Clarissa's Blog

When I first worked on committee X as a regular committee member 7 years ago, I couldn’t understand why the committee chair loved me so much. He kept showering me with exuberant praise that I felt was undeserved and kept telling my departmental Chair how amazing I was.

It’s only when I started chairing committee X that I figured out why I’d made such a huge impression back in 2009. I did everything I was asked, showed up on time, didn’t lose paperwork, and my grandmothers did not succumb to horrible misfortunes right when the paperwork was due.

My friends, I hereby solemnly swear never again to complain about student snowflakery because I now know that the kind of snowflakery that professors are capable of dwarfs anything students can do.

So do you know how you often go, “I’ll just browse the Web / check Facebook / see what’s on Twitter / watch a bit of YouTube for 10 minutes and then work”? And the “then work” part never arrives as you are stuck on Facebook or YouTube for the next 4 hours?

So what you should do the next time is say “I’ll just open my book / document / article, etc and look at it for 10 minutes and then go do Facebook and YouTube. ”

Worst-case scenario, you’ll do 10 minutes more work than you’d do otherwise. Best-case scenario, you’ll get into it and do more than 10 minutes of work. 

It’s very important to read the right thing at the right time. I’ve been wondering if too much ambition was not a good thing, if striving and wanting more should stop at some point, and then I read this article and realized that the alternative to wanting more is becoming a thwarted, verbose, yelping loser like the linked author. And that really helped to clear things out.

Sometimes a negative example is as helpful as a positive one. When you see what you don’t want to be, that’s as helpful as knowing what you do want. 

Klara is so funny. I wore long dangling earrings to the Leadership Institute. Klara was very interested in the earrings. She touched and studied them for a long time. And then she started touching her own earlobes as if to check whether sparkly, dangly things had grown out of them, too. 

During my talk at the Leadership Institute, people shared that traveling overseas has been difficult since last summer because wherever you go, people question you in accusatory tones about Trump. 

Turns out that the turntable doesn’t make any but the quietest sounds without speakers. That have to be bought separately. 

Totally dig the “and now buy a ton of extra shit to make your gadget work” thing. 

With a little baby, especially, there are always dozens of little things that you need to do that can eat your life and make you feel resentful. Narrating what you did to each other and getting signs of appreciation for everything really helps. 

Every day I list for N everything I did around the house in minute detail.

“And then I washed the bottles. And sanitized the bottles. And washed the bedding in the pram. And remade the bed in the pram. And made the fresh puree. And put it into the little receptacles. And made labels for the receptacles.”

Etc.

And N gets to listen attentively and express gratitude and admiration. 

I’ll be damned if I turn into one of the women who do a million things like that but nobody notices and they feel taken for granted and unappreciated. 

It sounds weird, it does, but it’s miles better than the alternative.