The Whining Stranger's Daily Haiku: 5 February 2007

You! Hallway whistler!
Avian interruptions!
Would that you would stop!

Musings: Ah, old scholar.

I realized this morning that my not infrequent grumbling about students' work ethics and yard ethics and driving ethics etc. may rehearse one of the more tired cliches of university life: The "What's wrong with these kids?" & "Back in my day" & "Now is worse than then" cross-generational divide. If I gave you the impression that I am united among my colleagues on the faculty in a constant misanthropic judging of today's youth, then I apologize. Such is not the case.

In fact, as I rediscovered at a faculty party this weekend, the professoriate has perhaps a greater ability to stir my ire than the earnest if underachieving undergrads about whom I sometimes rant.

Case in point: the tenured colleague from another department who brazenly and proudly told my partner and I that--

1. He hates cats and would be happy to shoot them if they came into his yard. ["Um, you do live out of the radius of my cat's wanderings, right?"]
2. He has pulled himself up from his bootstraps over the course of his career, the evidence of which is the fact that when he first moved here to [unnamed college town] he lived in a neighborhood where [sotto voce] he "was the only white person around." ["Um, it is truly inspiring how you've left those insidious black and brown folks behind."]
3. The university needs to stop hiring so many ugly women, and when he's on a hiring committee makes sure to vote against any unattractive women candidates. ["Um, what is the number for the campus ombudsman again?"]
4. He doesn't feel you need to be able to talk with the person you're fucking. In fact, he had a thing with a 17 year old a few years back. The pussy, he insisted, was great. ["Um, did a tenured faculty member just say "Pussy" and proudly admit to statutory rape?"]
5. The Mexican-American fellow colleague of ours who's thinking of running for the House of Representatives in the future should borrow his white wife and children to impress voters, unless of course that would hurt the "obvious" advantage of being a minority candidate. ["Um, we are talking about the United States, right? What fucking advantage?"]

Sigh.

Musings: On Headphones and Dark Sunglasses and Monday Mornings

A brief procrastinatory meditation as I try to kill ten minutes of would-be work time before I justify more non-work time with a noontime lunch break...

I like busy weekends with much socializing, for the most part, but they make me exhausted come Monday morning. Not a good way to start the week. I need to sleep more, perhaps. Saturday morning, for instance, I ran a 5k race on just under three hours sleep after too much beer and good fun the night before. My time was good given the obvious fatigue and dehydration, but I have to admit I'm not a kid anymore. ("I admit I'm not a kid anymore.") Sunday followed a long birthday party for a friend on Saturday night. I was slow moving till dinner time. Then it was about time to go to bed and call it a weekend. This morning's 9am meeting was unwelcome in turn.

In other news, I'm loving the mobile private bubble of my mp3 player and dark sunglasses combination on walks to campus each morning. The new shades that I got (black, Marcello-ish) for a dollar-fifty at a thrift store last week are clearly the darkest sunglasses I've ever owned. I won't even wear them for driving because they impede visibility so much. But that's good when I have to pass Casa Barbarian next door, and for general, "Don't get in my consciousness" ambulation time before meetings and classes.

Still reeling from the Tigers' collapse against KC this weekend. I am soliciting a general abundance of pro-Detroit, anti-Yankees vibes from anybody who reads this. Boo Yankees!

OK, there. I look at the clock. It's just about midday. By the time I post this it'll be time to get my lunch out and ignore the stacks of books on the desk for a little bit more.

Musings: The Barbarian Invasions Continue

Leaving the house today to walk to campus, my partner and I noticed that the rich barbarian undergrads next door--they of the BMW and the Jeep Cherokee in the driveway, of the garbage on the lawn, and the ratty couch on the front porch--were hosting a stack of crumpled Bud Light cans all over the front lawn, just steps away from one of their gas-guzzling expensive vehicles.

Now, I'm not one for neighborhood policing, or gated communities, or homogeneous middle-class living, I swear it. But could you spoiled little assholes at least make the slightest bit of effort to step up the evolutionary scale and join civilization? Christ, for proprietary's sake, even if you're refuse to adhere to the common sense (and humane) convention of not driving-while-shitfaced, could you hide the evidence of your drunken attempts at vehicular manslaughter?

