Mistakes are Made

I don't like making mistakes.  Does anyone?  Mistakes--from burning the garlic bread under the broiler to offering someone a job that doesn't exist--upset me, pretty much equally it seems.  I used to pride myself on my organizational abilities.  I could keep track of the obligations and belongings of multiple people in and out of my household.  Now, I find myself making little errors.  I forgot to renew the registration on my car. I forgot to check my passport's expiration until 10 days before an international trip. I forgot to mail a birthday card. For a few years, I blamed such mistakes on the distractions created by personal turmoil, moving to a new city, starting a new job.  What's my excuse now....age?

What bothers me is that these failures, these mistakes, challenge what I view as a fundamental aspects of my being--I am competent, I am capable, I am organized, I can be depended upon. Mistakes call into question those key understandings. What am I if I'm not those things?  Who am I if I'm not competent and capable?

I'm a human.  That's what and who I am. Like any real person, there are gaps in my competence. I make mistakes.

Today I was reading through the recently released textbook authored by one of my colleagues, "Principles and Practice of Psychiatric Rehabilitation."  Early on are these words, "Failure, however, is a part of life. Everyone better understands the bounds of existence through the experience of falling short."  My bounds are feeling pretty tight today....

The Thank You's

I will say upfront that I'm a sucker for praise.  I don't have to have it, but I love to hear it!

This time of year, at the end of a semester and the end of an academic year, I'm touched by the comments I hear from students.  Now, maybe these are just thinly disguised last minute bids for a better grade, but I like to believe they are sincere.

Hi Professor,

Attached is my final paper.

Thank you for a great semester,

Here is my final paper. Hope you have a great summer!

I hope all is well. Attached is my Demographic Profile paper ...Thank you for a fantastic class! I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was fun and I learned a lot. I'll be using this in my future business endeavors after college! Thanks again and have a wonderful summer!

Attached is my final country profile report. It's been a fun semester; I hope you continue to teach! I wish you the best!

Those are the ones I get through email and doesn't include the students who stop by to personally hand in their paper and thank me.

I know I like to hear these words, so I'm sure they do, too.  I've long been in the practice of writing individual students after the semester to acknowledge their work, their participation, or sometimes only their presence in my class. 

I saw a quote the other day that went something like this...To the world you may only be one person, but to one person you may mean the world. Few of these students will remember me in a few years, and, to be honest, I will remember few of them. I doubt I'm changing lives in my demographic methods and models class.  But the accumulated feeling of being appreciated hopefully will last much longer for all of us. 

So, go out today and say "thank you" to someone.  I think it will make you both feel good.

"Maybe I should just go live in a hut in the woods."

A couple of months ago my son had his wallet stolen from his gym locker at college.  It contained only about $5 in cash, but, of course, that was not the biggest loss.  He quickly notified me and I canceled our joint credit card.  Replacement cards came overnight and I sent him one the next day.  He got a new student ID that day. His bank did not have a branch in his college town, so he called to get a new debit/ATM card.  Unfortunately, he didn't realize that it would be sent to our old address, a place where we had not lived for over a year and from which mail was no longer forwarded.   Fortunately, he had his passport so our trip to Puerto Rico was unaffected and he was able to visit the bank on his way to the airport and change his address and get a new debit card.

The last item to replace was his driver's license. He had a NY license. Neither of us had seen a reason to change to an IL license when I moved.  He spent more time in New York than Illinois and who knew where he would land a year from now when he graduated.  He was able to apply online for a temporary NY license and a new permanent one would be mailed....again to the old, no longer living there, no mail forwarding address. Okay....time to get an Illinois license.  He is home for spring break in March, his temporary license is good until the end of March, we will get this all taken care of.

To get an IL license you need to prove your identity, your social security number, your signature, and...your residence.  He has a birth certificate, he has a social security card, he has a credit card.  To prove residency he needs government mail, a college bill, a utility/insurance/rent statement, a bank statement or any of a variety of other documents.  He has a college bill.  He has a brokerage account statement (joint with me), he has his filed state and federal tax returns.  He does not have enough. He cannot prove he lives here.

