Slump

The beginning of the year is always a little hard for me. The excitement of the holidays is over, and January in Utah is a little…well…bleak. February seems to drag on, and the weather makes me feel fairly underwhelmed about life. When we finally get a few warm days in early March, I’m ready to call the whole thing quits and start everything new again. My grades for winter semester tend to be worse, because I feel so unmotivated in the first half of the semester and restless in the second half.

This year I still feel that way, but I’m working hard despite that. And I am definitely still in need of a nap. We’ve gotten to the point in the semester where I’m glad to be nearing the end of classes, but the Romgi is still in job-search mode…there’s a growing tension in our house about where we’ll be this summer and if we’ll have any money. Being a grownup is just not as simple as I used to think.

On top of the school/weather slump, I’ve been conflicted lately about how to be a good person. I don’t mean to sound arrogant at all, but I think I’m fairly compassionate. At least, I easily feel compassion toward others. Unfortunately I’m not always able or willing to help. Today on my way home from running errands I saw a man holding a sign that read, “Losing house tried everything else now asking community for help.” I desperately wanted to help. In Levinasian terms, I heard his call and wanted to respond. But what do I have to offer? Right now the Romgi and I are living on student loans, and who knows what we’ll be living on in a few months. I can justify my actions, but I’ve felt miserable all day. There are many people who need help, even if they aren’t standing on a street corner holding a sign. They need my help. How am I answering their call?

This slump is no fun.

How do you handle the bleak winter months and the transition into spring? How do you help others when you don’t really have any money to give, and they aren’t asking for anything else?

image by Ilona Wellman

Heartless

The Romgi thinks I’m heartless.

He’s wrong: I just believe in enforcing the law.

There have been a lot of news stories in the past few years about little kids having their lemonade stands shut down because they were in violation of city ordinances, which say you can’t peddle goods on a public street or sell goods in a public venue (like a farmer’s market) without a permit. You know what? I support those closures! Sob stories mean nothing to me. I always think of the line in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (yeah, I listen to it all the time in the car, really ALL THE TIME), “All this tugging at my heart-strings…”, but in my case, it’s not justified. Those little kids were in the wrong. The cops who shut them down? IN THE RIGHT.

Yesterday the Romgi sent me a link to a news article about Girl Scouts being told they couldn’t sell cookies outside the home of the Girl Scouts founder, Juliette Gordon Low, in Savannah, Georgia. The reason is that they were on the public sidewalk, which meant they were peddling. The officials were really nice, and tried to find a solution, but there wasn’t anywhere else on the property that the girls could set up shop.

I support Girl Scouts. And I love their cookies.

But I’m also heartless enough to give a little cheer for victories like this. The law is the law. No exceptions!

(This heartless attitude caused quite a stir in my student development class. We were discussing whether a man who was convicted of a felony and sentenced to jail for 10 years, then escaped and started a new life of do-good-ery somewhere else, should be turned in and sent back to jail years later if he were recognized. I may have shouted a resounding YES! My reason? He may have “made up” for his past deeds by being a philanthropist or even a saint, but it’s not his call to say that it was a fair trade. He was sentenced to jail. He doesn’t want to be in jail? GOOD! That’s the point – it’s a punishment!)

The end.

P.S. Krista, I really do support Girl Scouts. Really. Cookies soon, right?

New job

After two sessions of my once-weekly Deviance & Social Control class, I’ve decided to give up my law school plans in favor of becoming a sociology professor. I will do so for only one reason: to prove to myself that I’d be a better teacher than my current professor is.

This is THE MOST PAINFUL class I’ve ever taken. I absolutely dread going. The material is interesting enough, but the teacher…you remember the Pride & Prejudice quote, “[T]he commonest, dullest, most threadbare topic might be rendered interesting by the skill of the speaker.”? Opposite effect here. The class period is 2.5 hours, so we should cover a lot of material. On the syllabus we were scheduled to go over the first 3 chapters of our textbook. After 2 hours, we’d just finished the first chapter.

It’s not that we necessarily spend a lot of time going over one topic. The professor just can’t focus. He loves to tell stories, to give advice, and to recommend books and subjects. For example, one ten-minute tangent was about the importance of a good letter of recommendation for graduate programs. No, this isn’t a senior-level course, and no, this isn’t a class about getting into (or preparing for) graduate school. I try really hard to pay attention for the entire lecture, but when the teacher is actually covering material, he reads right off of the PowerPoint, and despite my best efforts I’m not getting much out of everything else he says.

Sigh.

Anyway, as proof of my sincerity about this new job (or not), tomorrow I’ll give you tonight’s lecture in an efficient manner. It may not be interesting. But it will be to-the-point. Valuable?