Hey all,
Does anyone else here set impossibly high standards for him or herself? Who am I kidding, this is a Macaulay blog… to a certain extent, we’re all lovably yet certifiably insane. Here’s my issue: I’ve been noticing my perfectionism bleed over into how I see the world and other people.
Example: I’ve been waiting to find out if I am one of the lucky recipients of a fellowship, 
and one of the people that make the decision told me that I would know either by Thursday night or by Friday morning… LAST Thursday night or Friday morning. I didn’t hear anything. I asked around and this does not mean that I’ve been rejected–they simply didn’t let us know.
I became very annoyed about this and started to b•tch about how rude it is to set a deadline you know you can’t keep. I do this all the time but I don’t make it a habit to tell others I will do something important for them by a specific date unless I know I can do it.
When one of my roomies reminded me that people are just people, I said that I might be holding others to the impossible standards I have for myself. She disagreed because I am incredibly lenient with others… a step above doormat, actually. Apparently I hold SYSTEMS to a higher standard, and that’s not so great because systems are just made up of people, too. Right?
WRONG. Yes, people are just people and I should forgive them for their absentmindedness and whatnot, but I must retain my naive expectation that systems are close to perfect. At the very least, they ought to try.
In my fourth Macaulay seminar, we’ve recently talked about Bloomberg’s failure in dealing with homelessness. My paper for my internship class is about the fractured and poorly researched effort to improve English as a Second Language classes across the board in the United States. The crappy yet sometimes enlightening social theory class I’m taking is all about postcolonialist thought on how Western governments are making the same old mistakes in new and technologically improved ways. Every time I go to my internship or to work, I wonder about all the things that could be done to increase the number of clients we are serving. A lot of people need the services we offer but don’t realize that we can help them. Systems are imperfect but they should be better than they are now.
I know that I sometimes come across as holier-than-thou when I talk about the treatment
of animals or how my life plan is to save the world and earn no money, but this is something I’m right about. Individuals are allowed to make mistakes but systems that do not function correctly must be reworked until they do. A good system can take some healthy human error and still function. I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t really care when I hear about my fellowship acceptance/rejection. The error made by the person I emailed simply reminded me of everything else that’s wrong.
Maybe my nearly communist social theory professor is rubbing off on me… I’m just sad about the illusion of order created by bureaucracy. Sure, there are systems in place everywhere, but do they do anything useful or must they simply convince us that they are trying?
Think on it,
Julia
