One for the personnel file

My boss's wife had a baby in early February, but for some reason the office-sponsored baby shower was today. His wife and the kid came in for the event, and the entire staff and faculty were invited.

The idea of being expected to purchase a gift for my supervisor already bothered me--I went back and forth about what to buy before finally running out at lunch yesterday and picking up a generic-looking blanket at Macy's. This morning I wrapped it up (yes, at work) and slipped it into the gift pile, figuring that with so many, it'd be received in relative anonymity and acknowledged through a thank-you note later on.

Leave it to my coworkers to elevate a baby shower to the level of a ceremony. Office protocol seems to dictate that these events be heavily catered and rigidly structured, but today they took it to a new level by formalizing the gift-giving process.

We all gathered at 2:00. Once my boss had made the rounds with the baby, the shower officially began with a short speech by our president--in hindsight, not much of a surprise, since most major get-togethers, including the once-a-semester all-faculty meeting and the yearly Christmas party, begin the same way. Then we were instructed to eat. Another social- and baby-phobic coworker and I retreated to the corner with our cake and punch, figuring we could eat quickly and then slip out.

At precisely 2:30, one of the party planners announced that because the administrative staff had to be back at their desks at 3:00, they would now take turns presenting their gifts to the happy family. Individually.

I did hear the accountant, a generally cranky man in his 60s, mumble something about how there was no way he was going to do this, but everyone else acted like this was perfectly normal, except my antisocial coworker and I, who exchanged horrified looks in the corner and plotted our escape.

After a decent interval. we sauntered toward the food table, trying to look like we were just going up for a second helping. The table was next to the door, so we figured we'd toss our plates in the trash and make a quick exit. Except, of course, that the trash can was gone, having been moved, of course, immediately behind the guests of honor, busily opening gifts.

In hindsight, we should have taken our trash with us, but my coworker attempted to throw hers away unnoticed. Of course he looked up and said something about understanding that she needed to get to class--an airtight alibi, because she did in fact have a 2:45. Coincidentally, his wife had just selected my coworker's gift to open, so they did so post haste, oohing and ahhing and thanking her profusely.

With my usual social grace, I stood there stupidly at her side until they'd finished thanking her, then scuttled out the door on her heels. I'm sure that when they got to my gift, my absence was announced, and probably noted by the president and the VP. Hopefully my mad job skills will make up for my lack of a ceremonial gift presentation.

I've always known I wasn't cut out for corporate America, let alone corporate America, 1950s style. That's one of the reasons I went into academia. Leave it to me to manage to find the country's most corporate school.

Looking the part

When I tell people, especially guys my own age, that I'm a librarian, they often tell me that I don't look like one. After spending four days at an academic librarians' conference in Seattle last week, I can safely say that actually, I look exactly like one. I've never seen so many thin, short-haired white women in layered Gap sweaters in one place. If I had swapped out my contacts for my glasses, I would have blended in completely. It was like a homecoming of sorts.

Old notebooks

A couple of weeks ago my parents came over for dinner. I had emailed them a newspaper column about a Baby Boomer cleaning out decades of her own junk from her mom's house in preparation for a move to a retirement home. Apparently that inspired my mom to empty the basement of my stuff, because she brought me a box of old notebooks from college. After they left, I sat down and went through them.

I had thought it would be a fun little trip down memory lane, and in some ways it was. For whatever reason I had saved my notes from pretty much every class I took in college, and it was entertaining to flip through them and see not only what I'd been studying but also what I was writing in the margins during lecture. I also apparently saved almost all of the papers I wrote.

That was where the nostalgia veered toward the depressing. I remembered writing all those papers, including the ones that drove me crazy. After a decade I could still tell you which ones reduced me to tearful phone calls home and hysterical crying jags in the corner of my room because I could just not get started, the one that I wrote in the art library because I couldn't get anything done at home and the one I finished up in the dorm computer lab minutes before it was due.

And because I saved the final, graded papers, I also got to revisit the comments that my favorite professor wrote on a number of them, some of which were over-the-top complimentary. I remembered her nominating me for a scholarship based on one of them, but I didn't remember quite the extent of her praise. And I read the papers again and thought, yeah, these were pretty good after all.

To complete the emotional flogging, I also had saved everything from the creative writing classes I took freshman and sophomore year, before I completely lost confidence in my writing. Not just the finished products (also complete with comments), but also the journal I kept for class, full of false starts and, increasingly, panicked meta-analysis--writing about why I wasn't writing, or what my characters weren't doing.

A normal person would probably have read this stuff, laughed fondly, and moved on. (OK, a normal person probably wouldn't have saved it in the first place.) I, of course, was awake all night thinking about how the person I was then became the person I am today. And of course it was all framed as, "I was smart then. I was a good writer then."

I had thought maybe the little flashback would inspire me to start writing more, but instead it's had the opposite effect. I've been thinking a lot about those old stories, but when it comes to creating anything new, I haven't been able to focus.

I started writing something the other day about my experience sitting next to an apparently schizophrenic man in church last Sunday, but I didn't get very far. I'm officially the least productive member of the creative writing club at this point, which is pretty sad since I'm the resident authority figure.

This week I'm going to a conference in Seattle. Hopefully the change of scenery will do me good, or I'll have some kind of funny adventure or encounter that will inspire me.