I'm Growing a Beard

Thoughts on "East of Eden" and Reading in General

2010-10-21T13:20:00.005-04:00

This morning I finished reading John Steinbeck's epic novel, "East of Eden." I had been reading this book for about a month and finally put it to rest even though I didn't want it to end. If I had my way this book would just go on and on, and every time I turned to the last page another page would materialize. This fantasy would actually sort of be in line with one of the book's messages. The book covers two full generations of Californians, from 1880ish to 1918, and when it ends the reader is aware that there will only be more Americans committing the same sins and good deeds and no matter what translating those deeds into guilt and absolution and self-loathing. The reader becomes aware that he/she, too, is descended from ancestors who were complicit in murder and theft and material exploitation, and that he/she, too, is responsible for making the decision of how he will live his life in these events' aftermaths and whether or not he will let the past destroy him.

I won't go any further into the themes or the lessons or the plot of the book, since I don't want to ruin it for anyone or discourage anyone from reading it with my vague and silly philosophical ramblings. I will say that, in my brother's words, "East of Eden" has everything you could possibly want in a book. It's better than "Grapes of Wrath" and better than "Of Mice and Men" and better than "Tortilla Flat." It's probably better than everything else Steinbeck has ever written, too, but I can't say this for sure since I've only read those three others plus "The Pearl" in 9th grade, which is also good.

I love reading because it is always challenging, in ways that digesting any other medium of art is not. I love (and hate) how it usually takes a considerable amount of effort to actually pick up a book and read it, when you could be doing other things for pleasure. I recommend a lot of books to my friends, and when they fail to read not just these recommendations but anything else, they say it's because they're just too busy. At the risk of sounding incredibly snobby and self-righteous, I'm going to say that the reason people don't read is not because they're too busy, but because it is difficult to want to put forth the effort to read in a fulfilling way. Whoever invented the thriller, the page-turner, did so I think to rebel against literature's tendency to be just plain hard, like anything that makes you more intelligent. These thriller writers invented a way for people to read without having to work as hard. I love a good page turner; who doesn't? It's like the swing carousel at an amusement park: no lines, no risk, nothing but pleasure.

Perhaps like any obsessive reader, I read in spurts. Some months I read six books, some I barely read one. I've found that the amount of reading I do has little correlation with how busy I am. Some of my most productive reading has been done when I was terribly busy with work. I think this is because free time does not inspire a person to read; rather, it's the quality and the accessibility of the book that makes us want to turn pages.

It would be unfair if I didn't mention that one reason I feel the way I do is because I've always loved reading. It's one of my comfort activities, as instilled by my parents at an extremely young age. I have this advantage, this privilege, that reading has always had a positive and enriching association in my mind.

Some people get stuck on books for months, and they blame it on their lack of time. I think this is such an illusion. The reason people don't read their books is because they aren't into them. If you find that you're having trouble opening your book every night, it's probably because you don't like it all that much. My suggestion would be to find something that does motivate you to open it, to do the work of deciphering long sentences and complicated plotlines and grand themes.

Musical Theater

2010-07-26T09:20:00.004-04:00

In tenth grade I go out on a limb and volunteer my services for the school musical. The director hands me a 400 page score and tells me I have two weeks before rehearsals start and I better have the songs learned by then.

I go home and start practicing. The syncopated rhythms in the left hand are at such odds with the straight cadences in the right that for the first week I play it at the tempo of a boisterous death march and my mother refuses to call what I've signed up for "music." There are so many pages in the score that I believe I will never even get to the end let alone succeed at learning the whole thing, I'm not good enough and there are not enough hours in the day. Funny that I never took to learning music with this awestruck and thus painstaking approach before. This musical demoralizes and excites me at the same time. I am intimidated and at the same time burdened with the understanding that everyone is counting on me.

All my friends in high school are cool because they play football and basketball and baseball; we are a jock culture unambiguously. When I joined things like the band, the math club and the science olympiad team, I was not so cool anymore. Now that I've joined the school play I am so uncool that I'm starting to think I might be cool again. My jock friends tell me they're coming to see the show. My teachers, intrigued, tell me it's nice to hear me playing the grand piano in the school auditorium during study hall. I'm puzzled as to why I tell my friends with an air of proud obligation that I can't come over after school to play video games because I've got rehearsal.

Finally having worked up to a certain competency with some of the numbers in the show, I let slip to the director that "Steven Sondheim is a lunatic." No, he says, appalled. You just still don't understand him. Keep practicing. In person I dismiss the director's criticism but when I go home I do just that, I practice, incessantly. I've never practiced so much. Now my mother is starting to hear melodies in the music; I'm hearing them in my sleep. The pages in my score start falling out because I've whipped them back and forth so many times that the binder holes rip. I go to the drug store and buy 300 reinforcements and spend two hours one Saturday afternoon sticking them on while my mother and brother carry out the lawn furniture in anticipation of spring. Now when I turn the pages quickly they don't fly off the stand one after another creating a heap on the floor.

The director yells. He upbraids us. He gets furious when the actors don't listen, don't care. I can tell when they don't care enough to remember his directions; it happens when we've been rehearsing for too long and they need a break but he is so possessed by this show that he feels he must press on. He is earning a reputation for being a brutal dictator. Sitting beside him at the piano, below the stage in the pit, I empathize with my classmates as they blunder around above me exhausted yet mostly I take the director's side. Why won't they listen? Why won't they be quiet backstage? We're trying to put a show together here. We're trying to be great. This is the most challenging thing any of us have tried to do in our short guided lives. Take five, he says, and slams the door of his office. Take ten, he says, and goes up to the catwalks to talk to the lighting people, also students, who are into the tech work. During the school day I see people who I'm still just getting to know, who are part of the show. We have this unlikely bond and we exchange a silent acknowledgment, in math class across the room, in the cafeteria line, walking past each other's lockers between classes, it feels like we all belong to a secret society that the rest of the school does not know about. Take five, the director says and storms out of the auditorium to yell into the school's courtyard. I accompany my friends to the vending machines, we buy a bag of chips and talk about the show. We rehearse every day after school until six. In the final weeks of the show we're rehearsing until 8 or 9. Nobody goes home, nobody wants to. After rehearsal we find excuses, we go to the diner and talk, we give rides to people who live 20 minutes away in the woods and we make the longest trips first so the other an stay in the car as long as possible.

I'm still not practicing enough. The score is too hard. The director threatens to hire one of his professional friends to help out on the piano if I don't get my act together. There are still five, six, seven crucial songs that I'm faking, unconvincingly (nothing can get past the director but most other people can't tell the difference). My practice sessions are reinvigorated; when I get home long after dinner I just go to the piano. Schoolwork might as well not exist, I'm discovering it doesn't even matter. I'll finish my homework it in study hall. I'll finish it in class. I'll finish it when I finish it, or I won't. The director's friend never comes--maybe he wouldn't do it for free?--but now the director threatens to call the music teacher at our middle school to help out. No, I say, I'll learn it. Give me another chance. I can do it. Prove it, he says. Okay I will. I don't prove it. The middle school music teacher comes and sits in on a rehearsal. He plays the piano while I play the electric keyboard. He is far worse than me. Wrong notes everywhere. The next day I'm the solo pianist again.

We postpone the show for a week. It's still not any good, the director tells us after he sits us all down across the stage one afternoon. He is seated in the first row of the house, we are all dangling our feet off the edge of the stage, in rest position. Good thing we have the luxury of the snow date weekend, he says. People will still come if it's a week later. Now let's get to work.

Rehearsals are frantic, focused, laborious. People are building scenery and drilling nails and painting behind the actors as we rehearse. It's hard to hear some of the lines, especially Jack's song and much of Cinderella's dialogue. Far above on the catwalks a light breaks. During study halls I come to the auditorium just to hang out with the other students who are working on the set. If we have a substitute teacher I just skip the class. I go up to the spotlight booth and talk with the two lighting guys about biology. I go to the art studio and paint the Beanstalk with the people working on the scenery. I continue a rock-paper-scissors tournament with my friend Jon the propmaster. I climb the catwalks just to see if I know my way yet. I go to the piano while the director is on stage perched atop the Baker's House painting it slate gray, and I start playing the princes' big duet. I sing the first verse in my tenor and right before the second verse I wonder if the second prince will come in on cue. I get chills: the director enters punctually, his tenor voice dwarfing mine. We sing the choruses together. I look around, is anyone else listening? Of course they are, they are all over the theater, in the lighting booth, behind the stage, in the audience talking. Why aren't the real princes here listening to this right now?

The director is the greatest musician I've ever known. I am fifteen, rebellious, full of myself and my own talent, but in his presence I have only humility. He waves his arms at me, the only member of his pit. I know exactly what he wants before he conducts it. I play exactly the style he wants. I read his mind and he doesn't even smile, he has come to expect this. I know when to play melody to help out the singers. I have almost learned the whole show competently. Still want to call up the middle school music teacher? I ask. The director scowls at me.

Four days before the show we get two feet of snow. We cannot legally rehearse at school. Little Red Riding Hood invites the entire cast over to her house. I trudge across town in my snowshoes, in the peaceful blizzard, up and over hills and through town and past the school, where I look for the director's car. There are no cars on the roads. We order pizza and rehearse all morning, I have to conduct and I tell myself one day I will learn how so it's easier to cue the singers. The singers are still off, and I play the right notes and explain that they're off. They don't seem to hear the difference. How do I get them to sing it right? Two days before the show at the tech rehearsal the director says it's so bad he's embarrassed to put it on. I don't think it's so bad, only there's no energy in the cast. They're tired. The day before the show at the dress rehearsal we've asked some family friends and teachers to sit in the house and watch. The cast is rejuvenated, all they need is someone to watch them and suddenly the performance is incentivized. The director is proud of us. It's ready, he says. This is a show, he says.

We perform the show for two nights and one day. In the future I will become interested in how the dynamic of the show changes for each performance. The director tells me during intermission that Friday night's opening is always the most nervy and conservatively acted, Saturday's is always the smoothest, Sunday's matinee usually exemplifies hideous regression. He tells me Friday's audience is always the biggest, Saturday's is the rowdiest, Sunday's is the most comatose (all the grandparents come). I play well for each performance. My social studies teacher comes up to me afterward and tells me she cannot believe what she's seen. An old lady comes up to me and tells me it might as well have been on Broadway, which I don't buy. My parents embrace me. The cast mixes in with the audience after each show as is tradition. We pose for photographs, me in my black-on-black pit attire, the actors in their wolf suits and regal robes and heavy pink makeup. After each show we sit in booths at the diner until the early morning. After the last show we go to Cinderella's house and smoke pot and play games and sing the show for two days straight since another blizzard hits and cancels school until the following Wednesday.

