In the meantime, I have been dedicating my life to being the best Visiting Assistant Professor of Phonetics I possibly can be. To me that means--primarily--being a good teacher, an endeavor in which I think I was not wholly unsuccessful, if the reactions from my students are anything to go by. I found that being a good teacher at the university level for two classes that I've never really taught before takes an inordinate amount of dedication and time--usually about 80 to 90 hours a week. Hence the lack of progress in fun in my life during that time.
At a Research-First University like Illinois, however, teaching is only half the battle--and a minority half at that. They'd rather see you get papers out and published, to bring renown, glory and (most importantly?) money to the institution. I guess I can't blame them for that. Everybody's got to look out for their own interests. And everybody's got to make it look like they've been accomplishing something, too. Having a product you can point to makes that eminently possible. Perpetually yammering on about unfulfilled aspirations does not.
People in this day and age like to go on and on about how the money and power are the only things that really motivate people. I guess that, at some primal level, I can't disagree with that assertion, since I know that just about everyone out there would rather go on living than die, and money's more or less required to do that in civilized society. But there's still a part of me--even at the age of 32, as I head on in to middle-age--that can't help but disbelieve. I'm convinced that what people want more than anything else is a sense that someone else out there cares about them. But sympathy is in short supply when it's so expensive to dedicate yourself to other human beings...
It is for that reason, though, that teaching is one profession that I can believe in. Most every other profession--or economic exchange, for that matter--involves a consumer paying someone else to perform a service for them that they (the consumer) find onerous and distasteful. (Or, perhaps, they don't have the time or the inclination necessary to develop the skills to perform that service for themselves.) In teaching, however, you do not simply do something for someone else so that they don't have to. You enable them to do something that they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. It's the only profession I can think of whereby you actually help someone else become a better person.
And it's just occurred to me, as I sit here in my upstairs study on an otherwise empty Wednesday night in Champaign, Illinois, that maybe that's why every other economic interaction we have with people in modern American life takes on the aspect of an "I-it relationship", in the classical, Gabriel Marcellian sense. We don't want the potential for human interaction so much as we want the service provided by the interaction to simply be over.
Anyhow. All that is by the way of saying that I am much better at dedicating myself to improving the lives of others than I am at improving the life of myself. Or, at the very least, I am much more comfortable accepting working wages for doing so. Hence, I have not been offered the tenure track job here at the University of Illinois, despite the inordinate amount of effort I put into doing the job well this past semester. The person they offered the job to still hasn't accepted it, however, so there is still a chance that I may stay on here in the future.
What that all means for the future of either me or basesproduced.com is still too early to tell. I still have no intention of ever giving up on my unfulfilled dreams, however. Whatever they may be.
Until next time,
-Steve