Strongly Worded

Mature and Yet Sub Par

So after my triumphant conquest over the evil neighbor, and taking pride in my maturity, I find myself awash in lameness.

I've been doing that thing where I write down the same five things on my to-do list every day, and don't accomplish any of the tasks, and instead watch back to back Netflixed episodes of Veronica Mars (thanks to Maven and Melinda, I'm completely hooked) and experience self-loathing.

So in addition to this week's sparse blogging, I have failed to exercise, failed to to call two friends I need to speak with, failed to apply for two jobs that are probably filled by now, failed to make weekend plans, and failed to do a bunch of other things too boring to discuss here.

I suspect that today's outfit was on the ugly side. I said at least one dumb thing to a higher-up I am trying to impress, and I made a minor but annoying mistake on a project she gave me.

I am just off my game this week. That's all I've got for now. I figure a sub par post is better than none at all.

Posted by Dori at 9:09 PM 3 comments

Adult Content

I followed the beloved A.'s instructions and saw Lars and the Real Girl, which I loved, and which is sweet and sad in the way of Garden State and Lost in Translation.

In one of the movie's key scenes, the main character asks his brother when he became a man. And he responds by saying that adulthood is marked by the desire to do right: not (necessarily) what's right for you, or what feels right in the moment, but what's best for the community or people you care about. (I'd add that in addition to the aforementioned indicator, some other markers of adulthood include hiring movers, acknowledging (and ideally accepting) your parents' flaws, and staying in hotels and opposed to hostels.)

In any case, I had a flicker of adulthood on Friday, when I tried to back out of my driveway, which was slightly obstructed by a car that had parked too close. After an agonizingly slow, careful, billion-point turn, I was stuck in the middle of the road, and I gently bumped into the car.

I suddenly heard screaming, and I mean screaming. A neighbor raced down the stairs of his home, still in his bathrobe, and unleashed a torrent of obscenities upon me that almost reduced me to tears. My driving, though unskilled, was so clearly careful that I couldn't (still can't) understand where the rage was coming from - and while I had bumped the car, the only damage was a tiny (and I mean tiny) scratch. I apologized despite the defensive rageful feelings that his behavior triggered, and drove away.

I remembered how awful it is to live near unreasonable people who harbor (unreasonable) grudges. And then I squelched my defensiveness and decided to Be the Better Person. While the neighbor had behaved horribly, I had, after all, nicked his car. I drove to the local florist's and dropped $30 on a seasonal bouquet.

I felt like a major adult when I presented it later in the day. The guy was clearly struck by his jerkiness, and its contrast to my lovely neighborliness. He actually apologized for yelling at me. I accepted his apology, smiled, and took off.

Now I'm too scared to park anywhere near his car, but at least I am damned grown up.

Posted by Dori at 1:14 PM 3 comments

Ask and You Shall Receive

So I am constantly telling my students and fellow females about the need to negotiate and ask for what we want. The brilliant book Women Don't Ask addresses this phenomenon, and points to lots of shocking research, including the fact that women will pay, on average, over $1,300 to avoid negotiating the price of a car.

I belong to a fancy gym with flowers in the locker room and free tampons. I have the cheapest membership, which means I can't go to the gym during "prime time" hours (after work or Saturday mornings), but it's worth it. I love my Advanced Step and my Step 'N Sculpt, and I love watching America's Top Model while on the elliptical (though I'm concerned because it seems to be the only show ever on MTV/VH1).

One of my favorite aspects of the gym is the steam room, in which I revel in 120 degree heat and moisture (I know everyone hates that word), which is just the thing for my constantly cold body and parched skin.

A few weeks ago, after announcing the annual increase in fees, the gym also announced the complete renovation of the "wet area" (showers, steam room, sauna, whirlpool). To compensate for a whole month without these amenities, the club is offering everyone "all club access", which would grant me my steam fix if I drove to one of the other clubs (all at least 45 minutes away from both my home and work). That would just never happen.

This sucks, and it nagged at me. I knew I needed to request an alternative, but felt embarrassed to bring it up. Today I forced myself to email the manager and I suggested that I could get "prime time" access for the month of December, to compensate for steam-free workouts. She immediately agreed and I feel so, so pleased.

Posted by Dori at 10:38 AM 4 comments

Testing 1, 2, 3

So among the many perks of working in academia is access to a cappella music. When I was in college, I was somewhat of an a cappella groupie, because the members of the best group lived in my dorm, and thus I saw, first-hand, how cool it was to be incredibly talented and be a member of a tight-knit clique/cult and have access to the guys in male a capella groups who visited our campus as featured performers/fresh meat. The guys were always adorable and I'd sit in the front row and fantasize that their rendition of "Brown-eyed Girl" was directed at me. I never actually spoke to any one of the visiting a capella guys, but they apparently attended the coolest parties (hosted in their honor) in which they not only hooked up with my classmates but also sang impromptu harmonies.

