Freshman Orientation

Baby's First 9-to-5

        I'm working my first "big-girl job" this summer, as freshman orientation staff for my university's honors college.  This, along with my internship for Midwest Writer's Workshop, as assistant to literary agent Amanda Luedeke, makes this the busiest summer I've ever had.  Yet, I can pose no complaints; without a doubt, this is also the best job I have ever had.  Every day, I sit in a beautiful white house, the previous residence of Ed and Virginia Ball, talking with incoming students and their parents about what "honors" education is, and why they should be glad they decided to be a part of it.  (As Dean Ruebel often says, "Honors doesn't mean 'harder,' it means... 'different.'")

        It occurs to me now, as I look out the window towards campus, that many of the huge decisions we make are made on scant bits of information that may or may not mean anything.  When I ask, "What drew you to Ball State?" many students hardly have an answer.  I was one of them; I had never even heard of BSU in high school, but, hey, the pamphlet looked cool.  When I filled out an application, I didn't even bother applying to the honors college, for reasons that were backed by well-thought-out, deep convictions: it was an extra piece of paper to fill out, and I wasn't sure if I would get accepted.  I thank God for whoever it was who called me up and told me that I should reconsider applying for honors, and to make an appointment with someone at the house to show me around and talk to me about what I now tell the incoming freshmen I meet with: honors students aren't all clean-pressed academic robots.  We're just curious people who haven't finished learning yet.

Why All Planning Is Poor Planning

        I will never know the name of the person who called me up and told me to reconsider applying to honors, and yet I owe to them the entire beautiful, painful, serendipitous adventure that has been my educational journey.  We tend to imagine that our lives are full of intelligent decisions, and that the opportunities that we experience or miss are a direct result of good or poor planning and forethought.  In my own experience at least, life looks something a bit more like this.  We enter blindly into arenas we might have been too timid to engage in, if we knew in advance what we were getting ourselves into, if we hadn't wandered into things bigger than we can imagine with simple, gradual steps.  Right foot in front of left foot, a domino's distance at a time, a freshman sheepishly walks up to the front desk and asks me how to get to "Studebaker East" from here.  It takes me a moment to answer, because any landmark I am tempted to give would mean nothing to him.  When I look out the window, I don't just see a street and a few ambiguous buildings mostly obscured by trees.  I see three-dimensionally.  In my mind, I can see inside the buildings, the directions the halls and staircases wind; I know which buildings to snake through on my way to class if it's raining and I forgot my umbrella.  And I can see the memories I've had all around this campus, so I see the past too: four dimensions.  I can still hear echoes of songs I sung in the library stairwell to relieve stress between classes that first year.  When he looks out the window, all he sees is a moving photograph, beyond which nothing exists, to his knowledge.  I search for the words to direct him, but there is no obvious path to somewhere no road directly leads to.  I could give him a map, but that would only do him so much good: he wouldn't even know how orient himself north or east.


Orientation

        In the same way, newcomers approach this school, this college life, this adult existence, with the same two-dimensional view.  They know nothing but what they can see from where they stand.  They still see Dr. Ruebel as scary, because he's the Dean, and none of them really know what that means.  I see him as personable and goofy, because he's addicted to Oreos, and sticks his tongue out at people when he can't think of anything else to say to them.  I smirk, thinking about how the student asking me for directions will feel when he meets Barb Stedman for the rest time.  He will see an intimidating woman with a quick, birdlike intelligence, eyes prodding him forward to reach his fullest potential, demanding he be willing to go through hell and back to retrieve it.  As director of scholarship opportunities, she will push him to plan out that future potential beyond what he could possibly predict.  He will not know, not immediately, that she herself is a series of wonderful risks and fumbles and adventures, and that she once quit a stable and well-paid job to go teach in Pakistan; a decision made in the matter of an hour and acted upon minutes later.  For all her spoken belief in the "well-planned" life, she admits what I have come to discover one piece at a time: the biggest (and often the best) decisions we make, we make blindly.  The goofiest part of all of this is that we are clueless as to how blind we really are until much, much later.  We think we guide ourselves by evidence; we decide what school to go to, what to major in, who to marry, where to live, what job to take, based on what evidence we have, which is about as informed as predicting a gift given a careful analysis of the cardboard filaments that make up the outside of the box.

Unpredictability: Something Academics and Marriage Have in Common

        The best advice concerning marriage I have ever heard was, "You always marry the 'wrong' person.  They will, without a doubt, not be the person you thought they were, and you will not be the person you thought you were, and the real work/fun of marriage is learning how to care for the stranger to which you find yourself married."  When I see students walking through campus with their parents, carrying those tell-tale red and white plastic BALL STATE bags, I see the fumbling first-steps into a four-year marriage to a university that they know virtually nothing about. Lucky for me, there is no need for me to feign excitement and positive reinforcement about this new union.  When I stand up every day to face the fears of public speaking that still linger in the little girl who first splashed onto this campus, all I have to do is tell the truth of what I have stumbled into these past three years.  As I describe what they can't see beyond the brick walls, the honors classroom beyond the doors they've yet to wander through, I'm only telling my own story as one of many small balls who found themselves on a course they could have never predicted.  Through moments of peril, epiphany, joining the chorus of confusion and discovery with others beside me, I've become a part of a symphony of interdisciplinary learning I never knew existed.

