Homecoming Weekend Tally

On the whole, a better-than-average year. In all fairness, I have to mention that about 98% of the alumni I dealt with were polite and pleasant.

Photographs taken: 1,237

Free lunches: 2

Free dinners: 1

Forced laughs after stupid jokes by speakers: 683

Times caught in rain sans umbrella: 3

Streakers: 4 (too bad it was so cold out, if you catch my meaning)

Stephen Colbert spottings: 2

Brushes with frostbite: 4

Ibuprofen consumed: 18

Narrow escapes from trustee who gives me stomach pains: 5

Indecent proposals from alumni: 1*

Committee ladies who narrowly escaped a bite on the ankle: 2

Board members who narrowly escaped same: 1

Football games lost: 1

Delicious moments of football-related schadenfreude**: 1

Estimated days before fake smile frozen on face will relax: 3

*Or two, if you take into consideration that it was from a couple. A straight couple.

**Just Google it, okay?

Two Pictures of Me at Work

The Polaroid above was taken of me about this time last year, during a University event. It communicates eloquently my feelings about working at a large Midwestern university during that sentimental, beer-soaked week known as Homecoming.

We didn't have Homecoming at Harvard, so it wasn't part of my college experience. We had one football game that anybody cared about, against Yale. The hoopla lasted for a couple of hours, one afternoon in the fall. And then we went back to, you know, studying.

I liked it that way.

But part of adjusting to my job has been trying to learn the culture of the institution that pays my salary, and I've tried. Sweet Georgia Brown, how I've tried. Yet nobody has been able to communicate to me what exactly Homecoming is for; nor why it excuses behavior that, were it indulged in by people of color in a poor neighborhood, would be considered rioting.

This weekend is going to be a test of what effect, if any, zazen will have had on me so far. Am I learning to observe the world like an old man bemusedly watching children at play in the park? Will I react to ignorance with compassion?

When, for example,* an alumna who has been told my name four times calls me "Chico" because everyone with swarthy skin and a nametag is to her a Generic Mexican Servant, will I calmly correct her (again) and silently pity her narrowmindedness? Will I empathize with whatever secret sorrow leads her to treat fellow humans thus? Or will I haul off and smack her until her entitled jowls reverberate?

I'll let you know on Monday. Unless I'm in jail awaiting trial for beating a society matron to death with a Canon zoom lens.

On the Other Hand

This is what I look like when I'm doing work in which I am allowed to exercise my skills to the best of my ability, and with dignity. (The polar opposite, in other words, of what my day job has become.)



It's a test shot, snapped just before my first-ever wedding job. I was assisting a friend who's been in the field for ages. I was honored that he asked me to work with him.

I've photographed a lot of events, but a wedding is a special and many-headed beast. Say the word "bride" in just the right way and seasoned pros who have covered wars and revolutions will wet their pants. Shooting a battlefield has its challenges, I'm sure, but at least at the end of the day nobody will care if the general looks fat in every frame.

After eight intense hours, I had nearly 1,000 shots about 300 were keepers. Three or four are good enough to go into my portfolio. A very respectable haul, and the boss was pleased. I'd share a few with you, but I'm not sure the bride has even seen them yet.

Now I've done it, and done it well, and it's one less thing to fear, and that feels good. I'm going to try to remember the feeling when an alumnus shoves his kid's half-eaten corn dog into my hands, and orders me to throw it away and fetch the boy another Coke from the bar.**

*A true and representative example, sad to say.
** Also true.

Sanctuary?

As I think I've mentioned a couple times before, I work in a weird space. Instead of a purpose-built office building, my department does its thing in what used to be a family mansion, complete with an anaemic Stockbroker Tudor turret running up one side.

My corner of the mansion is up in the attic, under the dormers. This office was carved out of what had been a single, large room running the full depth of the house from north to south. I suspected it to be, and have since learned that it was, a dormitory for the female household staff.

What I'd not been able to figure out until recently is why my part of the room is elevated. The desk, file cabinet, and everything else perch on a deep platform about eight inches higher than the rest of the space. As 19th century domestic life is one of my fascinations, I spent a lot of odd moments mulling this over. I confirmed that there was no structural reason for the platform– no beams or ductwork concealed beneath.

I wondered if, for some hierarchical reason, one of the maids was given a bed higher than the others. But that seemed absurd, and I'd never heard of any such arrangement. Especially in the United States, parlormaids were parlormaids. The butler and housekeeper for this family had their own bedrooms on this floor (hers with a window onto the stairs, so she could monitor comings and goings).

