Almostgotit.com

These are just so exactly perfect.

• As I let go of my feelings of guilt, I am in touch with my inner sociopath.
• I have the power to channel my imagination into ever-soaring levels of suspicion and paranoia.
• I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else’s fault.
• I no longer need to punish, deceive, or compromise myself, unless I want to stay employed.
• In some cultures what I do would be considered normal.
• Having control over myself is almost as good as having control over others.
• My intuition nearly makes up for my lack of self-judgment.
• I honor my personality flaws for without them I would have no personality at all. Joan of Arc heard voices, too.
• I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me.
• I need not suffer in silence while I can still moan, whimper and complain.
• As I learn the innermost secrets of people around me, they reward me in many ways to keep me quiet.
• When someone hurts me, I know that forgiveness is cheaper than a lawsuit, but not nearly as gratifying.
• The first step is to say nice things about myself. The second,to do nice things for myself. The third, to find someone to buy me nice things.
• As I learn to trust the universe, I no longer need to carry a gun.
• All of me is beautiful, even the ugly, stupid and disgusting parts.
• I am at one with my duality.
• Blessed are the flexible, for they can tie themselves into knots.
• Only a lack of imagination saves me from immobilizing myself with imaginary fears.
• I will strive to live each day as if it were my 50th birthday.
• I honor and express all facets of my being, regardless of state and local laws.
• Today I will gladly share my experience and advice, for there are no sweeter words than “I told you so!”
• False hope is better than no hope at all.
• A good scapegoat is almost as good as a solution.
• Just for today, I will not sit in my living room all day in my underwear. Instead, I will move my computer into the bedroom.
• Who can I blame for my problems? Just give me a minute…. I’ll find someone.
• Why should I waste my time reliving the past when I can spend it worrying about the future?
• The complete lack of evidence is the surest sign that the conspiracy is working.
• I am learning that criticism is not nearly as effective as sabotage.
• Becoming aware of my character defects leads me naturally to the next step of blaming my parents.
• To have a successful relationship, I must learn to make it look like I’m giving as much as I’m getting.
• I am willing to make the mistakes if someone else is willing to learn from them.
• Before I criticize a man, I walk a mile in his shoes. That way, if he gets angry, he’s a mile away and barefoot.

Posted several places online, including here.  No attribution given.  Please let me know if you know the original source!

My daughter graduated from 5th grade today.  I never graduated from anything until highschool, but today I’m thinking:  some new ways of doing things actually are good.  We need to mark our milestones.  They matter.  My son will graduate from high school next year, and then supposedly will go to college (if he can remember to apply to any of them).  If 5th grade graduation can make me cry, I will really need my friends around me when my first born leaves the nest, I can tell you right now. 

But no, today, I’m not even going to go there. 

My mother is flying in for a visit tomorrow, the house is a total disaster, and I am also exchanging flurries of email with a potential employer.  The latter has gotten more than slightly ridiculous, like we’re settling a lawsuit or arranging security clearance, instead of just talking about a no-big-deal job.  Yesterday I almost walked away but decided to send one last demanding email instead, sure it would scare them off once and for all (which would actually have made it easier to focus on cleaning my house) but nope:  back they are again today, still wanting to talk.  I don’t know.  I asked them for the weekend. 

I still need some more time to eat olives and bake cookies. 

These are from actual resumes:

(from multiple sources: if you know original source, please comment!!)

“Personal: I’m married with 9 children. I don’t require prescription drugs.

“I am extremely loyal to my present firm, so please don’t let them know of my immediate availability.”

“Qualifications: I am a man filled with passion and integrity, and I can act on short notice. I’m a class act and do not come cheap.”

“I intentionally omitted my salary history. I’ve made money and lost money. I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. I prefer being rich.”

“Note: Please don’t misconstrue my 14 jobs as ‘job-hopping’. I have never quit a job.”

“Number of dependents: 40.”

“Marital Status: Often. Children: Various.”

“Here are my qualifications for you to overlook.”

“Responsibility makes me nervous.”

“They insisted that all employees get to work by 8:45 every morning. Couldn’t work under those conditions.”

“[left my last job because I] was met with a string of broken promises and lies, as well as cockroaches.”

“I was working for my mom until she decided to move.”

“The company made me a scapegoat – just like my three previous employers.”

“While I am open to the initial nature of an assignment, I am decidedly disposed that it be so oriented as to at least partially incorporate the experience enjoyed heretofore and that it be configured so as to ultimately lead to the application of more rarefied facets of financial management as the major sphere of responsibility.”

“I was proud to win the Gregg Typting Award.”

