Dead Motherboard

My son recently wrote a blog about his dead motherboard (I actually have no idea what that is, other than the fact that it pretty much controls a computer), but I have co-opted that little phrase to sum up my life in recent weeks.

I often chide students about their tendency to write what I call "shotgun essays," a poorly organized, poorly developed, scattered melange of content that is completely pointless. However, I have to respond to these essays, provide feedback to the drafts, and assign a grade to them, which is pretty much a waste of my time, talent, and training. After once again demonstrating the required outline that is to be completed before writing the essay, and receiving feedback during class that they don't need to use an outline, they just write, I'm done. Only final drafts of essays will be accepted through the end of the semester, rather than an endless stream of "drafts" they want me to "fix" for them so they can get a "good grade." That process is now a dead motherboard: deal with it.

The attendance issues with a couple of community college clientele were challenging, to put it mildly. Young people feel empowered to bully their way into making the adults in charge do it their way, not the right way. I did violate my own ethics and college policy by working with the students in an effort to meet their attendance needs, but the old I gave an inch and the student ran a marathon applies here. The end result is that my syllabus will now clearly state that upon the 3rd absence from class, the student WILL be dropped. It will apply equally to all students in all situations, and someone else will have to hear their pleas and deal with them because this issue is now a dead motherboard.

A person I have called "friend" for a decade recently assured me that I am the "most intolerant person" she knows, a comment that has rankled for a couple of weeks. The comment results from her asking me what I felt about Prop 8, the CA proposition restricting marriage to a male/female couple. She is gay, as are many of the people with whom I associate in one of the Gay meccas in SoCal, so I told her that I'd rather not have that conversation. She is gratingly persistent, so I finally said, "Okay," which I perhaps should not have done. She's entitled to her opinion, but I am only entitled to share her opinion: doesn't work for me. Dead motherboard.

Finally, here come the holidays, my least favorite season of the year. I used to love Thanksgiving because it was a time for incredible food, family and friends, but I began to hate the holiday when, instead of staying home where I wanted to be, we always had to drive to my ex-husband's family 500 miles from our locale! My daughter's birthday is at Thanksgiving, a special time for both of us, to say the least, and her ex-husband destroyed their marriage, her birthday, and the holiday last year. I'm glad he's a dead motherboard, but I'm devastated that he had to choose the holiday season as his weapon of mass family destruction.

Christmas has become a game of one-upmanship, a competition to see who can outdo whom in the gift-giving Olympics. My intent is usually in the right place, but it has become evident that I am the worst gift-giver in the world, especially when I care enough about a person to make a gift from my heart. My new policy is just send checks and/or gift cards: they want what they want, so let 'em go buy it. For me, 'tis a seasonal dead motherboard.

Yeah, as my years accrue, life just seems to keep poking its stick in my eye, and I'll admit I'm tired. Just once in a while, I'd like someone to care, but that's another dead motherboard: they have their own issues to handle, so don't need to add mine. I'm a giver living in a society of takers, so I have to accept that or move on, but it still violates some of my most basic beliefs.

When I called my financial advisor at AIG and asked him, now that AIG has received another huge financial relief package from the government (AIGs mismanagement goes back decades; my TSA was with another firm that was bought out by AIG just in time for the financial destruction to begin), is he going to put my money back into my retirement account? He was bewildered. I said, "I put all my money into the account during the last 30 years. Your company, through fiscal malfeasance, threw it away. Therefore, since I am the government and I've bailed you out so you still have a job and a 6-figure salary, how about putting my money back into my retirement account?"

He laughed, told me that was an interesting perspective, but it would not happen. I agreed: it wouldn't happen, but it should happen. I knew the conversation was a dead motherboard before I started it, but I'm the most intolerant person you've probably ever known, so get over it.