I have believed in story arcs: conflict, climax, resolution. I have believed that life is secretly like The Wonder Years, needing only a voice-over narrator to balance the story and smooth over the edges. I have not believed in chaos.
This certainty, this reliance on a grand-design narrative, is the hallmark of a True Believer, and I have been one. I have attributed actions and events variously to God or to the devil, to testing or trials or punishments or sin or saintliness. I have been reassured by identification of causes, and their effects.
I have repented and been washed of my doubts.
I have turned from repentance, and embraced them.
If God had allowed me to go to Vietnam when I most wanted to – when I had wanted to for ten years – I might have forgiven him. But he sent me to China instead.
If God had not broken apart the plans to live together, with friends, after college, I might have forgiven him that – or if God had not so drastically altered the school at which I taught in DC, I might have been merciful.
If God had allowed me to move to York and start a community, I may have been at peace. But I could not, and so I wasn’t.
If God had not included so many stories of these breaks and alterations and disappointments in the Bible, I might have had the strength to leave him – but they anticipate my complaints, my accusations, my enraged confusion, so I cannot. I cannot purge my body of this understanding that God, some God, exists.
It has been slowly coming into me that God, some God, is not causes and not effects, but something else. This God may be mystery; this God may be the strange harmony of coming into a new place and recognizing, and being recognized. This God may not care what I do or who or why I am the way I am. This God may happen to everyone, regardless. This God may want to love choice and complexity instead of steadfast, earnest purity. This God -- capricious and strange and real -- may allow me, out.
I cannot prevent myself believing in God -- I only don’t know which God is true -- but I am departing the first to be received by the second. I only need to come to terms with chaos, with my id-love for it. I need to embrace mystery and harmony and no-explanations.
At the crux of my soul, I am as I have always been. I believe, and I protect my belief, my innocence from fatal, soul-killing error, with walls and walls and walls -- the same walls, and the same beliefs. Only the walls are changing.
The center still holds.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Fair Warning
I remember standing near the window seat in my first room at our old, old, old house on Buell St. (three houses ago, from when we stopped adding "olds" to indicate how many had come since), with Tyler. We moved out of that house when I was nine; I would guess I was about seven on this day, which would have made Tyler four.
I remember the solemnity with which I addressed him -- that seriousness that only children can pull off unselfconsciously.
"Tyler," I said to him, and made sure he was listening, "I want to bite your finger."
He considered this for a few seconds.
"Will it hurt?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "I'm going to bite it very hard."
He paused again, longer this time.
"Okay," he said. He held up his hand as though offering a sacrifice to the gods, and I took it in mine, selected his smallest finger, put it in my mouth, and bit it. Hard.
(True story.)
I just wanted to feel what it was like to bite something, a person, as hard as I wanted. I thought for sure -- I guess the last time I had injured my brother, I had lied about it afterward or something -- that if I were honest, I couldn't get in trouble. Unfortunately, Tyler, though he believed what I said when I told him it would hurt, cried out and Mom came into the room, and I was punished for hurting him, despite my warning him in advance.
"But I told the truth," I protested. I remember thinking that this was all that should have mattered; of course, it wasn't.
The reality is that there's no such thing as fair warning.
I remember the solemnity with which I addressed him -- that seriousness that only children can pull off unselfconsciously.
"Tyler," I said to him, and made sure he was listening, "I want to bite your finger."
He considered this for a few seconds.
"Will it hurt?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "I'm going to bite it very hard."
He paused again, longer this time.
"Okay," he said. He held up his hand as though offering a sacrifice to the gods, and I took it in mine, selected his smallest finger, put it in my mouth, and bit it. Hard.
(True story.)
I just wanted to feel what it was like to bite something, a person, as hard as I wanted. I thought for sure -- I guess the last time I had injured my brother, I had lied about it afterward or something -- that if I were honest, I couldn't get in trouble. Unfortunately, Tyler, though he believed what I said when I told him it would hurt, cried out and Mom came into the room, and I was punished for hurting him, despite my warning him in advance.
"But I told the truth," I protested. I remember thinking that this was all that should have mattered; of course, it wasn't.
The reality is that there's no such thing as fair warning.
Confessions, VI
I’ve lost a minimum of 15 lbs. in the past 6 weeks.
When I was little, I gave Tyler pink Silly Putty and told him it was gum.
I’ve never been to Rhode Island, Maine or Canada, and had never been to New York City before the towers fell, despite living the first eighteen years of my life in Connecticut.
When I was little, I gave Tyler pink Silly Putty and told him it was gum.
I’ve never been to Rhode Island, Maine or Canada, and had never been to New York City before the towers fell, despite living the first eighteen years of my life in Connecticut.
CDs I got on the basis of one song, hoping for the best
And was horribly, horribly disappointed:
Fuel – Best of Fuel (turns out it should have been a single)
Gary Jules – trading snakeoil for wolftickets
Go Fish – infectious
Jojo – The High Road
Nickelback – Silver Side Up
And felt neutral about:
3 Doors Down – Away from the Sun
All American Rejects – Move Along
Annie Lennox – Medusa
Blind Melon – Blind Melon
Eagle Eye Cherry – Desireless
Indigo Girls – Retrospective
Maxwell – Now
Natalie Merchant – Tigerlily
Spandau Ballet – Gold: Best of Spandau Ballet
The Fray – How to Save a Life
Train – Train
And was justified completely:
Alan Parsons Project – Ultimate Alan Parsons Project
Barenaked Ladies – Stunt, Maroon
Blues Traveler – four
Collective Soul – Dosage
Counting Crows – August and Everything After
Damien Rice – O
Dido – No Angel
Interpol – Our Love to Admire
Killers – Hot Fuss
Linkin Park – Hybrid Theory
Live – Throwing Copper
Mr. Mister – Best of Mr. Mister
Nelly Furtado – Loose
Nirvana – Nevermind
Pet Shop Boys – Discography
Peter Gabriel – So, Car
Radiohead – OK Computer
Sarah McLachlan – afterglow
Talking Heads – Best of Talking Heads
Toad the Wet Sprocket – PS: A Toad Retrospective
Various – Felicity soundtrack
White Stripes – Icky Thump
Fuel – Best of Fuel (turns out it should have been a single)
Gary Jules – trading snakeoil for wolftickets
Go Fish – infectious
Jojo – The High Road
Nickelback – Silver Side Up
And felt neutral about:
3 Doors Down – Away from the Sun
All American Rejects – Move Along
Annie Lennox – Medusa
Blind Melon – Blind Melon
Eagle Eye Cherry – Desireless
Indigo Girls – Retrospective
Maxwell – Now
Natalie Merchant – Tigerlily
Spandau Ballet – Gold: Best of Spandau Ballet
The Fray – How to Save a Life
Train – Train
And was justified completely:
Alan Parsons Project – Ultimate Alan Parsons Project
Barenaked Ladies – Stunt, Maroon
Blues Traveler – four
Collective Soul – Dosage
Counting Crows – August and Everything After
Damien Rice – O
Dido – No Angel
Interpol – Our Love to Admire
Killers – Hot Fuss
Linkin Park – Hybrid Theory
Live – Throwing Copper
Mr. Mister – Best of Mr. Mister
Nelly Furtado – Loose
Nirvana – Nevermind
Pet Shop Boys – Discography
Peter Gabriel – So, Car
Radiohead – OK Computer
Sarah McLachlan – afterglow
Talking Heads – Best of Talking Heads
Toad the Wet Sprocket – PS: A Toad Retrospective
Various – Felicity soundtrack
White Stripes – Icky Thump
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Old Men I Would Gladly Pay to See in a Movie
Jim Broadbent
Michael Caine
Morgan Freeman
Anthony Hopkins
Mandy Patinkin
James Spader (not really old yet, but I like ’im.)
Michael Caine
Morgan Freeman
Anthony Hopkins
Mandy Patinkin
James Spader (not really old yet, but I like ’im.)
"He's much older than you."
I’ve been subbing recently for a male client whose job is to collect carts from the parking lot of a Walmart. We walk the parking lot two or three times, collecting six or seven carts at a time, when there are any, and then walk the circle inside the store looking for strays left by shoppers who have decided against buying anything.
As we walked the inner circle the other day, weaving around palettes of diapers and DVDs, my client informed me that there would be no black people left in America by the year 2050. (He’s African-American.)
“Oh?” I said, trying to be neutral. “Where’d you hear that?”
“It’s true,” he said.
“Yeah, but where did you hear it?”
“I heard it. It was on TV.”
“Well, sometimes the news predicts things that they think might be true, but they can’t really know what’s going to happen in 2050, because it’s not 2050 yet.”
He took on a condescending air: “My father says it’s true. You know, he’s much older than you. He’s wise. He’s wisdom. He was in the Army for 26 years.”
I bristled. There were too many things wrong with this set of statements: the misunderstanding of predicting the future based on current statistics, versus fact; the idea that age naturally confers wisdom; the grammar; the appeal to my faith in the Army as a source of wisdom (as a pacifist, I would argue that the Armed Services do all they can to NOT make people wise; as a Navy brat, I snort derisively at the idea that the ARMY, of all services, could do it. Not bloody likely).
“But I’m just saying I hope it’s not true,” I said. “I hope there are still African-Americans in 2050. These things could change.”
“You don’t understand what I’m saying,” he said. “I’m smart. I’m very smart.”
I stared straight ahead to keep from rolling my eyes.
“Yes, of course you are,” I said, not sarcastically.
He’s one of the only clients we have who lives on his own, with full-time staff, and who has received a high school diploma. He is smart; unfortunately, that wasn’t the point. It’s that he’s not teachable. He refuses to receive instruction.
It’s rare that my teaching instincts are at odds with my professional responsibility as a job coach. I wanted to set him straight, but saw that we would probably have an issue if I tried. I let it go. We spend most of the rest of the day discussing his workout routine and how impressed several of his staff were at how “cut” he was.
“Sometimes I wear a muscle shirt,” he confided in me, looking at me sideways. “I look really good.”
“Uh-huh,” I replied. “It’s important to be healthy. What about that cart over there?”
The next time I was with him, a few days later, we were coming in from the parking lot when a man in one of the complimentary automatic-riding carts – provided for people who have trouble walking through the store – rode out. He saw us coming in and waved his arm up and down, shouting “Hi-ho, Bingo! Away!” as though spurring on his cart the way a cowboy would spur his horse. I laughed. My client glowered.
As we continued into the store, my client turned to me.
“Did you see what that man did?” he said, almost sputtering in anger.
“Yeah, he was pretending his cart was a horse,” I said, trying to cut off whatever interpretation he had of the customer’s joke.
“He was so rude!” my client said, still fuming.
We went outside for more carts.
“I’m going to find him,” my client said, beginning to head off in the direction the disabled man had gone, a menacing look on his face. (This was not an idle threat; he has physically confronted customers in the past.) I said the man had probably already left, that we needed to get more carts in, that the customer almost certainly hadn’t meant it as an insult but as a joke. It must be hard to be in a cart that can’t go very fast, I said. A person has to be able to joke about that kind of thing. My client was beginning to calm down and attend to errant carts again.
“Sometimes, I imagine what it would be like to not be able to walk,” I said. “I think it would be really hard. Do you ever imagine that?”
“What?”
“If you couldn’t walk?”
“What are you saying? Don’t be rude!” he responded.
I thought he meant the customer, but a few sentences later he made it clear that he had meant me.
“You know I’m ignoring you right now, don’t you?” he said, facing me and waiting for me to respond.
“No, I didn’t, actually,” I said, and pulled the magazine out of my coat pocket. “Well, just let me know when you’re ready to talk it through, and we can do that.”
It took about ten minutes of my following him around – which, after all, is my job – and reading my magazine before he started to talk to me again. He had thought I was accusing him of not being able to walk and had taken my attempt at modeling empathy as an insult. (He probably should have, but not as this kind of insult.) I explained that I had just been telling him what I sometimes do – imagining myself in other people’s shoes – that might help explain why some people did what they did, and that most of the time, people probably weren’t meaning to be rude. He seemed to accept this, but couldn’t imagine the customer’s actions as anything but a personal insult. I dropped it and changed the subject.
We went the rest of the day without incident, even joking, but I knew that I would never really bond with this client.
As we left the store at the end of his shift, he waved his hand in front of his face to indicate a bad smell. There was a nail salon right next to a Subway just inside the Walmart, and I didn’t know which he was referring to. Somehow, there was a smell of fish lingering in the air.
“Smells like fish in there,” I said as we headed out to my car.
“No, the opposite of fish,” he said.
I was interested to hear this.
“What’s the opposite of fish?” I asked.
“Woman fish,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I don’t want to embarrass you,” he replied, and laughed to himself.
“Alright,” I said.
Whatever, I thought.
And I drove him home.
As we walked the inner circle the other day, weaving around palettes of diapers and DVDs, my client informed me that there would be no black people left in America by the year 2050. (He’s African-American.)
“Oh?” I said, trying to be neutral. “Where’d you hear that?”
“It’s true,” he said.
“Yeah, but where did you hear it?”
“I heard it. It was on TV.”
“Well, sometimes the news predicts things that they think might be true, but they can’t really know what’s going to happen in 2050, because it’s not 2050 yet.”
He took on a condescending air: “My father says it’s true. You know, he’s much older than you. He’s wise. He’s wisdom. He was in the Army for 26 years.”
I bristled. There were too many things wrong with this set of statements: the misunderstanding of predicting the future based on current statistics, versus fact; the idea that age naturally confers wisdom; the grammar; the appeal to my faith in the Army as a source of wisdom (as a pacifist, I would argue that the Armed Services do all they can to NOT make people wise; as a Navy brat, I snort derisively at the idea that the ARMY, of all services, could do it. Not bloody likely).
“But I’m just saying I hope it’s not true,” I said. “I hope there are still African-Americans in 2050. These things could change.”
“You don’t understand what I’m saying,” he said. “I’m smart. I’m very smart.”
I stared straight ahead to keep from rolling my eyes.
“Yes, of course you are,” I said, not sarcastically.
He’s one of the only clients we have who lives on his own, with full-time staff, and who has received a high school diploma. He is smart; unfortunately, that wasn’t the point. It’s that he’s not teachable. He refuses to receive instruction.
It’s rare that my teaching instincts are at odds with my professional responsibility as a job coach. I wanted to set him straight, but saw that we would probably have an issue if I tried. I let it go. We spend most of the rest of the day discussing his workout routine and how impressed several of his staff were at how “cut” he was.
“Sometimes I wear a muscle shirt,” he confided in me, looking at me sideways. “I look really good.”
“Uh-huh,” I replied. “It’s important to be healthy. What about that cart over there?”
The next time I was with him, a few days later, we were coming in from the parking lot when a man in one of the complimentary automatic-riding carts – provided for people who have trouble walking through the store – rode out. He saw us coming in and waved his arm up and down, shouting “Hi-ho, Bingo! Away!” as though spurring on his cart the way a cowboy would spur his horse. I laughed. My client glowered.
As we continued into the store, my client turned to me.
“Did you see what that man did?” he said, almost sputtering in anger.
“Yeah, he was pretending his cart was a horse,” I said, trying to cut off whatever interpretation he had of the customer’s joke.
“He was so rude!” my client said, still fuming.
We went outside for more carts.
“I’m going to find him,” my client said, beginning to head off in the direction the disabled man had gone, a menacing look on his face. (This was not an idle threat; he has physically confronted customers in the past.) I said the man had probably already left, that we needed to get more carts in, that the customer almost certainly hadn’t meant it as an insult but as a joke. It must be hard to be in a cart that can’t go very fast, I said. A person has to be able to joke about that kind of thing. My client was beginning to calm down and attend to errant carts again.
“Sometimes, I imagine what it would be like to not be able to walk,” I said. “I think it would be really hard. Do you ever imagine that?”
“What?”
“If you couldn’t walk?”
“What are you saying? Don’t be rude!” he responded.
I thought he meant the customer, but a few sentences later he made it clear that he had meant me.
“You know I’m ignoring you right now, don’t you?” he said, facing me and waiting for me to respond.
“No, I didn’t, actually,” I said, and pulled the magazine out of my coat pocket. “Well, just let me know when you’re ready to talk it through, and we can do that.”
It took about ten minutes of my following him around – which, after all, is my job – and reading my magazine before he started to talk to me again. He had thought I was accusing him of not being able to walk and had taken my attempt at modeling empathy as an insult. (He probably should have, but not as this kind of insult.) I explained that I had just been telling him what I sometimes do – imagining myself in other people’s shoes – that might help explain why some people did what they did, and that most of the time, people probably weren’t meaning to be rude. He seemed to accept this, but couldn’t imagine the customer’s actions as anything but a personal insult. I dropped it and changed the subject.
We went the rest of the day without incident, even joking, but I knew that I would never really bond with this client.
As we left the store at the end of his shift, he waved his hand in front of his face to indicate a bad smell. There was a nail salon right next to a Subway just inside the Walmart, and I didn’t know which he was referring to. Somehow, there was a smell of fish lingering in the air.
“Smells like fish in there,” I said as we headed out to my car.
“No, the opposite of fish,” he said.
I was interested to hear this.
“What’s the opposite of fish?” I asked.
“Woman fish,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I don’t want to embarrass you,” he replied, and laughed to himself.
