Beginning, with a tribute to Mr. Vonnegut

This all began around 8:20 one morning the second week of school on a Tuesday. I was standing in the lobby with some fellow tutors, caffeinating myself, waiting for students to come so that we could begin tutor observations. Each semester, we have new tutors join our team, and they are required to observe a total of five hours before they are released into the wild blue yonder of tutoring. Being that it was only Tuesday in the second week of school, our hours had been slow-moving, and mostly consisted of tutors taking care of office tasks and getting to know one another. Ann Theodori, the director of the Writing Center, aka "the bossman", came out from her fishbowl office and joined our conversation. I say she's the bossman, but it's not a scary thing. Perhaps "bosslady" or "bossgentlewoman" or even "bossmomma" are more appropriate words as she is more of the upbeat, happy-go-lucky, bottom-up boss instead of the grim, doom-and-gloom, top-down tyrant that is typically featured in films like Office Space. I don't recall exactly what we were talking about when she came in the conversation, but eventually, it came around to a typical conversation that occurs here: marketing.

I never feel useful in this conversation. I never feel like my ideas are original or are too grandiose to pull off effectively without dedicating my life to the project. Or if they aren't too elaborate, someone inevitably beats me to them, and I feel useless as an employee, which, for a multitude of reasons that I won't go into, is not a pleasant experience for me. So, like always with this topic, I grew uncharacteristically silent and sipped my French Vanilla-flavored legal stimulant, hoping no one would notice my lack of contribution due to un-innovative thinking or perfectionism.
And then she said, "I'd really like to have a blog for our website," and something in me clicked.

And then I found myself saying, "Yeah, that's a great idea! I could do that!" This all happened so quickly and without hesitation that the insecure and irrational part my soul jumped out of my body, turned and looked at me and said, "Really? You can do this? Who are you, and what have you done with Jenn?" That part of me then came back into my body and I remained silent for the next two weeks about what I had agreed to do for Ann. She didn't say anything to me about it during this time, but I laid awake at night thinking about this, until late last week, when I told that insecure part of me to can it. I went to Ann and said, "Ok, I'm serious now. I'm writing this blog for the Writing Center and I'm going to need your support and I want to see how this helps for marketing and I want to take it to conference."
And so it goes.