Wendy's Not a Miracle Worker

Good morning friends... I have reached a level of procrastination that I had previously thought unattainable by someone who claims to be as compulsive as I am. It started with the furniture rearranging, which is nothing new for me: shifting the bed away from the window for "practical reasons" [i.e. the unbearable cold], noticing the now-uneven distribution of furniture in the room thereafter, and then deciding you might as well just find a new place for your desk. Of course, when you move your desk and your bed, you are likely to find an assemblage of dust bunnies that you should probably vaccuum, except it's almost midnight and your neighbors [who are probably already irritated by the fact that you are sliding furniture around on wooden floors late at night] might not like the vaccuuming, and you aren't really a fan of vaccuuming yourself... Maybe leave that for tomorrow.

But now your wheels are turning. What about that plan you had to move all of your DVD's and videos [that's right, videos! you aren't one of those suckas with cable and DVR/Tivo]off of your bookshelf to make room for the rapidly accumulating pile of journal articles and photo-copied book chapters that your professors so kindly post on Blackboard sites for you to print out and that you have devised a theoretical filing system for in your head, in class the previous day? You should probably do that now, you know, since you are awake and all, and grad students don't really need to wake up early in the mornings.

This necessitates unplugging and rewiring all of your stereo and music equipment, so you can pile it next to your TV instead of under it, so that you can put the movies underneath. And what are you really doing with that 6 CD changer anyway? When was the last time you used that thing? [because contrary to your lack of technological progress in recording television, you are quite state-of-the-art with your music playing and prefer the iBook or iPod to the CD anyday]. You decide to sell the CD player on Craisglist. When you open up the CD carousel, you find the first Strokes album and the Police's Greatest Hits and realize just how long it's been... And what about all that other crap you found under your bed that you don't really use anymore. You could probably sell that on Craigslist too, right?

Once the TV and stereo are rewired, and the movies have been carefully arranged in a row, you set out to create "for sale" postings on craigslist for your CD player, your old rollerskates that you never use, and the classical guitar with the broken tuning peg that has sat, unplayed in the corner of your room for years. You could really use the cash. You also realize that maybe putting your movie collection right there under the television where everyone can see it might be kind of embarrassing, owing to the fact that in addition to having things like The West Wing, and Hotel Rwanda in your collection, you also have Felicity, Mean Girls, and the first season of the OC, and perhaps should consider getting some more "high brow" viewing materials to balance things out a little bit. You know, to preserve your "image."

It's now 2am [not "now" but you know, "then" in the timeframe of this story]. You have not completed copy-editing the manuscript for your adviser, nor have you read the four articles on social stratification for your class tomorrow, or graded the online discussion postings for the grad course you are a TA for. But your apartment looks great. And you are wide awake.

I had intended to post about seeing Wendy Kopp speak at a "social entrepreneurship" presentation I attended last week. It was the first time I had seen her talk, and it reminded me of the beginning of teaching, when things like making charts and designing a "behavior management stoplight" to track student behavior were still exciting... The woman who introduced Wendy kept reinforcing the idea that Wendy wasn't a "superhero" or a "miracle worker" [just because she created the national organization Teach for America when she was 21, an extension of her senior thesis at Princeton]. Her point was, that people "just like you and me" can do tremendous things if we devote ourselves to doing them. Before I started grad school, I had kind of hoped I could be one of those people doing tremendous things, but right now, I'm having trouble just getting my reading done before class starts in an hour.