“Alright,” I said.
Whatever, I thought.
And I drove him home.
Friday, March 28, 2008
(Really, really) Personals
Hartford Advocate, March 6 edition, "Man seeking woman" personal ad section:
PLEASE HELP ME
SWM, 39, very lonely on disability for depression, expert on 60s rock music, reaching out for companionship, please respond. Hamden
PLEASE HELP ME
SWM, 39, very lonely on disability for depression, expert on 60s rock music, reaching out for companionship, please respond. Hamden
Maxime
One of my greatest accomplishments in China, in teaching, and possibly in life, was teaching Maxime to speak English.
The first half of my first year in China was rough. In addition to the anorectic phase, there was a severe learning curve in figuring out how to teach. I had fourth, ninth, and tenth through twelfth grades, and my fourth graders were the “B” group, so they were more like second-grade-level English speakers. I spent almost all of my class time on classroom management.
Maxime, the French student I was assigned to tutor, was no exception. I spent much more time than necessary trying to get this wiggly nine-year-old to sit still and read a book aloud during the first half of the year, and he resented me for it. He was in a class of his own, literally, in a small room at the back of the school library, and was also learning subjects from French-national teachers, and Chinese from a Chinese teacher. I taught him twice a week at 8 a.m.
At some point, likely around the same time I began to understand what Chinese people were saying, I began to sense that there was a better way.
So when I came back from Spring Festival holiday and a somewhat traumatic conference-vacation in Thailand, I threw out the books.
(I mean, not literally. I love books.)
I had my fourth-graders put away their texts. I had the ninth-graders forget about business English. I tossed the curriculum I had created for the high schoolers. And I asked Maxime to tell me a story.
Fourth grade became a set of weekly units structured around occupations (and relevant vocabulary), with an activity mid-week and a quiz on Fridays. Ninth grade became a series of discussions on American culture, and later a furniture-making art class. High school became a bunch of independent studies.
Maxime’s story became an adventure.
When I asked him to tell me a story, Maxime began immediately to describe a hero – himself – warding off first a thief (who tried to steal his bow), and shooting a wolf. The story was about a paragraph long. But we could work with that, I thought.
And we did work with it. We typed it up, then looked at published plays for formatting. We talked about a cast of characters and wrote a dramatis personae. We wrote dialogue. We perfected his scenario. Then we got to work on production.
Everything we built was made up of a combination of string, tape, paperboard and bamboo, which we sawed down ourselves. (I broke two saws.) My teacher’s office became a forest of real bamboo stalks, stripped of their leaves, and drawn bushes – half drawn by Maxime, who took them home for homework, and half by me – and a paperboard “thief’s house” from which the offender would creep in the attempt to steal the bow. (I suggested that we write “Thief’s House” on the house, but Maxime wisely explained that no, we shouldn’t, “because you don’t know who is a thief. They look normal,” and then proceeded to draw an alarm box on the front door – showing another keen insight into thief mindset, I feel.)
We made a bow and several arrows, and practiced with them during class time. We assembled costumes for the characters, including a farmer’s hat for Maxime-the-hero, and a mask for the soon-to-be-slain wolf. We cast the parts.
We were almost ready to present Maxime’s play, which would be done in the library during a break and to a very small crowd, when Maxime came in one day and announced that his grandmother was coming from France. She wanted to see the play. She would arrive in two weeks.
So we came up with two more weeks of activities: We wrote up cast bios and got photos of each cast member, and mounted them on a foam-board. We wrote up a description of the play. We rehearsed. We watched Shrek II. (That last one was a reward for all the hard work.)
When play-day came, Maxime was all aflutter. He hopped around the library and chastised the boy he had cast as the thief, for goofing off. He solemnly greeted his father, mother and grandmother as they came and took their seats in child-sized library chairs. He prepared himself for his debut.
The play went very well. After being duped by the thief, Maxime recovered his bow and shot his arrow straight and true, almost into the wolf’s – that is, his French teacher’s – eye, then swiftly dispatched the wolf carcass with a cardboard knife. When the play was over, the three cast members stepped on stage to take a bow.
Later, Maxime’s father asked “Is that it?” The play had taken almost exactly two minutes.
I handed him a copy of the typed-up script, all of one page, and described some of the work we had done to produce this completely original performance. I described how Maxime had been taciturn and unwilling to respond when we first started the project, and how now his face lit up and he cavorted around the classroom, library, and school grounds cheerfully chattering away – in English – and imitating funny things he had seen in Shrek II.
“I just wanted him to be able to dare,” his father said. “I want him, if we’re on a plane, to ask for apple juice.”
And that is what he learned.
The first half of my first year in China was rough. In addition to the anorectic phase, there was a severe learning curve in figuring out how to teach. I had fourth, ninth, and tenth through twelfth grades, and my fourth graders were the “B” group, so they were more like second-grade-level English speakers. I spent almost all of my class time on classroom management.
Maxime, the French student I was assigned to tutor, was no exception. I spent much more time than necessary trying to get this wiggly nine-year-old to sit still and read a book aloud during the first half of the year, and he resented me for it. He was in a class of his own, literally, in a small room at the back of the school library, and was also learning subjects from French-national teachers, and Chinese from a Chinese teacher. I taught him twice a week at 8 a.m.
At some point, likely around the same time I began to understand what Chinese people were saying, I began to sense that there was a better way.
So when I came back from Spring Festival holiday and a somewhat traumatic conference-vacation in Thailand, I threw out the books.
(I mean, not literally. I love books.)
I had my fourth-graders put away their texts. I had the ninth-graders forget about business English. I tossed the curriculum I had created for the high schoolers. And I asked Maxime to tell me a story.
Fourth grade became a set of weekly units structured around occupations (and relevant vocabulary), with an activity mid-week and a quiz on Fridays. Ninth grade became a series of discussions on American culture, and later a furniture-making art class. High school became a bunch of independent studies.
Maxime’s story became an adventure.
When I asked him to tell me a story, Maxime began immediately to describe a hero – himself – warding off first a thief (who tried to steal his bow), and shooting a wolf. The story was about a paragraph long. But we could work with that, I thought.
And we did work with it. We typed it up, then looked at published plays for formatting. We talked about a cast of characters and wrote a dramatis personae. We wrote dialogue. We perfected his scenario. Then we got to work on production.
Everything we built was made up of a combination of string, tape, paperboard and bamboo, which we sawed down ourselves. (I broke two saws.) My teacher’s office became a forest of real bamboo stalks, stripped of their leaves, and drawn bushes – half drawn by Maxime, who took them home for homework, and half by me – and a paperboard “thief’s house” from which the offender would creep in the attempt to steal the bow. (I suggested that we write “Thief’s House” on the house, but Maxime wisely explained that no, we shouldn’t, “because you don’t know who is a thief. They look normal,” and then proceeded to draw an alarm box on the front door – showing another keen insight into thief mindset, I feel.)
We made a bow and several arrows, and practiced with them during class time. We assembled costumes for the characters, including a farmer’s hat for Maxime-the-hero, and a mask for the soon-to-be-slain wolf. We cast the parts.
We were almost ready to present Maxime’s play, which would be done in the library during a break and to a very small crowd, when Maxime came in one day and announced that his grandmother was coming from France. She wanted to see the play. She would arrive in two weeks.
So we came up with two more weeks of activities: We wrote up cast bios and got photos of each cast member, and mounted them on a foam-board. We wrote up a description of the play. We rehearsed. We watched Shrek II. (That last one was a reward for all the hard work.)
When play-day came, Maxime was all aflutter. He hopped around the library and chastised the boy he had cast as the thief, for goofing off. He solemnly greeted his father, mother and grandmother as they came and took their seats in child-sized library chairs. He prepared himself for his debut.
The play went very well. After being duped by the thief, Maxime recovered his bow and shot his arrow straight and true, almost into the wolf’s – that is, his French teacher’s – eye, then swiftly dispatched the wolf carcass with a cardboard knife. When the play was over, the three cast members stepped on stage to take a bow.
Later, Maxime’s father asked “Is that it?” The play had taken almost exactly two minutes.
I handed him a copy of the typed-up script, all of one page, and described some of the work we had done to produce this completely original performance. I described how Maxime had been taciturn and unwilling to respond when we first started the project, and how now his face lit up and he cavorted around the classroom, library, and school grounds cheerfully chattering away – in English – and imitating funny things he had seen in Shrek II.
“I just wanted him to be able to dare,” his father said. “I want him, if we’re on a plane, to ask for apple juice.”
And that is what he learned.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Local Trivia
The traffic out of Plainville was really heavy today; traffic in was light. It was as though everyone in Plainville had suddenly woken up to the truth of their lives: "What are we doing here?? Pack the car!"
FM 104.1 out of Waterbury/Hartford is running a contest to win Dave Matthews Band tickets; when listeners hear two Dave Matthews Band songs in a row, they are to call in and name the songs they heard. For me, this means being forced to listen to more Dave Matthews than should be required of anyone, and certainly hearing the "two songs in a row," despite that I will never call in for tickets.
Javapalooza!, an independent coffee shop in Middletown, is closed on Sundays. Probably because the owner never liked the coffee business that much, anyways.
FM 104.1 out of Waterbury/Hartford is running a contest to win Dave Matthews Band tickets; when listeners hear two Dave Matthews Band songs in a row, they are to call in and name the songs they heard. For me, this means being forced to listen to more Dave Matthews than should be required of anyone, and certainly hearing the "two songs in a row," despite that I will never call in for tickets.
Javapalooza!, an independent coffee shop in Middletown, is closed on Sundays. Probably because the owner never liked the coffee business that much, anyways.
Accusations
(To balance out Confessions, I accuse:)
People who leave used diapers in public parking lots after changing their children in the car: That's disgusting.
The manufacturers of "Colgate toothpaste" -- apt term for it, as it has the consistency of grade-school paste. Now if only they could make it taste half as good.
The driver of the Honda Element with the fire prevention ad covering the entire rear window, who drove up on my bumper through the entire I-84 to 691 ramp and then pulled angrily around me, only to cut me off, re-entering my lane for the first exit, less than a mile away: Your evil trifecta of Element, full-window ad and terrible driving habits has been noted. When the apocalypse comes, I expect the "four horsemen" to be taking lessons from you.
People who leave used diapers in public parking lots after changing their children in the car: That's disgusting.
The manufacturers of "Colgate toothpaste" -- apt term for it, as it has the consistency of grade-school paste. Now if only they could make it taste half as good.
The driver of the Honda Element with the fire prevention ad covering the entire rear window, who drove up on my bumper through the entire I-84 to 691 ramp and then pulled angrily around me, only to cut me off, re-entering my lane for the first exit, less than a mile away: Your evil trifecta of Element, full-window ad and terrible driving habits has been noted. When the apocalypse comes, I expect the "four horsemen" to be taking lessons from you.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
West of Chengdu, phantom pain
The New York Times reports today that all roads west of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in China, have been closed to nonmilitary vehicles. The area surrounding the temple of Wuhouci (woo-hoe-tsih) in Chengdu has experienced unrest -- fallout from the protests and crackdown in Tibet.
Dujiangyan -- the Duj, to foreigners -- is west of Chengdu.
Dujiangyan, where I spent my first year in China, where the school I taught at sits, where the Qingcheng mountain and the famous irrigation canals begin, is at the foot of what used to be the independent nation of Tibet. Many of my students -- some of my favorite students, like Andy and Tommy -- were Tibetan minority. They were taller and darker and proud of their culture, but they often kept it to themselves, like a secret.
Dujiangyan is the home of my Chinese heart, the geography of my Chinese childhood. It was in Dujiangyan that I learned to speak, first, where I gained the accented dialect of the Sichuanren. It was Dujiangyan's streets that I wandered day and night, where I walked home with grocery bags balanced on a sugarcane pole and ate tangcu bai cai, and Dujiangyan's markets where I bought fruit and spices and vegetables and haggled over mao per jin. Dujiangyan, the place I learned the ballad of the Tibetan lovers, is the only place I think of when I hear the sweet and desperate songs of laojia -- hometown.
Wuhouci, to me, means Catherine. She was not Dujiangyan people; I met her in Camp China in the south -- Nanning, Guangxi -- but she is not nanren, either. She is Heilongjiang people, from the bitter north, near Korea. She is big, for the south. She is pale and has freckles and straight black hair. She speaks a different Chinese.
I met Catherine when she was assigned to the Number 8 Middle School attached to Guangxi University for Nationalities in Nanning in 2001. She took an immediate liking to me, though I could not understand why. She made me uncomfortable at first, the way a person who knows you too well from the beginning, makes you uncomfortable.
She was and is different, Catherine. She was bolder, more outspoken. She challenged authority. She did not fit in, in the south. We talked, sometimes, and she said she wanted to improve her English -- her major at the university -- but we became friends on a warm, wet night, at a waterfight, where I snapped my towel at her until she ran from me, shrieking. We bent over, hands on our knees and grinned at each other, and became family.
Catherine's mother, who taught me to move to the side of the road on command, to not get run over by bicycles, is my Chinese mother. Her father is my benevolent, absent-minded professor Chinese father. On my last day in Nanning, Catherine and her father brought me the most beautiful present I've ever been given: a Chinese caligraphy scroll of a poem by Li Bai, about connections between far-apart friends. I could not find its equal in two years of searching even the most expensive scroll shops.
So when two years later, I had been in China a month, during October holiday, Catherine came to visit me in Dujiangyan. She knew all the places to go -- so many places are "very famous" in China -- and she brought her Aussie boyfriend, Ian. We visited the irrigation canals, the Qingcheng mountain, the people's square in Chengdu, and Wuhouci. Catherine had her picture taken at every place, in every famous spot, without smiling; this is the Chinese way.
I remember riding the bus with Catherine to the outskirts of Dujiangyan, listening to her explain to me how to ask the cost of something in local dialect; I remember her in bed next to me, at night, whispering questions I couldn't answer about her relationship with Ian; I remember her laughing.
Wuhouci was beautiful, and the people who went to light incense and pray for guidance were solemn and composed. The fish in the lotus pond were bright oranges, whites, yellows and blacks, and their fins and tails broke the surface when children threw crumbs into the water. The character-carved walls, and the stones, were unintelligible to me, but polished to mirrors and smooth to the touch. In my mind, my hand lingers over golden words set deep into black marble, dragging across them as though they can be gathered and saved.
I have trouble imagining this place spoiled, unrestful. Like the people of Tibet, it resonated peace; it was a sanctuary, even for tourists. And Dujiangyan, the small agrarian city of one million, was my home. Parts of me were born there. To have the city cut off, left with only the military to defend it -- not the free and healing ingress of warm, generous Sichuan people -- feels like a personal amputation.
Dujiangyan -- the Duj, to foreigners -- is west of Chengdu.
Dujiangyan, where I spent my first year in China, where the school I taught at sits, where the Qingcheng mountain and the famous irrigation canals begin, is at the foot of what used to be the independent nation of Tibet. Many of my students -- some of my favorite students, like Andy and Tommy -- were Tibetan minority. They were taller and darker and proud of their culture, but they often kept it to themselves, like a secret.
Dujiangyan is the home of my Chinese heart, the geography of my Chinese childhood. It was in Dujiangyan that I learned to speak, first, where I gained the accented dialect of the Sichuanren. It was Dujiangyan's streets that I wandered day and night, where I walked home with grocery bags balanced on a sugarcane pole and ate tangcu bai cai, and Dujiangyan's markets where I bought fruit and spices and vegetables and haggled over mao per jin. Dujiangyan, the place I learned the ballad of the Tibetan lovers, is the only place I think of when I hear the sweet and desperate songs of laojia -- hometown.
Wuhouci, to me, means Catherine. She was not Dujiangyan people; I met her in Camp China in the south -- Nanning, Guangxi -- but she is not nanren, either. She is Heilongjiang people, from the bitter north, near Korea. She is big, for the south. She is pale and has freckles and straight black hair. She speaks a different Chinese.
I met Catherine when she was assigned to the Number 8 Middle School attached to Guangxi University for Nationalities in Nanning in 2001. She took an immediate liking to me, though I could not understand why. She made me uncomfortable at first, the way a person who knows you too well from the beginning, makes you uncomfortable.
She was and is different, Catherine. She was bolder, more outspoken. She challenged authority. She did not fit in, in the south. We talked, sometimes, and she said she wanted to improve her English -- her major at the university -- but we became friends on a warm, wet night, at a waterfight, where I snapped my towel at her until she ran from me, shrieking. We bent over, hands on our knees and grinned at each other, and became family.
Catherine's mother, who taught me to move to the side of the road on command, to not get run over by bicycles, is my Chinese mother. Her father is my benevolent, absent-minded professor Chinese father. On my last day in Nanning, Catherine and her father brought me the most beautiful present I've ever been given: a Chinese caligraphy scroll of a poem by Li Bai, about connections between far-apart friends. I could not find its equal in two years of searching even the most expensive scroll shops.
So when two years later, I had been in China a month, during October holiday, Catherine came to visit me in Dujiangyan. She knew all the places to go -- so many places are "very famous" in China -- and she brought her Aussie boyfriend, Ian. We visited the irrigation canals, the Qingcheng mountain, the people's square in Chengdu, and Wuhouci. Catherine had her picture taken at every place, in every famous spot, without smiling; this is the Chinese way.