A musical is like an album because there are a lot of songs composed by one artist and you end up learning all of it. It's like a book because there is an endless supply of information and wonderment inside. A musical is both of these combined, it is twenty songs acted out into stories. Playing for a musical is like playing classical or jazz piano except it's not about the pianist anymore, it's about the show. The accompanist and the singer have one of the most complicated and intimate relationships that people can have. We both rely on each other and we both are always listening. I am playing, doing, but mostly I'm just listening. If I'm not listening then the ship goes down, fast, hard and calamitously. I thought I knew teamwork when I played soccer.

After the show ended I found myself sitting at home with nothing to do, and I was dejected and I lacked personal meaning, and I could only go to the piano and play the songs myself but it wasn't the same and I started to tire of the music like my parents had two months ago. Now that it's over when I see the director we talk about our next show. He's already brimming with ideas. He doesn't ask my opinion because he knows I still know relatively nothing about theater but that I will be on board with whatever he decides. The cast and I will spend the next two years talking about what this show felt like. I will spend the rest of my life accompanying and directing musicals always trying to replicate the experience.

I Am Traffic: Biking in Denver

2010-06-23T22:04:00.004-04:00

The city of Denver held its annual "Bike to Work Day" today, June 23. Though I did not have to work until noon I woke up at 6:30am anyway and "biked to work" with thousands of others. After all, I've been biking to work ever since I moved here sans automobile in October. I wasn't going to miss finally feeling as though I might possibly be part of a majority.

The first leg of my route was the 37 straightaway blocks via the 16th Street bike lane that led me down to Civic Center Park, which is the large stretch of green space that is boxed by the Denver Public Library to the south, the Colorado State Capitol Building to the east, the Colorado State House to the west and the Denver Post headquarters due north. About halfway to this first checkpoint I encountered a woman standing on the side of the road holding out her hand at me. At first I really believed she was trying to hitchhike on my back. But as I approached her I saw she was holding out a trail mix bar. "Bike to Work Day!" she shouted. "Have a Clif bar!"

All morning long I came across these types. At Civic Center Park I was mobbed by street vendors, chain restaurant promoters, radio emcees, and nondescript friendly people all trying to give me free things to eat, drink, or read. I feasted on coffee, bagels, bananas, apples, iced tea, chips, and of course more trail mix bars. I ate and pocketed enough to render my packed lunch unnecessary, six hours later when I actually was at work. Everywhere I looked there were bikes leaning up against fences, laying on the ground, or being wheeled around as their rider collected his/her rightful bounty. Most had their own bikes but I was humored to see that some people had patronized the Denver Bike Share program--the first of its kind in a major US city, implemented in April of this year--and were using the giant red Denver cruiser bikes to commute to work.

"Here," said one woman as I passed her, "take this free Denver bike map."

"Oh," I said, accepting it. "Thanks a lot. This is exactly what I've been looking for for months."

"And here," she said, "take this free water bottle."

"Thanks again," I said, and bewildered by the fact that I had no free hands or space left I added, "this is a little overwhelming."

"Better than last year, isn't it?"

"This is my first year, actually. This is my first year in Denver."

"Ohhhh," she smiled, as if we were now both let in on the same secret. "Welcome to Bike to Work Day!"

I continued on, through the region of Denver that is downtown, diagonal-shaped in contrast with the rest of the city's plain grid. I took the Cherry Creek bike path, a wide no-cars highway that zips below Speer Parkway that essentially splits the city in two. There were so many bikers on it this morning that it was unsafe for runners. I took it to Confluence Park, where the Cherry Creek flows into the larger South Platte River, stopped at another breakfast station for some more fruit and bagels, and then finally finished my commute by heading to a coffee shop to watch the US take on Algeria in World Cup soccer. Eventually I made it to work.

*****
I almost didn't register online for Bike To Work Day due to the fact that the annual event is part of my daily grind. I heard that it was happening and initially my attitude was a little defiant and a little cynical. "Nice that everyone else is finally going to join me," I said to myself.

I admit that I am fairly self-righteous in my decision, eight months ago, to not get a car when I moved to a city of the American West that has virtually no train system that is useful to commuters, a bus system that is overpriced and underfunded, a whole lot of roads, a whole lot of cars and a whole lot of square feet. Winter came early in eastern Colorado and the bitter early mornings saw me biking five miles to the school where I worked, taking the main byways to avoid the stop and go city traffic of the lesser roads, sharing pavement with irascible SUV gunners, getting the horn consistently. I would arrive at school and my coworkers would see my snow-pelted pants, my half rosy and half sweaty face, and they would frown, confused. "Wait... did you...?" On the most tempestuous or brutally cold days I could not bike, it wasn't physically possible, so I took the bus, but for the majority of the time it was just me on two wheels all the way until June (I bused for the equivalent of about a month and a half out of seven). I didn't really get sick of it; the morning workout was appreciated and the afternoon de-stressing was nice. I probably saved a lot of money on gas and spared the atmosphere a lot of carbon monoxide, I don't really feel like calculating it. The one accident I got in was from riding with no hands on uneven sidewalk going less than a mile and hour. Etcetra etcetra. I feel accomplished in many ways.

But for most of that time I felt bitter, too. Bitter at people in cars who scowled and yelled at me for taking up half a lane even though there were two more available, as if I had inconvenienced them by making them decelerate, hit turn signal, check blind spot, change lane, accelerate again, while I pedal furiously trying to keep my hands warm while most of all ensuring that I don't suffer a death by sideswiping. Bitter at the people who drove their car three blocks to the store because it was a little too cold out. Bitter at the exhaust I was inhaling constantly. Bitter at the rough, unpaved shoulders of roads to which I was often relegated and had to ride over slowly in order to save my tires. Bitter at the aggressive drivers who refused to let me merge into their lane for a moment when they watched me come upon a parked car in my "bike lane" and have nowhere to go. Bitter at the people who sat in their toasty, leather interior-ed cars, a coffee in one hand and their favorite music playing on the stereo, and looking as angry and impatient as possible because they caught a red light. Because they had to wait a little while. Because some stupid biker is to their right waiting for the light to change also so he can dart forward and possibly get in the way for a split second.

For the record, I don't think that everyone should bike to work, rather I understand that this year I was lucky enough to work close enough to my house that biking there was feasible. I also understand that I'm lucky enough to be in good health and that I have comparatively few responsibilities in my homelife which enables me to spend that extra 15, 20 minutes commuting just so I can conserve energy and do it with my legs as my only engine. I'm bitter only in a very irrational way. I want everyone I know to bike to work every day with me, and I'm happy to report that not only did many of my friends do so this morning, but they do it each morning just like me. Here in Denver our transportation culture is not yet ready to draw comparisons to the massive bike community in European cities like Amsterdam or Copenhagen, but Bike To Work Day is a start. Even before the US advanced to the next round of the World Cup by beating Algeria on a miracle goal in the 91st minute this morning, I had already confirmed this day as one of the best days of my eight months here, because I witnessed bikers utterly inundating the Denver streets with their presence in a way that probably made automobile drivers feel a little left out. No, Denver is no Amsterdam, but Boston, New York, Washington DC are no Denver, either. The omnipresence of this city's bike paths, lanes, riders and general enthusiasm is something to get excited about.

In Memoriam: Morris Borenstein (died April 11, 2010, age 90)

2010-04-22T20:44:00.008-04:00

At my very first lesson with Mr. Morris Borenstein I sat down in front of the piano and he asked me to play something that I knew well. I was in sixth grade and I played him some piece out of "Applause, Book 1," the only thing I thought might be acceptable for this 75 year-old Juilliard trained master who mostly taught only prodigies or children who practiced four hours a day and knew they would grow up to become concert pianists. While I performed the piece I looked over to see Mr. Borenstein looking away, not as though he were lost in thought, overwhelmed by the beauty of my playing, but rather staring impatiently toward the ground, his mind entirely in the now. "All right," he said after a while.

"Was it good?" I asked.

"No," he said, as if I had asked him if two plus two was five. Later he would use this analogy on me, repeatedly. "You've played that note wrong the last three times, Jerald, why don't you ever stop and fix it. It's like your teacher asked you what two plus two is and you said 'Five,' and she said, 'No, try again,' and you said 'How about five.'"

To these criticisms of his I rarely played the part of the penitent model student. I imagined the other students of such a highly reputed teacher were deeply apologetic or silent in their shame and obedience when Borenstein told them something was not right. I thought about how much realer and more human I was than they were, he would correct me and instead of nodding and putting in the hard work to fix my mistakes I would fire back a lighthearted retort and play the cool, lackadaisical card. I wasn't like his other students. I didn't want to be a concert pianist.

In our first year Morris told me how his parents wouldn't let him become a musician because they didn't want him to be poor; he became one anyway. Only once did Morris ask me if I wanted to be a professional player. I said no, not because I had thought about it at all but because his vivid anecdotes scared me. For all I knew he was satisfied with my decision, although he would sometimes say as an aside during our lessons, if only you practiced more you could have so much potential. Back then I didn't perceive it as cliche.

All the while in the back of his mind I knew he was always thinking, if you're not going to commit yourself, then why the hell are you still coming here each week?

In tenth grade I mentioned to my band director at school that I was probably quitting piano lessons soon so I wouldn't have to miss Wednesday's musical theater rehearsals (I was always the accompanist) anymore. He said, shocked and disgusted, "Why would you ever do that." That was the last time I ever mentioned quitting piano to anyone. I kept seeing Mr. Borenstein every week, kept enduring an hour of his rancid breath and crabby lectures. I kept practicing my lesson, not as much as his other students but a whole lot by my standards. I improved. Sometimes I practiced an hour a day. Mr. Borenstein gave me guarded praise and new music. In the three years before I went to college we tackled Beethoven sonatas and Schubert impromptus. My parents were vocal in their sarcastic bewilderment every time I sat down at the piano and worked on the same four measures for fifteen minutes. In my mind I kept summoning the image of young Ludwig V. B. practicing all through the night, in tears because his father forced him to do it. I knew that to him the pressure had probably been brutal, but for me in the 21st century the concept was so romantic, with a capital R or without. The payoff would be when I showed up for my lesson and could play half a page of a Bach fugue flawlessly. So smug, I didn't say anything, just waited to see Morris' reaction. "Well what about the rest of it," he only said.

