(Disclaimer: long, philosophical, personal, angsty post ahead.   Read on if you like, but you've been warned.)

So, I'm reading a book right now that isn't work-related (gasp!).  The book is I'll See You Tomorrow, written by Heather Thompson Day and Seth Day.   It's a book about relationships.   It's not necessarily the first book I'd pick up to read for pleasure, but I follow the Days on Twitter (particularly Dr. Heather), and they write so amazingly well that I bought the book just on that basis.   I'm only halfway through the book right now, so I can't really review it yet ... but so far, it's good.

Yesterday, in a section talking about saying "no" to people, I read the following sentence (written by Dr. Heather):

If you communicate a boundary in a relationship, and someone makes a choice to disrespect it, then you are simply respecting their choice to end the relationship.

That sentence has me spinning ... though perhaps not in the way you might expect.

I am lonely.  (I was about to say "I struggle with loneliness", but that's too passive a statement.)  I really enjoy the company of people, and I need relationships.  But for a variety of reasons, those relationships --- in particular, the deep, meaningful, talking over pizza at 2am kinds of relationships --- haven't happened for me lately, no matter how hard I try.   (There are reasons, but that's a whole other discussion.)

Last week, I caught a student plagiarizing in one of my classes.

The details aren't important.  (I really shouldn't share the details anyways, because of privacy laws and good ethical practice.)   But, as usual, dealing with the case sent me into a bit of a funk.  Those of you who know me know that I take such cases seriously --- and a little personally. 

I posted my frustrations on social media, and received a number of sympathetic replies --- particularly from former students and fellow faculty.  And a little discussion broke out, as sometimes happens in such situations.

One of my high school friends, in offering comfort, said that "they are only cheating themselves".   This is something that faculty say to one another in the face of such incidents.  It reminds us that we are all responsible for our own actions, and that we can't be responsible if a student chooses to cheat in our course.   

It is some small comfort to us when we think of all the cheating cases that we don't catch.   We trust that, eventually, the School of Hard Knocks will punish the students who cheated by presenting them with a life situation where they need the skills they didn't learn when given the opportunity.  

But this time, when I heard the comment, I realized that the comment isn't really true.

So ... I've had no heat in my office at school for, oh, the last month or so.  Folks have been working on the problem pretty diligently.   It's one of the joys of working in a (*cough*) historic building.  

Luckily, there's a common department lounge across from my office, so I've been hanging out there with my laptop during office hours or whatever, as it's really uncomfortable to be in an office with no heat.  It's not ideal, but ... well, nothing this term has been ideal, so what else is new?  (At least it's not like two years ago, when I couldn't even come to campus.)

Being in the lounge has also allowed me to chat a bit with the facilities staff who've been coming through now-and-again to work on tracing the problem, or checking to see if the last thing they fixed did any good.  

Well, today, I met up with them again.  The good news: after several failed repairs, they now know what they need to replace in order to get the heat working again.   The bad news: to do it, they need full access to the radiator, which means moving the table in front of the radiator.  

The table currently holding about a ton's worth of textbooks and notebooks and other accumulated junk on it and under it.

They broke the bad news to me this morning during my office hours.  They gently asked if I could clear all the stuff away, so that they wouldn't damage anything when they move the table.   

I looked at the table ... and audibly sighed.

So, this essay started in my head last week.  

Those of you with ecclesiastical backgrounds know that Advent has started.   And with Advent, churches dig out the Advent wreath and make the lighting of the candles a part of each week's service.

But, of course, there are rules about how you light them.  Which led to this meme which I saw (and reposted) on social media:

For those who don't know, the scene pictured is from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the caption is a parody of the lines being spoken in that scene.

To which, of course, I added a comment: "lighting all five is RIGHT OUT!" (a parody of the next line in the scene).

It was a fun little moment, as we all move into the Advent season.

And at the same time ... after I said that, I remembered another time when lighting all five candles was exactly the right thing to do.

Those of you who know me well know a little bit of my family history.  I grew up as the oldest of two children; my sister, Cindy, was two years younger than I.  Our childhood together was unremarkable; our family loved each other well.

