posted 2005/08/17 at 12:59
Tomorrow I have to be on campus at 0900 for an all-day training session for the second-year TAs. (Which I am expected to attend even though I was an RA last year, not a TA.) I just have a real bad feeling about this, not only because trying to get me awake and functioning by that hour of the day is a losing proposition, but once they get to the syllabus review and they see the kind of stuff I'm going to try out in my class, I have a feeling that some of them are going to raise some red flags, and I mean red in the Red Scare sense.
I am in a very tender position right now. In addition to a fair amount of trepidation about teaching for the first time (although I suspect no more than any other first-time teacher feels), I'm having to surrender two important parts of my past here in the next few days. One of them will probably be noticed here more by the lack of things said here these next couple of weeks (for those of you who've been reading the .org for a while), and I'd appreciate it if you could all just not ask questions about that when the time comes.
The other big thing is that I'm going through a whole new wave of emotions regarding what happened with Spectrum. "Angry" is definitely the best way to describe about that mess, and while I know that anger is a tool that's supposed to be listened to, I just get pissed off because there isn't really anything I can do about what happened. In the past when stuff like this has happened I've done really stupid, petty, and hurtful stuff (just ask Don B. or Jeremy about that), but I refuse to stoop to those levels any longer.
The worst part, though, is that being nice and letting things slide is exactly what got me into all this shit with Spectrum in the first place. I'm awful at asserting myself when things go wrong, and now it's cost me a huge chunk of my interpersonal safety net, and could conceivably cost me a whole lot more than that. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that society raises us to think that women can't be assertive or aggressive. (Think about it: Simon Cowell is praised in our culture to no degree just for being a boorish asshole, while Anne Robinson, who at least had a Don Rickles-like sense of humour in the criticism she dished out on The Weakest Link, was universally condemned as a "bitch.") More than once in the past, people have used that as a wedge against me, saying (and trying to make me feel like) I was less of a woman because I dared to assert myself.
To borrow a phrase from the generation I'm about to start teaching here, fuck that noise.
I've always had this saying I've told other people: "Do whatever the hell you want to me, I don't care, but if you mess with my friends, then Goddess help you, because no one else will." I think it's about time I started caring about what other people do to me. It's time for me to stop being such a pushover, and start standing up for myself. I may have conceded an awful lot of battles, and even a few wars, but I am still here, and I'm not going to let people fuck with me anymore.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon