Tuesday, July 19, 2011

When you’ve already written your resignation letter in your head, seen the blinking cursor inch forward as it spells out your marquee sentence, it probably doesn’t bode well for your tenure. The tenure, in this case, would be continued participation in the alumni association. Now, let me be clear: I haven’t jumped ship yet, and I’ve left myself ample runway to change course, but my blunt initial assessment? It’s time-consuming and costly, with benefits that can only be tenuously correlated–much like the alma mater itself, basically.

It’s relentless. The inaugural event hasn’t even cooled off yet, and it’s already onto the next thing and how to attract the maximum number of attendees to it. But when I step back, really ask myself what the purpose of this community is, it’s to stimulate donations, is it not? It’s this idea that these activities will somehow rekindle those feel-good memories of an era that, frankly, is over, and in the process you’ll willingly part with some more coin. That’s my old self speaking here, anyhow. For the briefest moment, when I was knee-deep in drafting an invitation e-mail, I reasoned that it’d be far easier to just write a check and avoid the work, until I realized that–guess what?–I have obligations to do neither.

So how does all of this affect the new social tapestry? For one thing, I think there’s a distinction to be made between a given community and the people within it, and you can enjoy one while merely tolerating the other. Additionally, I suspect this excursion into sociability has lasted so long because I’ve really just been trying to acquire new interpersonal skills and capacities, rather than the usual suite of impersonal abilities. This may very well be the case, because it’s not like you can emerge from a cocoon, after all, as a completely new person. You change the things you can, and the things you can’t, you make your peace with them.