So the last time I blog posted about this thing with the alumni club, I had totally misunderstood that the last Zoom meeting we were going to have with the alumni association was actually the week of, not the week after. I was working at the time, so I couldn't attend.
We haven't talked to the alumni association since. I have not talked to my fellow rebels since. Well, I have, but instead of Zoom we're on GroupMe, and we don't talk about this dissolution with alumni clubs, we talk more about our football team.
On my last post about this subject, I confessed my dwindling interest in furthering our goal in maintaining some semblance of what we had. The intervening weeks confirmed my disinterest. In fact, I have to tell you that I haven't thought about this alumni chapter thing at all ... and, I must confess, not thinking about has not bothered me one bit. Shit, man, it's not bothering me now at all.
From what I got during the call I should have been on but wasn't, the alumni association basically said that beyond the meager concessions they had already made about creating this new position for alumni from everyone in the United States to basically do what clubs did until the summer, there was nothing else they wanted to do with us. They had a plan, and they were now focusing on implementing this plan. I had the feeling in prior meetings that they wanted and indeed were going to rely on our participation to give helpful critiques about their plan. But I got the feeling that there was going to be no more bargaining or compromising.
However, they were going to reconnoiter with us in December so we both could exchange information about how their plan is going. And this is where my lack of caring is going to be found out. I have not helped out with the alumni association's efforts to reimaging alumni relations. For one thing, I have been too busy. Second, without meaningful concessions on their end, I was not eager at all to help. That rolls into the third thing, namely being busy with doing nothing work and other stuff to survive the pandemic. And, finally, I am going to call out the AA. I have not seen a whole lot of effort on the part of the AA to reach out to me (and I'm guessing other alumni) as to the new ways the university is going to continue to engage with its graduates. Well, I do see these series of Zooms available for me to register. But they're 1) on a bunch of subjects I am not interested in, 2) have a networking focus -- "Wanna jumpstart your career?" and 3) are meetings that convene during the workweek, when I have to work. If this is their "new plan," it's useless, at least to me.
Now, objective analysis of how this is going is going to be nearly impossible because of the pandemic. Are people not interested in these Zoom meetings and organizing events on their because they genuinely are not interested, or are they just trying to adjust and survive because the coronavirus has upended their lives to the point where they can't even think about their love and loyalty for their university? But I can tell you the alumni association was totally gung ho about how their new ideas were going to reimagine and kickstart a new way for graduates and my alma mater to interact, even in a fucked-up environment such as this one, and I am going to go out on a limb and say alumni relations haven't moved the goddamn needle at all this fall.
And now I realize that I have thought and felt more about how this thing is going between them and us/The Resistance in the time I have taken to blog post about it than I have in weeks, if not the past couple months. We already have a time set up for the Zoom meeting with the AA, but before then we Resisters are going to Zoom tonight about what we have seen and done ... or, in my case, not seen and not done. I don't know if my inaction is going to further alienate them from me, or me them, like I was afraid was going to happen when I had to beg out of the last Zoom meeting. But I have to be honest: I don't want to talk to them, at least not about this. They've sort-of become my friends now, so if we could talk about, say, the team cancelling this week's game, I would love to talk to them about that. But I honestly don't give two fucks anymore about this alumni relations shit -- not what happened, not what is happening now, not what we could be doing, not what we are going to say or demand, not what will we do if things with them continue to be rocky, all of that. This could cost me my relationship with my university. But frankly, I'm tired now, I'm not interested in patching things up, and I so don't understand what is going on with The Other Side that I don't care if this costs me my relationship with my university. Jesus fucking Christ, man, I could be doing other stuff that is less hard and makes me happy. I'm going to go do that. I have been doing that right now. And talking to The Other Side -- and to my fellow Resisters about this alumni relations bullshit -- is hard and does not make me happy.
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