I remember riding the bus with Catherine to the outskirts of Dujiangyan, listening to her explain to me how to ask the cost of something in local dialect; I remember her in bed next to me, at night, whispering questions I couldn't answer about her relationship with Ian; I remember her laughing.
Wuhouci was beautiful, and the people who went to light incense and pray for guidance were solemn and composed. The fish in the lotus pond were bright oranges, whites, yellows and blacks, and their fins and tails broke the surface when children threw crumbs into the water. The character-carved walls, and the stones, were unintelligible to me, but polished to mirrors and smooth to the touch. In my mind, my hand lingers over golden words set deep into black marble, dragging across them as though they can be gathered and saved.
I have trouble imagining this place spoiled, unrestful. Like the people of Tibet, it resonated peace; it was a sanctuary, even for tourists. And Dujiangyan, the small agrarian city of one million, was my home. Parts of me were born there. To have the city cut off, left with only the military to defend it -- not the free and healing ingress of warm, generous Sichuan people -- feels like a personal amputation.
Subversion of BS: perverse and often baffling
I was reminded of the "Subversion of BS" course that I took/created in college, yesterday, when I was informed of a story Malcolm Gladwell had told, of how he had inserted first the phrase "raises new and troubling questions" and then "perverse and often baffling" into health and science articles at the Washington Post.
His story is, unfortunately, fiction -- but mine is not.
As English majors in college, many of my friends and I were subjected to class after class of discussing theories -- reading theory, writing theory, critical theory, literary theory -- on how to read, write and use English. These theories also sometimes took over classes that might otherwise have been spent discussing the contents of books or poems, which was fine: Far be it from me, an intellectual, to begrudge anyone a bit of "meta"-level thinking.
But by senior year, I was ready for action -- just when my courseload was ready for me to begin my real, serious work in theory.
So I took Writing Theory and Literary Criticism, and went slowly insane.
Well, that's not strictly true: I went quickly insane, and then did something about it.
I don't want to take full credit for something for which the origins have become fuzzy in my memory (help me out here, Deb), but at some relatively early point in LitCrit, it seemed clear to me that the only way to survive the class -- taught by a professor born under a star so different from mine that we seemed to be speaking mutually unintelligible languages, and full to the brim with "English ed" majors, most of whom are not, by nature, theorists -- was to create our own meta-class.
Thus was born the "Subversion of BS 101."
The mission, accepted by myself and classmate/roommate/friend Debbie, was to subvert the bullshit of literary theory (which should be openly acknowledged by even its most stanch defenders) by inserting absurd words, phrases or concepts so seamlessly into our essays that they would be indistinguishable from a real, actual point, thus proving the bullshit nature of literary theory as a whole. We would get to giggle at the unsuspecting readers of our sabotaged essays, and I, for one, would get to feel that I was doing my part in both accomplishing something (writing a LitCrit essay) and in acknowledging the inherent ridiculousness of having accomplished it (LitCrit having pitifully little real-world application, certainly in comparison to, say, eliminating starvation or AIDS).
The Subversion of BS course awarded credits for insertion of the designated words, phrases or concepts, which were broken down into "normal credit" and "mad credit" depending on the difficulty of including the word/phrase/concept. The list was added to as the term went on and Deb or I thought up another worthy SoBS candidate. There was a final requirement, which both of us met, and at the end of the term, in a baffling act of hubris, we stapled the "syllabus" (SoBS list) to our final essays for the edification of the professor.
Here, below, then, is the list as it stood (I believe) at the end of class:
Alicia and Debbie’s Course in the Subversion of B.S., or “If she says she hates ya, that can also mean she loves ya”*
Normals:
Absynthe
“Body and Soul”
breakfast in a can
Craptacular
(the concept of) croquet
feist/dandle
fizzy-lifting (drinks)
Gidget
Harem
“It’s a Small World”
“just the ticket”
little bunny Foo-foo
mad scientist
“Ocean Lotion Potion”/Enya (form follows content)
reference to the flag of Wales
reference to VIP
“shut your face/mouth”
Spaghetti-Os
Spinal Tap
Strong Bad/Homestar
the heck
traditional grease-toast
“Union Jack” (no explanation)
warp and woof
Weasel words
“whatever”
Mad Credit:
Combination of any three “Normals”
Full paragraph on croquet
Full paragraph of the word “phallus”
Improved lyrics from “OLP”
Lyrics from “Gidget Goes to Rome”
“shut your word/pie/cake-hole”
Quotation of Spinal Tap lyrics
VIP—Keith reaching into cow (up to armpit/bare-chested=extra credit)
Final: (required)
apotheosis
*Some additional context: The title of the course includes a quote from a "Gidget" movie song; I was writing a paper on Freudian analysis of the unconscious in literature (hence the "phallus" references); "OLP" stands for an Enya song known colloq. as "the Ocean Lotion Potion" song, for reasons that become obvious to any listener; "Body and Soul" refers to an out of print black-and-white silent melodrama shown by LitCrit professor in another class; VIP refers to the British TV show "Vets in Practice," as does the reference to Keith putting his arm into the side of a cow; the final, involving the inclusion of the word "apotheosis" came as a result of my having a laughing fit in the middle of class when the professor used this word, as though the class had any idea what he was talking about.
His story is, unfortunately, fiction -- but mine is not.
As English majors in college, many of my friends and I were subjected to class after class of discussing theories -- reading theory, writing theory, critical theory, literary theory -- on how to read, write and use English. These theories also sometimes took over classes that might otherwise have been spent discussing the contents of books or poems, which was fine: Far be it from me, an intellectual, to begrudge anyone a bit of "meta"-level thinking.
But by senior year, I was ready for action -- just when my courseload was ready for me to begin my real, serious work in theory.
So I took Writing Theory and Literary Criticism, and went slowly insane.
Well, that's not strictly true: I went quickly insane, and then did something about it.
I don't want to take full credit for something for which the origins have become fuzzy in my memory (help me out here, Deb), but at some relatively early point in LitCrit, it seemed clear to me that the only way to survive the class -- taught by a professor born under a star so different from mine that we seemed to be speaking mutually unintelligible languages, and full to the brim with "English ed" majors, most of whom are not, by nature, theorists -- was to create our own meta-class.
Thus was born the "Subversion of BS 101."
The mission, accepted by myself and classmate/roommate/friend Debbie, was to subvert the bullshit of literary theory (which should be openly acknowledged by even its most stanch defenders) by inserting absurd words, phrases or concepts so seamlessly into our essays that they would be indistinguishable from a real, actual point, thus proving the bullshit nature of literary theory as a whole. We would get to giggle at the unsuspecting readers of our sabotaged essays, and I, for one, would get to feel that I was doing my part in both accomplishing something (writing a LitCrit essay) and in acknowledging the inherent ridiculousness of having accomplished it (LitCrit having pitifully little real-world application, certainly in comparison to, say, eliminating starvation or AIDS).
The Subversion of BS course awarded credits for insertion of the designated words, phrases or concepts, which were broken down into "normal credit" and "mad credit" depending on the difficulty of including the word/phrase/concept. The list was added to as the term went on and Deb or I thought up another worthy SoBS candidate. There was a final requirement, which both of us met, and at the end of the term, in a baffling act of hubris, we stapled the "syllabus" (SoBS list) to our final essays for the edification of the professor.
Here, below, then, is the list as it stood (I believe) at the end of class:
Alicia and Debbie’s Course in the Subversion of B.S., or “If she says she hates ya, that can also mean she loves ya”*
Normals:
Absynthe
“Body and Soul”
breakfast in a can
Craptacular
(the concept of) croquet
feist/dandle
fizzy-lifting (drinks)
Gidget
Harem
“It’s a Small World”
“just the ticket”
little bunny Foo-foo
mad scientist
“Ocean Lotion Potion”/Enya (form follows content)
reference to the flag of Wales
reference to VIP
“shut your face/mouth”
Spaghetti-Os
Spinal Tap
Strong Bad/Homestar
the heck
traditional grease-toast
“Union Jack” (no explanation)
warp and woof
Weasel words
“whatever”
Mad Credit:
Combination of any three “Normals”
Full paragraph on croquet
Full paragraph of the word “phallus”
Improved lyrics from “OLP”
Lyrics from “Gidget Goes to Rome”
“shut your word/pie/cake-hole”
Quotation of Spinal Tap lyrics
VIP—Keith reaching into cow (up to armpit/bare-chested=extra credit)
Final: (required)
apotheosis
*Some additional context: The title of the course includes a quote from a "Gidget" movie song; I was writing a paper on Freudian analysis of the unconscious in literature (hence the "phallus" references); "OLP" stands for an Enya song known colloq. as "the Ocean Lotion Potion" song, for reasons that become obvious to any listener; "Body and Soul" refers to an out of print black-and-white silent melodrama shown by LitCrit professor in another class; VIP refers to the British TV show "Vets in Practice," as does the reference to Keith putting his arm into the side of a cow; the final, involving the inclusion of the word "apotheosis" came as a result of my having a laughing fit in the middle of class when the professor used this word, as though the class had any idea what he was talking about.
PSA: Artists
Our good incoherent-artist friend Sol Le Wit has shown up in the most unlikely of places: the New Britain Public Library. His painting "Horizontal Brushstrokes," which is gouache on paper and was painted in "(More or Less) 2002," hangs in a corner outside the computer room.
In other, delightful artist-related news, Sam McKinniss has set up a website where we lucky interneters can view (some of) his art. Go see it! See it now! (Sam loves hits.) Then congratulate me for knowing someone as talented and articulate as Sam; I consider it a sign of excellent taste on my part.
In other, delightful artist-related news, Sam McKinniss has set up a website where we lucky interneters can view (some of) his art. Go see it! See it now! (Sam loves hits.) Then congratulate me for knowing someone as talented and articulate as Sam; I consider it a sign of excellent taste on my part.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
The "I don't want your cat" story
I think it's about time I put this story out on cyberspace.
When I was young -- fifth grade or so -- my family had two cats. Tyler was allergic to them but could generally survive on Benadryl...until spring and the re-emergence of other allergens. It became an annual practice to try to get rid of our cats, who we loved, though we usually failed.
One year, after threats from our pediatrician, Mom got serious about getting rid of the cats: She put an ad in the local paper. It included our phone number and the relevant information about the cats, and indicated that they would be "free to good home."
That's when the calls started.
These were not typical calls from people faking an interest in our cats and then never showing up, or giving themselves away by asking if our refrigerator was running and then giggling maniacally before hanging up. Instead, these calls were from a woman -- by her accent, a Puerto Rican woman -- who, as soon as the phone was answered, would immediately begin to scream "I don't want your cat!" at whoever had picked up.
We were baffled.
"Well, we don't want you to have our cats," we said, trying to reason with her. (Certainly we wouldn't have put our beloved cats in the custody of this strange screamer, even if she had wanted them.) She did not or could not listen, and usually hung up after making her cat-related feelings known.
This continued for several days.
Finally, we got a call from a nice old lady who was willing to take both cats -- a stipulation we had made in the ad -- and could come pick them up the next afternoon. We kids were heartbroken and spent as much time with the cats as possible (though this essentially guaranteed that the cats would be glad to go when the time came). When the next day arrived, we sadly gathered up the cats, their litter, their food, their toys, and waited for the doorbell to ring.
It did, and Mom went to the front door.
To be greeted not by a little old lady, but a detective.
He had been hired, he said, by the "I don't want your cat" woman, to investigate a series of prank calls.
Wait. We were confused.
She was investigating her own prank calls?
Apparently, the "I don't want your cat" woman had been receiving calls in the middle of the night, at all hours, for weeks. The most recent set of calls had been regarding our cats, which the prankster insisted this woman take, and our phone number had shown up on her caller ID. She had finally called us in frustration, trying to get us to stop the campaign of harassment.
Well, we said to the detective, we don't know anything about that.
He asked a few more questions and thanked us for our time, then left. The "nice old lady" had been a ploy he had used to get our address and know when we would be home; she didn't really exist.
So we kept the cats for another year, and Mom never placed another classified ad.
Her phone number is now unlisted.
We never heard from the "I don't want your cat" lady again.
When I was young -- fifth grade or so -- my family had two cats. Tyler was allergic to them but could generally survive on Benadryl...until spring and the re-emergence of other allergens. It became an annual practice to try to get rid of our cats, who we loved, though we usually failed.
One year, after threats from our pediatrician, Mom got serious about getting rid of the cats: She put an ad in the local paper. It included our phone number and the relevant information about the cats, and indicated that they would be "free to good home."
That's when the calls started.
These were not typical calls from people faking an interest in our cats and then never showing up, or giving themselves away by asking if our refrigerator was running and then giggling maniacally before hanging up. Instead, these calls were from a woman -- by her accent, a Puerto Rican woman -- who, as soon as the phone was answered, would immediately begin to scream "I don't want your cat!" at whoever had picked up.
We were baffled.
"Well, we don't want you to have our cats," we said, trying to reason with her. (Certainly we wouldn't have put our beloved cats in the custody of this strange screamer, even if she had wanted them.) She did not or could not listen, and usually hung up after making her cat-related feelings known.
This continued for several days.
Finally, we got a call from a nice old lady who was willing to take both cats -- a stipulation we had made in the ad -- and could come pick them up the next afternoon. We kids were heartbroken and spent as much time with the cats as possible (though this essentially guaranteed that the cats would be glad to go when the time came). When the next day arrived, we sadly gathered up the cats, their litter, their food, their toys, and waited for the doorbell to ring.
It did, and Mom went to the front door.
To be greeted not by a little old lady, but a detective.
He had been hired, he said, by the "I don't want your cat" woman, to investigate a series of prank calls.
Wait. We were confused.
She was investigating her own prank calls?
Apparently, the "I don't want your cat" woman had been receiving calls in the middle of the night, at all hours, for weeks. The most recent set of calls had been regarding our cats, which the prankster insisted this woman take, and our phone number had shown up on her caller ID. She had finally called us in frustration, trying to get us to stop the campaign of harassment.
Well, we said to the detective, we don't know anything about that.
He asked a few more questions and thanked us for our time, then left. The "nice old lady" had been a ploy he had used to get our address and know when we would be home; she didn't really exist.
So we kept the cats for another year, and Mom never placed another classified ad.
Her phone number is now unlisted.
We never heard from the "I don't want your cat" lady again.
Movie Review: Smokey and the Bandit, 2
(UK: "Smokey and the Bandit Ride Again")
The perfect tagline for this movie would have been "All the fun and thrills of NASCAR without any of the heady intellectualism."
It was that good.
From the very first frame, Smokey and the Bandit 2 promises to be all action, no exposition. We join our heroes -- or no, some other people, actually -- in the air above some kind of rally attended by well-dressed, clearly Southern ladies and gentlemen, who are gathered around the caboose-end of a stationary train. Two men in a plane, apparently a bomber dating back to WWI, and presumably high above the train (there is no establishing shot), dump buckets of shit into the air to fall onto the crowd (apparently) below. So goes the opening proposition of what (according to my mom) proves to be the best sequel to Smokey and the Bandit ever made: "Shit falling on people is funny."
The shitfall is followed soon after by another plane ride, this time taken by other people we don't know -- the ones the shit has fallen on, probably -- who dump red paint from a cropduster over a party of equally (exactly equally) well-attired garden party guests. Some ten minutes later, if we listen closely, we can deduce that the feuding parties are Texas gubernatorial candidates who are trying to earn the endorsement of the current Texas governor, who declares that he will not endorse either of them (due to their shenanigans). Luckily (for the movie), one set of candidates overhears the governor then insisting that he must get a shipment from Miami to Dallas in only nine days, or else.
Enter the Bandit.
Bandit's truck-driver pal "Snowman" is commissioned by the governor-hopefuls to get the Bandit to drive (with) the cargo from Miami to Dallas for a payout of half a million dollars. Snowman finds the Bandit drunk in a hotel room and gives the longest speech of the movie, which serves as a frame for every "man, that guy is drunk" gag invented before 1980. Bandit belches, stumbles, is unable to articulate even the simplest response; after a few seconds of this, the performance annoys the savvy viewer...but it continues. In fact, it continues so long that it becomes funny again, the way that Sideshow Bob stepping on those rakes in "Cape Feare" comes back to funny. (Or, in the case that you don't appreciate "man that guy is drunk" gags initially, it becomes funny for the first time.)
The Bandit's love interest from the first movie, again at the altar with Junior, the son of Sheriff Buford T. Justice, leaves in the middle of her wedding (when the preacher picks up a phone placed to the side of the altar, then insists that she take the call because "it's long distance") to join Snowman in helping the Bandit back to his Trans-Am-driving feet. They put him through a Rocky-style montage that involves him using one of those machines that's supposed to vibrate fat away, and he's ready to hit the road.
No one ever asks what makes the Bandit, who drives a Trans-Am and not an 18-wheeler, necessary. It appears to be a complete, bald-faced contrivance.
