Friday, June 27, 2003
Earnest, But Ultimately Creepy, Pick-Up Line
Will you sample some of my longing
while I try to forget in pairs items
from the list of things I do wrong
like walking faster than I'd feel safe
to admit to appointments or classes,
so that I'm always early but armed with a book,
or judging when to stop talking about my passions
to create a silence for you to spill yours
into this mixed drink that fate is willing to
house in a cocktail glass that is not plastic
or glass, but solid sanded wood? Would not
a sober decision to commit a future or two
between legs and dollars be the greatest
mistake that makes a small life better than
the thickest understanding of some god?
Will you sample some of my longing
while I try to forget in pairs items
from the list of things I do wrong
like walking faster than I'd feel safe
to admit to appointments or classes,
so that I'm always early but armed with a book,
or judging when to stop talking about my passions
to create a silence for you to spill yours
into this mixed drink that fate is willing to
house in a cocktail glass that is not plastic
or glass, but solid sanded wood? Would not
a sober decision to commit a future or two
between legs and dollars be the greatest
mistake that makes a small life better than
the thickest understanding of some god?
"go-getters" defined
There's nothing wrong with a good work ethic, or with wanting to create a positive, learning work environment. A line demarcates, however, the boundary between integrity and excessive ego/control issues. Go-getting isn't such a bad practice, and it's one that everyone should embrace in certain situation, but there are also "go-getters." This latter category can be divided into two sub-categories: active and passive.
Bare in mind, these are all observations gathered from "conference situations," in which dozens of employees or people of similar careers (in this case, camp staff) gather to refine their philosophies and techniques.
Passive "go-getters" are the nodders, the "mm hmmers," and are primary enablers of the active variety. When a speaker says something, keen or not, that they find to be "right on," the passive feel the absolute need to let everyone in immediate hearing distance aware that "by God, what this person is saying is true and I want to publically make it known that I realize it." The corollary to these "mmhmms" and "yesses" is that we, too, should be revering this apparent piece of wisdom like gospel. Fuck them. Let me be the judge of what is valuable or not, and don't try to make yourself seem super-insightful with your amen-calling. (Of course, any spiritual tradition that uses call and response does not fall under my admittedly picky scrutiny, simply because there is loads more legitimacy in such case).
Active "go-getters" are rarer, but draw their power and seeming legitimacy from the passives. These people are control freaks, most identifiable in these workshop situations by a type of myopia that prevents them from seeing the real importance of a group excercise. Indeed, to them each excercise is merely another opportunity for them to assert their dominance in any given are of knowledge (no matter how ridiculously uninformed they may be on the topic). The worst sub-sub breed of active "go-getter" is not, as you might suppose, the intelligent and over-confident bossy figure, but what we might call the dumbest common denominator figure: here is a man or woman who is so adjusted to their own level of incompetence that they assume their audience is, at best, at parity with their intellect. This makes their explanations of, say, the rules to a game you can play with kids (in this case), really fucking mind-numbing. Having sat through several spirit-crushing conferences, faculty meetings, and the like, I've really grown to appreciate a good, entertaining speaker who really understands and cares about the various personality types and capabilities of his or her audience. It's always better, I've found, to err on the side of assuming your listeners are, get this, *smarter* than they might actually be. This way, you're challenging those are just below your difficulty level of delivery, and, more importantly, not speaking condescendingly to the rest. And the slower the person committing this above-mentioned offense, the greater the magnitude of headache generated. It's a direct relationship.
