Change Is Hard

The trip into school took me two hours and 20 minutes today.  It was a long slow haul.  But it wasn’t too stressful as everyone was going the same slow 10 to 15 miles an hour.  I guess that’s the key.  When everyone is going the same speed there is so little stress.  Now if we could apply that to life.  Of course that would infer that there also would be so little excitement!

As I travel around Ann Arbor, on the bus, walking across campus, or driving through crowded streets, I am amazed at the high percentage of people that are walking, riding their bikes, studying in libraries, sitting in restaurants or on the bus, all with headsets on. If they aren’t listening to an IPOD they are talking on their phones. Is this an Ann Arbor thing? Or are all people everywhere traveling, reading, sitting or eating while listening to someone or something in their ear?
Does no one just listen to their own thoughts anymore? Have we lost the ability to be silent? Have we no thoughts of our own to ponder? Do we always have to be connected to someone or something else? Are we afraid to be alone with ourselves?

I rarely have a reason to turn my cell phone on. Certainly not for the kinds of casual conversations I hear all around me on the streets. I don’t have any desire to listen to someone or something else during my commutes to and from classes. There is so much to consider just being on campus, I don’t need more information filtering into my already overloaded brain. That sounds like something from a 503 lecture I recently heard. There’s probably a study on this going on right now.

Regardless, I think people that can’t leave home without having something in their ear are missing an awful lot of interesting things. Some of which are other people just like them.

After Mom died suddenly in July of 2004, while we were all back home arranging the funeral, I noticed that the windchime that hangs in her livingroom would occasionally chime a single, soft, gentle tone. It seemed to me that these tones would frequently correspond to times when I felt the most sad, or was the furthest into a deep melancholy memory. It was as if she was telling me gently that she was right there.

After Dad died in December of that year, at the hands of a tired semi truck driver, I would often look up at the night sky at the Big Dipper. Dad and I had talked about that constellation when I was a kid, how it would appear to angle in the sky differently depending on where in the world you were. Later, when I was an adult, he was in Costa Rica, and he told me after that trip how the Big Dipper looked so different from down there. I wonder now if it looks different from heaven.

Tonight I spent considerable time on the phone with our attorney talking about things that different people in our family are working on, trying to make a difference in the trucking industry; to help prevent more of these tragedies. After the call I took the dog out for her final evening walk in the snow. As she went about her business I glanced up sadly, with tears in my eyes. There was the Big Dipper. As I gazed at it and thought about Dad, somewhere from across the street on a darkened porch, a wind chime called out, a single, gentle tone. “I am right here.”

The ice is still with us, but thankfully we didn’t lose power like so many around us did.  So I can just enjoy how pretty it is and not have to live with consequences.

The night before last I was riding the bus back to the car.  It was 5 p.m. and the sun was just going down.  The air had started to get that pink cast to it, and I wondered how the icy trees would look in the pink air.  Ann Arbor sits up on a ridge, and as the bus decended down past the University Hospital and over the Huron River I glanced back.  There was a row of trees at the top of the ridge, between me and the setting sun.  They were glowing bright fushia and peach and orange.  It looked as though they were covered in milions of tiny pink and peach lights.  I only got a glimpse, but it was something I’ll never forget.

Having spent way too much time trying to do math problems for two of my four classes this weekend, I spent little time noticing the ice, rain and snow outside my windows.  It was a long weekend for some people.  This semester I have a long weekend every week with no classes on Mondays.  Sometimes that means I have lots of time for other things.  This weekend all my time was absorbed into the foreign world of math, graphs, story problems and fear.  Fear that I’ll never figure this stuff out.  Fear that maybe this stuff is important and I don’t get why.

So..after spending more time chopping my car out of it’s ice shell this morning than actually driving to Ann Arbor I was in a pretty poor mood as I climbed aboard the bus. My homework wasn’t finished and worse, I didn’t even understand some of it.  But as we rounded the corner of Green Road and Nixon Road, the sun came out and a row of maple trees that in the fall are a full blaze of orange were today glowing with their iced branches catching the sun.  There were maybe 14 of them, all the same size, all similarly silvered with ice.  They looked like the fabric on the dresses of some of the Golden Globe celebrities last night.  They made me smile.  This semester will, after all, end in April, regardless of whether or not I figure out all the nuances of logs or calculus. 

When I get out of school and am working in a public library somewhere, doing what I’ve dreamed of doing, I hope what I remember from this day is the ice in the sunlight and not the fear of the math. 

