As I was sorting and organizing my office (one part avoidance of other tasks, one part compulsive need to purge, and one part this-is-what-you-do-in-the-corona) I ran across a trove of random greeting cards. Some were freebies and some I bought because, obviously, you need to have a secret trove of greeting cards at all times, right? One card appealed to my English professor heart:

The cover announces: Why I Work: A short essay. And inside you can read the essay: I like food. The End.

It cost $1.65, so I bought it some time ago but haven’t used it. What is the occasion for such a card? Well, to write a blog.

Why is always a fair question; asking why of something that seems obvious is the fairest of fair questions. And in the light of the corona, Why? alights many new answers.

(Not really) coincidentally, but yesterday, before I found the card, I posted a prompt for the 30 days of journaling in the corona series I introduced in my last blog. The question was, How have my feelings about work changed? As I started responding to it, I started to see how angry I am about my job right now. 

So many of the things that motivate us to plod through our day-to-day have been taken away by this pandemic—vacations, TGIF, holiday parties—so why plod? It’s like running. All the races I usually run in the Spring and Summer have been canceled—no Shamrock Shuffle, no Cinco de Miler, no Soldier Field 10 mile. So why run if there is no goal for it, nothing to look forward to?

Because I like the way it makes me feel. I like saying I’m a runner and talking about running. I like gearing up and dressing out; I like getting sweaty and sore. Running clears my head and my heart—I pound it out on the pavement. Perhaps I lose some weight and perhaps I gain some muscle—that’s not why I run; I run because running helps me live my life.

In the corona, I don’t like the way work makes me live my life. As I shared in my March 24 blog, the remote learning version of This. Job. Sucks. I’m at my desk in my glorious basement office well before 7 each morning and I stay there until 3 or 4 most days. After dinner, I’m often back at my desk for another couple of hours. Granted, it’s much like anyone else’s workday, there are breaks here and there and I sometimes stray to Facebook or amazon.com between grading papers, but this job is not supposed to be like anyone else’s workday—that’s why I took it.

What I like is the work: reading, writing, creating thought-provoking and inspiring writing tasks to encourage the love of language and expression in students who don’t know they have the right to language and expression. Those things help me live my life.

Covid-19 has brought low an already wounded higher education system. Most schools anticipate significant decreases in enrollment which means significant decreases in revenue. Under this guise, colleges and universities are engaging in ruthless cost-cutting of people and programs and course offerings. Colleges are investing in online courses that tend to be pre-packaged and asynchronous and can be delivered pretty much anywhere on any schedule to any number of students—and they don’t need a lot of faculty to teach them. For me, this means that 2 of my 3 classes have been disappeared, Stalin-like, from my schedule. Pay no attention to the computer behind the curtain. 

Perhaps the anger I feel toward my job is in anticipation of losing it—I’m rejecting it before it can reject me. Come Fall, I may not have to worry about the state of higher ed or my teaching job, I’ll only have to think about my work—the stuff I do that feeds me.