Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

We went to a conference last week on higher education pedagogy and I was lucky enough to attend a couple of great sessions on student writing and collaborative writing.  While at the collaborative writing session, I realized that if my life were a pie chart sans sleep, 60% of my waking hours would be spent thinking about or doing some kind of writing activity.  I didn't intend for that to be the case, but I find that now that I'm in it, I rather like the way my relationship with the written word is shaping up.  I began to contemplate authorship more generally, but some brief background on all the writing before I get into that, as I think it's easy to not realize all the different kinds of writing we do every day. Professionally, the research group I'm part of just sent off a great paper on advisor / graduate student co-authoring, and there are more papers in the works on that topic.  Another large project I'm working on examines plagiarism in graduate students - ...

I'm still thinking, but some truth while it's on my mind.  Twice this weekend people were kind of shitty to me, and twice this weekend, I didn't do anything to deserve it.  I would say the opposite actually, which is why this has the potential to sting and destroy what has otherwise been a terrific couple days.  When you treat people well, you expect to be treated well.  There's a tendency to self-blame. But here's the thing.  The single best thing you can do for yourself is remember that bad behavior is the responsibility of the person who did it.  It's not my fault these people did what they did, it's theirs.  Now if I let them do it again, then I get to blame me.  But not until then. Which leads to the other reason you might self-blame for someone else being a jerk.  There's this sense that people need to be on their guard and protect themselves and if someone hurts you, it's because you made this mistake in trusting them not to. ...

Someone told me the other night that I there for them, that I was a good listener.  Oddly enough, this made me want to punch something.  Yeah... I seem to be the same person to a lot of people, and I'm trying to figure out what this means, if it means anything.  This ties in somehow with my idea that most of the things that happen to a person aren't really about the person, they're about persona.  We meet people, we don't have the time or inclination to really get to know them, so we decide on their most salient characteristics and use that as shorthand.  Everything else we assume based on who we are and what we think about the world.  I often find this very comforting because it means that when someone does something asinine in your general direction, really, it's probably not about you. However, the consequence of this is one of occasional loneliness because if you're "blunt", people assume they know you.  They assume they do, but they really don...

A girl met a boy in a bar.  They may have been drinking.  They may have exchanged phone numbers.  It's a little fuzzy. Boy meets girl again.  They kind of remember meeting the first time, but not really.  I told you, it's a little fuzzy. Either way, they get along really well.  Girl gives boy her phone number and never hears from him again. Girl now suspects that she is listed in his phone as something odd.