Over the course of the movie, which I won't recount scene-by-scene here (in order to not ruin it for you), the following plot points are also contrived: the cargo turns out to be an elephant; the elephant requires medical attention, which is provided by an "Italian gynecologist" who is left behind by an ambulance at a refueling station and gets the elephant drunk on Italian wine (from which we see no fallout); the elephant is, of course, pregnant; Sheriff Buford T. Justice, whose jurisdiction is apparently infinite, chases the Bandit and Snowman across three states, meeting Mean Joe Green along the way and having his car destroyed in a fall off a bridge being pulled up; the Bandit becomes the love interest of aforementioned elephant; Sheriff Justice calls in his Canadian relatives, named Gaylord (exactly as it sounds) and Reginald (who [for no discernible reason] comes in singing an opera duet with an unidentified woman who rides along in his police car), to help capture the Bandit; trucks and police cars clash to predictable end in the middle of a desert mesa, in what can only be described as a trucker revenge-orgy; the Bandit and Snowman get away from Justice but are waylaid by the elephant's giving birth; the Bandit eventually wins the girl by caring more about the elephant (her tears are like people tears!) than finishing the run.
Now, movies that use Deus ex machina contrivances to sew up otherwise ordinary or reasonable plotlines are annoying; we get the impression that the writers just weren't trying hard enough. It's a cop-out.
Smokey and the Bandit 2, however, is comprised so completely of contrivances that it cannot possibly be considered a betrayal of a reasonable universe. Reason simply does not exist in this movie.
The writers prove their mettle in their dedication to absolute absurdity by leaving plot points dangling left and right -- not one gets tied up by the end, in fact; the two elephants are hitched in chariot-style circus carriers to the back of the Trans-Am -- as though to say "We don't have time for plot or explaining things or making any kind of sense! We're making a movie!" This kind of exuberant disregard for all reason can only be respected -- respected and laughed at -- the way one would respect a particularly talented snake-oil salesman. You don't actually buy what he's selling, but you like listening to his spiel, despite yourself.
After a certain point, in fact, I began to wonder if the writers were making fun of us, the viewers, in the way one feels Monty Python's (incomparable) Flying Circus abuses its audience. "How much will they put up with?" you can almost hear them asking each other, giggling, enraptured. "Let's see if we can add something else! Ooh! Fart joke!! That's a good one!!"
I can't wait to see what they came up with for Smokey and the Bandit 3 (1983).
The perfect tagline for this movie would have been "All the fun and thrills of NASCAR without any of the heady intellectualism."
It was that good.
From the very first frame, Smokey and the Bandit 2 promises to be all action, no exposition. We join our heroes -- or no, some other people, actually -- in the air above some kind of rally attended by well-dressed, clearly Southern ladies and gentlemen, who are gathered around the caboose-end of a stationary train. Two men in a plane, apparently a bomber dating back to WWI, and presumably high above the train (there is no establishing shot), dump buckets of shit into the air to fall onto the crowd (apparently) below. So goes the opening proposition of what (according to my mom) proves to be the best sequel to Smokey and the Bandit ever made: "Shit falling on people is funny."
The shitfall is followed soon after by another plane ride, this time taken by other people we don't know -- the ones the shit has fallen on, probably -- who dump red paint from a cropduster over a party of equally (exactly equally) well-attired garden party guests. Some ten minutes later, if we listen closely, we can deduce that the feuding parties are Texas gubernatorial candidates who are trying to earn the endorsement of the current Texas governor, who declares that he will not endorse either of them (due to their shenanigans). Luckily (for the movie), one set of candidates overhears the governor then insisting that he must get a shipment from Miami to Dallas in only nine days, or else.
Enter the Bandit.
Bandit's truck-driver pal "Snowman" is commissioned by the governor-hopefuls to get the Bandit to drive (with) the cargo from Miami to Dallas for a payout of half a million dollars. Snowman finds the Bandit drunk in a hotel room and gives the longest speech of the movie, which serves as a frame for every "man, that guy is drunk" gag invented before 1980. Bandit belches, stumbles, is unable to articulate even the simplest response; after a few seconds of this, the performance annoys the savvy viewer...but it continues. In fact, it continues so long that it becomes funny again, the way that Sideshow Bob stepping on those rakes in "Cape Feare" comes back to funny. (Or, in the case that you don't appreciate "man that guy is drunk" gags initially, it becomes funny for the first time.)
The Bandit's love interest from the first movie, again at the altar with Junior, the son of Sheriff Buford T. Justice, leaves in the middle of her wedding (when the preacher picks up a phone placed to the side of the altar, then insists that she take the call because "it's long distance") to join Snowman in helping the Bandit back to his Trans-Am-driving feet. They put him through a Rocky-style montage that involves him using one of those machines that's supposed to vibrate fat away, and he's ready to hit the road.
No one ever asks what makes the Bandit, who drives a Trans-Am and not an 18-wheeler, necessary. It appears to be a complete, bald-faced contrivance.
Over the course of the movie, which I won't recount scene-by-scene here (in order to not ruin it for you), the following plot points are also contrived: the cargo turns out to be an elephant; the elephant requires medical attention, which is provided by an "Italian gynecologist" who is left behind by an ambulance at a refueling station and gets the elephant drunk on Italian wine (from which we see no fallout); the elephant is, of course, pregnant; Sheriff Buford T. Justice, whose jurisdiction is apparently infinite, chases the Bandit and Snowman across three states, meeting Mean Joe Green along the way and having his car destroyed in a fall off a bridge being pulled up; the Bandit becomes the love interest of aforementioned elephant; Sheriff Justice calls in his Canadian relatives, named Gaylord (exactly as it sounds) and Reginald (who [for no discernible reason] comes in singing an opera duet with an unidentified woman who rides along in his police car), to help capture the Bandit; trucks and police cars clash to predictable end in the middle of a desert mesa, in what can only be described as a trucker revenge-orgy; the Bandit and Snowman get away from Justice but are waylaid by the elephant's giving birth; the Bandit eventually wins the girl by caring more about the elephant (her tears are like people tears!) than finishing the run.
Now, movies that use Deus ex machina contrivances to sew up otherwise ordinary or reasonable plotlines are annoying; we get the impression that the writers just weren't trying hard enough. It's a cop-out.
Smokey and the Bandit 2, however, is comprised so completely of contrivances that it cannot possibly be considered a betrayal of a reasonable universe. Reason simply does not exist in this movie.
The writers prove their mettle in their dedication to absolute absurdity by leaving plot points dangling left and right -- not one gets tied up by the end, in fact; the two elephants are hitched in chariot-style circus carriers to the back of the Trans-Am -- as though to say "We don't have time for plot or explaining things or making any kind of sense! We're making a movie!" This kind of exuberant disregard for all reason can only be respected -- respected and laughed at -- the way one would respect a particularly talented snake-oil salesman. You don't actually buy what he's selling, but you like listening to his spiel, despite yourself.
After a certain point, in fact, I began to wonder if the writers were making fun of us, the viewers, in the way one feels Monty Python's (incomparable) Flying Circus abuses its audience. "How much will they put up with?" you can almost hear them asking each other, giggling, enraptured. "Let's see if we can add something else! Ooh! Fart joke!! That's a good one!!"
I can't wait to see what they came up with for Smokey and the Bandit 3 (1983).
Monday, March 24, 2008
I think we all learned something, here.
Last Friday, on an overnight, the girl I stay with -- the one featured in the post "I don't want your X-K for now" -- called me downstairs because she had "broken the TV." I worried that she had thrown the remote at it in frustration, loosening a cable connection or finally shattering the CRT screen.
What she had actually done was to press the button bringing her to pay-per-view, then hit "OK," resulting in a charge of $12 and explicit lesbian porn showing up on her television.
It took about five minutes for me to figure out how to turn it off while she waited in the kitchen, during which time many of my secret questions about lesbian sexuality were answered.
As for the girl, who was penitent and somewhat traumatized, I trust she will avoid pressing unfamiliar buttons in the future.
What she had actually done was to press the button bringing her to pay-per-view, then hit "OK," resulting in a charge of $12 and explicit lesbian porn showing up on her television.
It took about five minutes for me to figure out how to turn it off while she waited in the kitchen, during which time many of my secret questions about lesbian sexuality were answered.
As for the girl, who was penitent and somewhat traumatized, I trust she will avoid pressing unfamiliar buttons in the future.
Our Government Makes Me Sick
Last year, and the year before, I sold the use of my body to rich and willing men.
Just my stomach and my brain, though.
And they were psychiatrists, working on research at the National Institutes of Mental Health.
I started on medical studies because I was a volunteer earning a stipend of $50/month, and had noticed an ad in the free daily Express newspaper that comes with a morning metro train ride. The screening calls making sure of my eligibility took place, awkwardly, at work, where I stretched my office’s phone cord to its limit to try to get some privacy. When I had been approved, the NIMH sent a complimentary taxi service to pick me up for a preliminary physical exam and psych eval, and said they would contact me when a relevant study came up.
One did, not long after. I had told the overseeing doctor that I would not be willing to take any drugs, experimental or otherwise, and my handlers assured me that I would not be taking any, here.
There would be pills, of course – but they would be harmless amino acids, the building blocks of life, the essential parts of protein that your body encounters every day. I agreed that that would be fine with me, and they signed me up.
That first study, on tryptophan depletion, went quite well, despite involving the ingestion of no fewer than 76 pills (and possibly more) on each occasion; I went in two separate times, once for placebo and once for the “real” pills – double-blind, of course – and each time completed a computer task while strapped into an MRI. The task was to watch the computer screen, reflected onto a mirror immediately above my eyes, for a flash of yellow dots, followed by a delay and the flash of a single yellow dot. If the single dot was in the same position as any of the dots in the initial flash, I was to press the first button on the button box; if it was in a new position, the second button.
This was a boring task, and I was bad at it.
Still, they paid me for following protocol, not for succeeding at strange yellow-dot-flashing tasks. And they paid me well.
So when they called again a month later for a study involving amygdala response to emotional stimuli – and this one not even involving pills – I agreed to do it.
This time, the MRI task was to memorize two “target faces” and then identify, again by pressing the first or second button, whether the faces shown in a random sequence were one of the target faces or not. The real purpose, of course, was to study the amygdala’s response to the emotions shown on the faces of the randomly sequenced images, not to test a subject’s aptitude for remembering faces. All of the studies were like that: apparently about one thing, but secretly about something else.
Several months went by before I got another call, but then I got three. I was in another MRI study, a PET scan study, and finally, the long and terrible second amino acid study that ended my tenure as a government guinea pig.
This study was testing the effect of tyrosine, a different amino acid, and I had wrongly assumed that it would be similar to the first, almost pleasant, study I had done.
Instead of pills – of which there would have needed to be over 100, the handlers assured me – this study involved an amino acid drink. Orange had been pre-selected as my flavor. I shudder even now, remembering it, though I had no previous aversion to orange.
The drink was brought to me in a giant Styrofoam cup, and was foamy and gritty at the same time, a crazy orange – the hue that orange cotton candy would be, if it existed. I needed to drink 18 oz. of the cocktail within about half an hour in order to allow my body to digest it before the MRI scan. The first half or two-thirds were okay – the drink was bitter, but manageable – but after that, every sip was a trial. I watched hospital cable in an attempt to distract myself from the dreadful knowledge that I would need to swallow more.
I did eventually finish it.
This is the point in the story where the squeamish should stop reading.
After about an hour and a half, when the handlers assured me the drink should be gone from my stomach, I threw up. The nurse who had placed the red biohazard bucket next to me, saying “I always put it here, and no one’s ever been sick on my watch,” seemed dismayed as she removed the bucket and former contents of my stomach (which looked exactly as they had in the cup) from my bedside. The presiding psychiatrist came in to take a look.
“It’s not too much,” he said, evaluating the contents of the bucket. “We can probably still go ahead, if you’re up for it.”
I was feeling better and so agreed.
But the feeling better didn’t last. I got through the MRI tasks – a sort of “slot machine” game in which you won actual money, but through no fault of your own – and the mood scales, and went straight to bed when I got home. It was right before Christmas, so I left work early on my last day before vacation, and hitched a ride back to CT with a friend, pushing the memory of the hellish orange drink to the back of my mind.
I was unsure of whether I should go back for the second half of the study, but the handlers and doctors agreed: Everyone had some trouble one time, but no one had ever been sick in both halves of the study. I would definitely be fine if I came back to complete it.
Two months after the first half of the study, then, I decided to return.
I won’t give a moment-by-moment account of what happened to me then, as it’s almost too sickening for me to recount, let alone to inflict on innocent readers. Suffice it to say that I asked to be let out of the MRI, threw up once an hour for five hours, barely made it home in the taxi before being sick again, and went to bed immediately on my return. For two days.
Well, I thought, at least I was of some use to science.
The next time I spoke with my NIMH handlers, they were trying to convince me to participate in a drug study, which I refused.
“But what happened to the results of that other study, the one where I got sick?” I asked.
They knew exactly which one I meant; no one had ever gotten that sick before.
“Oh,” they said. “We’ve been having trouble with the results from that study. After you, everyone started getting sick. We can’t get accurate results if your body doesn’t digest the whole amount of amino acids.”
So it wasn’t even good for them.
Just my stomach and my brain, though.
And they were psychiatrists, working on research at the National Institutes of Mental Health.
I started on medical studies because I was a volunteer earning a stipend of $50/month, and had noticed an ad in the free daily Express newspaper that comes with a morning metro train ride. The screening calls making sure of my eligibility took place, awkwardly, at work, where I stretched my office’s phone cord to its limit to try to get some privacy. When I had been approved, the NIMH sent a complimentary taxi service to pick me up for a preliminary physical exam and psych eval, and said they would contact me when a relevant study came up.
One did, not long after. I had told the overseeing doctor that I would not be willing to take any drugs, experimental or otherwise, and my handlers assured me that I would not be taking any, here.
There would be pills, of course – but they would be harmless amino acids, the building blocks of life, the essential parts of protein that your body encounters every day. I agreed that that would be fine with me, and they signed me up.
That first study, on tryptophan depletion, went quite well, despite involving the ingestion of no fewer than 76 pills (and possibly more) on each occasion; I went in two separate times, once for placebo and once for the “real” pills – double-blind, of course – and each time completed a computer task while strapped into an MRI. The task was to watch the computer screen, reflected onto a mirror immediately above my eyes, for a flash of yellow dots, followed by a delay and the flash of a single yellow dot. If the single dot was in the same position as any of the dots in the initial flash, I was to press the first button on the button box; if it was in a new position, the second button.
This was a boring task, and I was bad at it.
Still, they paid me for following protocol, not for succeeding at strange yellow-dot-flashing tasks. And they paid me well.
So when they called again a month later for a study involving amygdala response to emotional stimuli – and this one not even involving pills – I agreed to do it.
This time, the MRI task was to memorize two “target faces” and then identify, again by pressing the first or second button, whether the faces shown in a random sequence were one of the target faces or not. The real purpose, of course, was to study the amygdala’s response to the emotions shown on the faces of the randomly sequenced images, not to test a subject’s aptitude for remembering faces. All of the studies were like that: apparently about one thing, but secretly about something else.
Several months went by before I got another call, but then I got three. I was in another MRI study, a PET scan study, and finally, the long and terrible second amino acid study that ended my tenure as a government guinea pig.
This study was testing the effect of tyrosine, a different amino acid, and I had wrongly assumed that it would be similar to the first, almost pleasant, study I had done.
Instead of pills – of which there would have needed to be over 100, the handlers assured me – this study involved an amino acid drink. Orange had been pre-selected as my flavor. I shudder even now, remembering it, though I had no previous aversion to orange.
The drink was brought to me in a giant Styrofoam cup, and was foamy and gritty at the same time, a crazy orange – the hue that orange cotton candy would be, if it existed. I needed to drink 18 oz. of the cocktail within about half an hour in order to allow my body to digest it before the MRI scan. The first half or two-thirds were okay – the drink was bitter, but manageable – but after that, every sip was a trial. I watched hospital cable in an attempt to distract myself from the dreadful knowledge that I would need to swallow more.
I did eventually finish it.
This is the point in the story where the squeamish should stop reading.
After about an hour and a half, when the handlers assured me the drink should be gone from my stomach, I threw up. The nurse who had placed the red biohazard bucket next to me, saying “I always put it here, and no one’s ever been sick on my watch,” seemed dismayed as she removed the bucket and former contents of my stomach (which looked exactly as they had in the cup) from my bedside. The presiding psychiatrist came in to take a look.
“It’s not too much,” he said, evaluating the contents of the bucket. “We can probably still go ahead, if you’re up for it.”
I was feeling better and so agreed.
But the feeling better didn’t last. I got through the MRI tasks – a sort of “slot machine” game in which you won actual money, but through no fault of your own – and the mood scales, and went straight to bed when I got home. It was right before Christmas, so I left work early on my last day before vacation, and hitched a ride back to CT with a friend, pushing the memory of the hellish orange drink to the back of my mind.
I was unsure of whether I should go back for the second half of the study, but the handlers and doctors agreed: Everyone had some trouble one time, but no one had ever been sick in both halves of the study. I would definitely be fine if I came back to complete it.
Two months after the first half of the study, then, I decided to return.
I won’t give a moment-by-moment account of what happened to me then, as it’s almost too sickening for me to recount, let alone to inflict on innocent readers. Suffice it to say that I asked to be let out of the MRI, threw up once an hour for five hours, barely made it home in the taxi before being sick again, and went to bed immediately on my return. For two days.
Well, I thought, at least I was of some use to science.
The next time I spoke with my NIMH handlers, they were trying to convince me to participate in a drug study, which I refused.
