Falling Down the Stair Way of Life

I'd like to first apologize for not getting this up yesterday, but following the read, you'll understand.

"I seldom have a student that I have a problem with; I seldom have a faculty member I don't have a problem with."

I really don't like faculty. It could be that because my job places me in between faculty and students, I see the worst. In the past weeks, I 've seen the following:

* Faculty members assuming that someone, somewhere will have anything on the four items listed to wach for an assignment. I'm not asking that they thouroghly investigate everything they assign, but if we don't have it, if it's not in the USG, if PINES doesn't have it, and if it's not carried by a commercial store DON'T ASSIGN THE ITEM.If you do, you are an asshole.
* Do not be rude to staff. If you are a professor, you should be able to read and understand written directions. Don't ask me to explain something you've done a hundred times, and don't flip out on me because I removed lines from a form. If I'm thinking, "do you teach Reading 99 or are you in it?" you are an asshole.
* If you try to get me to put something on reserve, after I have explicitly told you I could not put those items on reserve and then feign ignorance about our previous conversation, you are an asshole.

We do have faculty members who do a great job. I had one assignment that I had to help out with that was great. The professor detailed what he expected in the paper, how he wanted it formatted -- everything in two pages. That's an assignment. That's unusual. Most faculty give out assignments orally; if they do write down what the assignment is going to be, it's usually about half a page. Half a page is a paragraph, barely a complete though. It is not a concrete guide to an assignment, especially if it is a research paper. Give your students the level of respect and detail you want, then they have no room to complain. Then staff have no reason to want to hang you.

I cannot imagine my life without my wife and son. At the time that we found out that she was pregnant, I couldn't imagine my life with a son. It was the largest crisis of my life. Though I loved my wife before, it wasn't until several months after my son was born that I realized how much she loved me. I had a hard time dealing with the drastic change of having a kid. It was something that I never thought about doing, and to have it happen in the middle of our first year of marriage was quite a shock. After all, I had just married Emily, I wanted to spend more time with her - by myself. I'd fallen in love with being around her, just the two of us. Both of us were also trying to work our way through school, and having a kid threatened to de-rail that plan.

I love my son. Though my life has taken a different path than the one I planned, I am happy that Ian was born. My wife and I are closer than we ever were, closer I think as a result of having Ian. I love being a father. I love watching my wife be a mother. She laughs more now than ever. I could not imagine a world with out them. They are the lights of my life, what I miss while I am at work and what I love with every breath I take.

As a result of having to spend over twelve hours at work yesterday, there was no post. There will be one posted by the end of this evening. God, works sucks sometimes.

Over the years, I've had a couple of blogs. Most didn't last long and when I got tired of them, I deleted them. That's pretty much the way I've treated most of the things I've written, with caviler disregard. I had a journal in 1996, which was kept on a password protected Lotus Notes file. I still manage to have something like a journal from my sophomore year in High School, the only reason I think it survived was because it ended up in my documents folder and managed to escape my regular journal purges. The most recent journal, the one prior to my current Livejournal and Blogger accounts, managed to survive for awhile and was surprisingly full when I deleted it.

I've always had a love/hate relationship with my journals; I've never been comfortable with people knowing what I think. The existence of concrete examples of my thoughts always bothered me. I am an intensely private, compartmentalized and divided person. While one part of me wanted to keep a journal, the other wanted to get rid of them. So I'd write for a while and then delete it. I'd start writing again, and then I'd delete it. I've actively avoided friends from previous stages of my life, so avoiding my journals by deleting them worked that way as well.

About five months ago, I decided that I wanted to trace the development of my political and social life over the past five, ten years. When I began I realized that because of the destruction of my previous journals, I had little documentary evidence to work with in reconstructing my past. What I had left were more unreliable recollections of what I thought I was thinking. The historian in me was bothered to use evidence that fluid and "dirty." I had a hard time pushing myself to use what little evidence I had and reconstruct my past to the best of my ability. In the end, I couldn't. Though it may be that reconstructing my past represents the ultimate journal, not having concrete evidence also played a major role in abandoning the project.

As a result, I've spent most of the weekend working on unifying the two blogs that I have, my Blogger account and my Livejournal account. Most of the things were on the Livejournal, since the Blogger account had sat unused for several years. My goal is to slowly work to create a single source of material for me to use later on in my life to recreate my current life. I hope that by diversifying my repositories, I'll be less likely to delete them all. Since I'd also like to include documents besides "journal" material, I'm looking at trying to find a way to bridge the gap between a blog and a website.

I spent most of this afternoon getting WordPress installed locally on my machine, to play around with it and see if I can use it as a central source to combine both a blog and a website (since WordPress supports static pages). I've also created an online WordPress blog, both a personal one that will create another repository and a professional one that I can use to help provide research assistance (I'm not a librarian, I'm a researcher) as well as to expand my writing in a more professional manner.

I don't know if this will work out, trying to version control four repositories won't be fun, but I suspect it will give me an incentive to expand my computer knowledge. I do have to try to preserve my documents for my future. I need to push myself to write, as practice and to influence people. The future only knows if I will be successful.

FanNation | Georgia survives ... but for how long?:
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I always hate playing South Carolina, for as long as I've been watching it's been a messy close scoring affair. Neither team ever brings their A game and today was certainly no different. Here's the scores for the Mark Richt era Bulldogs:

2008 14-7 W
2007 16-12 L
2006 18-0 W
2005 17-15 W (SEC Championship Season)
2004 20-16 W
2003 31-7 W
2002 13-7 W (SEC Championship Season)
2001 14-9 L

The things that did concern me were the overall lack of adjustment from Willie Martinez and Georgia's penalty yards(partly due to the strange assignment by our DC of a LB to cover SC's main receiving target), but beyond that it was a very typical Georgia-South Carolina Game -- messy both for the teams, the officials(several very questionable calls, and the stadium(my god they couldn't get the play clock to work the entire game). For Georgia, the real test will be the trip to Arizona St. next week, the SC game is always too messy to use as a guide for the rest of the season. As for the SI article, a win is a win and SC is always ugly. If Georgia makes it through this schedule undefeated, they will deserve to play in the BCS Championship game:

at Arizona St.
vs Alabama
vs Tennessee
vs Vanderbilt
at LSU
at  Florida
at Kentucky
at Auburn
vs Georgia Tech

But we have to get though that schedule first and then win the conference(which means re-playing either Alabama, LSU or Auburn). One game at a time, one game at a time....

"And to hell with Georgia Tech!"