Ewwww! What’s That Smell?

I have never outgrown eighth grade. I still enjoy slapstick comedy — watching “Scrubs” and “Home Alone” makes me laugh out loud. Any bodily function that makes noise — whether it be burps or farts (or any armpit re-creation of them) — is an opportunity for a competition. And sexual innuendos will always bring a smile to my face.

Confession is good
Why do I feel the need to make such a confession? Now that I’m four times the age of the average eighth-grader, I no longer worry so much about what other people think about me. I also hope that these confessions can help many of my colleagues make their own confessions — and enjoy them as much as I do!

With this bit of confession out in the open, a good question arises: What is someone this immature doing in funds development? Actually, I’m pretty good at it. It seems many people — including some of our donors — never outgrew eighth grade, either. While I have learned to mute some of my childish preferences, others have been transformed into child-like behaviors that for some reason are endearing. It turns out that the more honest I am with people, the more they like me and trust me to help them.

Plastic lives
When I first began this work, I thought I had to be a certain kind of person to appeal to potential donors. I picked this up from looking at my colleagues. It seems to me that many people in our profession have a tendency to be “plastic”; they dress in prescribed ways, talk in prescribed ways, and even live in prescribed ways that make them look more like Barbie and Ken than flesh-and-blood humans who burp and smell funny in the morning, who dream of making the world a better place and who use their humanity to make these dreams come true in at least part of the world.