“But what happened to the results of that other study, the one where I got sick?” I asked.
They knew exactly which one I meant; no one had ever gotten that sick before.
“Oh,” they said. “We’ve been having trouble with the results from that study. After you, everyone started getting sick. We can’t get accurate results if your body doesn’t digest the whole amount of amino acids.”
So it wasn’t even good for them.
Resurrection
Today, I go to church for the first time in six weeks. It’s Easter, and I have no excuse not to.
Still, I am uncomfortable, feeling discontented and alien and alone. I sit down in the first seat I see, near the back entrance where I came in – late, because I had decided at the last minute to go to the first service, then dawdled over breakfast and getting ready – and look up at the giant projected praise chorus, which is unfamiliar. This is not a surprise, considering my absences: eight years gone, then sporadic attendance at best. This congregation is one I hardly know at all.
I sing along, though not loudly, and let my gaze wander over the people also singing – then stop, on a man who looks, from the side, exactly like my high school English teacher.
But Mr. Caswell has been dead for three years, and it had been at least two before that since I had seen him. He died of cancer, probably lung cancer although I don’t know for sure – he was a smoker – and before I left for my second year in China, in a hotel room outside of L.A., I had written him a last letter. It was a meaningless letter, full of trivia and half-finished reflections on the previous year, because I didn’t know how to write what I meant.
I still don’t know how to write what I meant. Not without falling back on clichés.
The man who is not my teacher moves differently than Mr. Caswell had, his joints looser and his motions more fluid. The effect is obscene, as though someone else were wearing a Mr. Caswell suit. I turn away.
I remember, though, the afternoons after school and finding myself again in Mr. Caswell’s room, sitting there while he graded or talked with someone else, never quite sure what I was doing there, never quite sure whether I wished he would pay more attention to me. Sometimes he did, and we’d talk. He told me about his wife, also depressed, like my mom, and I would tell him about home.
He told me once about a Christmas – he was not religious, and neither was his family – when his family had gone out for Chinese food, he said, because it was the only restaurant open, and they were hungry. He loved it, being together, and the spontaneity. He loved it so much that every year after, he asked if anyone wanted Chinese food on Christmas. (But no one ever did.)
I wrote him letters practically every day, for over a year. I left them with him after class and he read them before the end of the day. I wrote, in one of the first, “I don’t know why I’m writing this to you.” He replied, writing in red pen on the edges as though grading an essay – and this was the only letter he ever replied to – “Kindred spirits, and I tell the truth.”
I am sitting in church, and I remember hitting the nine-year-old, and how the next day at school, Mr. Caswell came into my second-period chemistry class to make sure I was coming to his classroom for my study hall third period. I went, sat listless at one of the desks, put my head down, cried. Mr. Caswell sat in a student desk next to me and pulled mine over until we were face-to-face.
“I know you won’t believe me,” he said, “but one day, this will fade. You’ll forget. That’s how things are.”
“I won’t forget,” I said.
He was right.
But I did not forget him. He seemed surprised when I visited on college breaks, as though he had thought I would cease to exist on graduation. When I said the last time that I likely wouldn’t be back – the school had instituted a new policy requiring badges for visitors – he said “Well, of course,” as though it were natural that I move on. As though he weren’t the closest thing I had to a father – or as though he was.
He said that secretly, Jane Austen was his favorite author. (Mine was Thomas Hardy.) He said that secretly, he was an optimist. (I was doom-and-gloom.) He said that secretly, he had been scared out of his mind during student teaching. (I never tried it.) I rehearsed these facts until they became second nature; I let them change me. They are still changing me.
I do not know how to conclude my thoughts on him, my best teacher, even though he’s dead, even though the world of what I will know about him has become finite and limited and the possibility of anything new has been cut off. So I won’t. I will remember what he was like the way I re-read my favorite books – with a new eye every time, with new experiences to inform my understanding. I will re-imagine our conversations and the tone of his voice and the gravity with which he signed my senior yearbook. I will reinterpret the way he laughed when I broke a solemn moment in class with some casual off-hand remark, or when he handed me an “extra” copy of a book I had loved, or when he gave me his address so that I could survive the summer through writing letters. I will recall his spirit and I will resurrect him every time.
I leave church, irritated and grateful, and hurry home to change and go to lunch. It will be ham, and my mother will want to know where I’ve been these several weeks, and we will eat candy – more than we should – and watch movies, and I will leave earlier than expected to clean my house. I will wash clothes and vacuum carpets and mop and gather papers into piles and put boxes in the attic. I will listen to music and sing; I will eat a late dinner. I will, secretly, be optimistic about the future, consider the merits of Jane Austen, dwell on the fear of trying something new.
It will be a good Easter, and I will be content, and not alone.
Still, I am uncomfortable, feeling discontented and alien and alone. I sit down in the first seat I see, near the back entrance where I came in – late, because I had decided at the last minute to go to the first service, then dawdled over breakfast and getting ready – and look up at the giant projected praise chorus, which is unfamiliar. This is not a surprise, considering my absences: eight years gone, then sporadic attendance at best. This congregation is one I hardly know at all.
I sing along, though not loudly, and let my gaze wander over the people also singing – then stop, on a man who looks, from the side, exactly like my high school English teacher.
But Mr. Caswell has been dead for three years, and it had been at least two before that since I had seen him. He died of cancer, probably lung cancer although I don’t know for sure – he was a smoker – and before I left for my second year in China, in a hotel room outside of L.A., I had written him a last letter. It was a meaningless letter, full of trivia and half-finished reflections on the previous year, because I didn’t know how to write what I meant.
I still don’t know how to write what I meant. Not without falling back on clichés.
The man who is not my teacher moves differently than Mr. Caswell had, his joints looser and his motions more fluid. The effect is obscene, as though someone else were wearing a Mr. Caswell suit. I turn away.
I remember, though, the afternoons after school and finding myself again in Mr. Caswell’s room, sitting there while he graded or talked with someone else, never quite sure what I was doing there, never quite sure whether I wished he would pay more attention to me. Sometimes he did, and we’d talk. He told me about his wife, also depressed, like my mom, and I would tell him about home.
He told me once about a Christmas – he was not religious, and neither was his family – when his family had gone out for Chinese food, he said, because it was the only restaurant open, and they were hungry. He loved it, being together, and the spontaneity. He loved it so much that every year after, he asked if anyone wanted Chinese food on Christmas. (But no one ever did.)
I wrote him letters practically every day, for over a year. I left them with him after class and he read them before the end of the day. I wrote, in one of the first, “I don’t know why I’m writing this to you.” He replied, writing in red pen on the edges as though grading an essay – and this was the only letter he ever replied to – “Kindred spirits, and I tell the truth.”
I am sitting in church, and I remember hitting the nine-year-old, and how the next day at school, Mr. Caswell came into my second-period chemistry class to make sure I was coming to his classroom for my study hall third period. I went, sat listless at one of the desks, put my head down, cried. Mr. Caswell sat in a student desk next to me and pulled mine over until we were face-to-face.
“I know you won’t believe me,” he said, “but one day, this will fade. You’ll forget. That’s how things are.”
“I won’t forget,” I said.
He was right.
But I did not forget him. He seemed surprised when I visited on college breaks, as though he had thought I would cease to exist on graduation. When I said the last time that I likely wouldn’t be back – the school had instituted a new policy requiring badges for visitors – he said “Well, of course,” as though it were natural that I move on. As though he weren’t the closest thing I had to a father – or as though he was.
He said that secretly, Jane Austen was his favorite author. (Mine was Thomas Hardy.) He said that secretly, he was an optimist. (I was doom-and-gloom.) He said that secretly, he had been scared out of his mind during student teaching. (I never tried it.) I rehearsed these facts until they became second nature; I let them change me. They are still changing me.
I do not know how to conclude my thoughts on him, my best teacher, even though he’s dead, even though the world of what I will know about him has become finite and limited and the possibility of anything new has been cut off. So I won’t. I will remember what he was like the way I re-read my favorite books – with a new eye every time, with new experiences to inform my understanding. I will re-imagine our conversations and the tone of his voice and the gravity with which he signed my senior yearbook. I will reinterpret the way he laughed when I broke a solemn moment in class with some casual off-hand remark, or when he handed me an “extra” copy of a book I had loved, or when he gave me his address so that I could survive the summer through writing letters. I will recall his spirit and I will resurrect him every time.
I leave church, irritated and grateful, and hurry home to change and go to lunch. It will be ham, and my mother will want to know where I’ve been these several weeks, and we will eat candy – more than we should – and watch movies, and I will leave earlier than expected to clean my house. I will wash clothes and vacuum carpets and mop and gather papers into piles and put boxes in the attic. I will listen to music and sing; I will eat a late dinner. I will, secretly, be optimistic about the future, consider the merits of Jane Austen, dwell on the fear of trying something new.
It will be a good Easter, and I will be content, and not alone.
PSA: Shout it out...No, really.
Shout spray, normally a laundry spot-cleaner, also works alarmingly well as a carpet cleaner.
Even on red Kool-aid stains that are two months old.
FYI.
Even on red Kool-aid stains that are two months old.
FYI.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Audio Mad-Libs: "I Want it That Way"
In the grand tradition of such BS-subverting classics as “Gregorian Chant Jenny From the Block” and the “Destiny’s Child carnival remix-o-rama,” here comes AUDIO MAD-LIBS!
Starring such diverse boy bands as THE BACKSTREET BOYS and N’SYNC, with a cameo from ENRIQUE HIMSELF!!!
These PITHY LYRICS will keep you on the EDGE of your SEAT!!!
RE-DISCOVER the SONGS of YOUR youth!!!
ALSO, learn dozens of NEW, REALLY TRUE FACTS!!!!! about your FAVORITE BANDS!
“I Want It That Way”
Backstreet Boys
1. N______________________
2. N—rhymes w/1___________
3. V______________________
4. N pl____________________
5. body part________________
6. Question word____________
7. health problem____________
8. N—rhymes w/7___________
9. time____________________
10. prep—position___________
11. V_____________________
12. pronoun________________
"I Want It That Way"
Yeah
You are my _________(1)
The one _____________(2)
Believe when I _________(3)
I want it that way
But we are two ___________(4) apart
Can't reach to your ___________(5)
When you ____________(3)
That I want it that way
Chorus: Tell me _____________(6)
Ain't nothin' but a ___________(7)
Tell me _____________(6)
Ain't nothin' but a ____________(8)
Tell me _____________(6)
I never wanna hear you ________(3)
I want it that way
Am I your _____________(1)
Your one ______________(2)
Yes I know it's __________(9)
But I want it that way
Chorus
Now I can see that we're falling _____________(10)
From the way that it used to be, yeah
No matter the distanceI want you to ____________(11)
That deep down inside of ____________(12)
You are my __________(1)
The one _____________(2)
You areYou are, you are, you are
Don't wanna hear you __________(3)
Ain't nothin' but a ___________(7)
Ain't nothin' but a ___________(8)
I never wanna hear you _______(3)
I want it that way
Chorus
Did you know?
When the Backstreet Boys first formed their band, major competitors on the pop-teen-music scene included The Fronters, The Sidestreet Boys, The Back-Alley Boys, and The Around the Blocks!
Starring such diverse boy bands as THE BACKSTREET BOYS and N’SYNC, with a cameo from ENRIQUE HIMSELF!!!
These PITHY LYRICS will keep you on the EDGE of your SEAT!!!
RE-DISCOVER the SONGS of YOUR youth!!!
ALSO, learn dozens of NEW, REALLY TRUE FACTS!!!!! about your FAVORITE BANDS!
“I Want It That Way”
Backstreet Boys
1. N______________________
2. N—rhymes w/1___________
3. V______________________
4. N pl____________________
5. body part________________
6. Question word____________
7. health problem____________
8. N—rhymes w/7___________
9. time____________________
10. prep—position___________
11. V_____________________
12. pronoun________________
"I Want It That Way"
Yeah
You are my _________(1)
The one _____________(2)
Believe when I _________(3)
I want it that way
But we are two ___________(4) apart
Can't reach to your ___________(5)
When you ____________(3)
That I want it that way
Chorus: Tell me _____________(6)
Ain't nothin' but a ___________(7)
Tell me _____________(6)
Ain't nothin' but a ____________(8)
Tell me _____________(6)
I never wanna hear you ________(3)
I want it that way
Am I your _____________(1)
Your one ______________(2)
Yes I know it's __________(9)
But I want it that way
Chorus
Now I can see that we're falling _____________(10)
From the way that it used to be, yeah
No matter the distanceI want you to ____________(11)
That deep down inside of ____________(12)
You are my __________(1)
The one _____________(2)
You areYou are, you are, you are
Don't wanna hear you __________(3)
Ain't nothin' but a ___________(7)
Ain't nothin' but a ___________(8)
I never wanna hear you _______(3)
I want it that way
Chorus
Did you know?
When the Backstreet Boys first formed their band, major competitors on the pop-teen-music scene included The Fronters, The Sidestreet Boys, The Back-Alley Boys, and The Around the Blocks!
Take THAT, heathen!
Typically, an Easter dinner involves ham.
It occurred to me to wonder if this was coincidence, or if the Christians who started it were intending to flaunt their disregard for Jewish (and Muslim) kosher laws.
But then, the answer seems pretty obvious.
It occurred to me to wonder if this was coincidence, or if the Christians who started it were intending to flaunt their disregard for Jewish (and Muslim) kosher laws.
But then, the answer seems pretty obvious.
Friday, March 21, 2008
CGU continues to leer.
Since I decided Wednesday that I would refuse the advances of CGU toward making me one of their L.A.-orbiting, culture-studying acolytes, I've felt the acceptance hanging on my shoulders like a drunken lecher at a bar.
Today I got the financial aid document in the mail, but not the acceptance packet. It's like said barfly pulled out his wallet to show a wad of fives, oblivious to the fact that I am not interested at all, money or no -- and that it's not even enough money to brag about. It's not convincing that they'll give me a third-tuition fellowship when the annual price tag is well over $30K, and it's a five-year degree.
I mean, I'm flattered and all, but at this point, all I want is the exit.
Today I got the financial aid document in the mail, but not the acceptance packet. It's like said barfly pulled out his wallet to show a wad of fives, oblivious to the fact that I am not interested at all, money or no -- and that it's not even enough money to brag about. It's not convincing that they'll give me a third-tuition fellowship when the annual price tag is well over $30K, and it's a five-year degree.
I mean, I'm flattered and all, but at this point, all I want is the exit.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
.gov/blog
The TSA has its own blog where travelers can snipe about various inconveniences and injustices perpetrated against them. ("When can we quit this charade and begin to carry our water and toothpaste with us again?" and "I think you seriously need to stop stealing toiletries from people" are just two stellar examples.) As far as I know, the TSA is the only government agency to start a blog.
It's pretty funny, actually.
According to the AP (I haven't read the entire blog):
"TSA learned that certain airports were requiring passengers to remove all electronics from carry-ons. TSA investigated and found out that local TSA offices set up the exercise. TSA had the exercises stopped and posted a "HOORAY BLOGGERS!" message.
"Blackberrys, cords and iPods began to flow through checkpoints like the booze was flowing on Bourbon Street Tuesday night (Fat Tuesday of course)," the post read in language that was surprisingly glib for a government agency. (White says the blog is written in a style that is consistent with the blogosphere.)"
Saying this is "surprisingly glib" is like saying the Wayans brothers have gone "slightly awry" in their recent movie choices. (Or, hey, all of their movie choices.)
The success of the blog, in terms of helping people understand why things happen as they do and allowing for feedback that occasionally makes a difference, and in terms of showing a sense of humor in a government typically as funny as a child born with Tay-Sachs (that is, not funny at all), makes me wish other government agencies would follow suit.
After all, my Lenten activity of last year -- sending one-line letters to the White House, reading "President Bush: I completely disagree with you," each of the forty days (figuring it would be useless to detail my reasons, or even the subject of disagreement, since he's notorious for not reading even reports he commissioned) -- would have been so much easier on a blog. I could have simply logged on and pasted my sentence into the comments, obviating stamps, printing onto new sheets of unrecycled paper and envelope-licking.
Of course, the blog would be dull, dull, dull. "Stay the course," "hang in there," "just kidding about Harriet Miers": It would be the same stuff over and over. The most interesting thing about it would probably be searching out the grammatical errors -- and that only to weirdos who like that sort of thing.
So I would spend hours reading it, in other words.
The TSA does delete some comments from its blog, but only if they "contain foul language, threats, attacks, or require TSA to divulge sensitive information." If FEMA had its own blog, it would likely have to lift the ban on foul language.
There's a risk that government agency blogs, if universal, would quickly be squeezed of all their surprising glibness by the only thing produced rapidly and in great quantity by the feds: regulations.
Still, I suspect that if every agency had its own blog, at least half of them would be funnier than SNL is now.
It's pretty funny, actually.
According to the AP (I haven't read the entire blog):
"TSA learned that certain airports were requiring passengers to remove all electronics from carry-ons. TSA investigated and found out that local TSA offices set up the exercise. TSA had the exercises stopped and posted a "HOORAY BLOGGERS!" message.
"Blackberrys, cords and iPods began to flow through checkpoints like the booze was flowing on Bourbon Street Tuesday night (Fat Tuesday of course)," the post read in language that was surprisingly glib for a government agency. (White says the blog is written in a style that is consistent with the blogosphere.)"
