My House, My Rules

So this morning, I’m sleeping like the precious angel I am. Mind you, I no longer have my own bedroom, so I settled for the couch. The mornings that my mom carpools to work, she comes and sits in her “waiting chair.” Yes, she named it her waiting chair. I’m a decently heavy sleeper, so this usually doesn’t bother me. So she sees me sleeping, looks at me for a second, and makes a statement.

“I know you aren’t sleeping on my good decorating pillow. Don’t you see that’s not a pillow for sleeping? Go get one of those raggedy pillows and sleep on that.”

So, instead of arguing about what pillow is meant for what, I removed it from under my head. It’s a pillow, me sleeping on it isn’t going to do anything. So, I went back to sleep. Two minutes later, I hear the tv turn on. Mind you, I am asleep. She turns it up and casually watches while checking email on her new cell phone that she won’t let me see. I’m feeling a little bold so I get up and turn it down.

She looks at me like this and says

“Now how do you think I’m supposed to hear that.” She rolls her eyes, turns it up, and continues about her business.

Once again, I lose.

Charlotte will always make the rules and regulations for this house. What she says goes. We are expected to abide or well get over it. No exceptions. I asked her if I could make a simple rule and that was that she doesn’t repeat things over and over again. She said this is her house, I don’t get to make any rules.

Well, that’s how life operates I’ve learned. We go from place to place, system to system and have to learn their rules of the game. We have to learn the “Virginia Tech way” or the “McDonald’s way.” When we don’t, we get left behind. We ridicule the system for being unfair or not caring about its members. We criticize and settle for discomfort until a new opportuntity presents itself. When we don’t learn the rules of the game, we become that awkward player that eventually doesn’t get picked for the team anymore. We become that person that is consistently unhappy. We become that person who everyone says “finally” when he or she announce his or her departure.

Now, I’m not a big one for “rules” and all that, but I’m going to credit that to me being a young and dumb graduate student. However, I do know that you have to get in where you fit in. There are some things I did at Salisbury that aren’t going to fly at Virginia Tech. I had a lip ring all summer at Coastal Carolina while serving in a professional role– they loved it! When I wore it at Virginia Tech, I was looked like this by several people. It’s not that it made me less of a person, it just didn’t fit into their rules of the game. No one told me to take it out, but I felt this discomfort, so I did something about it. I took it out and adapted. To me, this wasn’t changing who I was. To me, this was me making sure that I didn’t let something as simple as a lip ring disvalue me as a new person to the people who would quickly form an uninformed opinion about me.

There will always be a few things that are worth shaking or challenging the “rules” a little bit, but chose those carefully. For example, I want a pet. Professionals at VT can have pets, but grads cannot. While I’m sure I don’t understand all the context behind why we cannot, I consistently ask and voice my reasons why I believe I should be allowed to have a pet. Challenging the rules doesn’t mean going out and buying a 50lb dog to make a point. That would just be foolish AND I might lose my job. But working within the system and challenging the rules means appropriately advocating for my concerns, but recognizing at the end of the day there is a reason behind the rule. Will not having a dog change my experience? No, but I’d still like one and feel like I have the support to voice that when appropriate to the appropriate people. For me being probably the most inappropriate person, I sure am saying appropriate a lot.

Rules exist for a reason and it’s probably best to learn them before you try to break them. My director of Housing & Residence Life taught me a valuable lesson when she said she would first get a lay of the land for six months before making any major decisions. Sometimes we just have to sit back and learn the rules of the game before pulling up a seat at the table. If we don’t, well we’ll see how far we make it. You gotta get in where you fit in.

In another post or so, I’m going to contradict this entire thing and talk about when rules interfere with passion and prevent upward growth and creativity. That’s wall you call danger. For now, know the rules and proceed with caution. Next, break all the rules and get the naysayers on your team. Not really, but it’ll make more sense later.

Let me go find an appropriate pillow and go back to sleep.

Which One Does Not Belong In This Picture: People Watching

(my fancy new library card, cost me $2 for a replacement!)

So in the bordem of sitting at home all day, I decided to go to the library and check out some books for summer reading. I wasn’t sure if I even had a library card anymore or if I was hundreds of dollars in library debt from overdue books. All that aside, I tried anyway. Up and down the aisles I went searching for those “student affairsy” books all the top dogs read. Well not really, because this is a public library with little interest in student affairs. However, I was looking for some of those rocket ship button pressing books. I found a few, but most of all I found people.

I found the many different people that occupy the Germantown Branch of the Montgomery County Public Library system. I found old men reading casually in soft seats with their balding heads exposed to the flourescant lights. I saw a middle-aged man playing some RPG on the public computer. I saw kids running into each other and their parents over the excitement of checking out a stack of books. I saw an older woman waiting in the lobby for her ride or the local bus. I saw a grandfather with his head tilted back in the chair asleep while his grandson (assumption) read quietly next to him. I saw people.

Being constantly surrounded by “college folk”, I forgot what it is like to see just people. I’m so used to seeing students, colleagues, teachers, and the like that I forgot what it was like to just be a person in a library. Even when I go to Walmart, I see my students and local fans or constituents of Virginia Tech. At school, I’m a student, a hall director, a supervisor, a this and that, but in the regular world I’m just a regular person. Not that these roles are anything significant, but they still hold that awkward green diamond from the Sims over my head. When I walk across campus, I can look at people and box them into a major, academic year, career path, and student organizations. While I’m at the library, I can only look at them as a person.

In academia we play so many roles and wear so many hats and sometimes forget we are still just people. Outside of the comfort of our familiar campus, the world sees us as a person. In the library, our education, position, and different accolodaes all go out the window. At first glance, someone might look at me and think I might not even be able to read. It’s like on the campus we constantly wear our graduation cords, stoles, and hoods without even knowing. The freshman looks a certain way, while the VPSA looks another. Once we walk into the local Kroger, we are just that person looking for the 2% milk while clearly in the 1% section.

So my challenge this summer is just to be a person. I want to be a person on the metro beginning my 9 to 5 day and not Brittany the hall director. I want to engage with people because they’re a person, not a resident of my building. I want to talk to someone who can share the details of their profession because they are actually still passionate about it and not apart of a system of semantics. I want to meet people who don’t understand or even know what I do with my life. I want to be just like that old man with his cap off reading a paper.

If we get back to appreciating just being a person, I think maybe we can work on that person versus the person we feel we have to be because of our roles. I’m not saying most people don’t have this right already, but so often, especially in this field, we become our work. We become the job description and the resume to where we lose the name at the top of the resume. I hope this summer to learn more about Brittany the person, so that when I do go to my next step they are hiring Brittany and not Brittany with x experience. I want people to engage with Brittany and judge me the way I did at the library.

I’m going back tomorrow.