Expectations

I expect too much of people. I really do.

For example: The pathetic little student newspaper at my alma mater. I visited last week to participate in a panel discussion of grad school that was put on by the Career Development Center. I was impressed by the fact that it was even taking place; I remember no such service being offered by the CDC (ha, ha) while I was a student. And then I was disappointed when a mere seven students showed up. I think (I can't be sure, since I wasn't the same person then) that, had something like that been held when I had thoughts of grad school dancing in my head, I would have leaped at the opportunity to be enlightened by past Blufftonites. The current upperclassmen should appreciate their good fortune.

However, if such a thing did take place, and I missed it, I'm sure the reason was because I was busy trying to drag the student newspaper further out of the pathetic abyss it had resided in for decades prior to my class setting foot on campus (not an exaggeration; I cleaned all the back issues out of the Wit office's closet). Two of my classmates started that trend the year before I got there. I wanted to leave some kind of journalistic legacy. And yes, I use the term legacy with a bit of poetic license.

Things looked promising until the second semester after my grand exit from the premises: the communication department, in a grave lapse of judgment, decided to rip the reins of the newspaper from the hands of my hand-picked and much-lobbied-for English major predecessor and drop it in the lap of a dim-witted, cheerleader-for-Jesus communication major. And it became the print version of the 700 Club, religious spin all around.

I had hope when I flipped through a current issue and saw that one of the freshman staff writers during the Sommers administration had taken over as editor. She'd shown promise as a journalist and seemed to have some idea of what she was doing by the time the year was out.

Then I read her editorial. And was disappointed.

I'm not trying to say my editorials were brilliant, New York Times-worthy works of staggering genius. But they did get a few people to read the newspaper, if only to see how I would offend people's political, religious, and/or moral values. Or how I would mock the college and/or myself. The editorial I read was none of the above. It was a brief meditation on young love (young meaning first-year students). It was trite. Simplistic. Completely forgettable. As my college English students would say, it had no flow.

This revelation has been simmering on the backburner of my mind for a week now. It's merely one of a hundred instances in the past week where I have been disappointed by someone. A person's relationship to me, or whether I can even see his or her face, has no bearing on whether or not I will be disappointed. The breaking point today was, sadly enough, the driver of a car who failed to signal that he/she was making a turn as I waited to cross the street. The lack of a turn signal cost me at least ten seconds, and that was enough to piss me off during the entire walk between CVS and my apartment.

I need to be more realistic. I'm sure I disappoint people every day without even realizing it.