The mystique surrounding college a cappella persisted until after I graduated, and I fell in love with a former member of SQ. We went to a concert (he had "alum" status by then). And afterwards I had (what I thought would be) the supreme pleasure of attending an actual a cappella party at a co-ed school. I was kind of old by then (by which I mean 23), so the novelty of being inside a boy's dorm room underwhelmed me. And I was hugely disappointed to find that the party consisted of the same stale chips and beer and awkwardness that were staples of the social life at my (women's) college. I was disappointed. But I did have the very real pleasure of dating the aforementioned a cappella boy, and he'd sing in the shower and once (unsuccessfully) tried to teach me pitch.

Anyway. Despite the fact that I am much, much older, I remain a little in awe of this whole scene, and when two students at my foster job mentioned that they're members of the premiere group on campus, I got a little giggly and star-struck and listened to them online and then decided to check out their concert and also buy their CD.

Which I did with the beloved E. on Saturday night. They were so cute, running around before the show, all self-important with their water bottles and sound check. Their quirky set included break dancing and an encounter between a guy dressed as a gorilla and another guy dressed as a banana. They trash-talked about the women on their campus and how they are "the poor man's Wellesley girls."

I was too embarrassed to say hi to the students I know in the group. I felt so very, very old and dorky, way dorkier than I did in college, because there was absolutely no hope at all that any of the songs would be directed at me. Which is probably a good thing, since I'm almost old enough to be their mother (assuming I could bear children at age 12), and one of the concert's highlights was Nelly Furtado's "Promiscuous Girl."

Posted by Dori at 7:48 PM 1 comments

A Post in My Own Words

So after 20 weeks of teaching my online college class, I've encountered plagiarism for the first time. I am not naive enough to believe that it hasn't happened before, but in this case, the student submitted work that was unquestionably someone else's. She sloppily assembled a paper by pasting, verbatim, paragraphs from three different websites.

Interestingly, she actually did a fair amount of research to find three sources that related to the assignment. She was supposed to synthesize assigned readings, and instead spent considerable time/energy finding other stuff to copy.

The language was so sophisticated that it was a no-brainer to google it and find all three sources. I thought a lot about what to do. Give her a zero? Fail her for the class? Let her re-do it? Tell the department chair?

I consulted with several of my friends, who took a harsh stand and thought she should fail the class. They argued that leniency in this area erodes everyone's academic integrity. We talked a lot about whether it was better or worse that she didn't copy from a friend, or copy all of the text from one source. I decided against giving her an F for the class. Doing so would waste her parents' money and prevent her from learning the rest of the course material. Nobody else would know or care, so failing her wouldn't be a deterrent to other students. And she wouldn't necessarily act differently in the future.

When I confronted the student she was horrified and apologetic. She claimed that she had misunderstood the difference between quotation marks and footnotes. She said that she had used footnotes, but they hadn't survived the transfer of her document from Word Perfect to Word. When she re-sent the document, it became clear that while she had plagiarized, it was not a cut-and-dry situation. She's a senior in college and it shocks me that she wouldn't know that you need to use quotation marks and footnotes. And that it's never OK for 70% of one's paper to be lifted from other sources. But my class is not an English or writing course, and there's no way I can singlehandedly teach her the nuances of citation.

I sent her several links to instructional websites, and I asked her fix and re-submit the paper, which she eagerly agreed to do. But now I need to figure out how much (and whether?) to adjust her grade. The mistake was egregious. But it was (at least in part) due to ignorance--a failure on the part of her other professors, not just herself.

Posted by Dori at 12:27 PM 5 comments

Shopping Gone Awry

So I've been quite thrifty these quite few months, after quitting my decently-paying yet soul-sucking job in favor of teaching and contract work (and the search for a permanent position).

Thus, I have started patronizing Market Basket (also pronounced Mark-ey Bask-ey, in the spirit of Target/Tar-gey), a locally owned grocery store with the motto "More for your dollar."

Market Basket is shockingly cheaper than my closer-to-home-chain-store-that- caters-to-young-professionals. Because it also offers all sorts of ethnic foods and amazing and affordable produce, I have come to enjoy shopping there, even though there is sawdust on the floor in some slippery attempt at something. But I've been warned that one should never, ever try to shop at MB over the weekend, because it is insanely crowded. Thus far I've only gone on weeknights, and even then it is quite crazy. Young professionals do not shop there. People with turbans, lots and lots of screaming children, and sexy Brazilian accents are the main clientele. Customers stock up on unbelievable quantities of pretty much everything. And I'm talking about multiple gallons of milk and sides of beef. Seriously. You need two magazines to make it through the checkout line, even under the best of circumstances.