“Please call me after 5:30 because I am self-employed and my employer does not know I am looking for another job.”

“My goal is to be a meteorologist. But since I have no training in meteorology, I suppose I should try stock brokerage.”

“I procrastinate – especially when the task is unpleasant.”

“Minor allergies to house cats and Mongolian sheep.”

“Personal Interests:  Donating blood. 14 gallons so far.”

“Education: College, August 1880-May 1984.”

“Work Experience: Dealing with customers’ conflicts that arouse.”

“Develop and recommend an annual operating expense fudget.”

“I’m a rabid typist.”

“Instrumental in ruining entire operation for a Midwest chain operation.”

 ((When one might consider hiring a service..))

Sunday, the youth group at church was selling “mums for mom,” so everyone was buying them and giving them to everyone else.  Sweetness. My own mother is 2000 miles away, so I gave a bouquet to the elegant Fasia instead, who has dubbed herself my “African Mother.”  She hugged me as usual, which I love because then I get to spend several hours afterwards smelling like her perfume.

Last year I gave a bouquet to my Neighbor Mother, Betsy.  I couldn’t this time around because she died in February.  She still gave me flowers, though: the pansies which she planted by her driveway last fall are still brightly in bloom.  Her irises were especially beautiful this year too, as were her daffodils and columbine.  Her Lenten roses began to bloom almost as soon as she left us, and one plant has blooms on it yet. 
 

I miss Betsy. 

She surprised us, at first, with her way of walking into our house without knocking.  Neighbors around here used to do that, I guess.  She taught us how to be neighbors, in a world that hardly has them anymore.  We mowed her lawn and she gave our daughter piano lessons in exchange.  Summers, we regularly trouped back and forth between her screened porch and our back patio, laden with potato salad and wine. 

During baseball season, she’d invite our son over to watch our team with her on cable (which we don’t have), and the two of them would share popcorn and shout themselves hoarse.

She didn’t want to live like a sick person.  She laughed raucously, kept up with a million friends, and continued to play with the symphony. 

She wanted to go to a place she remembered in the mountains one last time, so a group of us took her there.  She read us a letter from a friend who’d died of cancer, because the friend had the Words Betsy wanted.  She took off her wig and let us kiss her cute head, and we laughed. Raucously.  We didn’t know she’d only live a few weeks more. 

She died at home.  It worked out.  We took turns staying with her that whole last week, when the night nurse wasn’t there.  And I couldn’t have done that, made all those phone calls, spent all that time, if I’d had a job. 

All this past year, Betsy has been very worried that I didn’t have a job.  She even told me she’d find me one!  I was able hold her hand as she lay on her couch and finally tell her that seemed to be working out, too.

The million friends showed up at her funeral, where YES a few of us even danced.  All the viola players in town seemed to be booked with La bohème that day, but Rachel’s soaring violin was so beautiful it made us cry.  And at the first symphony concert, after Betsy had died, they honored her with an empty chair.

I know it’s a few days late (she’d tease me for that, too) but Happy Mother’s Day, Betsy!

Turns out Marilee Jones does have a college degree: a BA in biology from the College of Saint Rose, a small Catholic College in Albany.  Along with Saint Rose and MIT, Jones was awarded the degree in 1973, six years before she first applied to MIT.

However, MIT now also claims that while Jones inexplicably omitted the Saint Rose degree, she not only claimed two other (unearned) degrees when she first applied, but later added the third (unearned) degree from Albany Medical College AFTER she began working for MIT.  This contradicts Jones’ own statement made last week, which still suggested she had no degree whatsoever, and only lied the once.

I’m going to need therapy over this.

My thesis has been than Marilee Jones lied, but that she is not a LIAR.  It makes all the difference.  Too many people have wanted to essentialize Jones, repainting her entire character and accomplishment with a single flaw: a tragic error which, nonetheless, I think I’ve argued is both understandable and forgivable. 

MIT’s chancellor believes he’s being charitable by describing Jones as “short on credentials but long on potential.”

An angry letter  published in the Boston Globe sputters:

In the eyes of this alumnus (1950 and ‘53), Jones has disgraced herself, dishonored a prestigious educational institution, and tarnished the reputations of the tens of thousands of MIT graduates for whose admission she was responsible. There is no substitute for honesty, most especially at a research institute whose main contribution to society consists of graduates imbued with the zeal to become productive citizens seeking the truth in whatever they do. How do we alumni now know what criteria have been applied for decades in selecting the pool of MIT freshmen each year? Jones’s “positive legacy” now needs to be carefully reviewed and amended appropriately.

