My Tenure

I am tired of Youtube changing. It has always been this way. I have been trying to keep up with it but it doesn’t really work. From day to day it has only continued. I can hardly get used to it. There is stuff in there that I really like listening to and, well, to be honest I am NOT going to stop. I just keep switching my playlists up so that I don’t get interrupted with commercials. I have to hand it to them though. They have come a long way with a product that basically does nothing but lose money.

I had a conversation with my two friends the other day about an organization of which I used to be a part. We were talking about being a part of a movement or organization and keeping up with change and development. Much like a website or even a company for that matter, groups need to change or they die. My one friend was talking about this with her work; about how changes at work can make things hard. This is when we started talking about my activities organizing in the town I last lived. My other friend made the salient observation that I had started this one club there only to watch it die.

I wouldn’t contest this but I don’t think that this was actually the case. Organizations tend towards dissolution and only the best organized and visionary of us can keep things up—especially in the face of adversity. I didn’t even preside over the failures he identified but I suppose I could have helped to keep them from happening.

It was about four years ago. I had started a campus club and my co-chair and I went looking for members. He set up the website and posted stuff. I made flyers and other types of artsy stuff. It was a public-safety/awareness organization and we were active. There were a lot of people involved. We had a lot of fun. We had events and trips and went all over the county.

There was a club in town—off campus—that was very similar to ours and was oriented more towards fun and entertainment and my co-chair was elevated to being their vice president. The city took notice because there were many elements to the club that fit the local government’s agenda. In time my tenure came to an end at the campus club and I stepped down—giving the chairmanship over to someone new.

From there both clubs stopped functioning in the same way. Both the campus and off-campus clubs both had a fair amount of readership and had even been mentioned in the local periodicals on more than one occasion. I had always tried to steer my organization based upon principles and I felt that my co-chair ran his vice presidency off-campus in the same manner.

This stopped being the case at some point though. I am not really certain where this happened since I moved away. However, I know that neither organization exists anymore in the form that I remember it. What has changed? The principles are all still there. They just require that someone return to them and pick them up. Hell maybe the principles themselves have changed in some fundamental way on a local level. However, those principles or a set of similar ones still inform my character and I am still using them to work.

Which is sort of why I wrote this isn’t it? The songs are still there. I just have to constantly keep reorganize the playlists to listen to them.

I started writing this [rphl] on 101412.

This is an occasional series chronicling my life. This Notebook Analysis series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.