My email has started to fill with indicators that school will begin sometime. When? I'm not quite sure. I really don't care to know.
This summer has been freeing. I've spent the last 40 days redoing the new house, moving into it, and unpacking. I've met my new neighbors, played a bit of b-ball on my new hoop, and mowed the lawn. I've spend thousands of unexpected dollars making this place livable. Good times. Stressful but good times.
I've not spend much time at all thinking about the return to school. I didn't check my school email for weeks at a time over the summer. It was nice. I didn't think about the early mornings, the students, the other faculty, the politics, or any of the other junk that makes our jobs yucky.
Of course, now I see all the back to school sales. It makes me a little sick. But the thing that really makes my heart sink are the college dorm aisles at Target. I see these kids and their parents buying stuff. The stuff that will accompany their children to greatness. The stuff that will show how unique their special child is. This same stuff that they won't bring to class or will use to avoid doing their work. I wonder how many of these Target customers will fail out (rather should but won't fail out).
Walking out of the store with my husband tonight I realized that there was nothing I was looking forward to less than the start of school. The hollowness of reality has hit me like a ton of horse shit -- there's a lot of it and it stinks. It makes me wonder what I will be doing this time next year.
CMP, I was at a Target 2 days ago and totally had the same mind-boggling thought. I needed some things for my house, so I went up the curtains aisle, the bedding aisle, looked at the ugly beige $14 carpets and thought "How many precious snowflake dreams will start with this junk and end in a drunken haze of bad decisions?"
ReplyDeleteAnd the specialness, the uniqueness: these things can surely only be decorated using mass-produced conformity-factory goods!
Oh, the humanity. I am dreading September 6.
I'm on both sides of that aisle-I take one daughter upstate to Law School this coming Sat., the other goes south in 1 week, and classes start one week after that. The emails have started already from students, along with those who failed their classes over the summer and don't know why? (isn't a 36 average close enough to get me a C, dude?)
ReplyDeleteYou know, I feel your pain and I don't like it. I don't think I am long for this world (the academic one LOL!). I feel guilty about that. I have been thinking of changing fields much more seriously. I think I might be reaching maximum burnout after only seven full time years (but 8 part time before that...)...
ReplyDeleteI suggest reading http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/burnout/WL00062
ReplyDeleteWhereas I saw that Target aisle and went "Holy SHIT! A pink blender! That's awesome!" and then I remembered that my kitchen appliances are mostly red. *sadface*
ReplyDelete@MLP: pink and red can go pretty well together in some situations. Maybe you should reconsider (or redecorate?)
ReplyDelete@CMP: congratulations on the new house, and getting settled; it must feel good. Looking around my rather chaotic environment, I'm wishing I'd spent more of the summer on such tasks (I've been putting together a flat-pack bureau all summer, and still have several drawers to go; that just about sums up my domestic/DIY accomplishments for the summer. Oh, and there's some pesto in the freezer. But I did get a good deal of research and one important, if short, piece of writing FINISHED! -- Hurrah! -- and revised some course materials I feel reasonably good about. So I guess I'm not at burnout yet, though if you offered me another month or six off -- with pay -- I'd certainly take it/them).
ReplyDeleteThe back-to-school marketing/shopping hoopla -- and especially the mass-produced signifiers of quirky individuality -- is definitely strange, and dispiriting (all the more so when you think about what they aren't buying, and often won't buy: textbooks). My dad and I did go on a shopping trip before I took off for college, but the main objective was extra-long twin sheets (my brother, at my father's suggestion, had already given me towels for graduation). Oh, yes, and a phone (the plug-in-the-wall kind). AT&T making us provide our own phones was still a new phenomenon. Otherwise, I mostly took stuff I already owned, and picked up a few additional things (a wastebasket, a cheap lamp or two, one of those wooden two-cube thingies, a couple of baskets which served assorted purposes) once there. Of course the car was much fuller four years later, but a lot of that was books, including the course reading I shopped for with great pleasure in the used-book stores each semester (and a bulky early PC and its peripherals). I did also acquire a foam couch, which I still own. It's not that I begrudge today's kids their shopping sprees, but I do worry about the consumerist mentality they embody and perpetuate -- and, yes, I wish they were studying the course catalog and reading lists with the same sense of having trouble choosing between wonderful possibilities that I remember.
With any luck, they arrive at college and are instantly humiliated about their Target stuff, which none of the upperclassmen have (having dumped theirs freshman year). Everyone on futons with Indian spreads, please! I do feel sorry for the eager-to-please parents, though, on their last school shopping trip with their kid, loading up the cart with things that the kid will soon spurn.
ReplyDeleteOr maybe I'm just melancholic because my kid is starting kindergarten.
@ Crazy Math Professor
ReplyDeleteDrink more rum and cokes, listen to Laibach, Black Sabbath, Slayer, Negativland, Half-Japanese, Einsturtzende Neubauten*, old Noam Chomsky speeches and/or ancient John Lee Hooker LPs to get ready for the day the EVIL comes back; i.e. the first mothering day of f-ing school.
Re: Target
When I went to the Krazy Khristian Skools they wanted you to buy all new crap every year, even if you had never used part of the old crap last year. So I had to talk my parents out of buying a new plastic ruler, protractor, and other dross for at least two years, though I would burn though the paper folders yearly because I was too dumb to tape them with packing tape (which we did have, but we only used for packing, not realizing that the stuff is transparent gaffer tape.)
God, school was a scam.
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* If you can't find any Einsturzende Neubauten CDs, watch their bizzaro feature length music video "1/2 Mentsch" aka "Halber Mentsch"; I think it's on Google video or Screw'dTube or maybe Vimeo....the weirdest bit about it is that a Japanese department store paid to have the film made in 1985!