Saying this is "surprisingly glib" is like saying the Wayans brothers have gone "slightly awry" in their recent movie choices. (Or, hey, all of their movie choices.)
The success of the blog, in terms of helping people understand why things happen as they do and allowing for feedback that occasionally makes a difference, and in terms of showing a sense of humor in a government typically as funny as a child born with Tay-Sachs (that is, not funny at all), makes me wish other government agencies would follow suit.
After all, my Lenten activity of last year -- sending one-line letters to the White House, reading "President Bush: I completely disagree with you," each of the forty days (figuring it would be useless to detail my reasons, or even the subject of disagreement, since he's notorious for not reading even reports he commissioned) -- would have been so much easier on a blog. I could have simply logged on and pasted my sentence into the comments, obviating stamps, printing onto new sheets of unrecycled paper and envelope-licking.
Of course, the blog would be dull, dull, dull. "Stay the course," "hang in there," "just kidding about Harriet Miers": It would be the same stuff over and over. The most interesting thing about it would probably be searching out the grammatical errors -- and that only to weirdos who like that sort of thing.
So I would spend hours reading it, in other words.
The TSA does delete some comments from its blog, but only if they "contain foul language, threats, attacks, or require TSA to divulge sensitive information." If FEMA had its own blog, it would likely have to lift the ban on foul language.
There's a risk that government agency blogs, if universal, would quickly be squeezed of all their surprising glibness by the only thing produced rapidly and in great quantity by the feds: regulations.
Still, I suspect that if every agency had its own blog, at least half of them would be funnier than SNL is now.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
My life is not a chess game.
This is what I will do: When the acceptance packet comes from CGU, I will refuse it.
I will stay in Connecticut until the end of the year. I will spend time with my grandparents and my brother before he goes into the Navy. I will help my mother drive the truck she will rent to South Carolina, to live near him. I will apply to new graduate schools in the fall.
In 2009, I will move to Boston.
I will work in one of the regional non-profits, or adult ed schools that I found while job-hunting last fall. I will live near a dear friend and see her as often as possible. I will be equally close to my grandparents in Connecticut and my brother in Vermont. I will apply to MIT. I will apply to Harvard. I will take Chinese classes and eat Chinese food. I will fail to attend church at least two out of every three weeks. I will complain about traffic and transportation and pollution and litter. I will not be living in New York. I will be miserable, and joyful, and pained, and anxious, and adoring. I will be free. I will be constrained by my choices.
But they will be mine.
I will stay in Connecticut until the end of the year. I will spend time with my grandparents and my brother before he goes into the Navy. I will help my mother drive the truck she will rent to South Carolina, to live near him. I will apply to new graduate schools in the fall.
In 2009, I will move to Boston.
I will work in one of the regional non-profits, or adult ed schools that I found while job-hunting last fall. I will live near a dear friend and see her as often as possible. I will be equally close to my grandparents in Connecticut and my brother in Vermont. I will apply to MIT. I will apply to Harvard. I will take Chinese classes and eat Chinese food. I will fail to attend church at least two out of every three weeks. I will complain about traffic and transportation and pollution and litter. I will not be living in New York. I will be miserable, and joyful, and pained, and anxious, and adoring. I will be free. I will be constrained by my choices.
But they will be mine.
GOD HAS DONE IT AGAIN
I found this subject line on an email that, for some reason, went to my bulkmail folder. I didn't read through enough of it to see what God had to do with my winning (yet again) money from a dead Nigerian relation, as I think it's pretty obvious: God must be involved when statistics go this awry. I mean, that's my fifth Nigerian relative to die this month.
In other news, news that I dread telling, I got accepted to a grad program. This, I suspect, is also God's doing, since God knows just how to piss me off.
Now I have to make a decision. Honestly, I hadn't considered that when I sent the applications in, and I find myself at a loss as to how to go about it. This isn't one of those regular decisions, like what to eat today (which I so often answer with "nothing," anyway) or what to wear (which I never answer with "nothing" -- sorry) or whether to watch a movie or read a book or take a nap. This is one of those life-altering, nothing-will-be-the-same-again, what-do-you-really-want-here, where-do-you-see-yourself-in-ten-years-type decisions. It snuck up on me. Even when I got the acceptance email last week, I didn't think much of it.
Until I went to New York this weekend and hung out with my lovely friends, who are a mere two hours away, and who will still be in roughly the same places next year (NYC and Boston, anyway). And had such a great, relieving time that I couldn't imagine not being able to see them again for months at a go.
And I thought about my life right now, which is pretty satisfying, and how much fun I'm having being a fake (that is, unpaid) copy editor, and going on spur-of-the-moment road trips, and how my schedule is nice even when my job is stressful.
Then suddenly, I panicked. As though the fact that I was having fun meant that I was living my life immorally, I felt I needed to move across the country to go to grad school -- despite the fact that I applied there mainly because its deadline was Feb. 1, and that I had originally only intended to apply to schools in New England (Pennsylvania at the farthest), and that I don't know whether I want to work in the cultural studies field long-term (but can't think of anything more flexible or fun to study), and that it costs over $30K a year, and despite that I think I'd hate L.A. The honors-student, anal-retentive, I-hate-joy side of me started kicking regular-me's ass. And that bitch is tough.
The trouble is that in my mind, God is always on the side of the type-A personality. The strident moralizing of the evangelical church fits in well with the strident moralizing of the control freak; I am a recovering evangelical and control freak, so I am particularly susceptible to the foibles of both.
The other trouble is that I don't want to be wasted; I want to live a meaningful life. I just can't figure out what that means in practical terms, anymore.
Does it mean moving to L.A. and learning how to criticize (even more) popular culture and what it does to our brains?
Does it mean moving to Boston and working for one of those regional adult ed nonprofits I found while job-searching last fall, and being near friends?
Does it mean staying here in Connecticut to be with family?
I've always thought of intelligence as my primary quality, to which everything else was a distant second. I'm smart. I've always been smart. So I should get a doctorate.
But I've opted-out since college. I've chosen other courses, and they haven't been bad. I've done and seen and learned things I never would have if I had gone straight back into academia. And I like some of those things. I like some of them a lot.
What I don't like is all this pressure. If I decide incorrectly, I'm afraid of being cut off from my own soul, and that would be worse than any practical consequence. But which one is right? They all feel, potentially, like versions of hell. These are the options provided me by the supreme deity?
That God -- he's a wily devil.
In other news, news that I dread telling, I got accepted to a grad program. This, I suspect, is also God's doing, since God knows just how to piss me off.
Now I have to make a decision. Honestly, I hadn't considered that when I sent the applications in, and I find myself at a loss as to how to go about it. This isn't one of those regular decisions, like what to eat today (which I so often answer with "nothing," anyway) or what to wear (which I never answer with "nothing" -- sorry) or whether to watch a movie or read a book or take a nap. This is one of those life-altering, nothing-will-be-the-same-again, what-do-you-really-want-here, where-do-you-see-yourself-in-ten-years-type decisions. It snuck up on me. Even when I got the acceptance email last week, I didn't think much of it.
Until I went to New York this weekend and hung out with my lovely friends, who are a mere two hours away, and who will still be in roughly the same places next year (NYC and Boston, anyway). And had such a great, relieving time that I couldn't imagine not being able to see them again for months at a go.
And I thought about my life right now, which is pretty satisfying, and how much fun I'm having being a fake (that is, unpaid) copy editor, and going on spur-of-the-moment road trips, and how my schedule is nice even when my job is stressful.
Then suddenly, I panicked. As though the fact that I was having fun meant that I was living my life immorally, I felt I needed to move across the country to go to grad school -- despite the fact that I applied there mainly because its deadline was Feb. 1, and that I had originally only intended to apply to schools in New England (Pennsylvania at the farthest), and that I don't know whether I want to work in the cultural studies field long-term (but can't think of anything more flexible or fun to study), and that it costs over $30K a year, and despite that I think I'd hate L.A. The honors-student, anal-retentive, I-hate-joy side of me started kicking regular-me's ass. And that bitch is tough.
The trouble is that in my mind, God is always on the side of the type-A personality. The strident moralizing of the evangelical church fits in well with the strident moralizing of the control freak; I am a recovering evangelical and control freak, so I am particularly susceptible to the foibles of both.
The other trouble is that I don't want to be wasted; I want to live a meaningful life. I just can't figure out what that means in practical terms, anymore.
Does it mean moving to L.A. and learning how to criticize (even more) popular culture and what it does to our brains?
Does it mean moving to Boston and working for one of those regional adult ed nonprofits I found while job-searching last fall, and being near friends?
Does it mean staying here in Connecticut to be with family?
I've always thought of intelligence as my primary quality, to which everything else was a distant second. I'm smart. I've always been smart. So I should get a doctorate.
But I've opted-out since college. I've chosen other courses, and they haven't been bad. I've done and seen and learned things I never would have if I had gone straight back into academia. And I like some of those things. I like some of them a lot.
What I don't like is all this pressure. If I decide incorrectly, I'm afraid of being cut off from my own soul, and that would be worse than any practical consequence. But which one is right? They all feel, potentially, like versions of hell. These are the options provided me by the supreme deity?
That God -- he's a wily devil.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
QWERTY verse
I have long thought – for years – that contemporary poetry analysis should include a physical component: studying the movement of the poet’s hands on the keyboard.
The qwerty keyboard was invented in order to make typing more difficult, so that typewriters (the people) wouldn’t jam up their typewriters (the machines) by typing too quickly. All the most common letters have to be typed with the weaker left hand, and their placement is difficult and inefficient. Punctuation is, for some reason, included on the main part of the board, but numbers aren’t. When you think about it, qwerty is weird.
But everyone got used to the format, and now it’s standard, despite the practical limits of a metal bar striking paper being eliminated.
This strikes me as being a poetic sort of progress. It’s certainly not a practical one.
There have been movements to produce and popularize a more efficient keyboard system, now that we have only screens to worry about, but they seem to fail as badly as the doomed-from-the-start Esperanto. Some people bother to learn it, but most don’t; it seems natural now, this bizarre setup, and making it more efficient seems crass and strange.
I find that I think of my hands differently when I’m typing than when I’m doing anything else. I am typically right-handed, using the left only as a stabilizer or guide, except when I’m typing. Then my left hand becomes familiar and useful. My right hand becomes the outcast, relegated to o and k and j and semicolons. It’s a small but persistent shift in my thinking, and it happens automatically.
And there are times when I find myself typing things out in my head – things I might say in conversation, or the content of signs, or headlines, or quotes I remember – and thinking through the interaction of my two hands, as though they reply to each other through striking different keys. As though they’re talking.
So sometimes, when I read poetry, I imagine what it was like to type out the words, to hit enter, to add and delete and add punctuation, what the poet’s hands were saying. I wonder what effect it has on a poet’s psyche to delete permanently, to remove from a screen rather than strike off of a paper. I wonder how many poets actually use computers to write, and how many fearfully or stubbornly or gratefully stick to plain paper and a pen. I wonder if they consider whether their words are graceful, in terms of the movements they encourage, as well as how they sound read aloud, or how their shapes look on the paper.
Maybe there should be a poetry that is based on the idea of movement, like a dance of writing. It wouldn’t have to make the same kind of sense as a sonnet or a villanelle – it could be mostly about harmony between sounds and appearance and motion. Instead of reading it, we could practice it, treat it like a piano score instead of a book. We could make typing – its strange anachronisms intact, in the midst of practical technological advancement – into a kinetic art.
Or not.
But I think it’s worth some thought.
The qwerty keyboard was invented in order to make typing more difficult, so that typewriters (the people) wouldn’t jam up their typewriters (the machines) by typing too quickly. All the most common letters have to be typed with the weaker left hand, and their placement is difficult and inefficient. Punctuation is, for some reason, included on the main part of the board, but numbers aren’t. When you think about it, qwerty is weird.
But everyone got used to the format, and now it’s standard, despite the practical limits of a metal bar striking paper being eliminated.
This strikes me as being a poetic sort of progress. It’s certainly not a practical one.
There have been movements to produce and popularize a more efficient keyboard system, now that we have only screens to worry about, but they seem to fail as badly as the doomed-from-the-start Esperanto. Some people bother to learn it, but most don’t; it seems natural now, this bizarre setup, and making it more efficient seems crass and strange.
I find that I think of my hands differently when I’m typing than when I’m doing anything else. I am typically right-handed, using the left only as a stabilizer or guide, except when I’m typing. Then my left hand becomes familiar and useful. My right hand becomes the outcast, relegated to o and k and j and semicolons. It’s a small but persistent shift in my thinking, and it happens automatically.
And there are times when I find myself typing things out in my head – things I might say in conversation, or the content of signs, or headlines, or quotes I remember – and thinking through the interaction of my two hands, as though they reply to each other through striking different keys. As though they’re talking.
So sometimes, when I read poetry, I imagine what it was like to type out the words, to hit enter, to add and delete and add punctuation, what the poet’s hands were saying. I wonder what effect it has on a poet’s psyche to delete permanently, to remove from a screen rather than strike off of a paper. I wonder how many poets actually use computers to write, and how many fearfully or stubbornly or gratefully stick to plain paper and a pen. I wonder if they consider whether their words are graceful, in terms of the movements they encourage, as well as how they sound read aloud, or how their shapes look on the paper.
Maybe there should be a poetry that is based on the idea of movement, like a dance of writing. It wouldn’t have to make the same kind of sense as a sonnet or a villanelle – it could be mostly about harmony between sounds and appearance and motion. Instead of reading it, we could practice it, treat it like a piano score instead of a book. We could make typing – its strange anachronisms intact, in the midst of practical technological advancement – into a kinetic art.
Or not.
But I think it’s worth some thought.
Monday, March 17, 2008
My Job is Revelation.
When I was little and an avid Bible-reader, I would occasionally sit down with the good book and open up to one of my favorite chapters, and read for awhile.
The two books (of the Bible) I can remember reading as a fifth-grader are Job and Revelation.
Both books have apocalypse in common, which is what starts me thinking on this topic now, when my dreams have become filled with tribulations and end-times, and I think that was part of the appeal. Job undergoes a terrible personal transformation, a complete negation of his life before God intervened (or let the devil intervene, I suppose, but let's not argue semantics); the churches and the world-at-large undergo an equally total annihilation and rebuilding in Revelation. When I was in fifth grade, my family was just beginning its apocalypse; I think I wanted a manual.
I can remember thinking, reading Revelation, that if this ever happened, if the horsemen ever descended and began to destroy the earth, I would hide under my desk. It was at least as silly a plan as living in the creek would have been, if my mother had been finally taken away, but it comforted me just by virtue of being a plan, period. I can't remember a time before I sought to prepare for contingencies.
In college, I remember crossing the street with Sharon, and seeing a backhoe on a flatbed that was hitched to another truck. I realized suddenly that without thinking, I had planned three escape routes in case the flatbed came unhitched and the backhoe rolled down the steep hill we were walking across. It was automatic, that I did this. I worried that it was a sign.
It would have been a sign that I still wasn't normal, which was the goal.
My mother has always had a way about her, the ability to warp reality and turn reasonable events and statements into insanity. Growing up, I could hardly tell the difference between what she said was true, and what was objectively true -- which is the case for all small children, so nothing special. But it continued beyond the point where I could see differences -- between her ways and others', her world and the real one -- and split my focus between the two. She created a kind of fantasy land, in which we were the ogres and she the maligned saint, or the imperious queen, or the put-upon, unrecognized, cinderellian princess.
The two books (of the Bible) I can remember reading as a fifth-grader are Job and Revelation.
Both books have apocalypse in common, which is what starts me thinking on this topic now, when my dreams have become filled with tribulations and end-times, and I think that was part of the appeal. Job undergoes a terrible personal transformation, a complete negation of his life before God intervened (or let the devil intervene, I suppose, but let's not argue semantics); the churches and the world-at-large undergo an equally total annihilation and rebuilding in Revelation. When I was in fifth grade, my family was just beginning its apocalypse; I think I wanted a manual.
I can remember thinking, reading Revelation, that if this ever happened, if the horsemen ever descended and began to destroy the earth, I would hide under my desk. It was at least as silly a plan as living in the creek would have been, if my mother had been finally taken away, but it comforted me just by virtue of being a plan, period. I can't remember a time before I sought to prepare for contingencies.
In college, I remember crossing the street with Sharon, and seeing a backhoe on a flatbed that was hitched to another truck. I realized suddenly that without thinking, I had planned three escape routes in case the flatbed came unhitched and the backhoe rolled down the steep hill we were walking across. It was automatic, that I did this. I worried that it was a sign.
It would have been a sign that I still wasn't normal, which was the goal.
My mother has always had a way about her, the ability to warp reality and turn reasonable events and statements into insanity. Growing up, I could hardly tell the difference between what she said was true, and what was objectively true -- which is the case for all small children, so nothing special. But it continued beyond the point where I could see differences -- between her ways and others', her world and the real one -- and split my focus between the two. She created a kind of fantasy land, in which we were the ogres and she the maligned saint, or the imperious queen, or the put-upon, unrecognized, cinderellian princess.
We lived in both of these worlds, this one that she had created, and the one where we went to school and to church and had friends.