Okay, look.  I have never said that it was okay for Marilee Jones to lie on her resume.  While it’s true that I carry big ugly cigars around in my purse now, it’s because they remind me that it’s okay to be bad every now and then.  But I don’t actually smoke them, because life feels a lot better when one is not throwing up. 

I do actually have a point here, and I want to say it one last time, very emphatically, before I’m quite ready to drop this whole thing, okay?

Memo to snotty Dr. MIT Chancellor and all the rest of the world:  Marilee Jones was FULLY credentialed.  Her legacy stands.  If this were a surgeon who lied about going to medical school (it’s happened!) that would be different.  A skilled mimic might actually become quite good at performing routine appendectomies, but if a complication arose,  his or her medical training would be called into play.  

But there is no “Dean of Admissions” school.  Jones’ 28 years of experience in MIT’s office of admissions *are* her “credentials,” just as surely as they would have been if she had not lied on her resume.

Nor is it at all helpful to suggest, as some (with degrees!) have done, that “had she gone to college, perhaps she would have taken a course in ethics.”    Since when did a course in ethics make one ethical?   Are we really now going to start making THOSE kinds of arguments?  If anything, I would hope that college-educated people, particularly those who have taken any philosophy, let alone any history, would have learned better than THAT.

I’m going to go lie down, now.  Tomorrow: new subject.

——-
Related Posts:
MIT blew it
Hail Marilee, denied any grace
The Marilee Jones Joke
The Devil and Ms. Jones

Still thinking about Marilee Jones.  A lot.  I’ve been reading lots of good commentary on the situation (some of the best to which I’ve posted links, right column) 

Our world, most especially the academic part of it, is still astonished at (and extremely resistant to) the idea that anyone can be so good at something without a degree.  Even in cases when they can produce two pages of (verifiable) publications and achievements. 

We can huff and puff all we want to about how a degree is a useful standardized measure of dependability or capability.  Or whatever.  We may even be right, most of the time.   But all our noise flies out the window when we have an exception right in front of us, proof in hand, and we turn the other way.  That is the point at which our myth is exposed.  We don’t care about the “dependability and capability” after all – our true fealty is to the degree!

Most of human chauvinism, of course, is based on self-interest, e.g.:  I worked hard on my own degree, and I need it to mean something.  I don’t WANT people without degrees to be as qualified as I am.  (Personally? I also permanently damaged my career in order to hand-raise my children, and thus don’t WANT the children of working parents to be as wonderful and well-adjusted as mine are!)  

Life is about exceptions, though.  And ah, confession is good for the soul. 

I don’t know Marilee Jones personally of course, but any accusation that she was a greedy “opportunist”  I dismiss out of hand.  We all are all of us that, and in this country it’s considered a virtue.

However, I do agree with other commentators that much depends upon whether she is a pathological liar.  I strongly suspect she is not.  I believe, instead, that much of the great good that she has contributed came from an interior acknowledgement of her own mistake.  As penance for it, even.  I think she has been truly sorry for much of the last 28 years. 

I also think it is absolutely wrong, even in the slightest degree, to look backwards now and recast her whole working history in light of this new information (that she had no degree.  And that she lied.)  To do so is fraudulent on our part, and only exposes our own grave disingenuity and chauvinism:

“She didn’t have a degree, so turns out she doesn’t know what she is talking about.”

“She lied, so therefore can say nothing to us at all about how to tell the truth.”

Garbage.

One of the things Marilee wrote about (and yes, we’re on first name basis now) was the importance of integrity.  In a book she co-authored last fall, Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond,  she writes:

Holding integrity is sometimes very hard to do because the temptation may be to cheat or cut corners.  But just remember that ‘what goes around come around,’ meaning that life has a funny way of giving back what you put out.

This is what I tell my kids, too.  But reading those words now makes me ache.  Just listen to her confession, her fear, even her contrition.  Thing is?  People who cheat quite often do get away with it, and people who don’t cheat quite often get shafted.  Sometimes, unfortunately, ‘virtue has to be its own reward.’  And often a pretty damned shabby one, at that.

Moreover, it’s just cheap for those who “have” to admonish those who “haven’t” for being greedy and ungrateful.

I’ve been hanging around the academy for over 20 years now.  Guys, academics do really ugly things, all of the time.  (as humans do in general, I imagine.)  They plagarize.  Have terrible, exploitative affairs. Torpedo the careers of each other’s Ph.D students out of sheer spite. 

And yes, quite often, they lie. 