I went off to college in September 1985, living in Mary Markley Residence Hall at the University of Michigan.    Life there was exciting and stimulating and annoying and enlightening and all the things you expect college life to be.

Sometimes, you stumble across something that confirms an observation you've had for some time, but didn't know how to express.

Yesterday, I was pressed into mowing the lawn for the first time in ... well, it's been awhile.   (Living with adult children and a wife who enjoys working outdoors means that I'm usually spared this particular chore.)   So, I fired up my old podcast app to listen to something while completing my task.   (I used to listen to podcasts all the time, but fell out of the habit.)

So, the one podcast I still have on my phone is Viral Jesus, hosted by Heather Thompson Day.  (I discovered Dr. Thompson Day on Twitter some time ago --- I've long forgotten how --- and have quickly become a big fan.  She has some remarkable insights into Christian living, and I'm slowly working through her latest book, It's Not Your Turn.)   I'm really far behind in listening to it, so I ended up listening to a podcast from roughly a year ago.

I'm old enough to remember being enchanted as a child by trips to the local filling station.

• The magic of having someone come up your car and ask you what kind of service you want ... and watching them clean your windows free of charge.
• The fascination of watching the mechanical dials spin around at different rates, and figuring out for the first time that mechanical calculators don't always line up perfectly when digits carry.
• The fun of watching the mechanics of embossed credit cards and carbon-copy credit slips.

(We won't talk about the time that Dad handed me the credit card to play with, and I promptly dropped it into the slot between the passenger window and the door...)

Alas, unless you live in New Jersey, those days are long gone.  

But even so, a series of incidents at my favorite local filling station --- some quite recent --- have left me feeling a little empty.   None of them are unique to my little corner station, or to my little community.   But their recent confluence has me mourning (yet again) the loss of commonality in our society.

(Obligatory warning: this will touch on politics.  If that's not your cup of tea, I'll totally understand if you click away.)

The Stickers

A couple of months ago, the gas pumps at our local station were finally visited by the sticker bandits.

I watched an automobile accident happen this morning, right in front of me.

I was driving around the area this morning, running errands.  (Okay, I was coming back home after running out to be the first to find a geocache that had just posted.)  I was stopped at a major intersection: a five-lane road intersecting at a light with a three-lane road, with a typical traffic light managing traffic.   Nothing unusual.   I was on the three-lane road, second in line behind another vehicle, stopped at a red light while traffic on the other road proceeded through normally.

And then the car in front of me decided to run the red light.   Across five lanes of traffic.  For no reason that I could see.

Amazingly, the car made it across the intersection, due in part to an incredibly alert driver who managed to break hard and slow down just enough to avoid being hit by the offender.  The offender made it through the intersection unscathed and proceeded at full speed down the road.

The alert driver who avoided hitting the offender was rewarded by being promptly rear-ended by a box truck who also braked hard, but couldn't slow down in time.   (The drivers were moving around and exchanging information when I left.)

I doubt the offending driver even knows about the accident they just caused.   

I really should be doing other work right now, but I can't get past this.

This is probably a follow-up to my earlier rant.  So be it.

Here's excerpts from three different conversations I had yesterday.

• Email from a student who's been out sick for a week: "Due to the inconvenience of me being out sick, I now have plenty of work ahead of me.   I now see the folly of having unforeseen and uncontrollable circumstances occur and responding with my health in mind."
• Email from a student who just experienced a death in the family: "I have to fly out to the funeral this Wednesday. I understand that this is bad timing but please understand that I am trying to balance school and grief currently."
• Email from a tenure-track colleague: "I'm sick, but I'm afraid to take medical leave because of how it will look in my tenure book when I apply in a few years."

My colleagues .... this is ridiculous.

What are we doing to our students?  What are we doing to each other?

People don't get to control when they get sick, or when they recover from being sick.   People don't get to control when their relatives die, or how long grief takes, or what form grief takes.   

It is not a sign of personal weakness to have the Real World interfere with our carefully detailed academic schedules.  It is not a moral failing to be ill.   It is not a moral failing to grieve.

I'm having one of those moments when several seemingly unrelated areas of my life all seem to be talking about the same topic.   Which might mean that God is trying to teach me something.

So, time to start writing my thoughts and seeing what comes of it ...