2023, education, Family, Food, Uncategorized

Treats

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Husband has been the secretary on the board of directors for our local food pantry for the past three years. He has to type the minutes for the monthly meetings, a thankless task. His term is up this month. He typed his last minutes on Saturday.

Husband said he got the motivation for finishing the minutes by promising himself that he could bake some rye bread when he was done. He loves baking rye bread so much he considers it a treat. The bread was really good.

I had a dear friend who was a philosophy professor who would reward himself with a small glass of cognac and a good cigar after grading every twenty essays and papers. I always wondered if his grading of the first papers was somewhat different from the grading of the last papers. Freshman philosophy essays must have been pretty tedious to read year after year.

What motivates you to finish a tedious job? Ever had to write up meeting minutes? Did you ever take a philosophy class?

36 thoughts on “Treats”

  1. As strange as it may seem, I actually enjoy typing up meeting minutes. I particularly enjoy the challenge of creating clarity out of the knotted nature of committee discussions for the sake of the historical record.

    Early in this century I was a board secretary at an international school in Taiwan, where the incoming headmaster basically drove a truck through an unclear summary of a discussion in the minutes of a meeting that took place before he arrived, and spent large amounts of money that had not been authorized. He “thought” he could do that because the minutes taken by the secretary at that meeting merely indicated that a discussion had taken place.

    When, as the new board secretary, I tried to do something clearer, he gave a weasel-worded statement about how he, as the headmaster, would write the minutes of board meetings going forward. His tenure there was a disaster.

    I was, subsequently, the recorder and presenter of meeting minutes for a faculty committee at a small college, where the head of that committee basically decided things on his own or by having private off-record conversations with the president. Eventually I was told that the minutes I took could not even be circulated to committee members (for approval at the next meeting) until after the chairman had approved them personally himself. MY tenure on that committee was a disaster.

    I still, occasionally, write minutes for a committee with rotating leadership. Basically, whoever chairs the meeting writes it up and circulates the minutes, which are used for the next meeting’s leader in preparing the agenda. It works for us.

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  3. my motivations are to get it off my to do list i come up with stuff driving down the road and text myself so every one i tick off has 5 new introduced
    you know you’re in trouble when tending to your to do list is an item on your to do list

    i hate committees
    turning a to do list item into a discussion is my idea of hell

    my secretarial skills are not good
    my impression and summation often are not accepted.
    i have done it . it won’t happen again

    i took a philosophy and instead of discussing ideas the class seemed bent on test to see if you could summarize a philosophers perspective and beliefs in a test to be graded and ticked off a teachers to do list.

    i love learning and generally don’t like institutions of learning

    now as for rye bread i’d love to focus on that for a while
    my first wife was from milwaukee and those germans could make pumpernickel and rye to die for
    my mouth is watering

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  4. I drink Champagne when I finish writing a book (the final draft only, of course).

    I think I was the secretary of some group wayyyy back when. Don’t remember the group, but remember I hated taking notes and then writing up the minutes.

    Yes, I took a philosophy course at the U of M back in the 1970s. I appreciated it for the new ideas I was exposed to about the meaning of life, God (yes or no or who?), and other existential issues. But I developed my own philosophies over the years and am quite content with my worldview. Strangely, the “philosopher” I believe in the most is George Carlin. Yes, I know, he wasn’t an official philosopher, but we’re all entitled to ruminate about life.

    Not only was he the funniest comedian I’ve ever heard, but also his take on life, spirituality, human existence and human nature, seemed to be spot on. It took me decades of listening to him and reading his writing before it made sense, but I truly think he had life figured out . . . as much as any human can figure out why we were put on this giant rock flying through space.

    Chris in Owatonna

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    2. I was inclined to like George Carlin from little soundbites I’d heard. A few months back he showed up on my Youtube feed, and I listened to a 12 minute sustained riff on, let’s call it, “overweight” people. I found Carlin to be drude and mean. I shall not be tempted to listen to more of his accumulated opus, and I kind of repent of having ever laughed (though I did, indeed laugh) at his schtick.