To Morris I was a knucklehead worthy of little more than a smart whack on the back of the hands with his number two pencil. "I used to be the fastest pencil in the west," he always said, and I believed him even though he understandably never pulled the stunt on me. His arthritis didn't permit him to play Chopin anymore let alone punish the errant hands of teenage piano students. Through his businesslike demeanor I knew he found me endearing. "At least you're not as bad as your father," he always said. He had been wronged by my dad in a way that made my chronic habit of settling seem like a mere case of the hiccups: at age eleven my father had chosen the accordion over the piano when his mother gave him the single-instrument ultimatum. "I'll never forgive him for that," Morris said, and my dad and I still believe he was not joking. He flinched whenever I brought up the accordion during a lesson. "That goddamned instrument," he would mutter and change the subject.

After I graduated I took more lessons in college which may or may not have been a waste of money, because I was again preoccupied with, well, everything else. It wasn't until senior year, 21 years old and the first time since age 4 that I was not someone's piano student, that I actually began to work for hours at a time in closet practice rooms, thinking fondly and regretfully of Morris. Wondering why it was so long after the fact that I resolved to dedicate myself. I finally tackled pieces Morris had wanted for me but had known were unattainable with my dismal ethic. I began to figure out how to play jazz. Using Morris' practicing strategies I found I could learn anything.

I dream of playing for him but really I know that if he heard where I am now he'd just smile and tell me what his teacher always told him: "Why all the mistakes?" My whole life I have had the problem of listening to myself with what he called "rose-colored ear horns," though I'm still not exactly sure what those are. In a way you could say I am following in his footsteps; I am not a pianist in the sense that he was but I am a teacher, and like him every day I cannot help but hold children to standards higher than they could ever envision for themselves. It is not always to my benefit. Even the nicest kids have mean streaks of obstinacy, sometimes not even on account of that typical childhood myopia but simply just because they revel in their blithe, flawed self-sufficiency. I always understood what Morris was talking about but I could never relate to him, and thus I never bothered to take his frustrations seriously. But luckily I did listen, and listen well. Though I haven't seen him since I was 17, these last few years I've listened the most. His ethos is still with me, and though I'll never play the piano as well as he knew I could, against all odds his methods only sharpen in my own conceptualization and practice. He left an unlikely mark on me, a mark that I am proud to carry.

Eventide (and Plainsong)

2010-03-18T19:40:00.005-04:00

Book Review: Eventide by Kent Haruf

The sequel to Plainsong (Haruf's powerful 1999 novel that was a finalist for the National Book Award that year), Eventide is just as good. Until you read Plainsong I would say you shouldn't pick up Eventide, but I assure you both are well worth it. The story once again takes place in the fictitious town of Holt, located in the northeastern plains of Colorado, and centers around two old brothers who live together on their cattle ranch outside the town, and the 19 year-old girl whom they took in in the first novel after she was banished from her own house by her mother who did not approve of the baby she was carrying.

I read a lot of books and I don't usually write about them on here unless they are classics. Which is to say I really think Kent Haruf is a classy writer. His sentences look and sound a lot more like Hemingway's, however he is much more reminiscent of the master William Faulkner in his subject matter. Haruf is interested in portraying some chronically ignored American voices; the dirt poor, mentally handicapped, angry and/or neglected preadolescents, primary and secondary public school educators both passionate and disillusioned. The books supposedly read more like massive, interconnected short stories, maybe like Winesburg, Ohio, but really there is no mistaking Eventide for the ambitious novel that it truly is.

Eventide is about small town tragedy, the kind that happens every day that everyone hears about but no one really acknowledges as tragedy. The dysfunction that children see in their schools, their communities and their homes every day and night but that has become glossed over by we who gossip about it just because it is all so commonplace--irresponsible parent figures, bullying, harrassment, abuse. And the thing about it is that Haruf, I don't think, is calling for a grand addressing or confrontation of these issues, rather he is only trying to make us see that this is what happens every day in our school districts, that this is what kind of human beings we are and that we need to understand it before we make the big decisions like starting a family or assuming responsibility for something we are not capable of controlling. Really, the book is devoid of morality. Summoning that Hemingwayesque approach Haruf is only writing down observations, recording the cause-and-effects that befall us all the time.
Although Eventide and Plainsong are two novels that deal with very difficult subject matter, the book is not hard to read at all, in fact it's quite therapeutic. Reading these books is like standing in the middle of the country and just looking around and seeing omnipotently. Haruf's narration is entirely without frills--there is no insight into the characters' thoughts or motivations--but at the same time beautifully rich in description of place, whether it be a diseased trailer home or the vast high plains.

I can't talk up these books and this author enough. If you're living in the United States in the 21st century, with kids or around kids or around normal people every day, then I think you need to give Haruf's work an honest read.

Crime and Punishment

2010-02-12T17:34:00.005-05:00

Book review: Crime and Punishment by Feodor Dostoevsky

This one won't be long since I will not pretend that I have a firm grasp of this book after finishing it on my own, without the benefit of commentary or analytical essays or the guidance of a college course. I've tried to give myself some time to think about it, to let it settle in, since finishing it four days ago, but I don't think I'll have any more tremendous revelations.

Notably, this is the second epic novel I've read so far this year that takes place around 1865 (see the review of McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove"... not that there are any real similarities between the two). Basically a twentysomething from St. Petersburg who has dropped out of law school decides that it would be moral to commit murder if the person he murdered was a despicable, greedy, awful citizen, since overall the person's absence would theoretically be more philanthropic to more people than if the person otherwise continued to live. He goes through with the murder, which is sort of a prelude to the real substance of the book, where Raskolnikov meets a whole cast of unbelievably unique individuals, goes through crazy inner turmoil and strides the seemingly fine line between insanity and coherence, and contemplates turning himself in.

In C & P, Dostoevsky has a wide variety of characters with subtle differences in personality and ideology. The reader's challenge is to decide which characters Dostoevsky is sympathetic towards, and which economic and political ideologies he believes in. At the center of the book is the issue of if and how a society can be just and organized when there is economic disparity. A student of philosophy, economic theory and/or history (i.e. someone well versed in socialism, utilitarianism, anarchism, nihilism) would be more affected by the ideas discussed in this book than I was. That said I did understand, in a basic sense, and was excited by Dostoevsky's discussions, as long as I remembered to read slowly.

Maybe in 10 or 15 years when I have a better grasp of the nuances and the historical documentation of these ideologies I will reread Dostoevsky's first great work and enjoy it even more. I guess I highly recommend C & P to anyone with a desire to learn.

Avatar

2010-02-06T11:54:00.006-05:00

Movie Review: Avatar directed by James Cameron

So I finally got around to seeing what I suppose will be the favorite for the 2009 Oscar for Best Picture (though I haven't seen any of the other nominees except for "Up," which may or may not have been better; it's sort of like comparing apples to oranges). I don't want to make this review too long or comprehensive, so I'll try to stick to some main points.

I left the theater feeling pretty sore, sad and angry. My initial protest was that such a blatant, transparent parable cannot possibly end the feel-good way it did. Of course it wasn't feel-good at all, and the friends with whom I saw it reminded me of this as we talked about it on the car ride home. Jake Sully and the Na'vi do win the day, but the more immediate thing that any conscious person will take away from that movie is the way it flushes out and vividly, steadily details the atrocities any imperialist nation commits when it decides it will exploit the resources of an indigenous people for wealth. Yet, I felt insulted that "Avatar" could have the nerve to posit an outcome where nature does quench technology, indigenous peoples can subdue the richer, more powerful, more numerous conquerors, and most of all, where after the initial fight is over, the Americans don't just return with more troops and more zeal and more destruction, when anyone who has paid attention in school or really, in their everyday life, knows that this is not how it ever ends. It ends with no redemption, no silver lining; there is only genocide and more economic polarity and few consequences for the aggressors.

At the same time, I did really enjoy the movie for its thematic undertakings. This is one of the most clear outcries against colonialism I've ever seen in film, and I do believe that it can go far to spread awareness among younger generations. Any elementary, middle or high school teacher could viably teach "Avatar" and engage minds that would otherwise be resistant to and bored with the usual moralizing via straight world history. Merely telling kids about what Andrew Jackson did to the Native Americans somehow doesn't seem as effective as doing a unit on "Avatar," in terms of helping them understand how high the stakes are when a country like the U.S. invades a country like Iraq, no matter what the officially stated goals or the media's treatment of our rationale might be. Some, incidentally, may argue that "Avatar" is fairly irrelevant to our modern militaristic endeavors, since we not motivated by greed, officially, but rather by an altruistic concern for the freedoms of citizens controlled by a dictatorial government, however I contest that when the script includes lines like "I can do it with minimal casualties to the indigenous," and "Exterminating the indigenous is bad press, but the one thing [...] stockholders hate more than bad press is a bad quarterly statement," and portrays American Marines shouting their present-day motivational cheer ("Get some!") right before launching missiles into the sacred and pristine Na'vi countryside merely to scare the defenders away and/or create havoc, and portrays warhawk Americans using the loaded word "terror" to describe how the natives mobilize in retaliation... when all this appears in the text, no responsible viewer can avoid at the very least considering it in the context of the last 50 years of American foreign politics.

But while the value of the film's political commentary is high, I'm still not satisfied with "Avatar." I feel like all my life I have been a consumer of epic stories whose most direct purposes are to moralize and supply me with lifelong definitions of greed, heroism, justice, and so on. It is the artist's right to offer opinions, however strong, in their work, but what I have a problem with is how formulaic it has become and how so-called progressivism and revelation has become utter convention. I would have liked to see this movie end up not being about whether or not the Na'vi successfully defend Pandora, or whether the terrible Marine general with the purple scars in his head ends up being destroyed, but maybe about the lives of some of the characters post- or mid-invasion, or maybe a more in depth rumination about the culture of the Na'vi, or about what actually has become of Earth and the people on it at this point in time in what we can assume to be the near future. I know it is unfair of me to demand more creativity out of such an already creative movie, whose setting serves as such a showcase of scenic and biological beauty, but I am tired of the same old story, no matter how incendiary and educationally valuable Hollywood can contrive to make it. I want to see more incisive movies for the whole family that do not depend on a storybook ending or a clear delineation between good and evil. I have a feeling that what I am asking for is impossible, but I still want to ask and will keep asking, because I think we as creators and storytellers are capable of even more.

