 word essay on being sick and getting better), but Vivi’s? Whoo boy. I’m not sure that faces with stringy hair, two-color noses, and scary-clown grins will cheer anybody up very much, but on the one hand Vivi means well, and on the other hand, any illness will seem less bad than whatever happened to this guy.
Okay, okay, I know I’m going overboard with the photos this week, but my brain’s too overworded at work to let me compose any coherent prose at home. And today’s bike ride to work was so fantastically pretty, I have to blog it.
My bike tires’ track through the frosty grass on the field behind Carleton’s Rec Center. The frosted grass crunched like peanut shells as I rode over it.
The Lower Lyman Lake, beautifully cross-hatched by the November morning breeze. I could’t capture the reflection of the moon flickering in the ripples, but it was gorgeous – a silvery circle being pulled apart and reassembled as the water moved.
The waning gibbous moon hanging in the sky above Carleton’s Boliou Hall. Somehow the moon is smaller in this shot than it was in real life.
Five kinds of Northfield drivers who irk me when I’m on my bike:
1. Those who, when passing me from behind, swing alllllll the way over into the opposite lane – even if we’re on a curve or a hill – and then take roughly four minutes to finish the pass. (7:50 a.m. today on Spring Creek Road.)
2. Those who, when coming toward me, decide that they rilly rillly rilly need to pass the bike in the other lane and swing alllllll the way over into my lane – even if we’re on a curve or a hill – and then, seeing me coming toward them, speed up to whip back into their own lane before I have to veer off the road but usually after I start to look for escape routes. (7:52 a.m. today on Wall Street Road.)
3. Those who don’t signal their turns but then scowl at me when I stop to figure out if they’re going to pilot their four-ton SUV into my route. (4:29 p.m. today at the entrance to subdivision.)
4. Those who stop at an intersection and then wave me through, even though they a) might not have a stop sign and b) reached the intersection before me. (Every day, often at the intersections near campus.)
5. Those who gun their engines to roar past me on the streets only to have to stop fifty feet away at the next stop sign, literally one second before I get to the same spot. (Many mornings, again, often near campus.)
Life is grand.
This week will be punctuated, Thursday night, by one of the least pleasant things I’ve done in my adult life: chairing the annual meeting of our full townhouse association. I’ve been dreading this event for several months, ever since those of us on the board began preparing to resolve some mounting problems that are or will soon plague us. Unfortunately, these solutions require raising the monthly dues that each owner must pay to the association – a step that has already generated a lot of invective and opposition from some members of the community.
The first change is perhaps the most radical and important: contracting with a property-management company to handle our bookkeeping, vendor contracting, and other tasks that the board has been handling on its own but which have been extremely hard to shoehorn into lives that are full of other obligations. Though the contract is not cheap, neither is it onerously expensive, especially when weighed against both the efficiencies of having professionals handle the more bureaucratic aspects of the association and the fact that each member of the board members has to do than than he should: we simply can’t find enough people to fill all five seats on the board. In my two years on the board for two years now, I’ve seen two board members quit after getting frustrated by their duties (and by a particularly obstreperous association resident), and had no end of trouble trying to find people willing to serve on the board. Right now, with exactly 48 hours until the meeting, we still can’t find anybody willing to be nominated for the fifth seat on the board: everyone knows that serving is a pain in the neck. These facts notwithstanding, some members of the board are intractably opposed to the use of a management company and naively certain that we can continue to rely on the already broken machinery of a volunteer board.
The shift of many responsibilities from the board alone to the board and the management company precedes by an expected springtime hike in our association’s insurance rates. This is where some real costs will come in, and where our dues increase is most needed. But as with the management-company situation, this is another place where the the naive think that we can just switch our policy to a new company, saving a few thousand dollars per year for the association (and a few hundred bucks per household) while also incurring considerable time-and-energy costs for board members, who would have to do all the hard work of seeking and evaluating bids for our policy, vetting possible insurers, doing all the changeover paperwork – and possibly still having to raise the dues to cover a premium that could well be higher than our current one.
God, my head hurts just contemplating it.
And but so, the annual meeting will almost certainly feature vociferous criticism from some people -and one person in particular – who think they know better than the board but who are unwilling or unable to actually join the board and do the work – even as they’re also unwilling to pay higher dues.
This is a pretty doomy scenario, at least for someone like me, inclined to ratiocination and averse to confrontation. But I’ve been surprised by how placid I’ve been in my angst. I’ve fallen back on all kinds of work habits which have helped dampen my sense of worry: breaking down tasks into discrete components; reminding myself that this is a temporary situation; seeking help from others; finding viable Plans B, C, and D; and using writing as a tool for thinking. With any luck, all the unpacking the doom will pay off with a better-than-expected meeting on Thursday.
I had big plans at work today, and while I did tick off most of the items on my to-do list before heading home, the morning was a mess owing, first, to a mysterious email message from the federal government’s stimulus-funds tracking service (I blew an hour figuring out the message and then resolving the ultimately benign issue behind it), and, second, to the surprising announcement by College President Robert A. Oden, Jr., that he’s retiring at the end of the academic year:
Robert A. Oden Jr., 63, Carleton College president since 2002 and a leader of educational institutions for more than 20 years, has announced his retirement effective June 2010, the end of the current academic year.
“I’ve personally informed all Carleton Trustees to tell them of my plan to retire at the conclusion of the current academic year,” Oden said. “My wife, Teresa, and I have devoted a great many hours to considering this decision over recent months and reached the conclusion that the time to retire is this coming June. You have my pledge that my commitment to doing all I can for Carleton remains fully in place throughout the current academic year.”
A “presidential transition” is a process experienced (once or more than once) by every longterm employee of a college and university, of course, but this will be the first one that I’ll see up close. It should be a good learning experience for me. I have worked with Rob a bit on various grant projects, writing letters and such for his signature. Just last week, I thought of some good ways to make my writing sound more like his (for the purposes to grant letters, I mean), but I guess that’s not really a useful skill to hone anymore. Regardless, I found Rob to be an exceptionally careful thinker, an excellent planner, and (most importantly, maybe, for a grantwriter) an extremely good editor. I wish him and his wife well.