Post-a-day for 31 days…Day 0

I promise, this was a planned number-I’m not just compensating for doing date math wrong and having day 1 on the day before I wanted to end.

I did specifically want to end today because today marks the close of another chapter-it was my last day working at a school district in a town hardly anyone has ever heard of (I promise, it’s a real town! It’s real!). I don’t think I’ll get all sentimental today because I feel like I’ve already used up my quota of career sentiment (last week, in fact), but then again, you never know with me.

I feel like this setting is definitely not for me-nothing wrong with the setting, per se (well, strictly work-wise, I guess-can’t guarantee personal safety, especially in these times), but it’s too many people for me to keep track of. I’m a perseverator-when I work with someone. I hyperfocus on their goals and progress and whatnot. That’s hard-nay, impossible, when you have four 6th graders with completely different goals in the room.

There’s also a great deal of paperwork. Again, paperwork is likely important-but I can’t keep track of all of it.

What I do like about this setting-and this is probably what I’ll miss about it-is that I didn’t have to (or really couldn’t, actually) refuse people services for superficial reasons. I got to patiently explain to parents that no, they didn’t have to be covered by the state insurance in order to get services-in fact, we at the school district would get funding for services from state insurance if they gave us consent for us to bill the insurance provider with minimal identifying information about the student-and here’s the kicker…we’d provide the student services even if the parent said no to this.

I got to tell parents their rights in the IEP process and really make sure they understood how much power they have in the team (I called this my ‘you-can-sue-us’ spiel in the privacy of my own head) and also got to tell them that the services their child was getting here would stay with them wherever they moved in the country-they wouldn’t have to worry as long as their child was in the public school system-and even if they did move their child to a private school, their child would still get at least half the services from the public school district.

These things are good things. These are things being done right. These are things I would like to remember.

Post-a-day for 31 days…Day 1

Why do we do things?

As I type, a person I cherish is trying to out-math a problem they’re working on. The problem? A cutesy game featuring whimsical characters and princesses and gnomes. Gnomes, I tell you. There are spreadsheets involved in this mathing.

The thing is, this person does a great deal of mathing for work-but of course, he gets paid for it. What, precisely, is his payment here? If I ask him that (and I will ask right as soon as I finish typing this sentence), his response will very likely be somewhere along the lines of “But math is fun!”

…He said, “Just for fun.” Ha! I knew it!

That’s the thing, isn’t it? Despite what we’ve all been led to believe (it’s a Conspiracy, I tell you! A CONSPIRACY! CONSTANT VIGILANCE!), a great deal of the things we do, especially the things we do well-more than we’ve been led to believe-appear to be motivated by…well, if not fun, as my friend so adorably put it, at least something approximating it. Just ’cause, let’s say.

I read a book where the author-a psychologist-made this very argument backed by research. ‘Do this, and you’ll get that’ apparently does not motivate people to do ‘this’ at all-it only motivates them to get ‘that’ through Any Means Necessary.

So what does that mean? What moral are we meant to take from this? Perhaps we should all embrace our inner four-year-olds and do things “just ’cause”?

Or ‘just for fun’.

Just a thought.

Post-a-day for 31 days…Day 2

The word for today is apparently ‘something’. This was not delivered to me by the random word generator-the source is considerably less random (I may even be a little biased towards this source).

I’m still drawing a blank, though. There’s been a lot of chaos in my perception of the world in the last few days-it’s the last week of school so I am basically a bureaucrat chained to my filing cabinet. I’m also saying goodbye to a lot of people at school (some of whom have been a relief to say goodbye to, I won’t lie). There have also been a slew of violent events in recent times-the most serious of which took place at a school in the very, very recent past. Between trying to go on as normal (but what is normal, anyway, especially in the last week of school?), receiving multiple emails from my school district’s admin effectively telling us to keep our chin up and so on and so forth, seeing the people I cherish absolutely terrified (and not necessarily without cause) and trying to figure out what exactly I feel about it (and let me tell you, that is one murky question)…

I guess that’s…something?

Post-a-day for 31 days…Day 3

May I make an inquiry? Is the right usage ‘inquiry’ or ‘enquiry’? To whom should I be making this query (or is the right usage actually, in fact, query?), the linguists (should I ask the descriptivists or the prescriptivists? Are there any linguists who are prescriptivists? Will the prescriptivist linguists please stand up?), or the English teachers (should I ask the Eagleland ones or the Conquerland ones…or the Desiland ones?)? Who came along and decided which form to use? Are they still right?

Are any of us right? Are any of us always right? What are we right about? If someone is always right, then, strictly, were they ever right without a standard of wrong as a foil? Can someone be always wrong? How long does that person survive? If they are always wrong, did they even exist, alive, in the first place, for isn’t being born alive the first thing a person can do right?