Lonesome Dove

2010-01-19T21:05:00.006-05:00

Book Review: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Unless you count the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which reads like one continuous book rather than three installments, Lonesome Dove is the longest book I've ever read. Like Captains Gus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call and their 3000 stolen Mexican cattle in the book, I hauled through this thing without looking back. After sixteen days, doing about 40 pages a day for the first week and pushing myself to an average of about over the last ten days, I polished it off.

The book begins in the small town of Lonesome Dove, located on our side of the Texas-Mexico border, right after the Civil War. Most land west of the Mississippi is still relatively untouched, with little meccas of population in Denver, San Francisco and Ft. Worth, but not much else. Two retired border rangers, Captains McCrae and Call, the book's two main protagonists, abruptly decide to uproot themselves from their home and take a massive herd of cattle, some horses and about 15 cowboys on a trek across thousands of miles to completely unsettled and unspoken-for Montana Country. They envision starting a ranch up there, developing the land and becoming wealthy when other travelers think to migrate there too for the same reasons. Their adventure takes them through dangerous Indian territory, across treacherous rivers, through rough saloon towns and over the endless American Plain.

The book is special for a few reasons. As a reader relatively new to westerns, I had long stereotyped them as merely tales about duels, cowboys and Indians; this book has all that, and it does not downplay the action, however I would classify it first and foremost as a history text and then maybe a book about love and loneliness. After decades of subduing the banditos and impoverishing the vaqueros across the Rio Grande, rendering impotent the more peaceful Native American tribes and decimating most of the hostile ones, Captains McCrae and Call seem to make the trek mostly on account of boredom and, implicitly, a thirst for more blood. McCrae, who is the more expressive and sassy of the two classically badass rangers, is entirely aware of this motive and even embraces it. McMurtry loves to give the two men ample page time to debate the issue that in many ways epitomizes the morally dubious geographic and cultural conquests our country made during the 19th century. Yet the rest of McCrae's and Call's crew are oblivious to any of the moral implications of their lives' work. What is so interesting is how McMurtry casts this rugged band of men in such a beautiful and devotional light, and for the whole ride the reader has no choice but to root for them.

If you read this, keep an eye out for how the protagonists treat the idea of revenge. What McMurtry seems to indoctrinate in this regard is pretty revelatory and progressive, I think, considering how the minds of our male leaders have worked since our country was founded.

Additionally: At the heart of the novel are about three or four great love stories that intertwine readily, and no less than 5 characters who are developed with such detail that they could easily serve as main characters in other, less ambitious books. This eye for human subtlety and interaction might be McMurtry's greatest skill. Though he does it painstakingly, sometimes taking hundreds of pages just to flush out an important relationship, it never becomes burdensome as you read it. It's always a pure joy.

There are, I believe, 4 sequels to this book and some movies. Are you kidding me? I'm going to set a 5-year goal to get to all of those, and hopefully see the movie this year. This was an amazing way to begin my year of reading, and I would wish the same upon anyone else. The characters and the setting engulfed my daily life and they are only now beginning to let go, a day after I put the book down for good.

Books of 2009

2009-12-26T00:17:00.004-05:00

It's that time of year again: the end of it. In honor of the new calendar year that is now only six days away, I am recounting and assessing, via a system of superlative awards, the books I read in 2009.

The Top Five:
1. Bernard Malamud, The Fixer
2. Kent Haruf, Plainsong
3. Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
4. J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
5. Junot Diaz, Drown

Six that were shockingly creative:
1. Adolfo Bioy-Casares, The Invention of Morel
2. Albert Camus, The Stranger
3. Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
4. Dave Eggers, et al., Best American Nonrequired Reading of '07
5. H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
6. Michael Chabon, et al., The Best American Short Stories of '05

Five that were very sad, saddening and/or poignant:
1. Russell Banks, The Sweet Hereafter
2. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
3. Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
4. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
5. Raymond Carver, Short Cuts

Five that were frustrating, infuriating and/or devastating, but great nonetheless:
1. Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
2. Al Franken, The Truth (With Jokes)
3. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
4. John Knowles, A Separate Peace
5. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Four that were difficult to get through:
1. Sophocles, Electra
2. Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life
3. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude
4. Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Four manly books about manly men:
1. Homer, The Odyssey
2. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
3. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
4. Bernard Malamud, The Natural

Three powerful and passionate books about love and politics:
1. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
2. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
3. Junot Diaz, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Three hilarious:
1. Franz Kafka, The Trial
2. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
3. Thomas McGuane, 92 in the Shade

Three lyrical and meditative:
1. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
2. Elizabeth Bishop, North and South
3. Hermann Hesse, Demian

Two with weak, rushed endings:
1. Leif Enger, Peace Like a River
2. Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty-Seventh City

One I quit after 50 pages:
1. William Gibson, Neuromancer

End of Year Entry, Prelude

2009-12-20T13:57:00.006-05:00

AT my favorite coffee shop in Denver I found out this morning that they have a "Green Board" for all the regulars who participate in the buy-10-get-one-free perk card that most coffee shops offer, but who don't want to waste paper. So when they come and buy a coffee the barista adds a mark to their name on the board, rather than stamping their card. (I found this out today when I turned in my full card to get my free super-duper drink.)

What I find amazing is how the people who frequent this shop and, probably, other shops like this one, are so different from other people in other pockets of our society. While most people in the U.S. don't know what recycling is, let alone practice it, here I am amidst a small culture of people who are so conscious of diminishing their carbon footprint that they will not even hold a tiny card in their wallet. What I am amazed by is this disparity.

+ -

Obama and the democrats are confident now that their healthcare bill will pass in the next week, now that they figure to have the 60 senatorial votes necessary. Apparently the last one to sign on was Ben Nelson of Nebraska, a moderate democrat who was wary of the already massively diluted bill because of its provisions for a government-run, or public, option among other things. But yesterday the dems coaxed Nelson over to their side with compromises that Harry Reid proudly considers to be "what this legislation is all about."

What's most interesting is what it took to win Nelson over. The compromises included:
-extra Medicaid money to the state of Nebraska
-limits on insurance coverage on abortions, with the option for states to flat-out prohibit coverage on abortions in insurance markets
-replacement of the government-run option with nationwide healthcare plans that would be run by private insurers

All these stipulations were added to appease conservatives. But it should be noted that there were some provisions added to the bill that liberals in Congress are supposed to appreciate:
-new services and funds to be allotted for supporting pregnant teenagers
-additional taxes on those who patronize tanning salons
-taxes on high-income families and profitable private insurance companies

Though Obama will publicly applaud the compromise, as will many supposedly forward-thinking senators, I think it's a pretty sallow bill that does very little, perhaps nothing for the people we originally set out to help. The bill will make it mandatory for everyone in the country to have health insurance, but it will still be unreasonably expensive, will still profit third-parties and middle men motivated by financial gain and lobbying power. Those who are found to not have insurance could be taxed an additional 2% of their income as penalty. Plus it's a victory for those who oppose a woman's right to choose.

+ -

I am unabashedly addicted to books, especially fiction, and as 2009 nears its end I am growing increasingly excited to write a recap of all the books I read this year, with ratings and summaries and so forth. I don't know who reads this blog, and I admit I have really let it go by the wayside, but those who are with me here, I encourage you to join me in reporting on the best and worst books you read over the last twelve months. Maybe a top five or something. Mine will probably be pretty elaborate and I don't expect anyone to be as painstaking and comprehensive if they should choose to do it.

Anyway, expect that to be the next entry you find on IGAB in the coming days.

With A Clear View Of The Rockies

2009-11-11T13:49:00.003-05:00

I moved to Denver last month, and from the moment when the decision was made I began to suspect I was actually moving to this city because there was no true reason for it. Aside from the few friends already living here, I had nothing but blankness and void going for me in Colorado.

Now I have a life, maybe. I ride my bike twenty minutes down the 17th Ave Parkway to the school where I work every morning, each mile feeling better than the last. The air is cold and active. The cars are voluminous but respectful, and they drive defensively and cautiously when passing me. After school is over my eyes are tired from so many interactions with children who hear but only sometimes listen, speak but only sometimes communicate. I bike home and it's warmer, and I don't have to wear my hat or gloves. I see friends at night, cook, read, carouse, converse, seek warmth and give it back. Maybe I came to Denver so I could do this every day.

I don't write enough anymore. I don't read enough either. I have far less time to myself nowadays than I've ever had. Sometimes I think this is sad; other times I think it's a relief.

Lament for a Sputtering, Wheezing, Bedridden Health Bill

2009-10-10T20:08:00.005-04:00

1

Here is my simple man's understanding of why it is a good idea to have a public, or government, health care option:

If you get sick you have to have insurance in order to get treated by a physician. Right now the only way to get insurance is to pay unreasonable amounts of money to private businesspeople who then pay a portion of that to doctors. If these businesspeople were not businesspeople at all but government-run organizations, then the cost that people would have to pay for medical care would be much less. Doctors wouldn't have to depend on insurance companies to give them business; after all this is the reason doctors tolerate, and in some cases value private insurers--because they guarantee that the doctor will see a certain amount of these insured patients. At the same time doctors risk losing money, since the government probably isn't going to pay as much for the service. All in all doctors would make a bit less, insurance companies would make a lot less, and the general public would pay a lot less and become healthier due to the new prevalence of affordable care.

I can come up with a few legitimate reasons why someone wouldn't support a public option. A) You believe that doctors deserve more for their invaluable services. After all, they spent most or all of a decade getting trained over the course of ridiculously late and long hours at hospitals in dangerous neighborhoods. Plus, they already are making way less than they used to (because of the rise of insurance companies, malpractice suits, and government-established organizations like Medicaid). B) You believe that since the educated, prosperous class in our society has come up with this system of ailing the sick, ensuring our welfare, and protecting our rights, these people thus are justified in benefiting financially. Wealthy people are wealthy not because they're greedy but because they put in the time and the work, and they deserve to be paid. C) You just don't trust the government to impose a plan that is fair.

2

When Barack Obama started to run for president I liked him for lots of reasons. One of those reasons was that he said by establishing a government-run health insurance program he was going to topple the private insurance companies that are making it so expensive to get medical care. He said that to me one cold morning in a Manchester, NH theater while I stood up, clapped and cried with the rest of them. Eventually he beat Hillary and ran against John McCain, and the contest devolved into what we were all used to--democrat versus republican. A lot of people at this point liked Obama because he was Not Republican. I liked that aspect of his candidacy but I also liked how he tended to think really hard before answering questions, how he had a good idea of what people in his country were actually like--not just people from small towns or those who had blue collars or those who owned ranches, but people from the inner city, people whose skin color was something other than white, people who were born after the Vietnam War--and how he preached working hard and engaging in public service and practicing altruism, just like every teacher I've ever had encouraged as well.

