Potluck

Sometimes, I feel like I've forgotten the potato salad.

I had a meeting of chairs and directors today. A two-hour meeting to be exact, and as I sat in the room listening to these talented, mostly articulate people I couldn't help but wonder what it is I'm supposed to be bringing to the party.

And of course, in every room of talented, articulate people there's always one who is so linear and literal that anything outside his or her immediate line of understanding is subject to inspection. This is not unlike Bill Clinton and the question of "is" except that these people really mean it.

I hope I don't grow up to be one of them.

But I digress. In hiring me, my institution has taken on its first-ever compositionist, so I have ideas. Lots of them, some of them even pretty damn good but the challenge of being the new kid on the block is that I have to keep a lot of them to myself for now. Instead, I sniff the air, lick a finger and see which way the wind is blowing. My reluctance to go storming in means that I spend a lot of time just listening. And wondering if I should've added more mayonnaise.