Nibbled to Death By Ducks

Slow Death? Part of the Job.

Nibbled to death by ducks. This is a phrase I first read in an essay by Joan Didion. Apparently her husband John told her that working for Life Magazine as a correspondent would be like getting nibbled to death by ducks.

That’s how I’m feeling about my job these days.

The ducks are not the students. Well, maybe the students who don’t their work or answer my plaintive emails, the duck being the nagging vacuum their non-compliance creates. The main ducks are the self-evaluative forms I’m required to fill out, the numerical grading system which has long struck me as absurd in a gifted arts program, the staff meetings that feel like they have nothing to do with anything that can possibly help or enlighten me, and the power games that go on in any corporate system staffed by humans.

I suspect the only folks who aren’t nibbled to death by ducks are those who live alone, off the grid, completely self-sufficient. That is, unless they have limited mobility and run into a team of actual ducks, who, from what I understand, can be quite aggressive.

I was filling out a rubric grid yesterday that was supposed to state what transferable life skills fiction writing would bolster and my first attempt, which included writing a cohesive narrative, was rejected as not something you’d need in real life, I finally settled on patience, tenacity, greater attention to detail, and how to offer constructive criticism. But even as I wrote this down it struck me that as both lame and requisite, like grasping at straws on command, which, now that I think about it, is like being, myself, a nibbling duck, only my heart’s not in it.

Anyway, my strategy is to keep the ducks in charge happy, acceding to their demands by tossing breadcrumbs from a safe distance. I mean, they just want to survive, right?

I get it. So do I.