Wednesday, November 12, 2008

The Need to Chat

In an earlier post, “Missing Comrade,” I mentioned how I have been having a hard time finding people with whom I easily build a rapport of trust, understanding, and respect.  This is not an instant thing, and I do not believe in simply forcing the issue—if great colleagues arrive, cool; if they do not, oh well.  I do not like forced relationships, and I find forced friendliness and performed closeness repulsive.

Still, I am driven to talk academics.  Part of me, the babbling GI Joe doll with an endless pull-string, is happy to talk anything from trashy gossip to instrumentalism to research methodology.  Hey, just talk to me about something in composition and I am all ears and mouth.  While this makes me a relatively cheap compositional date—you’ll have my attention very quickly—it can lead to some potential problems.  I do not always know how or when to keep my mouth shut.

Alas, since my comrade has been gone, there is no one I can really confide in.  One result has been that I confide pieces of material in one person and other pieces in another person.  I do hope that my pieces are so fractured that no one can see the big picture—at times at least—but I must talk to someone.  And that someone has to be someone who has an idea about comp and pedagogy.

If all I needed was therapy, I would tell my budgies Harold and Claude all about it.  But I can’t.  We’re too busy finger training, and I really don’t want to expose them to writing process theory or means to excite students about revision.  Really. 

So, quite frankly, I am not sure what to do.  Thus enters the perfectly timed admission to TTU.  I am very grateful for the PhD program I am in—they seem quite the social technology whizzes, and there is a spirit and energy in the community that I have never experienced in my time at university.  Still, there is a distinction between being around someone who is interested—their is-ness is present—and communicating with someone via a device.  It is just not the same.

Oh yes, I’ll butch it up.  This is not a crisis; instead, it is an effective self-reflection.  I knew that composition meant a lot to me, and I knew that I liked talking composition.  I just never knew how much I loved composition until I lost some of my opportunities to share with others.  I am looking forward to starting my PhD program so much that it almost hurts.

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