I learned to translate, probably before I could read, between these worlds. By high school, I was an expert. I could recount a story from home to outsiders, knowing exactly what sorts of words to use to convey the sense of the injustice or offense my mother had caused, despite her most spiteful, vindictive behavior making sense almost exclusively in the realm of her fantasy.
She helped, of course, by using English to abuse us: "You're lazy and manipulative," she said when I didn't clean the bathroom to her always-fluctuating standards; "you're a leech," she said when I talked on the phone with my best friend; "you can't manipulate me into saying that," she told Tyler when he asked her if she loved us.
Really, really ridiculous stuff. So radically ridiculous that even the most practical real-world dweller could see how stupid and wrong it was. This needed almost no translation.
I argued with her almost constantly, and epically. My arguments were never short; somehow, I always expected her to see how wrong she was, if only I could come up with the perfect way to explain. I would fight until she said something so outrageous that even she had to see its flaws: Once, after probably two hours of loud debate, she finally said (in answer to "Why won't you trust anybody?"), "I don't trust people because if you do that, they might want you to do things for them, like wash their car."
I waited, watched her face for any sign of recognition.
Nothing.
But there were things that couldn't be explained to outsiders without serious effort: chores, and why they were such a struggle; why "not doing chores" could mean anything from forgetting to deciding not to, to doing them but not "good enough," to Mom just being in a bad mood; how a person's whole self-worth could be tied up in chores; what it was like to be grounded for months, for no reason (literally, no reason); what it was like to have her barge into your room, yelling because you had been maliciously keeping her from the phone -- when she had never told you she was waiting to use it. These required stories and metaphor to be understandable to others.
There were other things that could never be explained. They needed to be translated into words or events with the closest available meaning in the real world, to encourage appropriate feelings and responses in real-worlders. Real-world people saw, when it started, that she was admitted to one psychiatric hospital after another, sometimes for weeks at a time. They saw that we were without our mother, guests in others' homes, and separated, with our schedules disrupted, with our family in pieces. They felt sorry for us, for that.
They felt sorry for that instead of for the times we were home and together, when it was worse. They felt sorry because of the hospitals, so I let them.
Mom being home and going to bed earlier every night, asking me to put the boys to bed, not making dinner, laying prone on the couch for hours, became Mom going into the hospital.
Mom being so angry she would choke out insult after insult, became Mom going into the hospital.
Mom accusing us of trying to manipulate her in irrational paranoia, became Mom going into the hospital.
Eventually, Mom passing out on the street, altering her medication, calling me crying from a psych ward, Mom asking, absurdly, what cars were in the driveway or where we had put her "special pencil, " Mom needing help to get to the bathroom, Mom driving while drugged, Mom taking the handsets off the phones when she went out so we couldn't call anyone, Mom hissing in my ear that if we talked to DCF we would be separated forever "and I would be glad," all became Mom going into the hospital.
People could understand hospitals. Hospitals were bad.
But I can remember coming home from eighth grade and approaching our back door, seeing the handle before I could reach it, holding my breath: If it turned, she was home, and it was another day with her. If it didn't, she had been admitted again, and I would need to call people to stay with, and get the boys' clothes together, and make some biscuits (the only thing I could make) for dinner. Both options were terrible. But I never breathed a sigh of relief when it turned.
My guidance counselor from the eighth grade kept us at his house a few times, after we had exhausted Grandma and Grandpa's ability to watch us, and most church people's, and I described this to him once, this coming home and turning the handle, blithely, as a small point of conversation. He turned to me from the driver's seat with shock and a kind of horror on his face.
"I always knew when it was coming," I said, in explanation. "When she was getting closer to going in again."
"Why didn't you tell anyone?" he asked, and I was taken aback.
"Well who would I tell?" I answered.
When she would go in was home-world knowledge. It hadn't occurred to me that anyone outside home would believe it. Tyler knew. Spencer probably knew, though he was very young. But I didn't expect anyone outside the house to notice the subtle changes in her voice, her appearance, her schedule, her speech. And it never occurred to me to ask for help, even when I noticed. I just started packing our overnight bags.
Staying at other people's houses was like a small personal apocalypse every time. Everything you had and had been was exchanged for something new. Each home had a different smell, a different layout, a different type of family, a new dynamic. Some people treated us like family; some people treated us like guests. I watched them from a polite distance, like an anthropologist, and imitated.
These erasures of us, of our home, annihilated the whole fantasy-world, at least for a time. They were revelatory. They were, in a sense, grand-scale.
And there was always the possibility, always disappointed, that this time when she came out, she would actually be better -- this time, the medications would work, and she would be cheerful and normal and praise us and love us and stay with us. Maybe this time.
It never happened. She never recovered completely, though she stopped going into the hospitals, and last year when I was finally told her diagnosis, I could see why. I immediately began checking books out of the library and researched, hoping to recognize us in these real-world volumes, in real-world terms. We were there. One book described my experience -- the fantasy-world, the alternate reality, the apparent mind-reading, the compensating, the translation, the metaphor, the contingency plans, the invisible and inevitable apocalypses.
I saw that I would never be normal. It was too late for that.
But what I am left with, now, from this past, is a sense of magic: That is, an understanding of the fantasy worlds that people can live in, and how they affect us. I empathize automatically. I see the truth about people. I see the complications and the greys. I translate. I explain. I understand.
My job is to reveal -- my clients to the community, to me, to themselves, out of their fantasy-worlds so they can see the real one, too.
And that is why I'm good at it.
Squirrel Thanatopsis
Yesterday in New York City, Carl and Sharon and I talked and laughed, and Carl told a story about a time a squirrel jumped onto his pant leg. I told about the time Tyler went to put the trash in the dumpster and a squirrel jumped out onto his arm, and clung there in terror as he tried to fling it off. We laughed some more.
But it reminded me of these dreams I've been having, apocalyptic-type dreams, all involving small animals. In the most recent one, several towns were putting on what amounted to an indoctrinatory political play, each town casting the parts with native citizens -- many of whom were somehow woodland creatures. I went to see another town's performance, two nights after my own town had performed it, and watched the rabbits and ducks and squirrels act out the plot under a broiling, dark sky. In my dream, I almost began to cry: Several of our cast members, ducks and squirrels, mostly, had died while we showed our version of the play, and the bitterness of the loss was still fresh.
Today, on the way to work, I saw a squirrel running across the road in front of me and didn't think much of it, until I noticed how slowly it was going. I slammed on the brake and my car screeched to a halt, leaving tire marks I could see on the road, two feet from the crossing animal. The squirrel dragged itself the rest of the way across, using its tiny front paws like a butterfly-swimmer, its back legs hanging uselessly behind it.
I continued down the road to pick up my girl, unsettled, and wondering: What happened to that squirrel? Was it a car? If it had been hit before, why did it seem to wait until I would almost certainly kill it before starting out across the road? What does that squirrel think about life, about its life? Does it remember what it was like, before?
It's only a matter of time for that squirrel. How can it even climb a tree?
So consider this my elegy -- premature, but sincere.
But it reminded me of these dreams I've been having, apocalyptic-type dreams, all involving small animals. In the most recent one, several towns were putting on what amounted to an indoctrinatory political play, each town casting the parts with native citizens -- many of whom were somehow woodland creatures. I went to see another town's performance, two nights after my own town had performed it, and watched the rabbits and ducks and squirrels act out the plot under a broiling, dark sky. In my dream, I almost began to cry: Several of our cast members, ducks and squirrels, mostly, had died while we showed our version of the play, and the bitterness of the loss was still fresh.
Today, on the way to work, I saw a squirrel running across the road in front of me and didn't think much of it, until I noticed how slowly it was going. I slammed on the brake and my car screeched to a halt, leaving tire marks I could see on the road, two feet from the crossing animal. The squirrel dragged itself the rest of the way across, using its tiny front paws like a butterfly-swimmer, its back legs hanging uselessly behind it.
I continued down the road to pick up my girl, unsettled, and wondering: What happened to that squirrel? Was it a car? If it had been hit before, why did it seem to wait until I would almost certainly kill it before starting out across the road? What does that squirrel think about life, about its life? Does it remember what it was like, before?
It's only a matter of time for that squirrel. How can it even climb a tree?
So consider this my elegy -- premature, but sincere.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Carte Blanche 1: "Have you read...what the hell is wrong with you...should I go into religious studies?"
"Have you read Cornell West's "Democracy Matters"? if you haven't, what the hell is wrong with you? it's the best book i've met since college, by far. anyway, since west's job title "professor of religion and philosophy" at harvard, is pretty much the best one i could imagine, and since the u of m rejected me, should i go into religious studies?"
Technically, I should point out that this is three questions, but because it is the first carte blanche question, and because they are related, I will answer them all. (Magnanimous of me, isn't it.)
First: I have not read Cornell West's "Democracy Matters." Yet.
Second: Sometimes I have no &#*%ing clue what's wrong with me, but I can speculate, if that would help.
In the matter of Cornell West's "Democracy Matters," I haven't read it for probably the following two reasons:
1. I've never heard of it before.
2. I have over 1300 (other) books in my library...er, bedroom.
In the matter of what the hell is wrong with me in every otherwise, I can tell the following story -- with which you, englshmjr18, will relate: I am coming out of a long winter.
That is, a three-year winter.
My internal cycles used to go two-years-neutral, one-year-good, and by that count, last year should have been the good year -- but it wasn't. (Oh, how it wasn't.) My work, which I had loved the first year, fell completely apart as the school moved to a new location across town (to which I had to take the bus, adding an hour and a half to a nine-hour workday) and became more corporate than I could really put up with. We went from having walls painted multiple colors and the roof falling in -- an atmosphere I liked -- to cubicles and ordering matching furniture that took four months to arrive. The trend was upsetting to me, to say the least, and I couldn't wait to get out of there. (Though I did still love teaching, and the students.)
This might explain why last year wasn't a good one, but when I say "good," I mean "intense." As in, significant and difficult and engaging, and a lot of bad things are all of those. I've never had a "good" year that wasn't difficult. Last year could have been intense, and I could have been engaged, but I wasn't.
I don't know what happened, there, why I missed the year; but that's less surprising when you consider that I never knew the reason for the 2/1 sequence to begin with. It just seemed to be the way things were for me.
So this year, I'm thawing. It's difficult; I feel off-kilter much of the time. It makes it hard for me to be coherent and focus. It makes things that should be easy or natural for me, nearly impossible. I say truly idiotic things every day, and cringe. (Much of my blog is littered with apology for these things, though it may be difficult to find.) And I am tired; I have moved across national or state borders four times in the past five years and left behind friends each time, friends that will never be all in the same place, and so I know I will always be missing someone. My job is difficult but instinctual for me because of how I grew up; it doesn't engage my brain, much. I was reading a book a week the past three years and watching movies as though I were entering the information into a database. I stopped writing, that whole time, thought I had given it up. I was like an automaton. Until two months ago, I hadn't listened to music in probably a year.
Life was easier, if not satisfying, on auto-pilot. I want most of the time to go back into withdrawal, I feel my sharp edges and awkward movements so keenly. But I can't, because it won't help.
And anyway, all of you are out here.
Third: Why not?
Technically, I should point out that this is three questions, but because it is the first carte blanche question, and because they are related, I will answer them all. (Magnanimous of me, isn't it.)
First: I have not read Cornell West's "Democracy Matters." Yet.
Second: Sometimes I have no &#*%ing clue what's wrong with me, but I can speculate, if that would help.
In the matter of Cornell West's "Democracy Matters," I haven't read it for probably the following two reasons:
1. I've never heard of it before.
2. I have over 1300 (other) books in my library...er, bedroom.
In the matter of what the hell is wrong with me in every otherwise, I can tell the following story -- with which you, englshmjr18, will relate: I am coming out of a long winter.
That is, a three-year winter.
My internal cycles used to go two-years-neutral, one-year-good, and by that count, last year should have been the good year -- but it wasn't. (Oh, how it wasn't.) My work, which I had loved the first year, fell completely apart as the school moved to a new location across town (to which I had to take the bus, adding an hour and a half to a nine-hour workday) and became more corporate than I could really put up with. We went from having walls painted multiple colors and the roof falling in -- an atmosphere I liked -- to cubicles and ordering matching furniture that took four months to arrive. The trend was upsetting to me, to say the least, and I couldn't wait to get out of there. (Though I did still love teaching, and the students.)
This might explain why last year wasn't a good one, but when I say "good," I mean "intense." As in, significant and difficult and engaging, and a lot of bad things are all of those. I've never had a "good" year that wasn't difficult. Last year could have been intense, and I could have been engaged, but I wasn't.
I don't know what happened, there, why I missed the year; but that's less surprising when you consider that I never knew the reason for the 2/1 sequence to begin with. It just seemed to be the way things were for me.
So this year, I'm thawing. It's difficult; I feel off-kilter much of the time. It makes it hard for me to be coherent and focus. It makes things that should be easy or natural for me, nearly impossible. I say truly idiotic things every day, and cringe. (Much of my blog is littered with apology for these things, though it may be difficult to find.) And I am tired; I have moved across national or state borders four times in the past five years and left behind friends each time, friends that will never be all in the same place, and so I know I will always be missing someone. My job is difficult but instinctual for me because of how I grew up; it doesn't engage my brain, much. I was reading a book a week the past three years and watching movies as though I were entering the information into a database. I stopped writing, that whole time, thought I had given it up. I was like an automaton. Until two months ago, I hadn't listened to music in probably a year.
Life was easier, if not satisfying, on auto-pilot. I want most of the time to go back into withdrawal, I feel my sharp edges and awkward movements so keenly. But I can't, because it won't help.
And anyway, all of you are out here.
Third: Why not?
Meeting New People
When I was little, I used to be shy. Tyler would get candy to sell from the Y, and we would traipse around the rich neighborhoods of our city selling $1 bars door to door. Mom trailed us in the car but never approached the homes (since kids selling candy is cute, but an adult selling candy is kind of pathetic). Tyler chatted with whoever would come to answer the bell or knock, always beginning with “Hi would you like to buy a candy bar to help support the YMCA daycamp?” delivered all in one breath, but ending up talking about other things, like the weather, or his Fagan league baseball team, or whatever the potential buyer wanted to talk about.
I stood mute through these conversations, contributing nothing. But I must have picked up a thing or two, because sometime in adolescence, I realized that I could do it: I could meet new people.
In fact, I can be excellent at meeting new people. I can be accommodating to the point of solicitude, friendly to the point of seeming genuinely nice, especially with people I wouldn’t normally get along with or can’t relate to. I’ve developed an ability to chat, and smile, and encourage, and to ask questions that indicate an appropriate level of interest. I can even be impressive, I’ve been told, in this area.
But it’s not the core version of me. It’s like a parallel-universe-Alicia. It’s an exploration of what I would have been like as an extrovert – like trying on a wig to see what you’d be like as a redhead. It takes a lot of energy to sustain this, especially when I’m still figuring out how to relate to the new people I’m meeting. Once it’s settled into “person X likes to discuss her pet” or “person Y believes in astral body projection,” I’m usually okay. We just talk about that topic incessantly for however long I know them.
Which is not often long for people with whom I carry on these types of conversations. They rarely go anywhere, very rarely break through into some real human connection.
This is not the case with people with whom I could be real friends. In fact, I identify potential real friends often by whether I switch over into solicitude upon meeting them. If I am still myself – sarcasm and awkward-skeptical foibles intact – it’s a good sign. Still, there’s that awkward phase to get through, as in all friendships, of trying to find some way of showing that you’re interested in being friends without being a pathological weirdo; I mess this up more often than I’d like to recall. (Possibly because I am a pathological weirdo, which is a difficult thing to hide.)
There are, however, even more potential obstacles, besides my absurd ability to say exactly the wrong things in exactly the wrong ways, which I retain well beyond the beginning of friendship. In my malleable, solicitous, meeting-new-people state, I can end up saying things or laughing at things or possibly doing things that are disagreeable to me, in an effort to be an agreeable and apparently sane person. I could, for instance, continually repeat a simple-but-false explanation for why I’m doing whatever I’m doing; to give a specific example, I was once instructed to go with a teammate in China to help a senior German woman fix her computer, despite my total lack of computer knowledge, and for a ridiculous reason. I could not tell her why I was actually there, as the reason was too complicated and would embarrass us all, so I continually repeated the slightly-less-embarrassing reason that I had wanted to see her apartment – and felt increasingly idiotic. Once I get into these situations, it’s almost impossible for me to get myself out. Later, I groan and wish never to be confronted by those people’s version of me again, which more or less precludes ever seeing them in the future.
It’s also nearly impossible for me to interact with people of different categories at the same time; if there is a real friend about, and a new person, I find it exceedingly difficult to attend to both. I often opt for ignoring the real friend until later, when I can theoretically explain, since this seems less rude than ignoring the new person – but they are equally rude in reality, and I almost never do explain, since I find this flaw embarrassing. Add to this that my offense is proportional to my desire to not-offend: the more I would wish to talk to the real friend, the more likely I am to talk to the new person, and vice-versa. I over-compensate in an effort not to be rude, thus ending up being much ruder than I would otherwise have been.
And then there’s my personal tradition of telling people more than they ever wanted to know, directly, which is mainly under control but does return with a vengeance every so often. This may be the most horrifying of all, since unlike with my other troubles, I can’t use the excuse that they just didn’t get to know the real me; the problem is that they did.
