No need for the MFA alumni directory

When they get your info so hilariously wrong

In this week’s episode of “Letting Go,” I dispose of a single book and CD. I am doing some re-organizing of the wonderful built-in bookshelves in my living room and guest room/office, and there is no need for me to continue moving this particular book and CD from place to place.

For starters, I don’t know about you, but I am no longer sticking CDs into a computer tower or laptop to extract oodles of information.

As for the book—it’s a hardcover 2013 Alumni Directory from Bennington College, where I got my MFA in Creative Writing in 2012.

As I recall, in the year after I received that degree, I was hounded by the publishers of said directory—a postcard, maybe a couple voicemails. I’m pretty sure I eventually gave them my information over the phone in a conversation with a real person.

A glimpse into what was going on in my life at the time…

I was in the midst of a separation and eventual divorce, living in my childhood hometown, lightly employed as a planner/community garden manager, trying to get essays published, and applying for teaching jobs at colleges and then high schools. I was running a monthly Positively Pottstown happy hour, an in-person companion activity to a blog I had created a couple years earlier, all as a volunteer. Then I began work on a local history book, Legendary Locals of Pottstown. I loved doing community development stuff, but it was also a time filled with so much uncertainty and lack of confidence that I would ever figure out how to make a living and be whoever I was supposed to be. I had recently turned 50 and was still wrestling with these issues after many years of being a stay-at-home-mom, volunteer, and part-time high school basketball and softball coach.

In that period of not getting a teaching position, I probably hit the nadir of my professional self-esteem, all while putting on a confident, Positively Sue front.

Back to that alumni directory… 

I can’t remember if it was free, or if I paid for it. I thought it might be useful for networking—the art of which I’d never really used to help myself. But maybe there was a new, improved, career-focused businessy Sue ready to emerge?

So when the alumni directory arrived, I eagerly cracked it open and rifled through the pages to get to my entry, only to have mild horror, hilarity, and resentment run through me all at once.

How was it that a few lines in a glorified phone book from days of yore was actually mocking me? 

Did the person I had spoken to on the phone think I was a “princess b*tch”? Had I said the name of my undergraduate alma mater in a snobby way? Or mispronounced it so dramatically? Had the person on the other end of the phone pictured me slathering jam on a scone or holding a china teacup with my pinky raised? Or, putting paranoid defensiveness aside, was it just a run-of-the-mill typo?

I realized in an instant that the directory was useless. Because how would a potential networking conversation go?

ME: I saw your name in the alumni directory and was wondering if I could talk to you about a position…

IMPORTANT PERSON WHO MIGHT HIRE ME: Oh, let me pull my copy of the shelf here.

ME: No need for that. I’m wondering—

IMPORTANT PERSON WHO MIGHT HIRE ME: Just a sec.

ME: Please don’t look it up… PLEASE! NO!

And yet I could not resist carrying the indignity a few steps further, which is why I am sharing this with you today and why I eventually made up some shirts, using my Princess U alma mater’s colors.

The magic wand is a nice touch, don’t you think?

Despite the universe conspiring to relegate my undergraduate credential to the realm of stand-up comedy, I met some of the people dearest to me in my life there, and after all is said and done, that’s what really matters. And laughing, which I do with these lifelong friends all the time. Laughter matters too!