In my 8-person table over the last couple days of orientation, I had two passive and one active "go-getters." The active was definitely not a bad guy, just perhaps a little competetive and domineering. The tributary feed from his two passives was evident during an excercise where we had to generate/brainstorm ideas for games to play with the campers. Several of us offered ideas, but it seemed only the ones he and the passives suggested made it on to his "master list" that was then reported to the rest of the room. Here is revealed the fundamental weakness of the classic active "go-getter": in being so absorbed with control and recognition, they forget that they need to promote cooperation and confidence among the other staffers, and eventually come up with what's best for the kids. We then broke up into our table-groups to perfect a couple games for a final presentation outside. First of all, our active missed half of this part of the activity, so I stepped up and introduced "Train Wreck" (a game familiar from Colgate Orientation Weekend) which was popular with everyone, simple, effective, and fun to play (as it was at Colgate, one of the few decent parts of that lame 4 day stretch in the late summer of '98), but as soon as he returned, he was back on his "riddle game" kick that he insisted we pursue. Basically, he wanted us to generate riddles that act as clues to a scavenger hunt. His big claim to fame was "I have a face and time flies when you watch me." Wow! Call Simon and Schuster! Yeah, great, but it's not like any game we come up with is going to be a shattering breakthrough in the field of kid-gaming. This guy seriously was excited enough that he probably expected to be on the next cover of Progressive Camping Games Monthly magazine. One of the passives spoke up late and mentioned a decent hoola-hoop challenge. SO, when all the groups reassembled to share, Active jumped out and explained his riddle game (to the visual dismay of a handful of the staffers) and then the hoola-hoop game. Now, I may sound like just a jilted underling, and in the end it doesn't matter because I think a couple of the Jr. counselors (11th and 12th graders) in our group really warmed to "Train Wreck" and they might use it in their groups anyway, but this Active is a guy who is going to be one of the higher ups. Anyway, I wont have much contact with him anyway, since I'll mostly be busy making sure kiddies don't drown.
Congrats Chrissy on graduating!
There's nothing wrong with a good work ethic, or with wanting to create a positive, learning work environment. A line demarcates, however, the boundary between integrity and excessive ego/control issues. Go-getting isn't such a bad practice, and it's one that everyone should embrace in certain situation, but there are also "go-getters." This latter category can be divided into two sub-categories: active and passive.
Bare in mind, these are all observations gathered from "conference situations," in which dozens of employees or people of similar careers (in this case, camp staff) gather to refine their philosophies and techniques.
Passive "go-getters" are the nodders, the "mm hmmers," and are primary enablers of the active variety. When a speaker says something, keen or not, that they find to be "right on," the passive feel the absolute need to let everyone in immediate hearing distance aware that "by God, what this person is saying is true and I want to publically make it known that I realize it." The corollary to these "mmhmms" and "yesses" is that we, too, should be revering this apparent piece of wisdom like gospel. Fuck them. Let me be the judge of what is valuable or not, and don't try to make yourself seem super-insightful with your amen-calling. (Of course, any spiritual tradition that uses call and response does not fall under my admittedly picky scrutiny, simply because there is loads more legitimacy in such case).
Active "go-getters" are rarer, but draw their power and seeming legitimacy from the passives. These people are control freaks, most identifiable in these workshop situations by a type of myopia that prevents them from seeing the real importance of a group excercise. Indeed, to them each excercise is merely another opportunity for them to assert their dominance in any given are of knowledge (no matter how ridiculously uninformed they may be on the topic). The worst sub-sub breed of active "go-getter" is not, as you might suppose, the intelligent and over-confident bossy figure, but what we might call the dumbest common denominator figure: here is a man or woman who is so adjusted to their own level of incompetence that they assume their audience is, at best, at parity with their intellect. This makes their explanations of, say, the rules to a game you can play with kids (in this case), really fucking mind-numbing. Having sat through several spirit-crushing conferences, faculty meetings, and the like, I've really grown to appreciate a good, entertaining speaker who really understands and cares about the various personality types and capabilities of his or her audience. It's always better, I've found, to err on the side of assuming your listeners are, get this, *smarter* than they might actually be. This way, you're challenging those are just below your difficulty level of delivery, and, more importantly, not speaking condescendingly to the rest. And the slower the person committing this above-mentioned offense, the greater the magnitude of headache generated. It's a direct relationship.
In my 8-person table over the last couple days of orientation, I had two passive and one active "go-getters." The active was definitely not a bad guy, just perhaps a little competetive and domineering. The tributary feed from his two passives was evident during an excercise where we had to generate/brainstorm ideas for games to play with the campers. Several of us offered ideas, but it seemed only the ones he and the passives suggested made it on to his "master list" that was then reported to the rest of the room. Here is revealed the fundamental weakness of the classic active "go-getter": in being so absorbed with control and recognition, they forget that they need to promote cooperation and confidence among the other staffers, and eventually come up with what's best for the kids. We then broke up into our table-groups to perfect a couple games for a final presentation outside. First of all, our active missed half of this part of the activity, so I stepped up and introduced "Train Wreck" (a game familiar from Colgate Orientation Weekend) which was popular with everyone, simple, effective, and fun to play (as it was at Colgate, one of the few decent parts of that lame 4 day stretch in the late summer of '98), but as soon as he returned, he was back on his "riddle game" kick that he insisted we pursue. Basically, he wanted us to generate riddles that act as clues to a scavenger hunt. His big claim to fame was "I have a face and time flies when you watch me." Wow! Call Simon and Schuster! Yeah, great, but it's not like any game we come up with is going to be a shattering breakthrough in the field of kid-gaming. This guy seriously was excited enough that he probably expected to be on the next cover of Progressive Camping Games Monthly magazine. One of the passives spoke up late and mentioned a decent hoola-hoop challenge. SO, when all the groups reassembled to share, Active jumped out and explained his riddle game (to the visual dismay of a handful of the staffers) and then the hoola-hoop game. Now, I may sound like just a jilted underling, and in the end it doesn't matter because I think a couple of the Jr. counselors (11th and 12th graders) in our group really warmed to "Train Wreck" and they might use it in their groups anyway, but this Active is a guy who is going to be one of the higher ups. Anyway, I wont have much contact with him anyway, since I'll mostly be busy making sure kiddies don't drown.