I was and am a registered democrat but this time around I was well enough informed that I could vote for the candidate rather than the party. After Obama was elected everyone was saying that we were about the embark upon some unprecedented progress in government policymaking, since we had a democratic president, a democratic congress, a democratic-leaning country. But now that we have this president who wants to serve the whole public, under- and overprivileged alike, whose concept of "fair" is in pretty decent alignment with our prescribed American ideals... and now that he's trying to push this beautifully sensible and socially sound public option, our democratic congress is about to slash and burn the whole deal.

I think we really need to think about this. Is it possible that politicians, democratic or republican or federalist or whig or whatever, run for office not under an ideology or a rationale, but under specific opinions on specific issues? Or worse, do they run under the banner of just a certain type/region/demographic of consituents, or a certain set of corporate/independent sponsors? When we vote are we voting for favorable types of policy decisions, or are we voting for a certain group of people? Like when democratic Montanans voted for Max Baucus, did they think they were voting for democratic ideals, or did they know they were voting for whatever special interests for which Baucus is readily paying political dividends?

The more this health care bill dies at the hands of who I once naively dreamed to be the good guys on Capitol Hill, the more I believe that those of us who turned 18 and chose not to register with a political party when filling out voting forms were right. Maybe you've voted democratic every election since Wilson's, but you're an independent because you know that the blanket ideological tenets that the two parties supposedly indoctrinate might not be particularly relevant at any given time. This is the way I'm beginning to think we as voters need to think about it. Historically the democrats are supposed to be about big government and the republicans small, but looking at what this congress is about to do, or not do, I don't see how one could identify all these lawmakers as members of only two different teams. Furthermore, I can't help but wonder if it's ever been the way it says it is on paper.

Detention

2009-10-06T11:06:00.002-04:00

Scene takes place in a small, congested office with no windows. SECRETARY 1 types on her computer at her wooden desk, and across from her SECRETARY 2 does the same thing at another desk. The room is almost a corridor because it is connected to two other offices, and has a third door that people can use to enter the main hallway. An American flag hangs from a black wire flagstick which is mounted on the wall above Secretary 1. The fluorescent lighting makes the room unusually bright. MR. CURRY stands hunched over examining papers near Secretary 1.

Enter CHIVES from the hallway door. He is visibly nervous; he looks around at the two secretaries and then at Mr. Curry, unsure of whom he should address first.

MR. CURRY: Are you looking for someone.

CHIVES: Um. I-- I don't know. I just got this.

He offers a piece of paper to Mr. Curry, who takes it brusquely and skims it. While Mr. Curry reads the paper without expression, Chives mostly looks down at the ground and picks skin off his cuticles idly. After a moment he takes a quick glance at Secretary 1 and smiles sheepishly. Secretary 1 looks back down at her computer.

MR. CURRY: Okay. Come with me.

Mr. Curry leads Chives through the office, avoiding the cluster of desks, into one of the connecting rooms. He does not close the door. This office is more spacious and has a window with a view of the front lawn of the high school. It is sunny outside and a man is mowing the grass.

MR. CURRY: So it says here you were disrupting Mrs. Sugar's class.

They are both standing in front of Mr. Curry's desk; Chives puts one hand on the arm of a chair for support--he seems to want to sit down--but Mr. Curry remains standing and uses his height and girth to his advantage. He sets a steady, severe glare upon Chives. Chives is obviously uncomfortable with the eye contact and looks to the side.

CHIVES: Yes.

MR. CURRY: Why were you disrupting Mrs. Sugar's class.

Just as before, Mr. Curry's question is more of an edgy, aggressive statement.

CHIVES: I-- I wasn't really. I mean I was. But I was just whispering--

MR. CURRY: It says here you were disrupting class. I don't think Mrs. Sugar would have sent you here if you weren't being a nuisance.

CHIVES: I guess it, it wasn't the first time. I shouldn't have been talking when she was talking.

MR. CURRY: Okay. Now we're getting somewhere. So more than once you were having your own conversations while she was trying to teach a class?

CHIVES: Yes.

MR. CURRY: Why.

CHIVES: I, I don't know. It was stupid of me.

Mr. Curry takes his eyes off Chives and reexamines the paper. He takes out a pen and writes something down.

MR. CURRY: You're going to have to spend some time after school with me. What you need to do now is sign here and then go back to class and talk to Mrs. Sugar about this when the bell rings.

He proffers the paper back to Chives and hands him the pen. Before Chives can sign the paper, Mr. Curry leaves the room. Chives reads the paper and signs it, then looks out the window. He rubs his hands together as if they are cold, while waiting for Mr. Curry to return.

MR. CURRY: (overheard from the other office) Do they have permission to be there?... Okay... Okay, why don't you send them to me...

Mr. Curry comes back into the room and confronts Chives.

MR. CURRY: Okay, are we clear on what you're going to do next?

CHIVES: I'm going back to class and talking to Mrs. Sugar about it. Then I'm going to detention?

MR. CURRY: That's right. After school, today. Do you know where detention is? Okay. Goodbye.

Chives hands the paper and pen back to Mr. Curry and leaves the room. Mr. Curry takes the paper and puts it aside on the desk, atop a stack of at least twenty others. Then, with unexpected and intimidating speed for a large man, he marches back into the first office.

A Separate Peace

2009-10-05T12:18:00.003-04:00

List of characters:
MR. TARRAGON, 29
CARAWAY, 15
PEPPER, 15
SAGE, 15

The scene is a high school classroom in which the students' desks are situated in the shape of a horseshoe around the perimeter of the room. Mr. Tarragon stands on the desk-less side, speaking to his class. One wall of the room is all windows, but the view is pretty bleak--you can only see another wing of the building from here, and a small, grassy courtyard with no one walking inside of it. There is a blackboard behind Mr. Tarragon that has a few irrelevant things written on it; mostly it's covered in erasure marks and stray chalk scribbles.

MR. TARRAGON: So let’s try this. I want you, in your groups, to describe the relationship between Gene and Phineas, but in a creative way. It’s a complicated relationship; arguably it is the only important relationship in the whole book. It makes the book. Mr. Tarragon walks to the blackboard, picks up a piece of chalk and writes, in a vacant spot, “Gene/Phineas Relationship.” So what you’re going to do is draw a scale in your notebook. You know the sign for libra? The zodiac sign?

CLASS: Yes.

MR. TARRAGON: Okay, so maybe your scale looks like this. (He draws it.) This one’s pretty lopsided; one of the characters is clearly ahead in the balance of power. Who knows what I mean by balance of power? (Three or four hands go up; Mr. Tarragon points to one.) Caraway?

CARAWAY: Like when one character is stronger than the other, like, if one makes all the decisions and the other just tags along?

MR. TARRAGON: Okay, that’s pretty good. When I say balance of power I’m talking about the dynamic in their relationship. Does one person have more of the power? For example the balance of power between myself and Mr. Curry is skewed heavily in my favor. (Several students laugh.) I would be on the heavy end of the scale because of my superior intelligence, my decision making skills and my brute strength, whereas Mr. Curry would be way up here because he isn’t all that bright and he would rather I make the decisions for him. Um, well anyway. Or, see, maybe Gene and Phineas are on an even keel, and the scale looks like this. (He draws it.) But the thing is I don’t want you to just draw the scale to show me the balance of power. I want you to explain why one character is more powerful than the other. If you’ve got Phineas all the way up here on the scale and Gene down here, weighing him down, then I want you to explain to me why it’s like this. If I’m going to really argue that I have more power in my relationship with Mr. Curry, I should give you an example, like when I, I don’t know, like when I called him up and told him we were going bowling so get ready whether you like it or not! (The class laughs again.) Hah, okay? Does everyone see what I mean?

Many students nod yes.

MR. TARRAGON: I’m going to hear from every group, all right? Remember, the best way to defend your answers is to give examples from the story. Okay? Go ahead, get started.

PEPPER (to SAGE): Did you read?

SAGE: (nods)

PEPPER: I didn’t read.

SAGE: You didn’t really need to, nothing really happens. Gene goes to visit Phineas in the hospital or whatever and Phineas is happy to see him and he doesn’t know that Gene knocked him out of the tree on purpose.

PEPPER: Oh yeah, I remember that. Did you do the math homework yet?

SAGE: I did some of it. It’s hard, it’s all about some shit we haven’t even done in class yet. I’m probably not going to do the rest. As long as I’ve got something on the paper he won’t care.

PEPPER: Yeah just like write the question and do the first step and he won’t even look at it. Unnghhh. I don’t want to go to practice today. My legs are still sore from those sprints. Maybe it’ll rain.

SAGE: Yeah.

PEPPER: If it rains we should go to the Big Shake. I think Poppy said she would go, and other people too.

SAGE: I think it’s going to rain. Look at it outside.

PEPPER: Coach is so dumb. I hate doing sprints.

SAGE: We should just scrimmage. We’d get better if we could play more. He’s a drill sergeant.

PEPPER: I was about to quit yesterday when he was like okay get on the line girls. Like, again? We just sprinted like all practice.

SAGE: Yeah.

PEPPER: This book is boring. I mean it’s okay, it’s better than like, Romeo and Juliet, you can actually understand what’s going on. But it’s, umm, nothing really happens in it. Like, who cares about these kids, they just like run around and jump in the river. Are they going to go to war already? Haha.

SAGE: Yeah.

PEPPER: Like, I guess it’s pretty sad that they have to go to war when they turn 17 or whatever. But umm I don’t know, I don’t really feel like reading about it. Do you think if we all just skipped practice and went to the Big Shake he’d kill us? What could he do?

SAGE: He’d be pissed. Ummm. I don’t know. We should all just not go.

PEPPER: What’s he going to do? He can’t bench us all if nobody’s there in the first place. I don’t care, I’m just going to skip. It’s not even fun, you know? I’d rather do what I want to do. Oh. Umm. So umm yeah about the relationship between Gene and Phineas.

Mr. Tarragon approaches their desks, walking slowly and saying nothing, but you can tell he is curious about what Sage and Pepper have been discussing. He smiles and hovers next to Pepper’s desk. He looks down at her notebook, which is blank.

MR. TARRAGON: So what do you guys think about these two kids, Gene and Phineas?

Pepper blushes and turns to Sage.

