Grout Expectations

I wrote this my senior year of college as I was thinking about what to expect after graduation.

When I was in high school I used to write my English research papers in the Georgetown University Library. Most of my other classmates would travel to American University, only 10 minutes down the street, but I preferred Georgetown. I enjoyed the antiquity, the history, and the intimidating buildings. Maybe I thought that if I did my research at Georgetown I would be able to absorb some of the history and knowledge of the location. Maybe it was because the students in my class had checked out all the books I needed at American University.

Regardless of my reasons, the Georgetown library shaped my expectations for college. Before the library, what I heard and what I observed formed my expectations. And I heard a lot of things. My teachers told me “you won’t get away with this in college”. From my friends I heard, “I spent the weekend with my brother at Maryland and I don’t remember a thing!” My parents put me off with “finish your application and then we will talk about it.”

Until I started visiting the Georgetown library, what I observed was equally useless in forming expectations of college. All I could determine was that in college you run toward blue lights when you are in trouble, you meet at the campus center or campus commons, and you live in large buildings and share bathrooms.

But what kind of people was I going to meet? What were we going to talk about? How were we going to spend out time?

Researching in the Georgetown library gave me the chance to sit and form my own opinions. I loved to walk through the books. I loved finding a small desk in the corner, and I especially enjoyed people-watching. The students all seemed busy and focused, but still seem to enjoy what they were doing.

But my real understanding of college came where I least expected it, the bathroom.

Public bathrooms tend to tell a lot about an establishment. My father says bathrooms reveal what the owner really thinks about his customers. There are the nice bathrooms in nice establishments. The employees clean the bathroom four times a day and there is no graffiti on the wall, and there are the grungy bathrooms that you need a key for. The gas station attendant only cleans the bathroom once a week and the graffiti on the wall consists of “someone waz here” scratched with a knife in the side of the stall.

The grungy bathrooms are covered in swear words and crude sexual comments. The nice bathrooms have aspirin dispensers and toilets that automatically flush themselves. There is no graffiti in a nice bathroom. The Georgetown library bathroom didn’t fit into either of these categories.

The Georgetown library bathrooms are small and old. The walls are covered in tile and the lights are dim. The tile on the wall made it impossible to create any graffiti. You can’t scratch “Jonny is a D%*k” on tile with a knife because you can’t really scratch anything in tile.

When I looked closer though I realized that the bathroom was not completely void of graffiti. Scratched or scrawled in between the square tiles all around the bathroom were small phrases written in the grout - “The Grout American Story”, “Grout Balls of Fire”, and “The Grout Gatsby”.

This was no ordinary graffiti, this was college graffiti. Granted they were not all clever, but neither is “Jonny wz hur”. These at least were intelligent. Their authors knew about books and songs; and they were not afraid to show it off in a place you would never expect. It wasn’t just one bathroom either. This graffiti existed on each floor in each men’s bathroom (my research did not extend to the women’s bathroom).

I concluded that college was going to be a place where education would permeate everything that I did. Maybe it was full of parties and drinking, but it was going to be clever and smart. We were going to toast to great American authors and create drinking songs about American politics.

So how did Tufts live up to my “Grout Expectations”? It was slow in the beginning. I wondered when running naked was going to become academic and intellectual. I pondered whether bonding electrons would ever enter into my daily life. And let me tell you that there is no bathroom on campus that has anything clever to say about grout. Not one.

But things started to change. My junior year was when the pieces started to fit. My classes seemed to reach beyond the classroom. I knew enough about civil engineering that I could walk through Boston with my friends and I offer something about the buildings and the architecture and that darn tunnel. My friends had things to say about politics and the world. We were able to talk as if we knew something. It was cool, or it was what I want cool to be.

It is my senior year now and I think college has finally met my expectations. All I need now is something to explain what the real world is going to be like. I have to make sure I check the bathrooms when I start interviewing.

Wouldn't it be cool to know you are unquestionably right?

It’s a conversation that I've had in some form a couple times now. The most successful leaders and organizations seem to lead and inspire with an unquestioned faith in themselves and in everything they do, so wouldn't it be cool to have that? To KNOW that you personally have found the answer to all of life's most persistent questions; you are Guy Noir and you can retire. Because, I want that.

I want to stand in front of a group and give immediate and satisfying responses that calm the anxieties of everyone looking for direction. I will explain with such conviction that questioning my answer will be the same as questioning my integrity as a person. The only pause in my response will be the moment I take to formulate the first sentence, and everything after will flow easily from my lips, because I will KNOW.

Unfortunately, I have some personal obstacles to overcome before I come to unquestioned confidence. The biggest obstacle might be my amazing ability to not know - to question, to doubt, and to caveat. Even the simplest questions unleash a rush of tangential thoughts. For example, "What time do we stop work?" was a daily (sometimes hourly) question this past summer. So simple! There were really only a couple of times of the day I could pick, but in the beginning of the summer I still hesitated. I was thinking, "We have to fill 80 hours of work in the next ten days. The crew wants to leave early at the end of the hitch, the supervisor has scheduled a hike on the third day, and we don't want to be so tired by the 4^th day that we can't accomplish anything. Three crew members are exhausted from working all morning and one member hasn’t lifted a shovel all day because she has been updating Facebook on her cell phone. I want to finish the day with the crew feeling accomplished, but I don't want to push so hard that they're discouraged. . ."

Answer: "let's wait until lunch and see"

If you value understanding, knowledge, and teaching, how can you possibly justify allowing yourself to simplify answers? Don’t people need to know the multitude of factors governing the answer so they can make their own personal and educated responses? Even better, I should provide the response my father gave me last week when I asked about the Wobblies: “You don’t know? Well I have a book for you to read.”

The reality though is that they didn't need to know, nor did they usually want to know, why we are quitting at 4:30 instead of 5:00, and they most likely didn't want to read a book to find out. The crew just wanted to be able to set a pace for themselves and trust that the decision in the end was close to the right one.

Leading for me has to be a balance. I am not going to be able to, nor do I want to, banish uncertainty from my mind. Like Socrates said, "all I know is that I know nothing" and so my confidence and conviction needs to be derived not from why I KNOW, but from what I am trying to accomplish, my goals. On the Conservation Corps I needed to finish projects efficiently while keeping the crew safe, happy, and healthy. Each decision is therefore supported by the confidence in those goals; “we are working today to finish the project but we are not working tomorrow because the crew is exhausted and needs the rest.” On Bike & Build I needed to safely transport 31 bike riders across the country while keeping them safe, happy, and healthy and at the same time helping to spread information about affordable housing. My decisions were based on my confidence and commitments to those goals.

So I may never know that I am without question providing the right answers, but I do know that I am without question headed in the right direction.