Idiots.

Musings: 100 Days of Curmudgeonly Sentiments Continuing--

Things to keep a prematurely grumpy old man grumpy as September wears on:

1. Academic departments that decide suddenly to ration out how much paper each faculty member receives each semester. "Um. Pardon me for printing out drafts of the academic articles, book chapters, short stories, reviews and lecture notes that lie at the heart of my job description and tenure expectations."

2. Nose-diving first-place baseball teams that seem determined to relinquish their lead just before playoff time.

3. Any vehicle with "F-150, F-250, or F-450" in its name.

4. Bigoted politicians who don't attend AIDS conventions ostensibly because it will link them publicly to a "queer" cause.

5. Fantasy football draftees who underperform. Yeah, I might be talking 'bout you, Cedric Wilson.

6. Thirty-dollar mp3 player covers supposedly designed for certain models of mp3 players but which don't fit properly.

7. The jerk campus police officer who ticketed my car when I was parked illegally to play basketball. The lot was half empty, dude!

So we beat on, boats against the current, and all that--

Musings: On Poll Results and First Weeks of Teaching

So the poll results are in for August. Apparently nobody (but me) gives a rat's ass whether the Tigers win the World Series or whether Barry Sonnefield makes the right casting choice for Jack Gladney in White Noise or if Philip Roth gets his Nobel laureate due. But you do care about fixing that mess down in D.C. that's contributed to our world getting progressively more miserable since early in 2001. (Not to mention that some of you think I'm underpaid. I am. Criminally.)

Meanwhile, your old pal, The Whining Stranger, survived his first week of teaching without too many public speaking panic attacks or confrontations with water-balloon-toting or vodka-swilling hyenas. I was a bit put off by one student in one of my classes who confidently announced to me in his introduction that he doesn't like using intelligent words to discuss literature nor does he find much joy in sitting around talking about books. I told him I expect plenty of both, so hopefully there won't be too much trouble there. Otherwise, the student population in my classes seems eager so far, though my jokes are only earning resounding laughter about 62% of the time thus far. The generation gap is widening, I fear. I need to incorporate more physical comedy into my schtick. Nothing goes better with a good literary discussion than a well-timed pratfall.

And Mom called this morning to say that she scored free tickets to see Steely Dan and Michael McDonald. I'm happy for her. She was envious when she heard my glowing review back in July.

Musings: Ah, scholars--

"Autum, to me the most congenial of seasons: the University, to me the most congenial of lives." --Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels (1981)

Now, understand this from the get-go: most days I love my job and enjoy the neighborhood in which I live. I love being a professor. I like being close to campus. I like the morning walk that takes me from my home to the university at which I teach. I like greeting the day by passing stately brick buildings and eventually entering the stately brick building that houses my office and the classrooms in which I teach.

But I also fear that I'm becoming a curmudgeon at age thirty-two. I find myself frustrated often by the undergraduates that surround me. I forgot about it over the summer, I think, but with their return to town en masse over the past week that frustration has re-emerged. Part of the problem might be that I entered this career expecting that undergraduates would tend to be the way I was as an undergraduate: that is, not insanely ambitious, but at least intellectually curious. The type of kids who read The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald on the weekends not because it's been assigned to them, but because it's fun to read. Students who check out Ingmar Bergman films when they show near campus because it's exciting to discover great art...

Alas--

Last night, walking the dog in the early evening, I saw a pile of undergraduates piling into an SUV with an open bottle of vodka and uncapped beers all around. (And this in a college town that--as I posted earlier--seems to lead the universe in drunk-driving catastrophes.) Then turning back onto my own street, I saw my neighbors from two doors down amusing themselves with a giant water balloon slingshot, taking turns dousing each other with the explosive splash of landing-balloons-plus-gravity, laughing like hyenas all the while.

Sigh.

Trust me, I wasn't a prudish undergrad. (Rather, I was enamored with the idea of a "studious by day, dissolute by night" Byronic balance.) Nor was I a humorless student. But I did aspire to be smart, cool, thoughtful.

Maybe it's narcissism, certainly it's idealistic, but I continue to search the neighborhood and the campus for visions of a younger me.