SAGE: Well, um, they are pretty good friends… there’s definitely a good balance of power because they are best friends.

MR. TARRAGON: Okay, okay, so do you think they’re equal in each other’s eyes? I mean, for example, do you think they are both in absolute control of the relationship? Or maybe one of them is more of the boss, and the other is the follower? What do you think?

SAGE: Yeah well I guess Phineas is kind of the boss because he’s always telling Gene what to do like with the suicide club and that ball game they play.

MR. TARRAGON: Okay, that’s good. Pepper, what do you think?

PEPPER: Yeah, like, Phineas is really loud and bossy and is always making jokes, and Gene is the quiet one who just wants Phineas to like him. Maybe? I don’t know…

MR. TARRAGON: No, no, that’s very good. Okay so now do you guys understand what I want you to do with the scale? Imagine the two of them are on the scale and—

PEPPER: Yeah, we know. Yeah. (She picks up her pen and starts writing something. They both shift around in their seats, Pepper swinging her body so it is facing Sage.)

MR. TARRAGON: Okay, good. So draw your own scale and I’d like to see what you guys come up with. (He walks away.)

Wearing Out My Welcome At The Crossroads

2009-09-28T23:16:00.004-04:00

It's been a while since I used this blog for that good old fashioned self-indulgence that most blogmen and -women establish as the foundation of their little slice of internet real estate. Which is to say I haven't really shown you IGAB's natural voice in a long while. What better time to start than when you're holed up in your parents' lake house, jobless, floundering and having come down with a cold so uncommon that you're having trouble reading even the most morose of paperback books without laughing simply because the page is covered in your own snot?

In terms of strength and destruction, this cold wreaks havoc at a level somewhere between the NY Blizzard of '93 and the '97 Everglades Brushfires (pretty high on a spectrum bounded at the top by Hurricane Katrina and the Influenza Epidemic of 1917, and at the bottom by Michael Jordan's fairly ridiculous ingrown toenail injuries back in the late '90s). It's been three days and my cough sounds like a gunshot in close quarters. While I hack away the cat cowers in a corner of the laundry room, thinking that this is surely the end. My throat feels chafed and burnt as though I've only been swallowing rocks and sandpaper. I've tried all kinds of tactics to combat the ailment--I've tried the Rip Van Winkle (excessive sleep), the Alice In Wonderland Frat Pledge (excessive tea), the early 2000s Graduation Song On Repeat (overdose on vitamin C), the Winnie The Pooh (pour honey down your throat), the Prefontaine (ignore the sickness and go running around the lake) and the Dead Sea Morning Ritual (gargle hot salt water)--but it's becoming more and more clear that only Time will cure me.

Meanwhile I continue to busy myself sending out cover letters that never get read, making follow-up phone calls that get answered tersely, politely and uneventfully, practicing the piano with a level of focus that baffles my parents and the neighbors, eating the food in my parents' refrigerator and plotting my next move (often simultaneously), which will happen soon and will definitely be to either New York, Chicago, Denver, Portland OR, Portland ME, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Raleigh/Durham, Atlanta, Boston, Austin, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Diego, or another US city where they might need a high school or middle school English teacher. Of course most public school teaching job search websites are looking pretty bare these days. Indicative of the nationwide education slump was this listing, found this morning on schoolspring.com:

********, Texas: High School Janitor, full-time. DO NOT APPLY

Which was weird, you know, but I figure at least they have the decency to tell you you have no chance of getting the job before you take the time to send in all the paperwork.

I'm not entirely sure why lots of people are ashamed to be living with their parents in times of transition or turmoil; even I feel the stigma of such a life situation when I tell old friends what I'm presently up to. But truly I am happy to be here and really have no qualms or misgivings about it. My parents are loving people who respect my need for privacy, my decisions and my lifestyle, which differs from theirs. We're similar in that we are all subdued, thoughtful and outdoorsy, and we function well as a family of two grown-ups and one maybe-grown-up. When it's time to take off, I'll be more than a little sad.

The Fixer

2009-09-17T22:06:00.003-04:00

Excerpt from THE FIXER by Bernard Malamud:

"Do you know any French, Yakov Shepsovitch?" Bibikov asked.

"Not that I can think of, your honor."

"The French have a saying, 'The more it changes, the more it remains the same.' You must admit there may be a certain truth to that, especially with reference to what we call 'society.' In effect it has not changed in its essentials from what it was in the dim past, even though we tend loosely to think of civilization as progress. I frankly no longer believe in that concept. I respect man for what he has to go through in life, and sometimes for how he does it, but he has changed little since he began to pretend he was civilized, and the same thing may be said about our society. That is how I feel, but having made that confession let me say, as you may have guessed, that I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small thing to offer--he does so at the risk of diminishing his own humanity."

Evergreens

2009-09-12T14:31:00.003-04:00

(Ultimately this is not a true story)

*

IT was around the time when I still didn’t have my driver’s license that I was trying to get a job, any job, so I could be busy during the summer time rather than sitting at home and languishing in my bed and feeling like a complete loser. My friends were all mowing lawns and serving ice cream by day, guzzling beer and making out behind closed closet doors by night. I wasn't getting any of that. I needed a job. The one I had my eye on was the cart boy position at a local prestigious golf course. Three of my best friends were cart boys. Supposedly they made hundreds of dollars in tips each day just by cleaning old rich guys' clubs and engaging in small talk with them for like three minutes while the men babbled on about their near chip-in on fourteen, their drive on six, their long, long putt on seven. And when they weren't working my buddies got to play for free, as often as they wanted.

They had taken me out a couple times—they were permitted to treat a guest to a free round once and only once, but we stretched it—and we gambled on the game, they with their tip money, I with the money leftover from my bar-mitzvah, that I had kept in a dark corner of my underwear cabinet. Most of the bar-mitzvah money had gone into the bank where it was collecting something called interest, but I had managed to covertly salvage a small percentage of it to feed my golf gambling habit. I was a good golfer but my friends were better, and what's more, they were better at arranging matches that would benefit them, whereas I was just so eager to play that I didn't give much thought to what the match would be. Knowing that unless I played the round of my life I would be four, five strokes worse than them, I still would volunteer to take them on straight up. Then I'd lose ten bucks after double-or-nothing on the back nine, and that was how I figured my summer would go: working towards broke but having fun doing it.

If only I could get a job. Then my friends wouldn’t have to sneak me on the course, since I had long worn out my one-time guest privilege. Then I could lose money I had made that day, rather than the exhaust the stash of bills I had stowed away.

See, it didn't help that I failed my driver's test that first time. The fact that I couldn't legally drive to my potential place of work was a real obstacle. My mom and I had driven to the test site certain that I would pass. I had been a nervous wreck but I knew that as long as I just functioned like I normally did I would be fine. My mom got out of the car and wished me luck, and there were a few seconds when I was in the driver's seat alone, brooding, sweating, listening to that last chorus of a Ricky Martin song that I secretly liked. I was planning on turning it off as soon as the guy giving the test got into the car, to show him that I didn't listen to music when I drove. He was going to sit down and I was going to reach over and shake his hand and welcome him into my dad's old Pontiac and thank him for administering this test.

But when he did get into the car all my plans fizzled. I said hello and he grunted. He was an obese, leather-faced sociopath who was just not in the mood. I shut off the music and froze, obediently awaiting his commands. "Drive," he said, as if he was hijacking the car rather than giving me my license. I put it in drive and stepped on the pedal and nothing happened. "Whoops!" I said. "Forgot to turn the key!" Put it back in park and turned on the ignition. Utter silence from the passenger's side, when at that point a nice laugh to help me recall our humanity would have gone a long way. Threw it back into drive and pulled out into traffic.

"Forgot to signal. Didn't check your mirror."

Believe it or not the rest of the test went pretty well, that is until I turned too sharply to the left into oncoming traffic as we made our way down the home stretch. After screaming at me, genuine fear in his eyes, the guy would tell me I was actually on my way to a passing score until this last false move. On the ride home I made my mom drive even though ever since I had gotten my permit it was the other way around—she hated to drive. I was too flustered to drive safely, I said. We rescheduled for the next available test slot, which was six months later. The worst part was having to tell all my friends about it when I got back to school. They all had figured me for a sure pass, optimistic that I would become their newest chauffeur.

We were all pretty let down, but I knew I could drive and so did my parents. I continued to practice with them in the passenger’s seat, reminding me to take it slow or not to tailgate. They even let me drive short distances by myself, like down the hill to pick up milk, or up the road to return a mixing bowl to somebody. On these occasions I rolled down all the windows and stuck my head out the moon roof and shouted along with the lyrics.

*

One place I did not drive was to my girlfriend's house. "We'll drive you," my parents would say. Whatever. At that age our parents were very watchful, almost omnipresent when it came to romantic relationships. My girlfriend and I weren't allowed to be in her bedroom with the door closed, nor were we allowed to be in the house without anyone else home. Likewise, I needed an escort to go over there. And in my house the rules were identical, the only difference being that my parents had the audacity to actually enter my room when we were in there. We would keep the door open a crack just so my parents could look from afar and see that it wasn't closed, so there wouldn't be a big fuss. Then we would pull each other onto my bed and do everything that two frisky sixteen year-olds could do to each other without removing any clothing. My dad once walked in to see it and awkwardly staggered out, panicky and just generally unsure of things.

Later he spoke to me about it. I don't think, he said, you two should be spending so much time lying on top of each other necking. "What do you mean?" I said. I really didn't know what necking was.

My girlfriend had a babysitting job, which kept her busy during the summer days. I, in turn, was occupied at the golf course. I figured that I would get a job in no time if I stole enough rounds on their course. At night we all got together at the houses at which no parents had been seen for months. Indeed, friends of mine were rumored to live in these places, though I was only familiar with the basements and back yards, where they would keep the keg. At these parties my role was mainly to get ridiculed by my friends for still not having a driver’s license, even though hardly any of them had one either. I was glad to have a girlfriend at these things because I could only take so much of standing around in a huddle, everyone's beer in one hand in the middle like a big, circular game of the hokey-pokey. Put your beer hand in, put your beer hand out/Put your beer hand in, and you shake it all about!

I didn't even drink. My girlfriend didn't either, though unlike me she said she had tried it once. It tastes like piss, she said. We sucked face savagely behind the house until the skin around our lips was chafed. It got boring fast. At some point we got brave and did things that I had only heard the obnoxious guys bragging about. After we finished I would find myself more verbally inept than I had ever thought possible. We would smile at each other in ways that we thought suggested love. We figured it was only polite to keep looking at one another after somebody tried to go down on the other, so intense, inescapable staring contests would arise every couple of minutes.

