Academic Rivalry?

I've never really understood academic rivalry. I've witnessed my friend's at Ohio University wage these slow terrible wars for years now and as the joke goes the fighting is fierce because so little is at stake. I was sure that my academic life at my low-profile technical college would be Swiss compared to a land grant school or Ivy League, but I guess I was wrong.

Today, I experienced my first sortie. I hosted a final presentation for a senior seminar class as I thought was the custom. I invited key faculty and recruited some committed underclassmen to help evaluate the senior candidates. I also recruited a few industry professionals to offer a reality check and to raise the stakes a little for the students. I just wanted the seniors to get a sense of the current climate and level of discourse that takes place in the business world. I had no idea how any of this could be threatening to my colleagues.

The seniors presented. My academic associates threw softballs, which made the students yawn. Then my professional associates threw a couple of startling change ups, which the seniors actually responded to extremely well. For some reason - I am honestly now sleepless trying to fathom why - one of my colleagues felt it necessary to come to their defense. This of course brought the discourse to a complete and grinding halt.

To abate the crickets I wrapped up the presentation with the usual polite fanfare and accolades. At which point I had hoped a more casual discussion would ensue. It did...briefly, until my comrade swooped in again to correct a rhetorical question I had offered as a topic of debate, which again poured chilling water on everything.

Never one to take a hint, or a subtle nudge I pushed on optimistically. I formally introduced my guests to my jaunty comrade. "This is so-and-so, an associate in the Game Design and Simulation department."

"Game DEVELOPMENT and Simulation - NOT Design! We are developers - what you do is design." The last part of his statement had a fairly dismissive tone. The professor went on to admonish me in front of my guests for a few more minutes, making it very plain how wrong I was to substitute the word design for development. The first explanation was adequate advice, the third was really overkill. My guests politely waited out the embarrassing and tedious tirade until my comrade finally acknowledged his introduction.

I've been with the department for almost a year already and in that time not one person has corrected me in regards to the official departmental name. This moment, in front of these outsiders seemed an odd place to make a teachable moment. It caused blood to back up behind the rage buffer, somewhere in the back of my brain. I quickly went to my happy place and called upon my power animal - a cross between a fuzzy kitten and a jelly fish - and I silently exhaled away the caustic counter attack that was forming in my frontal lobe.

However, here I am at 2 in the morning, trying to unpuzzle my mind about the event. Do I ask for an apology, or offer one? Do I sort things out or stock things away? Hopefully time will reveal what I did wrong, but for now I forfeit sleep and a little pride in search of detente.

Gravity... It's the law.

It has been a long time coming.

I have been playing fast and loose with the law lately. Dangling from ladders. Balancing on the edge of wobbly railings. Hanging from gutters fifteen feet in the air. I was begging for a moving violation from the physics police. Well...It finally came. Around 3 pm, Sunday afternoon, as I was deflating the giant, carnival-style bouncy that had dominated my yard for most of the weekend. The brightly colored baffles were slowly sinking into a pile of rubbery tubes when it occurred to me that it might be a huge laugh to throw myself swan-dive-style into its last gasp.

I backed up about twelve feet, planted my strong foot and then sprinted. At the edge of the pad I vaulted, converting my forward energy into a nice leap, entering the airspace over the now three-foot-high air bag with about two feet of clearance. I had a smile on my face as my horizontal body dropped into the festive-folds. My chest and belly arched to meet its last puff of resistance.

There was none.

My 200 pound body of forty-seven years dropped through the folds to find only about an inch of air above the cold, hard ground. The impact scared me. I felt my blood rush from the front of my body to the back in one sharp splash. When it hit the limit of my skin there it squirted out to my extremities, like super-heated gas. Again, there was no relief. I don't know what all that meat and juices colliding with earth sounded like from the outside, but from the inside it definitely sound like the word POW.

I didn't move for a second. Not sure I could. When I finally did I popped up to show everyone that I was pleased with myself. That I was unhurt and proud. The truth is my whole body hurt and I could have cried like a baby.

The first of 25 random things about me.

You've seen these things, right? Flipping around the social network pages? You are supposed to jot down 25 random things about yourself and then pass it along to 25 of your network "friends."

I did it. I admit it.

I resisted for a long time. But then I found myself reading the stacks of random thoughts others had published, as many as one hundred a day, and I found myself wondering what I would dribble about if given the chance. The result surprised me.

My first comment was: "I am not deep"

I'm not exactly sure who I was talking to when I wrote this. The phrase just sort of fell out of my subconscious ringing in a defensive of tone. As a sentence it is a nothing: subject, being verb (first person - singular), negative adverb, adjective. It has all the apologetic promise of an overweight, middle-age man dropping his towel before leaping into bed with a new lover.

Still, I can't help but acknowledge the truth of it. I am not deep. (written with less apology and defense, but a hint more resignation). Does that make me superficial? I can't agree with that notion. While I may be guilty of having a quick, fertile wit that is sometimes capable of generating a few too many twisty, superficial observations of the obvious, I can't help but think that I am deliberately looking away from the deep, subconsciously highlighting the shadows and counterpointing the low notes. Maybe it's my way of providing a public service.

After all, it's not the depth of the cave that will kill you, it's the sudden stop at the end.