Bank account, a bank statement with his IL address would suffice. Given the problems with getting his new debit card we had considered opening up a Chase bank account anyway.  We go to the bank.  There he doesn't need to prove residency, but he does need to prove identity.  Major way to prove identity.... a DRIVER'S LICENSE.




He can't get a license because he can't prove his residency. One way to prove residency is to have a bank account, which he can't open because he can't prove his identity.

He is a man without a place.

That's when he said..."Maybe I should just go live in a hut in the woods."

(On a more serious note, this saga made me really think about the complications faced by those forced to move frequently, those who have trouble maintaining or securing documents, and those who daily struggle with establishing their place in our society.  Coincidentally, just a few days before this comedy, I heard a radio story about the problems released prisoners face obtaining state ID cards in Illinois.  The point was made that the state was convinced enough of their identity to incarcerate them, the least we could do was supply them with ID upon their release.)

No cats in space

I'm taking a short course on "flash fiction" writing, all pieces 1000 words or less.  I don't really write fiction, so I'm writing non-fiction.  Here is my first assignment--about 700 words.

No cats in space

Write what you know. Her mind raced, flipping through the Rolodex of her life, looking for inspiration. (Well that dates her, doesn’t it? Maybe scrolling through her Instagram would be better.)  No boring stories about old people, or was it no stories about boring old people? She couldn't remember.  A few years ago she had expressed a great fear that she was growing into a boring old person.  Ditching a husband, taking a new job, and moving halfway across the country temporarily helped assuage that fear, but the march of time was relentless and she knew she could slip back into obscurity in an instant, melt into an overheated apartment with word search puzzles and soap operas.  At least she didn't like cats, she had that going for her.

No surprise dead children.  Well, that ruled out a big chunk of her childhood, surprisingly dead and perhaps dying sisters were something she knew all too well. They were convenient topics, but maybe too conventional. Nearly 50 years later she could still put herself back in that funeral home, church, or hospital and recall in vivid detail the plush carpet, the pink dress, the stained glass window, the labored walks through linoleum halls. But, no dead kid stories, no need to go there tonight, move on.

No stories about animals inhabiting your body.  She wondered if that included stories about ear worms, those times when snippets of song get stuck in your head.  Had that ever happened to her?  What about the restless legs that would sometimes keep her up at night with that feeling of ants crawling inside her thighs?  Maybe too close to an old lady story, though. There were those fire ants, marching north from Central America.  Was there a story there? Or the Zika virus?  Does a virus count as an animal inhabiting your body? A virus isn't an animal, she didn't think. Bacteria, those were maybe animals.  Well, this didn't seem to be going anywhere.

No heartbroken twentysomething stories. No danger there, those years were far in the past. Heartbreak certainly feels different at sixty than twenty. An older heart doesn't shatter the way a young one does. Instead it collapses, folds in on itself, and squeezes—takes your breath away.  Deep and visceral, your heart holds a lifetime of losses.

Stories that take place in foreign places were good, she recalled.  Should she write about catching a venereal disease from the Soviet intent on marrying her so that he could defect?  Or being in the back of a cab in Leningrad at 3 am, drunk and unable to remember the name of her hotel; holding out a handful of rubles and hoping the cab driver was kinder than the men who had left her at the bar? Those seemed a little too revealing, perhaps.  Wasn't there something about sex on that list, though?  She thought she might be good at writing erotic fiction. Maybe that was a way to go.  That, at least, might help dispel the boring old lady stereotype.

She had more living abroad stories. Experiencing the events of September 11 in Germany, the sense of dislocation, the first-hand witnessing of foreign sympathies, the joking of her French neighbors about the harshness of the English language, "’AfghaniSTAN,’ ‘PakiSTAN,’ it is like you are dropping a bomb every time you say it!”  Her parents carried five pounds of grape jelly through Heathrow because you couldn’t get grape jelly in Germany and the boys were complaining. That was before the 3-1-1 rule.  Funny, that you could do that on September 30, 2001, but not September 30, 2015.  Were her parents boring old people?  She remembered her father remarking, at an age not much different from hers, that he was doing more things for the last time than for the first time.  That's why she canoed in the Boundary Waters, scaled a high ropes course, and rode a zip line this summer.  Vigilance was key. 