According to the New York Times article on the subject of Marilee Jones’ “resignation”, Phillip L. Clay, M.I.T.’s chancellor declared:

There are some mistakes people can make for which ‘I’m sorry’ can be accepted, but this is one of those matters where the lack of integrity is sufficient all by itself.  This is a very sad situation for her and for the institution. We have obviously placed a lot of trust in her.

(The aptly-academic Latin to respond with here would be ”res ipsa loquitur“)

Dr. Clay is probably correct that there is no conceivable way that MIT or any other university could re-absorb Marilee Jones back into its ranks, but “integrity” has very little to do with it.  Jones is now a public embarrassment to them and worse, an irreducible iconoclast.   (as in, literally: “a breaker or destroyer of images, esp. those set up for religious veneration. a person who attacks cherished beliefs, traditional institutions, etc., as being based on error or superstition.”)

She’s gotta go. 

In a fair world, though?  Half the rest of ‘em would go with her.

—-
Related Posts: 
MIT really blew it
Marilee Jones joke
How to (Almost) get Marilee
Coming Out: I’m a closet academical

This one’s for my really smart friends, with & without degrees

An educational institution advertised for a “Young Harvard graduate or the equivalent.” Among the inquiries received was one from a Yale graduate who inquired, “By equivalent do you mean two Princeton grads or a Yale grad part time?
*************************************************
When Marilee Jones saw the same ad, her question was: “By equivalent do you mean four young Princeton grads, two Yale grads, or someone who can actually do the job?”

The University of Tennessee’s Lady Vols just won their 7th national championship under Coach Pat Head Summitt.  Summitt is  the all-time winningest coach in NCAA basketball history (men or women). For 32 seasons she has proven herself as a winner and role model. Summitt’s coaching has created 12 Olympians, 19 Kodak All-Americans, 65 All-SEC performers, 45 international participants and 38 professional players.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that Pat Head Summitt never actually graduated from UT-Martin, as it says she did on her resume — when one can even find it.

And what would the fans do now if UT forced her to resign over it?

By all accounts, MIT’s Marilee Jones is the Pat Head Summitt of college admissions.  The Ivy League dean of admissions is also a celebrated writer and speaker.  She is concerned about the effect on young people of the rising competition to get into top colleges, and has preached that we need to get back to supporting the “human being” rather than over-hyping the “human doing.”

Her 28-year career at MIT, apparently all spent in the admissions office, saw her rise from administrative assistant to the top position. 

Nobody knew it yet, but back when she applied for that first secretarial position three decades ago, she lied about her college credentials.  No one cared enough about such a lowly employee to investigate, and all of her subsequent promotions were based on her MIT experience and accomplishments alone.

And now she’s was forced to resign for doing on her resume what (according to CNN)  57% of the rest of us do, too. 

In a statement issued through MIT, Jones wrote:

“I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to MIT 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job or at any time since.  I am deeply sorry for this and for disappointing so many in the MIT community and beyond who supported me, believed in me, and who have given me extraordinary opportunities.”

No, she shouldn’t have done it.  But she was 26 years old, bright, perceptive, and vulnerable to the glory buzzing around her, all the time, about the sanctity of high achievement.  And maybe, as a mere secretary, she didn’t think it would matter very much.

But her first promotion came, and then her second.  At any point she could have come clean, but she knew that as soon as she did, the ride would be over.  And by every measure that mattered, she had earned that ride.  There is no “Bachelor’s Degree of Admissions Deanhood.”  She learned her job, just as any other person with a whatever-degree in her position would have done, by doing it.  And I have no doubt that Marilee Jones was so compassionate with students in large part because of her secret. 

If it turned out that Sofia Coppola wasn’t really the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, we wouldn’t take away her Academy Award.  Sure, she had a hand-up in the business (as did her cousin, Nicolas Cage) but their accomplishments are their own.

Marilee Jones’ real sin is not that she lied, but that she made a fool out of MIT.

Like any university, MIT is dedicated to the preservation and advancement of its own main product: the Almighty Academic Degree.  If Marilee had been honest from the beginning, sure she may have kept her job for 28 years, but she’d still be an administrative assistant. She could have played the game their way and gone back to school, but how galling to spend the money and time, not to mention endure such a drop in the academic food chain, when any other business would have promoted her for her chops alone.

Here’s my confession:  I want Marilee Jones’ autograph.

I’m very grateful (thanks, dad) for my own college education.  But let’s not deify credentials to the point that we’ll admit no exceptions.  This forces vulnerable people to do what Marilee Jones did.  And then it forces the rest of us to jettison them when they expose our own, far greater fraud.

