Yesterday, I had about six meetings in the course of about five hours. Two of the meetings were scheduled, the rest were impromptu, initiated either by me dropping in on others or others dropping in to see me. (By ‘meeting’ I don’t mean classtime, or a couple of minutes of chit chat at the water cooler, but interactions lasting at least 20 minutes on some piece of business or another.) Later, on the subway ride home, I started to think: academic administration at a certain level really is a kind of conversational sloshing, a slurry of words and gestures mixing ideas, suggestions, speculations, gossip, pleas, exhortations, commands, dictates, directives, good wishes, sly insinuations, jokes, sarcastic asides, idle chat, praise, complaints, winks, and sighs into a vast soup of signification.
Then, I remembered that all afternoon throughout these meetings I had been carrying around a cup of ice tea the size of Minnesota, and in any event garbage cans have already been invented.
