20130821.1927

I am continuing to settle into my new teaching gig at Oklahoma State University, meeting today for the second time with the four classes I am assigned for the fall term.  Each had a diagnostic writing exercise to go through, and so I ended up with close to eighty papers to review and from which to distill comments and major issues in need of correction.  A quarter of them are done now, and the remaining three-quarters are on the docket for tomorrow.  It should be a busy day and productive.

The experience of being back on a college campus, this time among the professoriate rather than as a wide-eyed, too-young undergraduate or a too-much inebriated, too-much hidden away graduate student, is proving to be in some ways quite melancholy.  I am not so long past being a student that I have forgotten it and its allure (although I admit that I did not recognize it nearly enough when I was an undergraduate).  Seeing so much available to so many and seeing them take advantage of it as I did not, and now cannot, is at once good to see and saddening.  I wasted a great many opportunities in years not quite so long ago, and I cannot help but consider that I allowed myself to be diminished thereby.  I wonder how much I am like a certain blue-suited Lieutenant, Junior Grade, on the starship Enterprise, and I wonder if there is somewhere, somewhen, a red-suited version of me of much higher rank and much more impact.

But then I look at what and where I am now, and at what I have had the privilege to enjoy as a result of the choices I have made, and the melancholy is greatly lessened.  I am in a good position and am poised to improve upon it.  I have worthwhile work to do and the training to do it well.  I have an excellent and supportive family, and an amazing wife who loves me dearly and to whom I can devote myself worthily and in confidence.  And I have not lost much if anything in achieving them for which I have not been more than abundantly compensated--which is not the case for many.  That certain officer only enjoyed his own position as a result of being stabbed through the heart, after all, and I have been fortunate in that I have not had to learn my lessons through quite that...pointed...a tutorial method.

I do not apologize for not being able to resist the pun.

There is also this to consider: I am not so firmly scripted as are the commanders of starships.  I will not go far as to say there is no directorial staff overseeing the performance in which I am engaged--I have written of myself as playing a part before--but, being Methodist, I do not think that all of my lines are pre-determined and my actions blocked out.  I have much room to improvise and a much larger stage in which to do that improvisation.  And, as I am both performer and audience, I necessarily see much that cameras turned to other places miss.

The difference in medium accounts for much.