This one's for Betty Cole and the Honors Lounge

BLOT: (25 Feb 2011 - 04:12:41 PM)

This one's for Betty Cole and the Honors Lounge

I was making a comment about having the wrong color printing prices for the library on the Exponent (UAHuntsville's student newspaper) website. I noticed this article: Betty Cole, Honors Program Staff Assistant, to Retire. I knew about her retirement already (I heard it from her last Spring) but it made me go off a bit down reminiscence road. Figured I would share some thoughts. But first, I want to share something from the article and then discuss the lounge itself:

When I first came to UAH (I'll switch back and forth between that and its new moniker—UAHuntsville, but keep in mind that both are referring to the University of Alabama in Huntsville) I did not immediately start showing up to the Honors Lounge. Once I started, though, I loved it. Picture two rooms. A larger (20x25 or so, maybe) room with chairs, and a couch, and some tables and computer stations. A smaller (10x10?) room with a single chair and small table and an older computer. In those days, circa spring 1999, it was a lot more open place. Students could install things on the computers, and so games were often played in there. Geeks would sit around and try to create really random programs. People would have lunches, or impromptu philosophical debates (that never went well but not for lack of trying). Sometimes people did homework. Morton Hall (the liberal arts building at UAH) was closed about 9pm ever night, but the Honors Lounge stayed open and when it was closed, students knew where the key was "hidden". Students would regularly stay in to 2am or so and work on papers and hang out. Well, I say regularly...I did it only a few times* and some others I know did it a couple times each.

It got a little too anarchic. The first strike was students who would come in, start playing music kind of loudly (or games) and then would play hard. Keep in mind, this was next door to classrooms (above one classroom, beside another, across the hall from a third). Professors started complaining. What's more, people who wanted the lounge to be something other than a place where people could scream "FAGGOTY BASTARD!" (actual quote) while loudly slamming down chess pieces—or other than a place for getting into graphic debates about what oral sex tastes like while CDs were cranked up to the stress limits of the lounge PC speakers—were complaining. The second strike was a trifecta of events involving the lounge PCs. Someone decided to steal some parts. Someone decided to replace some parts with "better parts". And someone decided to go port-sniffing from the lounge computers. The middle one could have been likely ignored, but the criminality of the first and the semi-criminality of the second were red flags.

Trying to prevent a full-on third strike, several rules changed. Games, both PC and Board, were banned. Loud talk was shushed. I think music was allowed but it had to be kept down. This lasted long enough that more and more began coming into the lounge to study and so the other elements tended to stay away. It was all in good fun, sure, but it was not a frat-house nor a play-house. After a few months, games trickled back and conversations picked up, and reached something like a Silver-Age in comparison the pre-anarchy Golden-age where rules were made, Wikipedia style, on the fly and based often on unspoken consensus. Never quite as loud. Never quite as free, but still an awesome place to hang. It was at this stage that I "met" Sarah (we had a class together before that, but only started talking the next semester in the lounge) and several other friends. A whiteboard was installed and we would use it for all sorts of reasons. It got a little loud some days, but usually was a positive thing.

I know it ended up going through at least one more change, and last time I was in there the lounge had "monitors" much like the computer labs, people to watch and keep order. I think it now closes at a specific time and I know the computers are locked down. I think free printing is gone. Not sure if they still have guest lunches or not (probably, but I doubt as many or as open). Oh well, college generally is a different thing from when I started in the late 90s, and I personally wish I had started in the early 90s when it was even more different, still.

During all these changes, there was Betty. I don't remember the first time I sat down in her office and talked to her, but she was good for it. She knew how to sit there, as busy as anything, and spend half an hour talking to students about their day and what they were up to. A lot of us smart kids tend to get over-analytical about things, having someone willing to drop stuff and be our friend and advisor for any length of time was like manna from Heaven. For real. She was not always 100% understanding, she would sometimes take a critical stance on some things, but generally she the Queen of finding out how to make life seem better, how to make you feel smarter, and how to get your feet back under you. And she was also the Queen of the encouraging smile. Dan Nielsen and I would sometimes sit there for an hour and talk about outlandish stuff, and she would sit there and nod and smile like it made sense. If we ever asked her what she thought, her response would be something like "Too smart for me!" and she never once made that sound condescending. That's not easy to do.

On a personal note, around the end of 1999 and the start of 2000, I went through a Real Rough Time®, which was lesser but in some ways more painful than the Summer of Hell®. Not only did Betty always take time to listen and help me through it, but one of the side-effects of the old RRT was that I produced Poetry. Not poetry. Not even Poetry. Poetry. Emphasized and capitalized. And a quantity of it. To be honest, the initial point of this activity was a passive aggressive attack against the individuals who inspired the RRT. They were included in the sizable bcc list. After a month or two, it shifted focus toward sharing poetry with those who were game to read. I was pumping out 15 poems a week, which makes for a lot of email, and so I was starting to feel self-conscious, and would often change out who was on the list from time to time. I didn't know it but around the years 1999-2000, I was stumbling upon my personal precursor to blog technology (I had already developed a website, on Geocities, but combining the two never quite occurred to me). There were blogs already in development, but I seriously should have looked into it.

At any rate, half of the passion behind the poems was to share technique and my thought processes on many things, and half of the rate was to be an asshole. Not an asshole in the sense of telling your new girlfriend that you are in the toilet and the sounds and smells mean it might be a while before you can come to the phone, but an asshole in that way peculiar to the depressed and emotional unstable. I gave The Test (capital T, capital T). The Test is when a depressed person tests his or her boundaries by tossing their depression in your face. If you leave, and they fully expect you to, they win (?) The Test. Now, friends find ways to survive The Test for a bit, but eventually they tap out. Read Prozac Nation to see how much fun it can putting up with someone in this situation (and this is written by a person who did it to others). Along the way, many/most people kind of dropped off. Which I don't blame them. You send me three poems a day, every day but random days off, and I would eventually drop off, too. Even if I did not want to drop them at all. I had five or six friends, though, who stuck with it. Kept talking about them. Saved them. Praised them. Those five or six friends helped me to rebuild most of my mental health (for better or worse).

Betty? She printed them all and kept them in a folder. Would share them and refer to them. Maybe it was just evidence if I ever snapped, I don't know, but when she finally handed me the folder because she needed to make room and (this would have been 2004, here) it had been a few years since I had sent them in, I realized what this meant. There were a lot of pages. I was "just" a student, though, someone to whom her only responsibility was Honors Program paperwork. She went above and beyond. And that is just grand. UAH is lesser to not have her, anymore.

She retired a year ago, this semester, and I hope her time with her family has been awesome. She worked incredibly hard and has earned all the good that might possibly come her way.

* One time was to work on three papers that I had let back up. Each was something like 4-8 pages long. Yes, this means I wrote about 16 total pages across three papers from about midnight to 4am. I got A's. Suck it. Another time involved my friend Juanita coming back into town and hanging out. She talked like it was going out of print. At one point, I timed her to see how long she could go without any notable feedback from me: nearly an hour. She was a salsa dancer turned flight attendant, very cute and funny, but boy could she gab.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: February 2011