On blogging…
For someone who loves technology and gadgets to a fault (my former boss used to call me the Gadget Lady! and in a letter of recommendation a colleague wrote: “While we have to admit that Gaby just loves new technology for its own sake… “I have to admit that I was pretty slow to warm up to blogs. Ever since discovering them, I deliberated over starting one because I couldn’t find anything interesting to say. What do people write in blogs? Who cares? I also found the format of blogs quite awkward: newer entries appear first pushing old entries out of the way to the point that to see what someone has previously written, you have to go through all the trouble of clicking your way further which will keep away people who are perhaps interested, but not that interested in finding out about your soliloquies. But then I realized that this is really how life is: you meet people at different stages in your life, and those who are in your inner circle and become friends, those who really care about you, go through all the trouble of finding out, not just who you are today, but how you’ve arrived here; how your journey was. For the other ones, those who are just passing acquaintances, it’s just enough to know the “you” today.
Something happened this week at work that made me realized why some people write blogs: “social soul searching.” After experiencing an unpleasant situation and being dumbfounded at the realization that some of my colleagues had the need to go out of their way to teach me a lesson in public, I did a lot of soul searching and I asked myself how I had put myself in that situation, and realized that perhaps I have ruffled some feathers. Overloaded by the one-way conversation inside my mind, I decided to do what I hadn’t done in a long time: write, but write for the sole pleasure of writing. So here are my thoughts:
To all of you who openly taught me a lesson and those who didn’t do it but enjoyed the situation –schadenfreude (I learned a new word today!) to those to whom I may have appeared conceited and perhaps overbearing, please forgive me. Believe me that whatever I said or did, it wasn’t directed at you, but rather at me. You may find some comfort in knowing that I don’t really feel superior: on the contrary, I am usually my worst critic. I am always questioning myself. To tell you the truth, the person in my life who is the most difficult for me to please, is the one that looks back at me on the mirror. I usually end up believing that if I gave 100%, I could have given 150%. My biggest pet peeve is people who don’t take pride in their work and slack-off. For me to respect myself I need to find projects in which I can get involved in and make a difference; to find new challenges, new goals to move on to when I accomplish something, new situations in which I can keep on learning.
It’s not that difficult for me to understand how I got to be who I am. I had a happy childhood: two loving parents who had wanted for many years to conceive a child. When I was born, I was their pride and joy and they certainly didn’t skimp on giving me everything that a child would want and more: attention, time, the most elaborate gifts, vacations, but most of all, unconditional love.
After all I was their most precious project: they sent me to piano and guitar lessons, dance and acting classes, the best schools, and private tutors. Neither of my parents had the privilege of finishing elementary school because they had to work to support their families, but they had higher expectations for me: I would be the one to finish college. To be fair, even though my parents weren’t formally educated, they were incredible self-taught individuals. Both of them were avid readers: ours was the only modest two-bedroom house in our neighborhood to have a library. My mom loved to read geography books and would rather spend her last cent buying National Geographic than clothes for herself. My dad was a traveling salesman, though I always thought of him as a traveling writer. I have memories of me accompanying my father to work and he stopping the car under the shade of a tree by the side of a rural road, and beginning to write thoughts that came into his mind on the back of his clients’ invoices. After he died, my most precious inheritance was discovering these pieces of paper with the stories and the poems that he had written through time.
The happiest memories of my childhood are the times I’d spend with my dad and uncle (two frustrated wannabe painter-writer-actors) sitting at the dinner table and reading and acting out plays. Or the “where in the world” game my mom used to make up from everything she had learned from her readings about faraway lands. And later my high school years, with teachers that encouraged us to use our creativity. Teachers that were not afraid to let us express ourselves and so I was the one that they would call to organize the assemblies, to write the speeches, design the yearbooks.
There were also the not-so-happy times too: a serious illness that kept me in and out of hospitals and drove my parents to celebrate each of my birthdays as if they were my last, and my mom’s belief that I had to be always the best that I could be which made her always question my grades (If I got an “A” she would ask me why I didn’t get an A+) As bad as that pressure can be for a child, I am grateful to my parents for always pushing me hard and for making me believe that I could do anything; that I could learn anything, as long as I set my mind into. I do believe that. And I tell this to my students: what you need to learn is to learn. The “topic” or the “theme” of your learning, doesn’t really matter, which brings me to who I was before I came here: a medical student half way through my degree. I had dreams of becoming a rural doctor in a little town in the north of Argentina. (I guess that was before the Internet and before becoming fascinated by technology!) I don’t know if I would have become a good doctor; perhaps that was what my parents wanted me to be. It just reminds me of a great song by Mike and the Mechanics which says:
Every generationBlames the one beforeAnd all of their frustrationsCome beating on your doorI know that I’m a prisonerTo all my father held so dearI know that I’m a hostageTo all his hopes and fearsI just wish I could have told him in the living years
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqQM-HoFeEk (with Spanish subtitles!)
In any case, I guess I was at the wrong country at the wrong time (something that 30,000 other Argentineans paid dearly for), or it was just faith or destiny, but I found myself here, in another country, with no family, no “useful” language, no identity at all. Working at a factory in Paterson one day a co-worker, realizing that I was so depressed, told me that I could study. I was surprised to learn that I didn’t need to know English and that “someone” would help me pay for it. Not long after that, I found myself at PCCC’s door. Looking back at that moment, I can’t help to think how appropriate it seems to me now PCCC’s motto: “Nothing so close, can take you so far.” Yes, it did indeed. And I’ll be forever indebted to all the people: faculty, administrators, and fellow students, who along the way believed in me and encouraged me when I wasn’t even capable of expressing my gratitude to them in this foreign language that I had to learn from scratch. And there were those especial individuals that went beyond their call of duty; those for whom teaching is not a profession, but a religion; whom I would never forget. They were my inspiration to be a teacher. They have set up the standards against which I always try to measure myself, and still fall short of. Nothing in my professional life has ever made me happier or more proud when in 1990 I was hired by PCCC as an instructor and now I was being called their peer. And this is where I fast forward to this week: back at a meeting with my peers, I felt an outsider again. I was being taught a lesson for which there was nothing to learn. Rules are rules, I understand. I don’t object to that. I just would have had appreciated a gentler touch in the right direction.