Canoodling With The Problem by faculties on Blogster

I’m here to report that putting your arms around the problem is the best idea in many a long year. The problem and I spent several days looking into each other’s eyes like new lovers who irritate the heck out of everybody else. We canoodled. I loved up the problem like nobody’s business.

And did it pay off? And how! *Everything* I was aiming for fell into my lap! I am so flabbergasted I can hardly believe it. Administrators reappeared and approved my initiatives, editors capitulated to my ideas, long-lost students returned and grovelled, people who had apparently retired to the Sahara returned my e-mail, a professional agreed to remove my lead paint, and the People On Whom A Big Project Depends *cooperated*! The likelihood of this was something akin to cold fusion in a coffeemaker on my kitchen counter. (And I don’t even drink coffee.) Pigs were seen in great flocks soaring over Harrisburg. Demons were tossing snowballs from pitchfork to pitchfork down in the fiery place. Which leads me to Kafka —

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

I am feeling like the queen of persuasiveness.

I think the real truth must be that when you hate the problem — whatever the problem is — you’re actually acting with bitterness and resentment, even on the rare occasions when you’re actually acting and not just avoiding the whole endeavor. When you put your arms around the problem, you relax. Things become unknotted. The universe rolls in ecstasy at your feet.

If they have some sort of satellite self-satisfaction detector, which the National Security Agency no doubt does, there is a little red-hot glow of it on the spot on the map that denotes my house.

3 comments on Canoodling With The Problem

snacks said 2 years ago
wonderful post, both humor and wisdom, with Kafka thrown in as icing!
plenty said 2 years ago
I'm guessing you don't mean Harrisburg is the city of dreams? [WINK] Lived there not once, not twice, but *three* different times with in-laws (and that third time brought about the first recorded flying of pigs in Harrisburg, I can tell you that). Yikes. I've read all of your posts and have been trying to deduce exactly *which* of the universities you are at down south. Having gone to both, I think I have an idea where you're at - just wish I could have taken a class from you (would have been good fun). [THUMBUP]
faculties said 2 years ago
Thank you all. Of course if I told where I am, I'd blow my cover, and the next time I griped about administrators, I'd probably get an ominous little note ("We found your tenure to have been an error, you have one hour to vacate your office, and give back the Post-Its, too"). Here's a hint for those in the know: there's something medieval-ish about our library. I wasn't implying that Harrisburg was the city of dreams (nothing against Harrisburg!). It was just where the pigs achieved escape velocity. Something to do with a long stretch of flat ground, nothing to do with in-laws, or so they claim...