Community

So I've been watching, pretty religiously, the Thursday night NBC comedy bloc. This is due to three reasons:

1) I haven't been able to watch t.v. on Thursdays since I started work on my PhD because we have this special conference on Thursday nights and I've given myself permission to skip it this year because a) I've never liked it to begin with and b) I'm tired.

2) I'm tired. I teach and have class on Thursday so when I roll through the door at 7 I'm tired, like achey, feet-sore, eyes burning kind of tired.

3) I think laughing is good for nausea.

So there is this new show called Community with Chevy Chase. It's okay, not nearly as funny as the Office but it has a few moments that have been enjoyable. But I do enjoy the premise (and I have one major beef with the writers).

Okay what I like: So the show centers around 6 people all attending a local community college for a myriad of reasons. And like at most colleges, they are 6 strangers who happen to fall into each other's lives. They don't know each other from their past lives. They haven't slept with each other yet (although obviously that is one of the subtext....it is t.v...). And, they aren't really sure why they have been thrown together. And this is how I feel almost everyday, even after 6 years in New Jersey. I mean, sure, Daniel and I have formed a bit of community ourselves. I'm learning to tolerate our neighbors. Daniel has a few people at work that can talk to him about non-work-related issues. We have a small network of folks around the area that sometimes come over. And after 6 years of 2 different graduate schools, I've made some actual friends.

But, really, it's all been about throwing us into these strange little places of work and school and trying to form a community out of them. And it's really difficult. Especially for Daniel and I. We like our little habits, we liked the people in our past, heck, we usually like our families! And at times, if we don't laugh we would cry -which is a pretty accurate description for what makes a comedy, comedic. It borders on the insane and tragic and then laughs at it all. I don't think forming communities gets easier the older you get. I think it probably gets more and more accidental and comedic. I see all these mommy groups and think, gosh, it's simply their children that hold these women together. My yoga class is held together by the fact that we all are IN LOVE with our yoga/doula/magical calming voice for a pregnant lady teacher.

I try and form a community in my classes and my students often (I know) are saying in thier heads, "Really, I just like my friends, can't she simply lecture and not have us get to know each other and each other's thinking?"

The thing is when people start to pull away and you understand that your community is drifting apart it hurts. After college there was a rash of marriages and moves to different parts of the country and Daniel and I still haven't recovered that community or recovered from the loss of that community.

Of course, I've always thought it important that we not hang on to nostalgia and longing for what was. It is important to keep going and trying new ways of forming new communities and new ways of renewing old ones...and it's wonderful how much of those CAN be recovered with a short note or a new picture of a new little one.

So I suppose that this is all to say is that acknowledging that your community changes over your lifetime is difficult but it can also be a good thing -a growing, changing, thing. And something that hopefully gives you something to laugh over every once in a while.

MY BEEF with the show: They make ALL the professors buffoons and while this is funny it just renforces the norm about what a professor does, what a teacher does. It makes the classes simply a joke and doesn't really applaud the efforts of what some community colleges really strive to do. My hope is that the writers write in a good professor at some point.