In a lecture this week a professor spent considerable time explaining sunk costs.  Those are costs that a person has already spent, and regardless of what their next decision is, those costs will not be reimbursed, and hence should have no effect on the next decision.  One example was a person who had purchased a ticket to an event when something else comes along that the person would rather do.  The professor said that if the person were a rational decision maker they would make the decision about going to the event with the previously purchased ticket or going to the new event independent of the fact that the ticket was already purchased.  But we all know that the fact the money has been spent will weigh on the mind of the decision maker and that person may well go to the previously scheduled event just to make sure that ticket money wasn’t wasted.

Another example used in lecture was people that tend to stay on a certain path on which they have already invested a great deal of time or money rather than accept that the path is heading in a way that will never be successful.  The specifics she talked about related to research, that people stick with a line of research even if it becomes obvious that the end result would be less than optimum.  Her point was that it was much better to abandon the research even though much had been invested, because those investments were “sunk costs” that would never be retreived.

This lead me to wonder why anyone has motivation to work on  difficult situations.  Why work through problems in a relationship or at work?  If a rational decision maker would know the previous work was a sunk cost and not recoverable, would that rational decision maker cut their losses and leave as soon as the going gets tough?  What keeps us trying to make things work?  Are we being irrational?

I have to say that being a student is a lot more comfortable during balmy fall days, with trees lit up in brilliant colors and beautiful sunsets than it is with snow showers, gusty winds and early dark evenings.  So as I make my way through this first week of classes I try to adjust to leaving campus in the dark and cold, try to get comfortable with standing at a dark bus stop with my hood up, back to the wind. 

The classes are confusing, but I remind myself I felt the same way at the beginning of last semester.  I spoke to my graudate assistant for one of the classes about my fear of math.  It’s been almost 30 years since I took and barely managed to pass my last math class.  I hoped never to see algebra again in my lifetime.  I asked him if algebra had changed much in the last 30 years and he looked at me blankly.  Could be because he’s from India and doesn’t have my sense of humor.  Could be he can’t believe I took algebra 30+ years ago.  He said he couldn’t say if it had changed because he didn’t take high school algebra in this country.  I see his point.  I guess it doesn’t mater if it changed as I didn’t understand it back then anyway.  I told him it would be interesting to see if I could learn it now, and he was encouraging that I probably could, and that he’d help.  Wouldn’t that be amazing, if I found out I could understand something now that was so foreign to me then?  But I don’t have high hopes, as I didn’t understand it when I was trying to study for the GRE, and that was only a year ago!  But I didn’t have a tutor then, nor a support group.  So maybe this will be OK.  I hope.

Forget what I said about “easing into this school thing slowly.”  Having attended only two of my four classes so far I have three chapters to read for one class and 4 chapters to read for the other, all by Friday.  Not to mention the short paper due Friday about a search experience, and another one for the other class about a problem solving game that I have yet to do, also due Friday.  I hope the other two classes have less reading!  But I imagine they will be similar. 

Last night I read a chapter while working out on the eliptical.  Do you get extra calorie deductions for doing homework while working out?  There should be some way to manage that. 

After a long break for the holidays we’re back to school.  I’m easing into this school thing slowly, my first classes were not until Friday of this week, and since I don’t have classes scheduled on Monday I have a three day weekend.  But looking at the syllabus I think I may have trouble this semester.  Just what IS an algorithm anyway?  And why oh why do I need to know how to use it if all I want to be is a librarian when I grow up?

And what’s the difference between a class called “Choice & Learning” and one called Search & Retrieval?”  Couldn’t this all be one course?  Don’t you make choices as you search, and don’t you learn when you retreive?  Of course I recall the same feeling of confusion at the beginning of last semester, and at least this time I can navigate a little better both around campus and around ctools. (the computer software we use to provide communication between faculty and students.) 

I haven’t attended the other two classes I have this semester yet.  I can only hope they are more obvious in their goals and meanings, than the two foundation courses I have attended so far.  And more fun!  I fear, though, that “Fundamental Human Behavior” is going to be a whole lot like “Choice & Learning”.  We shall see. 

Meanwhile I am getting organized, setting up file folders, notebooks, buying textbooks, figuring out schedules and trying to think like a student again. Amazing, after “only” three weeks I seem to have forgotten how to roll with the punches of student life.  I figure that will come back quickly though, for really, what else can you do?

A week from today I will be back in school, the second semester of my new life.  I am looking forward to it, though I am also throughly enjoying the weeks off between semesters.  To have this time without work or school has been a gift.

I wonder what the new semester will hold for me, what I will find intresting, and what I will find annoying.  I know there will be some of both.  But looking back at the last semester I learned so many interesting things that I can only hope the novelty will not have worn thin! And that the snow will not test my resolve to continue along this path in Ann Arbor.

I almost can’t wait for school to begin!