Grown Ups Talking

Winding up the semester now. The students have an end-of-year portfolio review which I’m looking forward to. Friends and faculty and industry types come and look over their best work, make comments, give feedback, and generally torture the students. This can occasionally result in a job or internship, but more likely a nervous breakdown. We professors tell them “it’s a great experience” or “it toughens you up for the real world".

This kind of public display can be agony for some students. Others don’t give a crap.

With the hindsight of all my practically middle-aged years, it’s easy to be amazed at how complacent some students are. They want to graduate, have a good summer, get drunk, get laid, and when they get around to it, get a job.

Here we are in the middle of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and they are thinking about what color to paint their toenails.

They’ll be sorry. Oooooh yes.

Bastards. It’s good to be young.—Pomerol

Hot weather has finally hit our mercurial borough and I went out on the first leg of my annual round of not-jogging-very-far regimens. I’m feeling ridiculously proud of myself, though most of my sweating is due to the weather rather than any actual exertion. Hot to trot indeed!

Being not very employed at the moment like many many many of my fellow humans, we try to fill the day with economical time-killers. Jogging not very far but taking a long time over it is a good one.

Another one is lunch, providing it’s cheap and they don’t throw you out too soon. The slipper is an excellent luncher. In his day he has been known to make lunch last until dinner. Of course he learned the art on Fleet Street where lunch used to be not just the reason for being a journalist, but the means by which you were a journalist. Or so he claims. I’m not sure how much actual news was gathered at these marathons, but they certainly talked about it a lot.

Our leaders have also been setting the lunching pace. A couple of days ago the Republican Party, in the form of former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, and, God help us, Jeb Bush (yes, he’s a brother), met in a pizzeria to lay out the “new” Republican goals and ideals before a munching press corps.

Not to be out-lunched, Obama and Biden (both of them!) flanked by top reporters and senior writers, stopped in at a trendy greasy spoon in Washington to get down with the people and wade in on some serious hamburgers. Biden was in hog heaven, Obama obviously hadn’t had a burger for a long time and stumbled a bit over the condiments. Yes we can, indeed!

And finally the presidents of both Afghanistan and Pakistan met for lunch hosted by Senator John Kerry. The Senator expressed support, the presidents extended their sweaty palms for large checks, and then they all had coffee and dessert.

So lunch is either a way to get through the day, make a point, fund a war. One of our more flexible meals.

Thankfully today I teach a class in the afternoon and may even skip lunch.

I’ll save it up for a rainy day. With dark times ahead, I’ll need all the lunches I can get.—Pomerol

A soft gray day with some free time before my afternoon class, I snuck off for a quiet browse in a local bookstore. It struck me, as I strolled through, how much my buying habits are influenced by my point of view, and in this case, my height. Being a fairly tall Wine, I can comfortably see the 4-5th shelves without craning up or stooping down. More average-sized vintages are probably more 3rd-4thers.

You wonder how the marketers, who already have sex, age, income, race, religion, education, nationality, voting record, eating habits, career, technology use, transportation use, and, of course, reading, all wrapped into neat little graphs to determine what kind of covers, subjects, advertising, and last, and probably least important, what kind of writer, could be used in a logical way to optimally place books in order to sell them.

Don’t kid yourself. We are talking about an entire industry devoted to promoting and selling books. The big tables at the front of your average Barnes & Noble are filled with titles whose publishers have paid Large amounts of money for the privilege.

Authors go on book tours, and if you are a work-from-home person, you might hear the same author bleating the same neat refrain to several different NPR hosts in a matter of hours, and that’s before you get to television and what remains of newspaper book sections.

As I, Pomerol, increasingly approach impending middle-age, it is simply easier to rely on height. The books that are stacked highest on the front tables receive my perusal, the higher shelves of authors and magazines are easiest for my gaze. A truly vintage Wine might shrink a little in old age and discover a whole new world of fascinating reading.

Point of view comes into so many areas of life. One radio interviewee had lost his job and he joined the army to go to Afghanistan with his wife’s blessing because it was a steady income with health insurance for the family.

Another was concerned she couldn’t afford those $5,000 children’s birthday parties anymore.

It all depends on your point of view.—Pomerol

New York is bursting into buds and flowers. Despite the wildly fluctuating temperatures, it’s been a very pleasant week with sun and rain and visiting relatives.

Without the rain, you don’t enjoy the sun, or so us former New Englanders opine. New England is famous for heavy winters, sweltering summers, and amazing practically tropical thunderstorms.

Which got me thinking about Obama.

Throughout his administration, P. Bush was excoriated by every right-thinking person in the world. The relentless pulse of heavy-handed brutality and retrograde policies emanating from the White House was terrifying and humiliating, practically tropical. Americans were so horrified all we could do was vote in a drastic change.

So you figure, without Bush, there would not have been an Obama. In fact, without the economic meltdown, there would be no stimulus package.

Now granted, the meltdown will take many years to recover from.

But think of what Obama is pulling off now. Major health reform? A new railway? A government-encouraged, planet-saving green industry?

And none of it could have been done without good old P. Bush.

Who knew? —Pomerol

Ah, a pleasant 10 days of studentless bliss coming up. I love them, the little buggers, but an occasional break helps the frame of mind. They lie, waffle, don’t pay attention, miss class, do shoddy work, giggle and gossip, and above all, play on the internet and their iPhones throughout class.

This used to infuriate me. I work at a state-funded university so in my condescending way I assumed this was par for the course for youngsters from less-than-privileged backgrounds.

Then I heard an interview with a Princeton professor, and he said virtually the same thing.

The truth is, getting and retaining kids’ attention takes relentless energy and a loud voice. So this mid-term break is as much for my voice as my psyche.

Economically speaking the public universities are in a weird situation. They provide a low-cost education, but the city and state are rapidly running out of money. Meanwhile the private colleges are shedding students like cat hair on a summer morning. Where are they going? To the public universities.

So the pubs need to layoff teachers, but meanwhile contend with, at last count, a 10% rise in student applications. At my outfit, no one is turned down. This accounts for the somewhat spottily prepared students, but also gives an unusual and extremely healthy kick up the backside to some confused high school graduates.

The administration’s answer is, I believe, this: They will ask/demand/enforce that the full-time staff work only four days a week (as if they even do that now, but that’s another story) and pay them only four days-worth, but hire more (much cheaper) part-timers like me to pick up the slack and teach the newly broke students. But part-timers are not allowed to teach more than three classes, so a whole new tribe of part-timers will arrive, further dispersing educational cohesion and giving only a partial income to recently laid off professional who are used to making an actual living.

A fantastic recipe for a solid education.

The good news is that these jobs should be stable for a while.

At least til the end of the year. And then… —Pomerol