And then all became clear when I was rummaging through the archives and found a program from an event that took place here decades ago. At that time, I learned, the building housed the religious center. And the large room in the attic was the chapel.

Every day I come into work and sit on the altar.

Now the question I mull over in odd moments is whether this makes me a God or a Sacrfice. Given the working conditions around here, I suspect the latter.

Man Plans, Management Laughs

It looks like Stitchy's excellent Rhinbeck Blogger Bingo game is moving ahead splendidly, but alas it will do so without me. I will not be attending Rhinebeck as I had hoped. The overpriced finishing school university for which I work has determined that it is absolutely vital that I be around that weekend so that I can hand pom-poms to snotty alumni and hold up a sign that says "CAMPUS TOURS START HERE."

Which is so in keeping with the job description of an electronic marketing specialist.

Have fun, folks. Take lots of pictures and let me know how it goes.

How to Survive a Lousy Business Presentation

I was cleaning up my office files and ran across a folder of notes from a business conference I attended two weeks after beginning my present job.

I remember writing the sheet posted below. We were about forty minutes into a presentation that was slated to continue another forty. I was certain that I was going to die from boredom. Truly. It seemed inevitable that I would slip, unconscious, beneath the waves of inanity gushing from the speaker, and there expire.

Doodling might have saved me, had I not been seated next to my boss. Scientific evidence suggests that busy hands actually help one's retention rate, but bosses don't care. Bosses always expect one to do the professional thing: keep the eyes forward, nod every so often, and fantasize about sex with a tabloid celebrity.

If you can't do that, and I couldn't, you can pretend to take notes. Doesn't matter what you write, unless your boss has superior eyesight. On this day, the Latin word matella (-ae, f.), which means "chamber pot," popped into my head. Highly appropriate during a presentation that was a pile of crap.

I amused myself by inserting matella into a couple of sentences. Alas, my vocabulary was limited by a curriculum heavy on Caesar.

(Jean and Vivienne, get out your red pens. But be nice. I'm just a grammar school boy.)



If you don't enjoy Latin, letters of resignation in any language are always fun.

Actually, I'm thinking about writing one right now.

Memo

I'm cheating a little. I wrote this last fall after an encounter with three sets of parents in a row who drove me right up the wall. Yesterday, an encounter on the way home from work reminded me why I wrote it.

The years roll by, but the students (and their parents) change not.

Handy Info for New Students and Their Parents

1. Contrary to appearances, I am not a member of the janitorial or groundskeeping staffs. I know this will come as a shock to you, as your sheltered life in the upper Midwest leads to you believe all persons less white than a bar of Ivory soap arrived yesterday from Mexico or Africa and aspire to careers in leaf blowing. But you're in the big city now. So try to adapt. (And by the way, don't talk to the janitors or gardeners that way, either.)

2. Yes, thank you, I do speak excellent English. I can write it, too! Isn't a Harvard education a wonderful thing?

3. No, I am not looking at your daughter like that. Now that you've pointed her out, I do question your wisdom at letting her wear an ill-fitting belly shirt and droopy sweat pants with the name of the school written across the seat. If one's ass is wide enough to serve as a billboard for the lengthy name of a prominent university, one should probably not emphasize it.

4. Yes, I am gay. No, I'm not the first one you've ever seen. I may, however, be the first one you've seen who isn't married (possibly to your wife) and lying about it.

5. I'm not looking at your son that way, either. He should be so lucky.

6. I arrived at college with a steamer trunk, five boxes of books, and a suitcase. It is not my fault that your child could not travel as lightly. If you require help in carrying your kid's Disney Princess bidet up five flights of stairs, don't hesitate to ask for assistance. From somebody else.

7. Here in Chicago we are fond of the concept of "walking distance." The space between Point A to Point B, if it can be covered in roughly five minutes or less, is "walking distance." If you insist on driving your Hummer the three blocks from your hotel to the dormitory and then cannot find any place to park, don't look to me for sympathy.

8. There is no McDonald's in the neighborhood. No, seriously. You may have to try eating actual food for lunch. I'm terribly sorry. Please stop crying.

9. For the student. If you are going to ask me a question, please do the following first. 1) Take the earphones out of your ears. 2) Hang up the cell phone. 3) Stop text messaging your best friend Caitlin at Michigan State. What's that you say? Multitasking? Well, I can multitask, too. I can write a memo, get my job done, and ignore your rude ass all at the same time.

10. For the parents. News flash: Within 24 hours of your departure, your little darling will either have gotten profoundly drunk or participated in an orgy. Or more likely done both simultaneously. We call this "multitasking."

Welcome to the University! Have a pleasant year!