A New Point of View, Part 1

This is the first of a recurring feature, within which I share very little (even trite) and very recent life lessons that you may regard as sheer coincidence or utter hogwash if that is your preference!

(NOTE: VeryLana dared me to post an entry that was short, to the point (and heart), and without the usual heavy academic veneer… So, let's see if I can!)

Yes, "ONCE UPON A TIME..."

...when I was summarily dismissed from my academic job for telling a "supervisor" that I didn't like being "stupid-vised in the classroom"...

An associate dean kicks a part-time professor's butt! Ouch.

...I decided to follow my heart and head, and get the hell out of LA!!!

For the graffiti-challenged, this says "Urban Hell"!

However, I had TOO much stuff for my very small moving budget. The material accumulations of my life felt like a heavy, dead albatross around my neck. I had to shed four-fifths of my junk, at least half of which was as much emotional as material, as it symbolically represented my (just toppled) status as “professor.” 

A full-professor in all his regalia, ironically at Oxford Uni!
I'm gonna be on the lookout for HIM next month...

The physically/emotionally hardest to rid myself of were four 4-drawer file cabinets of research I had copied from hither (UC and CSU libraries) to yon (all over Mexico), and 30 Trader Joe shopping bags full of books acquired in the same sorts of places. They had been compulsively read, with highlighting and note-taking throughout. These possessions showed all the years of effort to attain the somewhat coveted and highly overrated PhD.

The file cabinets went to my sister’s garage, sans their paper contents, which I dumped unceremoniously, but with simultaneous waves of sadness, relief, and elation, into 4 consecutive weeks of recycled-paper garbage cans. Even more files kept in my uni office eventually met a similar fate in campus recycle dumpsters.

Bigger than this one, and 4 weeks in a row!

Rather paradoxically, I donated all of the books to the very university that had just sacked me! “Do you want us to write a letter of acknowledgement to you regarding your contribution?” the librarian queried sweetly as I wheeled load after load from loading dock to "Acquisitions." “Nope!” I replied. “I already know that I gave them to you, and I don’t know what my forwarding address will be…” She furrowed her brow; such odd behavior from an academic she seemed to be thinking.

"Can we send you a letter?"

A quarter century of collecting and compiling the material proof of my hard-earned status as academic was all dumped or donated! ALL GONE! I knew that it could be either a heart-wrenching tragedy (like someone who loses all of their possessions in a fire, flood, tornado, earthquake, etc.)...

The news caption says this family was still smiling after  a tornado hit their home; I bet they were happy to still be alive, something we should all be grateful for in times like these.

...OR the most liberating thing I had done since I ate “green pharmaceutical” LSD at age 15, and wound up in a womb-like padded jail cell for 3 daze while hallucinating R. Crumb characters acting out the Watts' “riots” (that is, “rebellion”) of 1964. But that’s another “bridge burned,” to be told in a subsequent post.

A great UTube, only 26 seconds in length... BUT, at this point I can imagine VeryLana running out of hope for a short, sweet story, and grabbing me by the throat, and saying: 

Not me, and not Lana; and SHE doesn't resort to violence...

Well, as a result of my downsizing, I was left with a sad little pile of about 50 volumes, very few of which are academic. (In fact, I chose to keep mostly art and metaphysical texts that I had collected way back in my LAST New Age era, between 1967 & 1976; hmmm...) 

Doesn't this little pile look sad?

But, then the Humboldt County library sent me a robo-email informing me that my hold on The Psychopath Test (what an amazing read!) was about to expire. So I went to pick it up… When I got there, folks were filing through a side door into what turned out to be a 1-day annual book sale. Thousands of books were piled up everywhere, in 2 different buildings, differentiated as either fiction or non-fiction.

This is EXACTLY what my old uni office looked like!

The price? A dollar a book? No! A DOLLAR PER SHOPPING BAG!!! Bags the size of the 30 I had wheeled into the university library down south just 8 weeks earlier. For just 30 bucks I could have upsized right back to my old collection again!

The library gave us paper bags, BUT I am shifting to canvas, bamboo-weave, and backpack!

But, not wanting to replace the old albatross with a new one... 

Well, yes, this IS an albatross, but it's alive, beautiful, and not around MY neck...

...I restricted myself to what I could cram into 2 bags, 1 of which was purely fiction. However, a few of the most classic academic texts that I had given away in LA were in their hardcover glory at the book sale; I came home with 50 more books, and filled my bare bookshelves.

Bigger than mine, but organized and uncrowded like mine is now!

The moral of this little trite story?

Well, if you believe in morals, which I’ve begun to revert to (just like when Mom read me fairytales as a toddler so long ago)...

Not Mom, and not me, but I can dream, can't I?

...it goes like this:

If I can give something up without descending into utter madness, some of what I have "lost" may come back to me again, unlamented and unbidden.

Or, as a variant on the classic "mind over matter," my recent mantra is that if  I refuse to "mind," then IT (whatever "it" is) won't "matter!"

I can all but hear the sign-off music!

“The End.”

(How did I do, VeryLana?)