Annotations - 5/24/99

I feel horrid today. Absolutely horrid. I feel like I've taken a knife. I'm not sure if it's in the back or not.

I won't go into details -- you may have guessed from entries past that I don't tend to put details in here. I guess... I just feel like I'm getting an idea of my place in the pecking order. My place in the estimations of my staff, my co-workers, my superiors. I'm learning a little bit about what they do or don't think I do well.

Which is rough, since I work here. I'm ostensibly a manager, officially because my judgment is trusted. I've tried my best and I've been complimented many times. But in the end, that judgment apparently only applies when people either don't understand the issues or don't want to understand the issues. When called on something they think they do understand, my opinion seems to go down, geometrically.

When I was twenty-one, I worked at the School of Hotel Management at Cornell University. I was secretarial/administrative assistant, and I sucked. I mean, sucked. I got fired and I deserved to be fired. But one thing I learned there has stuck with me.

The School of Hotel Management was entirely a style over substance operation. Entirely. That was actually the whole point of the school. Their graduates learned how to glitz it up. Which, in a Hotel, is probably a good thing.

But it made me nauseous.

Today, I made the strong case that substance outweighs style in the real world. That you wanted competence to be rewarded. That the image you wanted to present should have more to do with what you do, and less to do with what paint you put on the outside.

Apparently, that's naive. I feel sick.

If what Brewster Academy's about, at its core, isn't a firm foundation -- isn't ensuring that you have the best people possible doing the best possible job at all levels -- but instead is about how bubbly and cheerful a person is, I need to find another place to work. I don't have any interest in promoting that kind of wrongheaded thinking.

And yeah, I feel betrayed. Maybe I was due for a fall. I don't know. But some of the people involved with this I utterly trusted -- not so much that they would back me (though that's part of it) but that they'd see the need for substance over style. The need to ensure the best for our students and their parents. The need for what was best.

I'm reminded of an old Tom Tomorrow strip. If you've never encountered the comic strip Tom Tomorrow, look for it. It's good. This one came out during the whole Health Care fracas from Clinton's first year in office. The government representative was describing the government's new "Bananas for Everyone" program. One of the questions asked of him was "all right, you say we can have bananas. But what if I need an operation? Will there be delays in getting treatment?" The answer was "Well, I don't know -- but you'll have bananas while you wait!"

I don't want bananas. I want substance. I want a foundation that I trust.

Well, I guess I know where my opinion ranks, right about now.

The outline's looking good, though this was the wrong week to take such a thing on. I've got so much stuff to do this week. If I weren't so ripped, right at the moment, I wouldn't even be working on this journal. I'd be doing that stuff. Call this a need to vent, or center, or just do something else. Besides, I worked until seven on Thursday, close to nine on Friday, worked on Saturday, came in for the power outage and checked stuff out Saturday Night, and checked it again on Sunday to make certain it had recovered. I think I've given enough of myself the last five days to let me type a damn journal entry this morning.

Mom and Dad just called. They want a ride to Marblehead to pick up the boat. I may go and stay overnight there tonight, so we can go like at six in the morning or something. Which deeply crowds tomorrow for me. Wednesday I'm pretty booked as well. We have an all day Tech Update on Thursday. Friday we'll probably do some screaming. Saturday's graduation. I'm on duty Sunday. Monday is exams. Tuesday is Powerbook turnin. Wednesday we've got cleanup and system work. Thursday is Faculty In-Service. Friday is one of my staff member's last days. So, I'm booked solid from now until the Fifth of June. Joooooy.

Owen Hart, a professional wrestler, died last night. In front of eighteen thousand people and millions on Pay Per View. He was suspended from the ceiling, and was being lowered to the ring, when his harness released and he fell fifty feet and hit his head on the turnbuckle. He was D.O.A. at the hospital.

I used to hate wrestling. I didn't like anything about it. I mocked Frank for watching it. I only watched it with him because it was a small apartment, and there is a bonding experience in adversity sometimes.

For every wrestling fan, there's that moment where they go from scofflaw to fan. With me, it was Owen Hart wrestling Curt Hennig at Wrestlemania V. Astounding stuff. Their choreography was flawless. Their moves weren't like any I'd seen before -- Owen had cut his teeth in the much more aerial Japanese arenas. I loved it. I "marked out," to use the term.

Owen had been playing a character called the Blue Blazer then. He'd revived it recently, with an angle of returning moral sense to the WWF -- of which they have none. That was proven conclusively last night, when a wrestler plunged to his death on live Pay Per View television and they kept the show going to the end. They asked wrestlers to go out and perform when their friend (and in many cases their relative) had just died -- and died a horrible, useless death, in the name of a ring entrance.

Frank e-mailed me about ten minutes after I'd heard, since he remembered I'd been an Owen fan. And while his death isn't that big a deal to my life personally -- it seems worse after the morning I had -- it still affects me. Frank had this to say, though. Owen, unlike most wrestling deaths, didn't die of an overdose, or a heart attack from steroid use, or anything out. The Blue Blazer went out flying.

The WWF kept the show going. Any suspicion that the organization wasn't morally bankrupt went out the window with that. I guess we knew that anyway. Ah well, that's show biz, right?

It's a grey, rainy, cold day today. That seems right, somehow.