When does a person become a person? Is it at conception? What defines them as being a person at that time, having a full set of chromosomes? Is it when their heart begins to beat? What gives the heart such priority so as to define personhood-and not even the metaphorical heart but the real heart? Is it when they begin to think? How do we know when they begin to think? How do we know that the signs we use to decide that now, yes, now, this is a thinking person were not delayed in their occurrence because the person who showed the signs decided to only show the signs of their thinking to the world now, and not earlier, although they were already thinking (how’s that for a logic puzzle?)? Is it when they cry for the first time? How do we know that the first cry is a volitional act (because isn’t the hallmark of a person that they have volition with which to choose to act-or not act?)?

Is any act a volitional act? What, really, is volition? Is our fate predetermined? Is our fate, while not exactly predetermined, still deterministic in the sense that our actions are whole contingent on the exact soup of environment and life history that we bring to any given moment? Is there any way we can find out? If we do find out, would it only be because we were fated to find out? Would we be writing our own story from that point onwards? How would we know whether we were writing our own fate or not?

If I were to stop writing at this point, would it be because I am fated to do so, or because I made the active decision?

Post-a-day for 31 days…Day 4

Language is such an odd thing, isn’t it (As I type this, I am suddenly acutely aware of one particular trope I appear to employ with semi-regularity-introducing a subject with a tag question)? Not any language in particular, just language in general. Specifically-languages used and contained within small groups of people-maybe even as small as two individuals. People who are intimate with each other-as families, close-knit friends, small villages, small pockets of isolated cultures-generate an entire lexicon of specific words and phrases, sometimes in the span of mere months, that convey very specific things-things that may not even be translatable to the world at large.

This generation of an almost secret code, gradually growing more and more encrypted with greater occurrences of shared context, is something that I have recently been participating in with a person I cherish, and while I believe (for the most part) that I am simply an unwitting participant in this process, there is a small part that is the linguist in me that is attempting to put together a dictionary for this code in a corner of my brain.

This linguist is certainly in for a challenge, because just in the past thirty seconds or so of conversation with this person, I have referenced a dessert, a wild animal, and a common food allergen, and l may have sub-referenced a vague legal term, and none of these references were actually used in a literal sense. It made perfect sense to us, of course.

And that’s just the words. There is a whole host of simply sounds, and facial expressions, and gestures, and so much more, that all weave together to create this dialect known only to the two of us.

What if some xeno-anthropologist among the extra-terrestrials caught a snippet of our exchanges? What would they think human language was like (if, you know, they were so abysmal in their statistics common sense that the sampled only us and only our shared context and nothing and no one else)?

I wonder.

Post-a-day for 31 days…Day 5

So I just watched a movie. A Tamil movie; moreover a Tamil movie made featuring an actor with mass appeal, which means a few things.

1. There will be multiple action scenes that occur at close quarters and the Hero is always Unscathed. Even when in the face of a machine gun-wearing white to boot, he will have a few tasteful smears of someone else’s blood on him, but never his own.
2. There will be a great deal of time spent in dialogue that is meant to sound cool instead of Getting On With Things.
3. There will be a woman whose reason for existence is….okay, my brain fails me here.
4. Actually, take that back. There will be multiple women who will fight over our Hero. Their combined age will be less than or equal to the Hero’s (or rather the actor who plays the Hero’s) age.
5. There will be a comedian (or three) who will get into multiple close scrapes and mouth off to everyone, villains, Heros, Look-Pretties, blah blah blah, and will remain mostly unscathed.
6. There will be one or two deaths that spur the Hero-one required By Law at the beginning, and one that may or may not occur later on to add to the Hero’s Motivation Juice if required.
7. There will be at least one profession that is Woefully Misrepresented.

And that just about sums it up, I think.

Post-a-day for 31 days…Day 6

Today’s word is ‘indulge’. Allow me to indulge in a daydream in today’s post, will you?

Could we have a perfect world? And if so, what criteria would define it as perfect? Would we weed out war? Erase evil (but can we have good without evil?)? Remove racism? Strike down sexism? Annihilate ableism?

I would really like to believe we could. Eventually. Someday. But let’s be real-can we really have perfect without a foil of imperfect against which to judge? Would such a world be…boring? I’ve read (fictitious, of course) descriptions of utopias, and they always, inevitably, without fail, end up being some horrible, distorted, dystopia. An example that springs readily to mind (particularly because some students I have been working with read this book recently and they were speechless with misery when they found out about this) is The Giver by Lois Lowry.