A few weeks ago, world-famous violinist Joshua Bell played his best stuff on a 3.5 million dollar Stradivarius in the Washington D.C.  subway, and 1000 people walked right by him because he wasn’t playing in a concert hall.   Marilee Jones is a world-famous dean of admissions, she played her best stuff, and her accomplishments are no less impressive because she wasn’t playing with a degree.

MIT should accept Marilee Jones’ apology and make a real name for themselves by hiring her back. 

—–
Related Posts:
Hail Marilee, denied any grace
How to (almost) get Marilee
The Devil and Ms. Jones
The Marilee Jones Joke

Everyone knows that the majority of eco-conscious college students become just as evil as the rest of us, once they can afford it.

But who are we to criticize those vain, skinny creatures?  Why not make a virtue out of deprivation?   Those of us who somehow managed to miss that immediate-post-collegiate flush of wealth still have just as much right to feel good about ourselves as college students do.  Or as Bill Gates does, and he really didn’t even GO to college, did he? 

Therefore, in honor of Earth Day, here are a number of ways in which we, too, can save the planet while incidentally saving money at the same time.  Start small by choosing just one or two; five or six if you feel inspired.  And really, who even NEEDS a job when you already can contribute this much meaning and goodness to the world? 

The e-zine writers at  LighterFootsteps.com   suggest that we make the switch to Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs (CFLs); monitor our thermostats; clean or replace our air conditioning filters; unplug idle appliances and electronic devices; buy low-flow shower heads with a shutoff valve; drive smarter; get an annual tune-up for our cars; use our bikes; go meatless once a week; buy local; buy in season.

Here are some other stunningly-cheap virtuous ways to save the earth:

1. Give something away
2. Recycle, including batteries and toner cartridges
3. Get more sleep
4. Grow less grass (saves water, mowing, and habitat too!)
5. Make your own stuff
6. Develop a flea market habit
7. Downsize
8. Eat less
9. Use a real cup instead of a styrofoam one.
10. Compost

And finally, my favorite: 

11.  Get a woodstove that’s big enough to heat your house,  and ask all your tree-cutting friends to bring you free firewood instead of taking it to the dump!

At the garden store yesterday, while concentrating deeply on which kind of bush bean seeds to buy, I heard my name.  When I looked up, I saw a familiar woman but couldn’t place her.  But we hadn’t been meeting regularly in garden stores, clearly. 

“I thought that was you, but wasn’t sure!” she said, warmly.  I covered well, knowing it would come to me eventually. 

“Well, Hi! How are you?“  I said.  I knew I’d get it in a few more seconds.  Church?  Nope.  Wow, a real puzzler.

We exchanged a couple more pleasant words before it came:  she was the head of the search committee that had most recently rejected me, duh.  This is the one where I crashed the computer during a timed writing test at the first interview, but was called back for a second one, anyway.  This is the one where the head of the division said she’d be calling me back first thing Monday morning after my second interview, which seemed pretty unambiguous as that would have allowed no time for negotiating with any other candidate.  And then I heard nothing further, until I called THEM two weeks later.

And this was also the one I’d decided would be my last shot, ever, at the Institution Which Shall Not Be Named.  Because any more of these stupid things were going to kill me.

This was the woman who had to step in, after her boss’s gaffe, and tell me they’d hired someone else. “I want you to know,” she said, leaning towards me and holding her hand in front of her, with her thumb and finger nearly pinched together in the sign for “very small.”  I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this.  She looked very earnest, all of a sudden.  “it was really, really close.”

Okay. What do you do with that? This wasn’t exactly news:  the two interviews, the boss’s comment, and the two silent weeks that then followed had already kind of clued me in.  The more salient point here, at least from my point of view, is that I didn’t get the job.  Again.

Maybe she was hinting that I’d been her own personal favorite?  Maybe she’s suffering debilitating guilt because she’d had to do the axe work this time around? But in the end, it comes down to this.  The woman didn’t have to speak to me.  Literally: I never would have noticed her for beans if she hadn’t. 

I remembered my final email to her, too, in response to her own, when I said they were better off without me anyway since they’d solemnly asked me about my abilities to work with “upper-level people.” That’s because (I wrote) although I’m certainly now entitled to wear a tiara when accompanying my high-level (he’s 6’5”!) administrator husband at the same institution,  I’d be more likely to wear my pirate hat instead.  Because I’m just that kind of person. 

Which points out two things, I guess:  one is the longer story I’ve definitely not blogged about and don’t know if I ever will.  The other is that this woman had a much better sense of humor (or, at least, forbearance) than I’d ever suspected. 

And besides: she was buying mulch, which just says a lot of redeeming things about a person right there, doesn’t it?