My thoughts on collegial engagement with the (inevitable) conclusion of how I think I'm awesome

Your colleagues are a lot like your family -- you can't pick them, you're not all working for the same goal, you don't have to take their advice but you have to pretend you're listening to it, there are hierarchies that do and don't make sense, and you are all supposed to live in the same house. I think of the family home like a Romneyesque mansion where some members hide in their rooms and only come out for meals, some keep getting their artwork put up on the refrigerator, and others are always vacuuming at inappropriate times. Somehow we're still supposed to be a family. Excommunication is not an option.

I think just acknowledging that is a step in the right direction.

Like my family, my colleagues can surprise me. I'm trying to think about the things that I love about history and about my job.

 I like that history is essentially about people. I'm not a people person but I'm not a misanthrope (those two things aren't binary opposites) and I like how by studying history you essentially study the spectrum of humanity. We can get all classicist and shit about it with Terence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, or "I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me." The stakes are always about how folks live their lives and that seems important to me.

I like that there's lots of different ways to do history. My own training and whatnot has me with strengths in some areas and weaknesses in others and someone with different training and whatnot has a different set of strengths and weaknesses. We can both produce viable history. Actually, it's essential that we both produce viable histories because neither of us can do it on our own or even in tandem -- in order to have any value, the discipline requires diversity. We are longgggg past the point where the definitive book on Subject X is possible. I'm not entirely sure why so many of my colleagues insist on evaluating everything in terms of how many degrees away it is from how they would do it (or more to the point, if it's written in a manner that is pleasing to their storybook training). This frustrates me. Recognizing the value of diversity in methodology is actually fundamental to recognizing the value of diversity period.

I am aging (teaching 19-year-olds reminds one of this, often) but not yet aged (the aged reveal themselves to me on a daily basis as well), and one of the sheer delights about the whole thing is that you get a much better sense of what you're good at, what you could be good at, what you don't have to be good at, and what your weaknesses are.

Goal: remember all of these things and all of the above.

Conclusion: I am awesome!

 
 ps If Mittens wins this election, I seriously don't know how I'm going to react. It will be extreme and dramatic. I could threaten to move to Canada (# of people who threaten to move to Canada if X happens in the US: millions; # who actually do: 0. Babies! Way to walk the walk, people) but I'm already here and realize that a Republican win will fuck up my country too. I so hope this neck-and-neck polling is just CNN bullshit drama that, like most CNN bullshit drama, will not be real when the time comes.

pps E is on a plane, flying home to Montoya and me as I type this!  Steer clear of Hurricane Sandy, Lufthansa! It's only 3 hrs late so far but this will give us time to clean up the apartment.  And by us I mean me.