No pieces that are only dialogue with no story.  She feared she was drifting into that territory.  Her life drifting in space, words from a great black void.  Is that what growing old would be like? Space travel, that doesn’t seem boring at all.

Aging

I study aging.  A common laugh line used in public presentations is that it is an important field of study because everyone is aging, from the moment we are conceived we are getting older.

Even me.

I take classes at a small gym near my house where I am by far the oldest member.  I could be everyone's mother.  Laughing, I told the owner I thought it was important for me to keep coming because I set the low bar for everyone else.  If the old lady can do it, surely they could, too.

Ten years ago an orthopedic surgeon said that ACL reconstruction was not indicated for someone "my age."

A speech therapist has been helping me resolve a problem I have with vocal chord spasms. After I expressed frustration with not being able to fix the problem faster, she noted that "with age" our voices change and that I need to learn to work with those changes.

I still have one baby tooth.  For whatever reason, the permanent tooth never came in.  At my last check-up the dentist noted that the bone around that tooth was starting to dissolve.  "It happens with age," was his explanation.

I am quite often offered the senior discount at movie theaters, restaurants, and other venues. Although I don't technically qualify based on age, I've decided to use my gray hair advantage.  I should get something for my "age."

What matters?

I'm living in a city dealing with racial tension head-on.  A university campus two miles away is closed under threat of violence.  Colleagues on campuses across the country are facing difficult questions about the balance of free speech and rights.

But, what is on my agenda today:

1. Edit information describing our academic programs for the university bulletin
2. Review a faculty member's materials for promotion and tenure and start drafting a letter of support
3. Meet to discuss leadership initiatives on campus
4. Meet with a student appealing a grade
5. Begin budget planning for next fiscal year with my budget director

Some days I wonder what difference these things make.  Does it matter? Do I matter? Am I accomplishing anything?

Let me look at each of those more closely.

Bulletin info: This is where I state the purpose of our college--to bridge the gap between technology and people.  The goal of our program is to help people understand the role of technology in their lives and how to make sense of it, to encourage students to think broadly and critically about the future, to encourage students to pursue these as serious areas of study.

Promotion and tenure:  Here I have a chance to shape the face of academia, to show the value of scholarly work in new areas, to reward collaboration and interdisciplinary efforts, to support the role of diverse voices in our institution.

Leadership: how do we prepare students to be thoughtful, informed citizens?

Grades:  Helping a student understand the value of honesty and hard work, while still respecting a student's point of view and balancing the need to learn from mistakes against the need to maintain standards.

Budget:  What is important? How do we support our mission?  How can I help faculty members achieve their goals?  How do I engage alumni and friends?

When I start to wonder if what I'm doing matters, I remember one day from second grade.  It was late spring and I sat at my desk, head bowed over my paper, pencil gripped tightly in my hand. I don't know what the subject was that had my attention, but I remember the feeling of intense concentration, the warmth of the afternoon sun through the windows, the quiet of the room.  As I worked my teacher came by, placed a hand on my shoulder, and said, "Good job, Chris."  She probably said those words a hundred times a day, year after year, student after student.  Why did they mean so much that day?  I don't know, but they have stayed with me for over 50 years.

I'm sure there are days she wondered if it made any difference, if what she was doing mattered.  I know she did make a difference, and it did matter.

Some days I think what I'm doing matters very little, other days how much it might matter scares me.

Adding

I've been going to a new gym for a few months.  It is a small, personal "fitness studio" rather than a large anonymous gym like Gold's or Planet Fitness.  The other members are friendly, supportive, and accepting of having someone about twice their age sweat with them.  I didn't really join to lose weight, but now that I've been working out it has become more of a goal.  

Last night the trainer offered one piece of advice that really hit home on many levels.  He suggested that rather than cutting things out of my diet, I try adding things in.  Add more vegetables, add more fruit, add more protein.  By focusing on what you are adding, rather than subtracting, positive changes will naturally happen and be less stressful. 

I think that is good advice generally.  Focus on positive additions instead of negative subtractions. Focus on adding good things to your life, more fun, more enjoyment, more pleasure.  Think less about what you shouldn't be doing, and more about what you want to do.  I think I'll try that out.