The book describes, initially, a world which is perfect because everything people do is decided for them-family units (consisting of one pair of adults brought together based on their interests and compatibility, one male child, and one female child-no more, no less), careers (decided based on extensive observations over childhood and intimated to the person when they officially turn twelve), meals (delivered to dwellings thrice a day). People commute on bicycles, are taught to use precise vocabulary, immediately apologize whenever they are at fault, spend their preteen years volunteering around the community after school, discuss their feelings over dinner as a family because they are legally required to do so, and take pills that presumably inhibit sexual arousal and also possibly act as birth control as soon as puberty begins to hit.

We then begin to find out other things. This world is climate controlled-weather as a concept doesn’t exist because it is always pleasant and therefore the same. It seems like everyone is of the same race, and also conveniently, people either can’t see or have no cognitive concept of color. Animals have long been eradicated (other than some which may be raised in a cloistered environment solely for food purposes? The book doesn’t go into details). And finally, the part that shocked my young students-when children are born in multiples, or are developmentally delayed (or show even the slightest possibility of being different in some way), or when senior citizens cross a certain age, or when people commit really any (even harmless) infraction, they are Released. The book’s protagonist remains in blissful ignorance over what that means until, like the young readers I was speaking to, he has an epiphany-through firsthand observation-of what precisely that means. So then he runs away, and brings some chaos into this artificially perfect world.

My little daydream thus ends with the question-can we afford to indulge in ideas of perfection?

Post-a-day for 31 days…Day 7

Today marks the 5-year anniversary of the end of the intern diaries (see here for that post). Reading through it now (especially when followed up with reading the much more world-weary one-year follow-up here), I see a starry-eyed child (Don’t worry, I’m not about to go into a world weary rant. I think.). Not that it was strictly wrong to think like that-I daresay it’s expected, nay, practically required of any excited new grad worth their salt.

I still agree with myself on a whole lot, which either means that I was on the right track back then or I’m basically still a novice now. I particularly resonate with that spiel on principles-that little metaphor still makes so much (at the risk of sounding excessively self-congratulatory) sense. My principles have indeed evolved, but never really moved from where they started. That ‘one smile at a time’ is where I draw the line at cheesiness, though.

What would I tell myself from back then? Nothing, really. I think I was doing alright. What would I tell myself of the year after that? I mean…so much of that resonates with me now-not so much the rose-tinted glasses bit but the ramble I went on after that. Some parts do not-some of those tasks have been accomplished, thank you very much- but well…

I think end-of-the-intern-diaries and end-of-one-year-after-the-end-of-the-intern-diaries (still a mouthful, whew) were two sides of the same coin. Both are really essential to give the coin some…tangibility, to run with the metaphor, because we can’t do things with a 2D image of one side of a coin. We need to tint our glasses red and blue to see the 3D picture, you see (I’ll stop with the horrible analogies now, I’m actually starting to make myself cringe a little)

So what else can I say now? Everything appears to have already been said.

Post-a-day for 31 days…Day 8

I don’t have all day, so take this down quickly. Good grief, can you not have a pencil sharpened before I get here? You have literally one job.

…Well, yes, getting me lunch is also your job, but one can’t exactly call it a job-you get to take your lunch while you get me my lunch, so it’s actually a break. In fact, I shouldn’t even be paying you for it, now, should I?

Speaking of which, the usual, please. The place around the corner, of course. And no mayo, for goodness’ sake, and the cheese on the side. You ought to know this off by heart now-what are you still scratching away with that pencil for? What do you mean it’s different than yesterday’s? I eat the same thing everyday, don’t be ridiculous. How you managed to become an assistant is truly beyond me. And please, don’t wear so much hair product-it makes my eyes burn.

Now, call back Jolene from Vistas and tell her I’ll have to push our meeting to tomorrow. I have to get my partner roses this evening for some darned reason because they’ve been giving me the stinkeye for a week-I don’t know what they want. Find out for me, will you? Was it an anniversary? And a dozen long-stemmed pink ones will do-get them from Richa’s, not that shifty looking dark hole of a store on third. I don’t trust dark florists’ shops-what they even do to get their plants to grow in that dungeon of theirs I don’t want to know. Pink. Do try to remember that-they hate red with a passion and if I get banished to the couch over your blunder you’ll be staying on your couch instead of coming in here for the forseeable future. Well? Don’t you want to write that down?

What do you mean Jolene can’t do tomorrow? How on earth can you possibly know? Oh, she shared her calendar? As though it were a poem she were writing. Ridiculous. One’s schedule is between one and their assistant. Well, when can she meet that isn’t today, then? No? Only today? Oh, good grief.

Alright, it will have to be a lunch meeting then. Cancel the sandwich-just get me the lilies. Roses? What roses? I did? Don’t be daft, they hate red roses with a passion. Oh, pink roses. Well, that’s not a bad idea. Do that then. And since I already placed the dratted order online while you were fumbling, go ahead and pick it up. I hope you aren’t too fond of mayo.