Because nobody responsible had a driver's license, we all slept over. I'd wake up at sunrise and go walking down county roads, enveloped in evergreen. I'd come back and raid the pantry and try not to step in beer. Eventually other people would wake up and I could convince an upperclassman to give me a ride home after everyone threw away two or three Solo cups, played a few games of Madden and called it a cleanup.

*

I got the call one afternoon when, ironically, I was nowhere near the golf course, but practicing driving with my dad. It was the head pro, asking me whether or not I wanted to come and talk with him about working. "Don't talk on the phone while you drive," my dad snapped in the background. I pulled over to the side of the road. When I told him what the pro had called about, my dad got excited.

"All right, let's get over there!" he exclaimed, imploring me to hit the gas. Though this meeting would be different, I couldn't help finding comparisons with the first time my dad, the pro and I were all in the same room. It had been in the spring, when dad had ordered me into the car one Saturday morning so that we might drive to the course and formally ask for a job. That whole ride had been silent. I was playing different scenarios through in my head. I ask if there are any jobs available, pro sneers at me, tells me to get the hell out. Or, I ask if there are any jobs available, pro laughs and tells me I owe him a grand sum of money for playing so many free rounds under his nose. Or, I go in there asking for the pro but the pro isn't there and a bunch of desk clerks and/or my own friends, not-so-hard at work, all laugh at me for daring to come in here and beg for a job. When we had gotten there my dad quickly shuffled into the back of the pro shop to look at new putters and striped polo shirts that would look goofy on him. The pro was there, and I had no choice but to go up to him and ask the question. He smiled back, showing me his infamous left fang. It was already going better than I had imagined. "Maybe," he had said. "Maybe in a couple weeks. I'll call you."

And now he had called. And now we were driving there again, this time not just chasing after the dream but hot on the trail. I broke the speed limit and my dad didn't say anything. We barreled down a back road, the shortcut to the golf course, the Mamas and the Papas crooning, "Monday, Monday." When we came upon a Jeep Wrangler going an ungodly twenty miles per hour I maneuvered right up so I could see the dust on his back bumper. That was when the Wrangler stopped moving, and a tall, slick-looking individual climbed, with lackadaisical grandeur, out of the driver's side door and made his way over to me.

I recognized him to be the proprietor of a local bar who also happened to be a state policeman. He had a hot dog stand at the golf course at which my employment was imminent. Luckily, in his plaid mountain-man flannel shirt and torn up jeans he looked about as off-duty as a cop could get. I rolled down the window. The cop peered in and saw my dad, who was slouched down like a teenager so he could see out of my window back at the cop. The cop and my dad were both smiling, which was misleading, because I knew neither of them were very happy.

"Scuse me son? You normally get this close to the car in fronta you?"

Immediately I knew he hadn't recognized me from the course. He knew my friends but he didn’t know me. This was all that mattered, and I could breathe easy. In a body that, when in doubt, reverted to extreme nervousness, I was bewildered by how uncharacteristically calm I felt at the moment.

"Well I'm still learning. I've just got my permit."

I reached into my pocket, wanting to show the papers that proved I was but a poor novice. Before I could do so, my dad began issuing apologies. The guy was no match for our collective ability to play the amiable, innocent no-nothing. He was perpetually angry and hated by everyone who knew him. His hideous, mustachioed wife worked as a substitute teacher in our school. A few of my African-American friends told me he was an unabashed racist who didn't allow his darker employees to hold jobs any higher up than busboy.

After a brief lecture, he got back into his car and drove extra slowly. Starting the car back up, it occurred to me that we were both obviously headed to the same place. I had to reroute and, when we finally arrived at the course, park as far away from that Wrangler as possible.

Circumventing the hot dog stand, I walked the long way to the pro shop, around the cart barn and past the driving range, while I sent my dad in the opposite direction, to the putting green, where he could practice his game but not go near the clubhouse until I had secured the job. En route I encountered one of my friends, who already knew what was up.

"Heard you're meeting with the pro about a job. Congrats, my man! Now we can play a dollar-a-hole without having to sneak you on."

Five steps from the pro shop door the off-duty cop burst out of the bathroom and nearly collided with me. "Oh, sorry! Didn't see you there, buddy!" He looked me in the eyes and grinned gregariously, the way all upstanding citizens act towards people they haven't met yet.

*

It was the same house we always had parties at, that of a close friend, located a few miles outside of town, halfway to the next. The sky blue paint was peeling in so many places that the house almost looked polka-dotted. There was a driveway that circled around the front lawn and led to the front door, which nobody used, probably not even during the day when there was no teenage madness going on around back, in the basement. The driveway was filled with cars, as were both shoulders of the county road for a quarter of a mile.

One of those cars was the Pontiac. I had finally gotten my license, and it had only taken until mid-July, nine months after I had turned sixteen. The test had been completely unremarkable. Only thing I'd done wrong was stop at an intersection where there was no stop sign. The lady who gave the test—and I had been relieved that it was a lady, who had returned my greeting and with a welcome cordiality asked how I was doing—said I shouldn't have stopped, to which I replied that I was just being careful.

She retorted, "Yeah except what if there was a car behind you didn't know you was stoppin?"

But I had detected her staged sternness. I knew she had confidence in me, and that I had passed. When she gave me the verdict I had been looking for, I thanked her repeatedly and reached for her hand, which she shook, not without a skeptical roll of the eyelids. "You have a good day!" I shouted. She fled the car, dodging my mom on the way out. I was so gleeful that I drove back under the speed limit the whole way.

We were in the basement discussing the day's golf round, the keg almost kicked but still fairly early, on account of the party having attracted an impressive contingent of underclassmen from one of the neighboring towns. Our foursome had played two dollars a hole over three rounds of nine, and I had lost $46. The big winner had won 70-something. Each night I told myself not that I needed to stop making these silly bets but that I just needed to work a little harder on my game. Whenever I told my girlfriend that I'd lost—I never told her precisely how much—she laughed, in anticipation of my good humor about the whole thing. When I told her about it I was always smiling, not ashamed or mad, not even embarrassed. Just laid back with a hint of self-deprecation.

"You should keep betting," she said sarcastically.

My girlfriend was really good at finding empty rooms and isolated places. That night she took me by the wrist and led me into some kind of shack or tool shed out behind the house, past where groups of emo kids were kicking the hacky-sack. When we were in the dark she leaned in and looked at me good and long before she breathed vapor into me and kissed me, softer than usual, but also more aggressively. With her unruly hands she removed my clothes with staggering efficiency. I knew what was happening but wouldn't believe it until the deed was done.

Nearby, one of my friends vomited in the high grass until he got lost and fell asleep. They found him a little while later and slapped him in the face until he came to and started drinking again.

Inside, another one of my friends took a ninth grader from the other school district into a bathroom and locked the door. It's unclear what they did before he realized that she was unconscious. My girlfriend and I finished in the shed just in time to see the ambulances arrive. We ran up to the road where a few people had carried her into the back of the vehicle. For a July night it was blustery and cool, and they had wrapped a blanket with our high school's name and football mascot on it around her bare body.

The next day when I went to work at the golf course I talked for a long time with her father, who worked there too. It wasn’t so much that we had a conversation about the party and the role his daughter played in it, but that he talked things through with himself and I was there to listen. I admired his positive attitude about the whole thing. "Hopefully this'll be the first and last time she gets her liver pumped," he told me, both of us sitting in adjacent golf carts, feet up on the steering wheels, waiting for guys who probably wouldn't show up for their tee times in this rain.

Captive Audience

2009-09-07T11:46:00.003-04:00

I live in the state of California, where supposedly most of the people are democrats. But you'd be surprised how many people in this school and in this town are against us listening to the President's speech. My parents are hippies so they're all for it, but some of the columnists in our newspaper, for example, think that by directing the speech towards children the President is going to corrupt us or brainwash us. When my dad read the paper out loud this morning, some of the things they had written were so horrible. Like that the speech is part of a plan to sell liberal propaganda to defenseless kids. Or that the President should be trying to fix the education system rather than taint it even more. One boy in my class--I won't say his name--says the President is a communist and a terrorist and that he's going to shut his ears and put his head down when they air the speech. When he said that, some other people agreed with him and said they would do it too. They wore expressions of determination and anger, as if it was a threat to their safety. It made me want to punch them, or at least yell at them. I thought I was going to snap, and then I thought I wasn't going to do anything, just let it go, because they are stupid and no matter what they say, I can listen to the speech if I want. But then I surprised myself by speaking up. I said that they didn't know what they were talking about, and that the President was only going to talk about how we should work hard and do community service. I could feel and hear my voice quivering. Jess and Alexa were nearby, but I couldn't feel them with me then. I felt alone. When I stopped talking, those other kids made fun of me and said some things that I don't want to repeat, even here.

I know I shouldn't listen to them, that I should just forget about it, and I am. Sometimes I don't understand politics. Why does it make people get so mad at each other? It's like people choose sides before the information is even out. I don't think people really care about what it means for our country. I think they just want to be "republican" or "democrat," whatever that even means.

This week in social studies class we're having debates about politics in school. The first debate was about whether or not the President's speech should have been shown during school hours. Instead of picking our sides we were assigned a stance--affirmative or negative--and then we had to do research so we could have facts that would back up our arguments. Mrs. Dougherty put me on the negative side, probably on purpose, because she knows that I was in favor of the speech, and wanted me to try and argue the other side. Because I was supposed to be negative I didn't really participate that much. When I had to speak, I said that I was against the speech being shown because most kids didn't even listen anyway. While the President was talking they just zoned out or talked with their friends or fell asleep. But that was all I said, because I really liked the speech and was glad we got to see it.

All of the republican boys were placed on the affirmative side, so they didn't really say that much either. The most annoying republican boy--the same one who said the President is a communist and a terrorist--gave a really bad argument in favor of the speech, when it was his turn. He said the speech should be shown because the President is a minority and minorities should be given just as much say in government as anyone else. Instead of asking him to cite his source, Mrs. Dougherty just said, "Thank you," and moved on to the next person, because I think she didn’t really want him to go on about the issue of race. But then Polly Elston cross-examined and said that she didn't think the President's race had anything to do with whether or not the speech should be shown. She was supposed to be on the negative side with me, but I know for a fact that Polly was in favor of the speech.