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      1. I respect your opinion, but want to stress that Carlin was insulting, rude, and mean to EVERYONE in his various monologues. If you think he was tough on overweight people, listen to his rant about the existence of God. I have to imagine that more than a few religious leaders denounced him as more evil and vile than Satan.

        Carlin seemed to get angrier and preachier in his final years, but he was, without a doubt, true to himself and his beliefs every time he stepped onto a stage. He never suffered fools lightly and ranted against society’s trend toward oversensitivity, political correctness, and using language as a tool to sanitize and camouflage people’s thoughts and beliefs by making definitions more complex than they need to be.

        A salient example for me is his theory that modern parenting trends toward the parents’ inability to say “No” to their children. Helicopter parents don’t want their little darlings to endure any hardships or disappointments in life. So, instead of being told they lost the footrace or the baseball game or the spelling contest, some parents will say something like, “You were the last winner.”
        And of course, even the last winner gets a ribbon or a certificate or a trophy these days.

        More than anything, Carlin made me think about the world from his own unique perspective. I think he had life figured out far better than most people.

        Chris

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        1. As a rule, I’m not a fan of stand-up comedians, but I do think Carlin was brilliant. He made us think. He poked us where it hurt. To me, he would have been more effective if he weren’t quite so profane. I really have to get over myself when I listen to him. I don’t think his main aim or accomplishment was to entertain, he made us think. At least some of us.

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  5. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    I do not remember ever taking a philosophy class. I am so practical about life, I am sure that even in my young adulthood, speculation about meaning would have bored me to tears. Statistics had that effect, too.

    I thought parenting a pre-schooler was pretty tedious, so I knitted my way through that experience. Creating a safe place for a little one to explore and play while I kept my eye on him was a great goal that repeated itself over, and over, and over, and over.

    Writing minutes was an activity I first encountered in 4H. I am good at taking notes. But the next steps of making them legible and writing/typing it all out holds no interest what-so-ever. No Thank You Very Much.

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  6. I kid you now, the first time I was secretary was 3rd grade for my Brownie troop meetings. Then I was going to be Secretary for the El Granada Residents Assn. (where I lived when teaching in Half Moon Bay), but I moved to New York in stead…
    I don’t envy anyone taking minutes for anything these days.

    I took that Philosophy of Religion class last fall, think I’ve described it here. It was good that the instructor was young and had a sense of humor, would entertain all manner of off the wall questions… I find it to be a lot of mind games.

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  8. My life from wake up (5-7) is nothing but repetitive tasks if not tedious except for a 20 minute coffee break until about 10. And the same from 3:30 to about 7 or 8. The paperwork is the tedious part. So I break it up with physical work. A book I read on coping skills said to break big jobs up into small bites. I have a big cork board listing all this. My therapist says to leave time to do things for myself. They are listed on the board. I get the tedious jobs done because there is no choice.
    Clyde

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  9. As silly as it sounds, I am highly motivated by stickers and colored highlighters. I spent years breaking myself of the food rewards — too many ways to convince myself that I needed a reward!!

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  10. Ah, and I realize that for a while now I entice myself to make dinner with a small glass of red wine. I was starting to depend on it a little to strongly, so I’ve backed off now to once or twice a week. (the wine, not making dinner)

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  11. Sometimes building a set I have to get myself to finish part of it before I come back to the office and check emails or eat M&M’s or something. Rewards aren’t big for me; I need deadlines. HARD deadlines.

    A few years ago I had ‘Philosophy and World Religions’ and that was really fun. More the world religions than the philosophy. The teacher was very engaged and fun. The one unit on Nietzsche was hard…

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    1. I agree about firm deadlines. As an adult, that’s about the only thing that motivates me. Gold stars or colorful stickers on my written work in grade school were great motivators, too. Who knows, they might still, though it’s been so long since I got one, I can’t tell.

