Illegitimis non carborundum.
Please raise your glass to a new year of focus.
Let no Puget Clowns wear you down.
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Faculty:
Answer "Is our children learning?" [Dubya] in the affirmative or bust your butt to make the answer more affirmative more often. Your students matter far more than your colleagues. Make your teaching your highest priority; the rest of the campus will evanesce.
After your students, consider your intellectual or academic agenda. What was it you meant to accomplish beyond a paycheck in academia? You got a job. You acquired the means. Now, do you recall any ends worthy of your exertions to get the means? Once you take care of your students' needs and your desires, you will find you have too little time to waste on colleagues' psychoses, departments' intrigues, administrators' fecklessness, or other folderol. Pity!
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Staff:
Listen to Willie Nelson sing "Hands on the Wheel:"
At a time when the world seems to be spinnin' hopelessly out of control,
There's deceivers an' believers an' old in-betweeners,
That seem to have no place to go.
Well, it's the same old song, it's right an' it's wrong,
An' livin' is just somethin' that I do.
There's deceivers an' believers an' old in-betweeners,
That seem to have no place to go.
Well, it's the same old song, it's right an' it's wrong,
An' livin' is just somethin' that I do.
...
I looked to the stars, tried all of the bars.
An' I've nearly gone up in smoke.
Now my hand's on the wheel, I've something that's real,
An' I feel like I'm goin' home.
An' I've nearly gone up in smoke.
Now my hand's on the wheel, I've something that's real,
An' I feel like I'm goin' home.
...
Make working just something you do. Then go home. Give deceivers, believers, and in-betweeners not one thought.
They're clowns.
They're Puget Clowns.
Not even real clowns.
When the Puget Clowns are funny, the comedy is not deliberate. Hence, you are not supposed to laugh.
Pity.
