The Farewell Call
Abandoned Barn, Farmersville TX.
A friend left the company today, and we had one of those hideous team calls where normal people express sadness. I felt nothing. I felt something two weeks ago, when he told me he was leaving, but this morning, on a global video conference? Nada.
What I do in situations like this is make jokes. I said, “Enough about you. What about me? Who am I going to trade crude jokes with in private chat during staff meetings now?”
I’m not passionate about my career, so it’s hard to imagine getting weepy about anyone leaving it. I enjoy the work and I like my colleagues, and that’s it. I might feel differently if I’d become a high school or community college English and art teacher, which was probably my “first, best destiny,” as Spock put it. For various reasons that didn’t happen, and at this point I’m glad. Teaching in America looks miserable to me now. I think it could have been fun through about 2010. After that, I would’ve quit.
It’s gotten bad enough that, according to The Atlantic, freshmen are arriving at Columbia without ever having been asked to read a whole book. I wouldn’t know what to do with that. If even the wealthy, gifted kids can’t get through a book cover to cover, what the fuck is a humanities program supposed to be built on? Challenging YouTube videos?
Should students turn in iPhone videos instead of essays, walking around campus with selfie sticks and talking to the air about Modernism? Or should the university just say, “We’re closing the humanities program because no one is qualified to take it”?
Maybe that’s why the call didn’t get to me. Teaching was the job I would have cared about, and caring about it now looks like a long, slow heartbreak. The job I have is just a job, and the people in it are people I like. When they leave, my sadness won't show up on the farewell call. It will show up halfway through the next staff meeting, when I realize I have a joke to tell, and nobody to send it to.