This is a baffling set of behaviors that causes me to wonder how anyone, ever, has decided to befriend me. (Crying, mainly. I burst into tears at some point.)
But the good news is – and I’ve been told this by more than one real friend – that I improve in the knowing. So don’t give up.
I’ll get better, I swear.
I stood mute through these conversations, contributing nothing. But I must have picked up a thing or two, because sometime in adolescence, I realized that I could do it: I could meet new people.
In fact, I can be excellent at meeting new people. I can be accommodating to the point of solicitude, friendly to the point of seeming genuinely nice, especially with people I wouldn’t normally get along with or can’t relate to. I’ve developed an ability to chat, and smile, and encourage, and to ask questions that indicate an appropriate level of interest. I can even be impressive, I’ve been told, in this area.
But it’s not the core version of me. It’s like a parallel-universe-Alicia. It’s an exploration of what I would have been like as an extrovert – like trying on a wig to see what you’d be like as a redhead. It takes a lot of energy to sustain this, especially when I’m still figuring out how to relate to the new people I’m meeting. Once it’s settled into “person X likes to discuss her pet” or “person Y believes in astral body projection,” I’m usually okay. We just talk about that topic incessantly for however long I know them.
Which is not often long for people with whom I carry on these types of conversations. They rarely go anywhere, very rarely break through into some real human connection.
This is not the case with people with whom I could be real friends. In fact, I identify potential real friends often by whether I switch over into solicitude upon meeting them. If I am still myself – sarcasm and awkward-skeptical foibles intact – it’s a good sign. Still, there’s that awkward phase to get through, as in all friendships, of trying to find some way of showing that you’re interested in being friends without being a pathological weirdo; I mess this up more often than I’d like to recall. (Possibly because I am a pathological weirdo, which is a difficult thing to hide.)
There are, however, even more potential obstacles, besides my absurd ability to say exactly the wrong things in exactly the wrong ways, which I retain well beyond the beginning of friendship. In my malleable, solicitous, meeting-new-people state, I can end up saying things or laughing at things or possibly doing things that are disagreeable to me, in an effort to be an agreeable and apparently sane person. I could, for instance, continually repeat a simple-but-false explanation for why I’m doing whatever I’m doing; to give a specific example, I was once instructed to go with a teammate in China to help a senior German woman fix her computer, despite my total lack of computer knowledge, and for a ridiculous reason. I could not tell her why I was actually there, as the reason was too complicated and would embarrass us all, so I continually repeated the slightly-less-embarrassing reason that I had wanted to see her apartment – and felt increasingly idiotic. Once I get into these situations, it’s almost impossible for me to get myself out. Later, I groan and wish never to be confronted by those people’s version of me again, which more or less precludes ever seeing them in the future.
It’s also nearly impossible for me to interact with people of different categories at the same time; if there is a real friend about, and a new person, I find it exceedingly difficult to attend to both. I often opt for ignoring the real friend until later, when I can theoretically explain, since this seems less rude than ignoring the new person – but they are equally rude in reality, and I almost never do explain, since I find this flaw embarrassing. Add to this that my offense is proportional to my desire to not-offend: the more I would wish to talk to the real friend, the more likely I am to talk to the new person, and vice-versa. I over-compensate in an effort not to be rude, thus ending up being much ruder than I would otherwise have been.
And then there’s my personal tradition of telling people more than they ever wanted to know, directly, which is mainly under control but does return with a vengeance every so often. This may be the most horrifying of all, since unlike with my other troubles, I can’t use the excuse that they just didn’t get to know the real me; the problem is that they did.
This is a baffling set of behaviors that causes me to wonder how anyone, ever, has decided to befriend me. (Crying, mainly. I burst into tears at some point.)
But the good news is – and I’ve been told this by more than one real friend – that I improve in the knowing. So don’t give up.
I’ll get better, I swear.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Confessions, V
A few weeks ago, I found a crack pipe in the back room at Pizza Hut. I know whose it was.
On my first day at the paper, I strongly suspected -- and suspect -- that someone was doing drugs in the first stall of the ladies' room. I don't know who it was.
When I was little, I deliberately made a friend cry and then suggested to her that she must be crying due to her body's attempt to rid itself of excess salt and not because of what I had said, because I didn't want to get in trouble.
On my first day at the paper, I strongly suspected -- and suspect -- that someone was doing drugs in the first stall of the ladies' room. I don't know who it was.
When I was little, I deliberately made a friend cry and then suggested to her that she must be crying due to her body's attempt to rid itself of excess salt and not because of what I had said, because I didn't want to get in trouble.
Ninety-nine reasons to go to Agave Grill
When Deb and Jeff came up to visit a few weeks ago, I promised them a tour of northwest Connecticut, complete with old factory sightings and scenic routes through countryside. After stopping in Cheshire for hot chocolates from Greenwich Coffee – an independent coffee-shop offering “Mexican hot chocolate” and “Ancho Chile hot chocolate” as well as bubble teas – we headed north to Torrington, where we were to eat lunch.
It was a chilly day. This is important, because it helps to explain the grievous lapse in judgment to which I will soon admit.
We walked up the streets of downtown Torrington, looking for a place to sit and eat. There were a few places with local color, including a Nicholas Pizza (which appeared to have a little too much local color – as in, ties to the mob or some such) and a little café named after a Helen or a Hannah, but for some reason, we didn’t stop there. We headed back, instead, toward the strip-mall parking lot I had parked in, and decided to go to our back-up choice, the Ninety-Nine restaurant.
I had never been to a Ninety-Nine, though I knew it was a chain. But how bad could it be? I thought. All chains are basically the same. We won’t get anything great or unique or truly interesting, but we won’t get anything terrible, either.
But Ninety-Nine, by the end of lunch, impressed me with its ability to get almost every aspect of the bland, corporate chain-restaurant concept, wrong.
First, the menu made no sense, unless it had been designed around the idea of being moderately appealing to all of middle-class America. I ordered fish tacos, for instance (not very good, and the cilantro was horribly wilted and almost nonexistent); Deb ordered beef tips (clearly not the tips of anything, but steak, cut up); I forget what Jeff ordered – pork chops? – but I recall someone commenting on the chicken pot pie. What have these meals to do with each other? What sense of identity (even a corporate one) can be surmised from this?
The waitress, who was cheerful and bubbly, also brought us what seems to be Ninety-Nine’s signature, free appetizer: a basket of butter-flavored popcorn.
The food wasn’t very good. My fish tacos had clearly been made to suit my assumed “American” tastes, and Deb’s beef tips were large enough to necessitate cutting – but this was not nearly as ridiculous as her broccoli, which was plated intact, as in, one very large stalk of broccoli, the cutting of which ended in a gravy disaster for Deb’s sweater (which cleaned up miraculously well).
The décor was no help. Ninety-Nine had clearly, like all chain restaurants, imported sets of items to be displayed on the walls; still, there was no sense that the design teams inevitably called in for this purpose had any better idea of what should go where, or why, than a three-year-old scribbling in crayon on the hallway wallpaper.
None of the pictures or plaques or artifacts were hung crookedly. That was the up-side.
Here’s what they should have decorated with: bottles of beer. The reference to the song would have served several purposes, in addition to being the most clever decorating scheme a restaurant called “Ninety-Nine” could hope for. It would have warned us all about what to expect – a crass, slightly hick-town feel in a chain restaurant – and it would have added a sense of coherence to the theme. They could have made themselves into a brewery.
As it was, decorations seemed to have no common theme. Unlike at Pizza Hut, where large photos of Italy adorn the walls, or Chili’s, where there’s at least an effort at displaying southwestern memorabilia, looking at the objects on Ninety-nine’s walls was like looking through a trunk in your grandmother’s attic – in a bad way. There was one sign that made a saucy reference to Lizzie Borden’s school of etiquette, and many of the objects were made to look antique-American; but in the corner of the room, suspended from the ceiling, was a TV showing baseball spring training. What do sports have to do with Lizzie-Borden-type Americana? (This is a rhetorical question.)
The plaque reciting the creation story of the restaurant revealed that the incoherence likely dated back to the first, probably charming restaurant, which had (for no reason, or for personal ones) a horseshoe nailed around the name; thus, the horseshoe had become the corporate logo when the business became franchised.
I once visited Bird In Hand, PA, with my grandmother, and stopped at a barn sale. A man – possibly an Amish man – had died, and all of his things were being sold out of the barn in which he kept them. Fascinatingly, the man had kept what looked like every single newspaper he had ever read; the rest of his things offered similar insights into his character: LPs, old blankets, glass bottles from decades ago. I bought an old, empty bottle of Dr Pepper and one of 7-up, likely from the 70s (or whenever 7-up’s motto was “You like it. It likes you.”), which I still have. I was very happy with the barn sale, the items inside, and my purchase. I like these sorts of haphazard, idiosyncratic experiences.
But imagine that a corporation had noticed the popularity of the barn sale and decided to franchise it. Across the country, you would find “Amish Barn Sale” buildings going up, concrete but with stressed wooden facades to make them look authentic; inside, you would find novelty newspapers, probably sorted so that you could find your birthdate, and definitely overpriced. What had been a window into one man’s personal (packrat) habits would become a vehicle for corporate interests: that Dr Pepper bottle would be a Dr Pepper ad, as all “nostalgia”-based, ye-olde-style, mass-produced items are. Soon, “Amish Barn Sale” stores would be in the malls next to Abercrombies or Old Navys or Gaps. It would be disgusting.
We left Ninety-Nine and drove around the hills of Litchfield and Torrington and New Hartford, saw some old factories and a sugar shack, and went home.
The next day, having failed to drive to Boston in the several inches of overnight snow, we debated where to eat. I had recently noticed a new restaurant on the road-that-is-a-strip-mall, Queen’s St., in Southington; I had noticed it because it was an Agave Grill, the restaurant I had taken a friend to, in Hartford, right before she moved to Kyrgyzstan this fall. I had assumed that Agave was a single restaurant, and though seeing another instance of it made me suspicious of franchising, my friend and I had had a good time there, so I suggested that Deb, Jeff and I try it out.
When we arrived, the greeter informed us that there were “plenty of seats on the patio” – a joke, since the patio was covered in snow – and we laughed. When we sat down, our waitress, Michelle, came over and immediately enchanted us with her unselfconscious banter and apparent intelligence. She was so impressive, in fact, that Debbie suggested we hire her as a “consultant waitress”: “Oh, no,” Deb said, as though speaking to waitstaff at another restaurant. “We’ve brought our own waitress.”
The food was pretty good, well-plated and nicely presented. The atmosphere was coherent and low-key, allowing people to focus on each other rather than a crazy décor. They did not offer us popcorn.
As we left Agave Grill, satisfied with our experience as a whole and charmed by the staff, a man coming into the restaurant noticed Deb and I and said, as he swung wide the door, “Ladies” – as in, “I’ll hold the door for you.” As Jeff appeared behind us and came through the door, the man said “But not you,” pretended to let the door go, and laughed. We all laughed.
But we never did ask Michelle if she would free-lance for us.
Maybe next time.
Deborah Harbin contributed to the writing of this post.
It was a chilly day. This is important, because it helps to explain the grievous lapse in judgment to which I will soon admit.
We walked up the streets of downtown Torrington, looking for a place to sit and eat. There were a few places with local color, including a Nicholas Pizza (which appeared to have a little too much local color – as in, ties to the mob or some such) and a little café named after a Helen or a Hannah, but for some reason, we didn’t stop there. We headed back, instead, toward the strip-mall parking lot I had parked in, and decided to go to our back-up choice, the Ninety-Nine restaurant.
I had never been to a Ninety-Nine, though I knew it was a chain. But how bad could it be? I thought. All chains are basically the same. We won’t get anything great or unique or truly interesting, but we won’t get anything terrible, either.
But Ninety-Nine, by the end of lunch, impressed me with its ability to get almost every aspect of the bland, corporate chain-restaurant concept, wrong.
First, the menu made no sense, unless it had been designed around the idea of being moderately appealing to all of middle-class America. I ordered fish tacos, for instance (not very good, and the cilantro was horribly wilted and almost nonexistent); Deb ordered beef tips (clearly not the tips of anything, but steak, cut up); I forget what Jeff ordered – pork chops? – but I recall someone commenting on the chicken pot pie. What have these meals to do with each other? What sense of identity (even a corporate one) can be surmised from this?
The waitress, who was cheerful and bubbly, also brought us what seems to be Ninety-Nine’s signature, free appetizer: a basket of butter-flavored popcorn.
The food wasn’t very good. My fish tacos had clearly been made to suit my assumed “American” tastes, and Deb’s beef tips were large enough to necessitate cutting – but this was not nearly as ridiculous as her broccoli, which was plated intact, as in, one very large stalk of broccoli, the cutting of which ended in a gravy disaster for Deb’s sweater (which cleaned up miraculously well).
The décor was no help. Ninety-Nine had clearly, like all chain restaurants, imported sets of items to be displayed on the walls; still, there was no sense that the design teams inevitably called in for this purpose had any better idea of what should go where, or why, than a three-year-old scribbling in crayon on the hallway wallpaper.
None of the pictures or plaques or artifacts were hung crookedly. That was the up-side.
Here’s what they should have decorated with: bottles of beer. The reference to the song would have served several purposes, in addition to being the most clever decorating scheme a restaurant called “Ninety-Nine” could hope for. It would have warned us all about what to expect – a crass, slightly hick-town feel in a chain restaurant – and it would have added a sense of coherence to the theme. They could have made themselves into a brewery.
As it was, decorations seemed to have no common theme. Unlike at Pizza Hut, where large photos of Italy adorn the walls, or Chili’s, where there’s at least an effort at displaying southwestern memorabilia, looking at the objects on Ninety-nine’s walls was like looking through a trunk in your grandmother’s attic – in a bad way. There was one sign that made a saucy reference to Lizzie Borden’s school of etiquette, and many of the objects were made to look antique-American; but in the corner of the room, suspended from the ceiling, was a TV showing baseball spring training. What do sports have to do with Lizzie-Borden-type Americana? (This is a rhetorical question.)
The plaque reciting the creation story of the restaurant revealed that the incoherence likely dated back to the first, probably charming restaurant, which had (for no reason, or for personal ones) a horseshoe nailed around the name; thus, the horseshoe had become the corporate logo when the business became franchised.
I once visited Bird In Hand, PA, with my grandmother, and stopped at a barn sale. A man – possibly an Amish man – had died, and all of his things were being sold out of the barn in which he kept them. Fascinatingly, the man had kept what looked like every single newspaper he had ever read; the rest of his things offered similar insights into his character: LPs, old blankets, glass bottles from decades ago. I bought an old, empty bottle of Dr Pepper and one of 7-up, likely from the 70s (or whenever 7-up’s motto was “You like it. It likes you.”), which I still have. I was very happy with the barn sale, the items inside, and my purchase. I like these sorts of haphazard, idiosyncratic experiences.
But imagine that a corporation had noticed the popularity of the barn sale and decided to franchise it. Across the country, you would find “Amish Barn Sale” buildings going up, concrete but with stressed wooden facades to make them look authentic; inside, you would find novelty newspapers, probably sorted so that you could find your birthdate, and definitely overpriced. What had been a window into one man’s personal (packrat) habits would become a vehicle for corporate interests: that Dr Pepper bottle would be a Dr Pepper ad, as all “nostalgia”-based, ye-olde-style, mass-produced items are. Soon, “Amish Barn Sale” stores would be in the malls next to Abercrombies or Old Navys or Gaps. It would be disgusting.
We left Ninety-Nine and drove around the hills of Litchfield and Torrington and New Hartford, saw some old factories and a sugar shack, and went home.
The next day, having failed to drive to Boston in the several inches of overnight snow, we debated where to eat. I had recently noticed a new restaurant on the road-that-is-a-strip-mall, Queen’s St., in Southington; I had noticed it because it was an Agave Grill, the restaurant I had taken a friend to, in Hartford, right before she moved to Kyrgyzstan this fall. I had assumed that Agave was a single restaurant, and though seeing another instance of it made me suspicious of franchising, my friend and I had had a good time there, so I suggested that Deb, Jeff and I try it out.
When we arrived, the greeter informed us that there were “plenty of seats on the patio” – a joke, since the patio was covered in snow – and we laughed. When we sat down, our waitress, Michelle, came over and immediately enchanted us with her unselfconscious banter and apparent intelligence. She was so impressive, in fact, that Debbie suggested we hire her as a “consultant waitress”: “Oh, no,” Deb said, as though speaking to waitstaff at another restaurant. “We’ve brought our own waitress.”
The food was pretty good, well-plated and nicely presented. The atmosphere was coherent and low-key, allowing people to focus on each other rather than a crazy décor. They did not offer us popcorn.
As we left Agave Grill, satisfied with our experience as a whole and charmed by the staff, a man coming into the restaurant noticed Deb and I and said, as he swung wide the door, “Ladies” – as in, “I’ll hold the door for you.” As Jeff appeared behind us and came through the door, the man said “But not you,” pretended to let the door go, and laughed. We all laughed.
But we never did ask Michelle if she would free-lance for us.
Maybe next time.
Deborah Harbin contributed to the writing of this post.
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