        Meanwhile I've begun to recognize the important of finding, in this goofy, horrible world, my one tiny role in it all, and try to do that role to the very best of my ability.  My advice to new students (and I think we are all new students in this great Universe-ity) is simple: keep doing very small things with all your might, every ounce poured into every step towards the person you want to become, and hope, at the end, that all of it will add up to something.

(Squeezing out a tube of tooth paste, maybe
frying an egg.)

Civilization and its Discontents

Written upon turning his poem sideways.

I look across the skyline
of someone else's words:
smokestack fingers reaching
for something;
(Fame?
Freedom?
Food on the table?

Or are they simply
an extension of self,
unselfish; stretching here
to feel out their length,
breadth?)

I wonder if there
are children in the factories,
their innocence tarnished
in the soot of progress.

Grandma's Getting a Twitter: Thoughts on Citizenship in the 21st Century Literary Community

There's a joke in the math department, "The university loves us because we're cheap dates.  All we need is pencil, paper, and a wastebasket.

Of course, they love the philosophy department even more: all they need is pencil and paper."

This illustrates something I love about both my fields of study (terrible jokes aside): simplicity.  One of the many things writers and mathematicians have in common is the age-old simplicity of their craft.  Pythagoras and Plato and Poe all used the same simple tools, the same tools writers and mathematicians continue to use today.

...Or do they?

After accepting the opportunity to intern for this year's Midwest Writers Workshop, along with ten other Ball State students, I began to realize just how much the writing world has changed and developed, even (and especially) during my lifetime.  Imagine my embarrassment when I was singled out, almost immediately, as the only person on the team without a Twitter account.  I was shocked, embarrassed, and immediately mended this error in my prehistoric ways as soon as I got home.  After mastering the "hashtag" and creating my first few "tweets," I felt no small amount of mental backlash at this rude awakening: the writing world had moved beyond my comfort zone, beyond the simple, pen-and-paper lifestyle that I signed up for when I began my journey as a writer.  To even apply for the internship, not only did I have to have a website with my electronic resume instead of a paper resume, I also had to provide evidence of my active use of social media.

This is entirely contrary to what students have been told for years: Don't get a Facebook.  Don't use social media, because employers search through your pictures and may turn you away as a result.  (Lucky for me, my idea of a wild Saturday night is making three different kinds of buffalo wings and eating them inside a blanket fort with a few friends while watching the Lion King, so I've been pretty comfortable having a social media presence for a number of years.)  Now, we're being told that our savvy in social media networking is what gives us an edge in the job market over our more experienced counterparts from the previous generation.  What used to be a bane to our career potential and a distraction from our studies is now an obligation, and is in fact the substance of the work I currently do for my internship. 

Growing up in the information age is both convenient and exhausting.  The worth of a great story seems to inflate, as more and more links on newsfeeds and tweetdeck lists makes new information so overwhelmingly convenient that it's hard to get, and even harder to keep, a reader's attention.  Can you blame stubborn old fogies like myself for our hesitancy in embracing this brave new world of writing platforms and self-promotion?  Joan Didion doesn't have a Twitter, because she dislikes microblogs (for unstated reasons that nonetheless seem obvious to me).  I have to wonder, are we ushering out a certain style and method of writing, without knowing the effects on the future generation of writers as self-promoters? 

A dear friend of mine is currently using a typewriter for his writing projects, because he feels that the method by which art is created affects the resulting art itself.  I whole-heartedly agree, and yet I wonder if any writers once saw the typewriter as a threatening piece of technology, poised to destroy the "right" or "real" method of writing: a pen to a page.

And taking a step even further back, I wonder if the earliest Greek oral poets stuck their noses up at the thought of their verse inscribed on a page, at the idea of destroying the transient beauty of performance, removing the precious temporality of the spoken word and reducing it to a list of figures that can be read and reread a thousand times.  I wonder if seeing their stories preserved on a scroll horrified them, their words removed so far from their vocal chords, bare and vulnerable to any prying eye to prod and question.  

The act of writing, unto itself, is a technological advancement.  To attempt to ignore the development of the blogging, tweeting, hashtagging literary community simply because of a belief in the superiority of "real" writers like Didion is to fool oneself into believing the world of writing is at all separable from the society it inhabits.

A useless question would be, "Should the writing world change to accommodate the desires of this generation and the methods of information age?"  The fact is, the literary community already has and will continue to change and develop within the society that it both affects and reflects.  A better question would be to ask yourself how to find new ways of connecting to this generation in a way that communicates to your readers while still maintaining the integrity of what you believe to be important as a writer.  I believe in the power of ideas to create change and the beauty of words toward healing and understanding. Stepping into this generation and using their communication tools to reach as many minds and hearts as possible need not have the effect of "selling out," nor does it require you to deny your own passions and reasons for writing.  It can even become your Areopagus, your venue from which you can share those passions more effectively with an audience better able to receive that message and pass it on.