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  12. I took Philosophy 101 my freshman year in college. The class was in a large lecture hall with roughly two hundred clueless students, an uninspired textbook, and an uninspiring teacher trying in vain to give us an overview of the major Western philosophers and their work.

    For years afterwards I thought I hated philosophy. I saw it as boring and a waste of time, and I’d be willing to wager that most of my fellow freshmen did too.

    One of my favorite philosophers is Piet Hein, though most people think of him more as a scientist and a writer. Here are some samples of his Grooks:

    BRAVE

    To be brave is to behave
    bravely when your heart is faint.
    So you can be really brave
    only when you really ain’t.

    LAST THINGS FIRST

    Solutions to problems
    are easy to find:
    the problem’s a great
    contribution.
    What’s truly an art
    is to wring from your mind
    a problem to fit
    a solution.

    MEMENTO VIVERE

    Love while you’ve got
    love to give.
    Live while you’ve got
    life to live.

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  13. I took minutes for board meetings for the early Cannon River Watershed Partnership. I was Board Secretary for seven years, and was voted back for each of my terms. I think my minutes were too lengthy and detailed. I was very thorough about it. We didn’t have anyone who was egotistical about power or control, or who was trying to scam the pathetic finances of a nonprofit organization. Taking the minutes and typing them up became a chore though. The best thing to do was to get it done right away while the meeting was still fresh in my head. I enjoyed doing a good job. Like Aboksu, I wanted to clarify for everyone what had been discussed and acted on, what everyone was supposed to work on before the next meeting, and get the dates and times right for meetings and events. I’m really glad I didn’t have to deal with someone with a big ego for that.

    I did have to deal with someone who had a seriously big ego when I worked for DNR Fisheries. I took minutes every Monday for our weekly staff meeting. I began typing them up exactly as I had noted them. I turned them in to the Regional Office after the first few meetings. From there, they were sent all the way up the chain to the DNR Fisheries Director’s office. My supervisor at the time was a narcissist and wanted to make himself look good. He called me into the office and ordered me to give him the minutes for approval and editing before sending them on to his supervisor. I started doing this as requested and they came back to me filled with red ink. Sometimes he would even make up whole discussions that never even happened. I did take issue with this. I was opposed to making up stories for the meeting minutes. Unfortunately, this conflict went on and on until he finally lost his job (for other, much worse reasons.)

    I do reward myself with food these days. I need to break that habit. I also reward myself with trips to the North Shore. I plan to hike some of that food off my midsection this week.

    I have taken a few philosophy classes. I took the Intro class at St. Olaf. I also took a philosophical readings winter interim class my freshman year there. I read Dostoyevsky, Huxley, Kobo Abe, Camus, and others – lots of existentialism. Years later I took a Philosophical Ideas in Science class. One concept I enjoyed from that class was “paradigm shift.” I sure hope we start to have a paradigm shift soon. I got a bumper sticker during that time that said, “Subvert the Dominant Paradigm”. Still waiting.

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    1. Our late Gizmo, a double yellow headed Amazon parrot, had several phrases that he liked to say when the thought the time was right. For instance, when the phone would ring, Gizmo would wait until we lifted the receiver and then he would say: “Well hello there.” Then he’d laugh. At other times he’d cock his head to one side and ask: “What’s the he matter, (slight pause) huh?” in a really solicitous way. If he wanted a treat he’d declare “I love you.”

      Gizmo was a rescue. We were told that he was 23 years old when we got him. We had him 20 years before his health started failing and we had to have him euthanized. A sad day. Hans still misses him.

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  15. I was never board secretary. I was a treasurer once, and was grateful to the person who took notes for the minutes. It’s very hard to take notes for minutes and still participate in the discussion in any meaningful way.

    I took notes for a few of the early BBC meeting, but Anna was queen of the BBC blog notes.

    Never studied philosophy in any formal way, though life sprinkles a little in your path from time to time.

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