Meeting The Past, Again

This summer, I'm teaching a class on the campus where I worked my primary job this year. Something odd is happening:  Even though I have only taught that class for a week (It runs for seven and a half weeks.), I feel closer to those students than I have to any I have taught at that college in some time.  Yesterday, I--and they--realized that I knew all of their names!


What makes it so odd is that the school already feels like it's in the past for me.  That's how I feel when I'm anywhere on the campus besides my class.  I noticed that when I bumped into two women I hadn't seen, probably, in about two years.  Back when I was an academic advisor and, later, director of the tutoring center, I used to see them all of the time: One is a supervisor in the financial aid office, and the other directs the office of student services.  Both seemed happy, and surprised, to see me and gave me longer and more emphatic hugs than I could have anticipated.


They have never been anything but kind to me.  But, in some strange way, they felt like memories at the very moment I was talking with them.  Perhaps they were:  Perhaps I was talking to a memory I had of them, and they were talking to the way they remembered me.  Not that I disliked any of it.  However, I did have the sense that I might not see them again.  


The director of student said, "It has to be about two years since I've seen you.  Something about you has changed."  I mentioned that it's been almost two years--already!--since I've had my surgery. "Yes!  The last time I saw you, you were about to have it," exclaimed the woman from Financial Aid.


Now I am recalling the other times I felt as I did upon seeing those women:  the months, the weeks, the days before my graduations--from high school, from college, from graduate school.  In each of those situations, I had the feeling, as I did yesterday, that those situations were already in the past, that I had in a sense, already graduated--or left, at any rate.  


In high school and college, I knew I was just biding time:  In other words, I was warehoused.  In high school, I had to stay because the law said I had to in order to graduate; in college, I was merely getting enough credits to graduate, having already completed my major and distribution requirements.


On the other hand, as I neared the end of graduate school, I had the sense that I was beginning something that I couldn't have continued, much less completed, there.   Turned out, there were a whole bunch of things.  True, I was finishing some course work and my thesis.  But I didn't feel that those were, or had anything to do with, the tasks I could see before me.  


If anything, what I felt yesterday was more like what I felt toward the end of graduate school.  In other words, I feel more of a sense of moving on--and, hopefully, ahead--rather than leaving.  I have been at that college for six years --which, even at this point in my life, seems like a geological age.  When I entered, I had been living as a woman, as Justine, for not much more than a year.  I was grateful that I had a job and could work in relative peace, under a department head--I'll call her Claire--who was friendly and supportive.   Now it has been nearly two years since my operation.  Claire has retired and much in the college--and the department in which I've worked--has changed.  The charming, quirky dysfunction one finds in so many departments and colleges has turned into something that is more disorienting, and even vicious.  I've never been in any other place where people get as defensive when you ask a question, and I'm not used to people filing charges against people over a simple disagreement. 


I simply can't see how I can develop, personally or professionally, in such an environment.  At least, I can't see how that place can help me to become anything I'd want to become, as a woman or a professional.  


I feel more like a stranger in that place than I did on the first day I spent there.  The women I saw yesterday are not among the reasons why.  They are simply two more people there, and they are--from what I can tell--working for a pension.  The one from Financial Aid will probably get hers fairly soon; the woman from Student Services has at least a few more years.  They know what their futures will be; I am just starting to understand what mine could be.

At The End of 2010: Leaving The Past, Again

Nobody I know seems sorry that 2010 is ending.  I realized this tonight, when Mom, Dad and I were having dinner at the Mezza Luna restaurant (highly recommended!) in the European Village of Palm Coast.  The owner, who greeted customers after they were seated, said he was worried about business earlier this month. The economy is bad everywhere, but particularly in Florida.  It might be better here than in Detroit, but that's like saying that the North Pole isn't as cold as the South Pole.

I won't say "good riddance" to this year.  It wasn't great, but it wasn't awful, either.  More than anything, I'd say this was a transitional, or perhaps developmental, year.  It was my first full year after my operation, which means that I am still learning new things about my body, myself and my world.  Probably the most important change I'm seeing is in the ways in which I see other people. 

Probably the most interesting, and sometimes difficult, thing I've learned is how to look at my past without either hatred or sentimentality.  In some ways, what I had thought of as my past wasn't really mine after all.  I have come to suspect that, at least to some degree, this is the experience of most women.  As she was leaving Torvald, Nora (in A Doll's House) said that she went from being her father's property to Torvald's property.  Her ideas, opinions and wishes--and her very life itself--were therefore never her own; she took secondhand versions of what those two men in her life offered, if she got anything at all.

My life, before my transition, was a variation on that:  I was trying to fit, or make myself fit into, the ideas, wishes, wants, dreams and accomplishments of men, most of whom I didn't even know.  All I knew was that they didn't fit me any more than I could fit into them.  I could no more become the military officer my father had wanted me to become (To his credit, I think he came to understand that.) than I could become the next Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  It wasn't only a matter of being more than a foot shorter than the basketball legend; it also a matter of my emotional--and, according to the medical tests I would undergo much later---hormonal makeup.

Now I am just beginning to discover what my strengths as well as my interests are.  I don't know how long I will continue to do that:  In some ways it's exhiliarating, but at other times I wish I could be more settled.  But then again, I sometimes think that I always was and always will be in a state of flux.

So 2010 was a year of transition and development.  It's probably the sort of year I needed to have.

Moving On At The End Of Daylight Savings Time

Tonight--or, more precisely, at two o'clock tomorrow morning--Daylight Savings Time ends.  That means the clocks are turned back an hour.