Because I no longer have time/energy to shop during the week, I made the misguided decision to check out MB on a Sunday night. There was no parking. After circling for 15 years, and considering aborting the mission, I finally found an (occupied) spot about six miles from the store, and put on my blinker (as E. has taught me), to "reserve" the space. A woman drove in from the opposite direction and used obscene, enraged gestures to convey that, in fact, the space was hers. She was wearing a sari. I thought: aren't your people all full of Ghandi-like tolerance? I was not going to fight over a parking space. I refused to look at her, then yielded and parked even further away.

I cannot begin to describe the mayhem in the store. It was mobbed. I spent way too long gathering and paying for my items and then headed to the yuppie grocery store, where I bought shampoo and stuff-- and then mascara -- because I got a coupon that kicked in with purchases over $20. Also I bought bread because MB does not carry the brand that I like. While shopping, I was accosted by a fucking elf trying to push cookies and eggnog on me, and I was all, "Elf, your costume sucks, I hate your gross processed offerings, and it's fucking early November and what happened to waiting until after Thanksgiving before assaulting me with your holiday cheer?" (Except I didn't actually say any of this out loud.)

When I got home I realized that I had left the bread in the store (stupid self-checkout).I opened the mascara and found immediately that it was royal blue (I wear mascara maybe six times a year and my current mascara was purchased in high school. So there is no way royal blue has any chance of getting play.). And no longer returnable. So my endless economical, multi-cultural shopping expedition was offset by maybe ten dollars of useless purchases. And a run-in with elves.

Posted by Dori at 8:31 AM 6 comments

Caveat

There are approximately a million issues I would like to discuss with you all, but I find myself among the legions of people I never understood before: people who are busy (all day!) at work, and then get home and are way too fried to sit at a computer for any length of time. I also find myself working, for the first time, in an office environment in which there is no privacy, and people are constantly zipping into my space to check email or whatever; and also everyone is tech savvy, and could totally find this blog if they knew about it (God forbid). And I am also working under insane self-imposed pressure to convey to co-workers and higher-ups alike that I am delightful to work with, brilliant, efficient, and in every way worthy of a full-time, permanent position.

So for now I will just stick to writing from home about my lackluster personal life. And thus I will share with you that an ex boyfriend just invited me to the theatre. He has season tickets, and goes to a show (and a fancy dinner beforehand) every few weeks with a married couple he's known since college. Earlier in the week, the ex emailed me and the subject line was "weird question". Essentially he invited me along, with the stipulation that it would be "awkward" if he paid for my dinner, and thus he wanted me to confirm that paying for my own elaborate meal would not be too much of a financial stress. He did say, however, that he would sponsor the theatre ticket (since he already paid for it).

While I recognize that all this was meant in the kindest way--and he was trying to avoid an uncomfortable situation and clarify expectations, it hurt my feelings. I cannot exactly explain why. I would never assume that my dinner would be "comped", although in the past, he's been extremely generous in that regard. Is it because we're no longer a couple? Meaning, now that the romance is gone, he needs to expressly articulate that the perks are gone, too? Which I interpret to mean I used to be worthy of dinners and now I'm not?

Of course I am going. It sounds like fun. But I need to sort out where this caveat is coming from.

Posted by Dori at 8:02 AM 6 comments

Love and Academia

So my foster job is pretty awesome. While the situation itself is often anxiety-provoking (what with the blurry professional/personal relationships, the need to prove myself, the lack of paid benefits, and the generally stressful nature of some of the work) , I love working at VPS (Very Prestigious School).

Because I am mostly working with science students and preparing them for the work world, I am learning about thermodynamics (relationships between heat and energy), C and Python (software), and assays (scientific analyses). It is fascinating. I also love all the college-ish irreverence. A fraternity just held a BBQ fundraiser for testicular cancer research, and it was called Sausage Fest. All the a capella groups have clever names. And the fliers and posters everywhere are funny and cool.

I also get a little wistful getting to know (in a purely appropriate and professional context) male college students. I have little experience with this population, because I graduated from a women's college. I'm sure many male students are crude and smell (per stereotypes), but the ones I've met so far are quite lovely, and have expressed some anxiety about dating.

Because I have a veritable Ph.D. in this subject, I am semi-seriously considering offering a class on dating for the aforementioned aspiring boyfriends. The course would be a service both to the participants and their eventual love interests, and the curriculum would include segments on Asking Her Out, LISTENING AND ASKING QUESTIONS (and there would be a pop quiz on this one), Avoiding Mixed Signals, Making a Move, and Coping With Rejection.

Posted by Dori at 12:16 PM 5 comments