Congrats Chrissy on graduating!
Thursday, June 26, 2003
directions to hell:
It's camp orientation in near-sweltering, close quarters. The information and buzz is positive and exciting, given there are over 50 young people working as counselours, guards, instructors, and whatnots. Yes, 50+! There are some 350 campers signed up, too.
More later on the "go-getters" sitting at my table that, because I'm cranky and still somewhat cynical, have caused severe teeth-gritting and death-doodling.
(word to Blogger/Pyramid-Google™ for the facelift)
It's camp orientation in near-sweltering, close quarters. The information and buzz is positive and exciting, given there are over 50 young people working as counselours, guards, instructors, and whatnots. Yes, 50+! There are some 350 campers signed up, too.
More later on the "go-getters" sitting at my table that, because I'm cranky and still somewhat cynical, have caused severe teeth-gritting and death-doodling.
(word to Blogger/Pyramid-Google™ for the facelift)
Tuesday, June 24, 2003
shared
Back to St. James/Smithtown/Nissequogue territory.
I met up with Misha tonight for food, coffee, and poetry. After chewing over MFA and related topics, we came to remembering the amazing personalities of our beloved Poetry Workshop, Spring '02, at Colgate. Specifically struck with laughter over one Brother K. fromt he group, we decided to compose a poem and mail it to him. Even though we weren't really taking it seriously, the two we wrote together, trading lines, weren't all that off track from being decent. I think I'm beginning to see why writing in tandem can help structure the directions of meaning in a poem, and I found this to be true especially while drafting K with Flynn: something to do with the instant feedback and reinterpretation of the poetry as it's actually being formed from two different perspectives really seems to make the tendencies of expression stand out, or at least so far as I've encountered. And if there doesn't seem to be an initial drive ("K" started literally with bananas for breakfast and a back deck), one just kind of is summoned.
Tonight, for example, we began just being silly, and after a few lines we agreed to title it "Poop Fugue" (juvenile, I know, but Brother K. — no relation to the aforementioned poem — was our "shock poet"). No, it's not the most serious piece of work ever, but it did "flow," so to speak, in a more "solid" direction than I would have predicted. Plumbing, fugueing, excretion: you do the biology.
The more I can believe that the random can be interestingly shaped and interpreted, the better.
Back to St. James/Smithtown/Nissequogue territory.
I met up with Misha tonight for food, coffee, and poetry. After chewing over MFA and related topics, we came to remembering the amazing personalities of our beloved Poetry Workshop, Spring '02, at Colgate. Specifically struck with laughter over one Brother K. fromt he group, we decided to compose a poem and mail it to him. Even though we weren't really taking it seriously, the two we wrote together, trading lines, weren't all that off track from being decent. I think I'm beginning to see why writing in tandem can help structure the directions of meaning in a poem, and I found this to be true especially while drafting K with Flynn: something to do with the instant feedback and reinterpretation of the poetry as it's actually being formed from two different perspectives really seems to make the tendencies of expression stand out, or at least so far as I've encountered. And if there doesn't seem to be an initial drive ("K" started literally with bananas for breakfast and a back deck), one just kind of is summoned.
Tonight, for example, we began just being silly, and after a few lines we agreed to title it "Poop Fugue" (juvenile, I know, but Brother K. — no relation to the aforementioned poem — was our "shock poet"). No, it's not the most serious piece of work ever, but it did "flow," so to speak, in a more "solid" direction than I would have predicted. Plumbing, fugueing, excretion: you do the biology.
The more I can believe that the random can be interestingly shaped and interpreted, the better.