That is particularly ironic for me.  As I have described in earlier posts, various parts of my life are moving forward, whether or not as a result of my doing.  And, as I have also described, I do not have the option of going back, even if I wanted to do such a thing.


My working life, if nothing else, is making that abundantly clear.  I am teaching in two places where nobody --at least, nobody who had any authority to interview or schedule me--knew me.  And, save for one prof at the technical institute who knew me from long ago, I have not talked about my past with anyone.  And I didn't talk about my transition with him:  He seemed to know more or less what I did, and he has only a vague memory of the person who once shared a desk with him at John Jay College, where I taught just after I finished graduate school.  So much has passed since then!


Meanwhile, something even stranger is happening at my main job.  It's as if people are moving forward in my life--my previous life, that is--without me in it.  What's even stranger is that I'm not upset with them because, really, I don't have the choice--no, the luxury--of doing so.   Yes, I did suggest that the college could use an LGBT organization (The college is part of a university that includes twenty other colleges and is the only college among them that doesn't have an LGBT organization.)  and volunteered to do the work to organize, and enlist support, for it.  The college's administration thought it "too controversial" (What city are we in?  What century?) and not only nixed the idea, but cast aspersions on me for suggesting it.  Now they're willing to support other profs in doing it, and I really am not interested in it now.  I don't know what I'd say if those profs approached me to work with them on it.  


It's not a matter of "sour grapes."  Rather, I have come to realize that the college is so decidedly un-progressive in its attitude toward LGBT people, and much else.  So, I have to wonder just how much the college administration is willing to support those profs who are talking about starting an organization.  And, quite frankly, my interests and energies are moving in other directions.  I'm finding that there's not much, if anything, I can do about that.


The same holds true about a hip-hop institute I suggested while I was teaching a course in the poetics and rhetoric of that art-form.  Other profs are probably going to run with it; they can have it because, even though I suggested it, I feel that the idea is not mine anymore.  Or, at least, I don't feel as if I have a place in it.


On the other hand, at the technical institute and at the other college, I really don't feel any compulsion--for now, anyway--to do more than to teach and be a supportive presence for whoever may need or want it.  I don't yet know whether there are any "in" or "out" groups in either place, and if there are, I may not need to know, at least not yet.  In contrast, I now realize that at my main job, even though I have been involved in two committees and a number of other activities, and gained respect for my teaching, I was never one of the "cool kids," if you will.  And, what I learned is that it's the sort of place in which that's exactly what you have to be, or become.  You know whether or not that has happened if you are part of a clique.  I'm not, and that's why I actually feel more like an outsider at that college than I did on the day I started there almost six years ago.


As I describe all of those things, they already feel like part of the past and are unchangeable in the same way. You don't grow up by trying to change your childhood; you use what you can from it to help you move forward.  There are times when that college feels like as much a part of my past as junior high school, to which I have compared the college.  (I've also compared it to a juvenile detention center, as the power relationships operate in almost exactly the same way as those among detained adolescents.)  Some people there are proceeding without me; I am moving in the direction in which I need to move.


They say the fall is a time of change.  Indeed it is.  The end of Daylight Savings Time is part of it.

Evaluation: Moving Forward

My workday started and ended with evaluations. First I was evaluated by someone who was probably born about the time I started my undergraduate education and has a higher rank than mine. And, at the end of the day, I evaluated someone I'd never before met.

Next week, I'll find out the results of the evaluation that was done on me. No matter how often I'm evaluated or how good an instructor I become, I think I'll always worry about the evaluations. Everyone tells me not to. But they didn't know me when a vindictive (over what, I'll never know) prof at another school wrote, by far, the worst evaluation I've ever had. The thing about being an English prof is that there are no statistics you can invoke to support your contention that your evaluator was biased. And, if you say that the evaluator had it in for you, the powers-that-be tag you with all sorts of labels, none of them flattering.

Whatever comes of it, I feel good about the class. They are a very good bunch of students, and I very much enjoy working with them--not only because they make me look good! And I can honestly say that I'm doing the best I can by them.

As for the evaluator: I hope I didn't seem resentful of her. She did what you're "supposed" to do in the academic world: Go to school from the time you're four until, oh, about thirty. And she got a PhD with a specialty that the college and department were looking for at the time they hired her. Whether she did those things by design or not, they worked. Plus, she's smart and a seemingly decent person.

In other words, her path--at least professionally--bears almost no resemblance to mine. Probably the only point of intersection between our trajectories is one of the schools each of us attended: She earned her PhD where I completed my B.A. But while she went "straight through" school, I spent more than a decade doing other things between the time I finished my bachelor's and started my master's. And I left the academic world for three years when I was with Tammy.

During the class, I didn't think of the evaluation as a "first." Of course, I had one good reason not to: I've been evaluated a number of times before. But I felt that I had an energy, or at least a level of energy, to which I am only beginning to acclimate myself. Even after the evaluator left--an hour into the two-hour class session, as is standard--and even after the class ended and the students left, I felt as if I could have continued forever.

The students knew I was there for them. And I knew that I was doing what I did for myself. It became very personal; what we did in that class had everything to do with the life I've led--at least, some aspects of it, anyway--and with them. Why else did they respond, not only as intelligently, but as passionately, as they did?

Sometimes I think I'm not an intellectual because....Well, actually, I never think of myself as an intellectual. Why? Well, the only way I've ever been able to learn anything is to take it personally. I am not someone who can learn "objectively" or dispassionately. That's certainly a reason why I was drawn toward literature, writing, history and language rather than to, say, math or chemistry.

Just as I can only learn something by taking it personally, that is also the only way I can teach it. And I can only reach students through that same sense.

To tell you the truth, I don't want it any other way. It's moving me forward now.