I asked Mrs. Dougherty if I could go to the bathroom and then I left the room. I don't know why I was so mad, but I didn't want to stay in there any longer. People were getting really loud and upset about things they didn't even believe in. Like, James was almost shouting at Deborah about how we don't allow religion in school, so why should we allow politics, but the thing is, I know that James doesn't give a crap about the speech. He was playing finger football with Sanford in the back of the cafeteria during the speech yesterday. My dad says this country is full of idiots, and I think a lot of them go to this school.

After the week of debates ended, Mrs. Dougherty gave us an assignment to write a letter of reflection. She said that the President had wanted to ask everyone to write a letter to HIM, but that he changed his mind because it would be too controversial, and so we didn't have to write that if we didn't want to. If we didn't want to write a letter to the President we could write to anyone in the government, or to a friend or a family member or a teacher or a principal or a classmate ABOUT the government, or just one to ourselves. Basically, we could write to anybody as long as it had to do with our government.

I didn't know what to write so I just wrote a letter to my little sister, saying that when she gets older she will hear all kinds of things about politics, about whose side is good and whose is bad, but that she should make her own decisions and not listen to people who try and tell her what to believe. Once Mrs. Dougherty grades it and gives it back to me, I'm going to give it to Angela one night before bed. She's only ten but I think she's old enough to understand.

KiDs

2009-08-21T10:23:00.002-04:00

A

I work with seven year-olds. The job is dangerous because after only a short amount of time I find that I, too, am becoming a seven year-old.

It's not the drastic loss of maturity I'm worried about. Not the disintegrating worldview or the perils of living on the constant brink of emotional breakdown. Not the fact that I crave Goldfish, juice boxes and icy pops, or that I have started to address my coworkers and friends as "Mister John" or "Miss Sally."

Mostly I'm worried about a downward trend in communication methods and skills that I might be experiencing. The things I talk about, laugh at, and brainstorm are changing. I am becoming simpler and goofier. I love a good nonsequitur as much as I love a quick sprint through the sprinkler or the promise of ice cream. If I tried to chronicle my demise I would get caught up in and confused by the timeline, so I will instead just give you a sampling of how and why this is happening.

B

"Let's tell jokes," a coworker announces during 5:00 snacktime. The day is nine hours ripe and nearly finished. Bleary-eyed I sit with thirty students on a mini-chair in the cafeteria drinking my juice. "What's black and white and red all over?"

"The flag," someone guesses. "A teapot." "A dead penguin." "My daddy's VCR with red paint on it." Finally my coworker divulges the answer. "Okay," she says, "does anyone else want to tell a joke?"

Hands fly up like a flock of wayward balloons in a gale. She calls on one child, the boy who has a different Boston Celtics jersey for each day of the week. "Okay, okay, who's the who's the the best player in the NBA?" "That's not a joke," someone shouts. Others offer answers. "LeBron James." "Michael Jackson." "The guy with the big hair." I should note that my name comes up in the discussion as well.

"Nope," the boy says, and then names his favorite Celtic.

"Okay, good one," my coworker says. "Who's next?" Back comes the sea of hands, and the next jester is chosen. She is a confident second-grader, maybe the most popular of all the girls.

"Knock knock."

"Who's there?" In chorus.

"Banana."

"Banana who?"

"Orange."

"Orange who?"

She pauses, looks around. She's forgotten the joke. "Nevermind, I don't want to tell it anymore."

Before my coworker even speaks the hands go up again, and she chooses a boy with legendary gas. He stands up, relishing the spotlight. "Why, why, why did the why the why did someone scratch their ear?"

There ensues a silence out of our collective puzzlement. Even the loudest boys and girls cannot think of the answer. "Just tell us," says the girl across from him.

"Because, because his ear was on fire."

C

First thing in the morning, playing the card game "War" with one girl, we both display the same card, which, as the rules state, means that it's time for a war. Each of us puts three cards face-down and then readies the fourth card for battle. "Wait," she says. A first-grader ambles over to our game to watch. His friend, also a first-grader, follows behind and says, "Mister Jer, guess what. My grandma and grandpa are at my house right now but they aren't even awake yet!"

"Really," I say.

"When my uncle comes," the other boy says, "he sleeps until the night time!"

Out of the corner of my eye I watch my opponent examining her deck for a high card with which to win our pending battle. I turn back toward the gallery so as to hide the fact that I'm watching her cheat guiltlessly.

"Well when my uncle comes," I say, but I get cut off.

"Mister Jer, my uncle has a big belly and he says it's cause he he needs to have, love handles." Covertly I check my deck and fish the ace of spades out onto the top. "He always walks around with his shirt off!"

"Mister Jer, let's GO!"

"Okay," I say, and we draw our top cards. My ace beats her king.

"Hee hee!!!" she squeals, overcome with laughter, tips over and falls off the couch.

D

At 6:00 the last parents are still coming in to pick up their children. One of my coworkers asks a parent if he might talk to her in private while her son is retrieving his lunchbox. They go into the hall to have a conversation about the child's behavior issues.

The boy re-enters the room swinging his lunchbox and immediately heads for the door, sensing that his mother is in the hall. Another coworker calls his name and diverts his progress, asking him to come over and talk to her for a minute. Reluctantly he comes over to the desk.

"So," my coworker says, "What are you uhhhh..."

He waits for the question, any moment liable to run off in impatience.

"What are you doing tonight?"

The boy shrugs. "I don't know."

"What did you do last night?" I say.

"I don't know."

My coworker: "What are you having for dinner?"

"I don't know."

"I had a hamburger last night," my coworker says.

"I had pizza," I say.

"I love pizza," my coworker replies.

"It had mushrooms and peppers and--"

"EWWW!!!" the boy shrieks. "You like MUSHROOMS?"

I nod happily. We've got him.

"I hate mushrooms. Mushrooms are so bad? Did you know? Did you know I, I had mushrooms once and... Ewww! I like pepperoni. Miss Sally, did you know my mommy said she's going to make a a a pie. I'm going home and I'm going to play video games and she's going to make a pie?" Right on cue he turns to make his exit just as his mother comes back in the room. "Bye!" we say as he grabs his mother by the wrist and tugs her out the door.

Leftfielder, Part II

2009-07-14T09:38:00.001-04:00

2.

Play is interrupted due to an all-camp event called Sadie Hawkins Day on which all the girls chase all the boys around camp, and if a girl catches a boy she gets to put a plastic ring around his finger, in effect claiming him as her own. In the morning there is talk of canceling softball for this event, but there are a few of us who push for the game to go on. “Who cares about Sadie Hawkins, whoever she is,” I speak out to my group of ten and elevens, all of us sitting on or around the picnic table as counselor Adam takes the attendance. A few of the boys are with me but most ignore the protest. There is a girl named Lauren Firemeister who is rumored to be after any number of the more popular boys in the group. Although she is in the same age group as us, rumor has it she’s thirteen. She and her friends are from the city and they hang around us sometimes when we are lounging in the pavilion in the late afternoon eating popsicles and watching the teenagers play table tennis.

“Wouldn’t you guys rather play softball than get chased around by girls all day? They’ll never catch any of us anyway.” I’ve got my glove on my lap, pounding my fist into it as we deliberate. But no one is listening. Sadie Hawkins Day prevails, and my team disbands temporarily. I go to the softball field anyway with Mike and Anthony and we play catch lazily, talking about the Yankees or about the recent camp all-star games. We’re in the middle of a seven-game series with the teenagers, down two games to one. In the last game I dropped my first deep fly ball and had to play the rest of the game in right.

A couple of girls appear and run toward us. “You better run,” one of them warns as she approaches me. Her name is Erin Oldehoff, curly-haired and runty like me. She is half running, half walking, like she’s dragging a sled by an ankle, or she just can’t make up her mind.

I look at Mike and Anthony, who wait there, watching. Erin reaches me and stops a couple feet away. She wants to tag me but would like there to be a chase first.

I say, “I’m not playing.”

“That’s not allowed,” she says. The other girls stand cautiously behind. “Everyone in camp is playing. It’s Sadie Hawkins Day.”

“Well,” I say, pausing, unsure. The softball field is infested with couples chasing each other around. It’s hot out and my long white socks feel awkward bunched down from the middle of the shins all the way to the sneaker, as if they span too wide a range of skin.

Suddenly feeling playful, I take my glove off and hold it under my arm, and turn and run for the woods, Erin screaming with renewed thrill and urgency behind me. I lead her into the forest and then back out. I trace circles in the outfield, take her around the tennis courts and across the soccer field and down the camp road and back. I run slowly, keeping her close enough that she doesn’t give up. Her periodic shouts implore me to continue the game, knowing the challenge is still on, enjoying this frenzied tour of the camp. Every once in a while I tear away to remind her that I’m so much faster than she is, that she could never really catch me unless she got a dozen of her friends to surround me, or I tripped over a stump, or if I just let her tag me, which is just out of the question.

It’s not that the other boys are that much slower than me, rather they are not as proud or determined, I think. My mind is a mighty iron clamp. A couple of the boys in my group have girlfriends, and though I am aware of my own irrational jealousy I still have no interest in playing less softball to make time for the likes of women, or having to sit through their endless and overdramatic conversations, or having to follow around three girlfriends instead of one, since that’s what you get when you date one.

Erin Oldehoff gives up, and by the time I get back to the softball field I’ve shed her like an unnecessary layer of clothing. Mike and Anthony are still playing catch, and I rejoin the game like nothing happened.

*

Over the next week we get around to playing games four and five of our series with the teenagers. Going into the first weekend of August we are down three games to two, a big game looming on Monday morning.

Saturday afternoon my mother takes my brother and me school shopping at the mall. School is still too far away to be thinking seriously about books and supplies and new clothing, but these are the things my mother thinks about every night. “We’ll beat the rush if we go early,” she says. My brother plays Game Boy in the backseat as we drive the half hour towards civilization, and he would like to take it inside with him but my mother doesn’t let him. “Maybe we’ll see a movie after we shop, if we have time.”

Coming out of J.C. Penney with a bag full of new underwear I see Eric Beech, the 13 year-old boy who hit a home run over my head in the last game. He is coming out of the skateboarding store with two other boys I’ve never seen before, wearing cut-off t-shirts and sideways hats. As always his face is bright red and covered with freckles, and he is smiling in that toothy and malicious way, the same way he looked when he rounded the bases slowly from the moment the ball came off his bat, as if he knew it was forest-bound all along. The way his team leapt off the bench to meet him at home plate and taunted us with their crescendoing chants made me want to retreat into the woods and stay there until everyone was gone.

I feel my throat constrict as our paths intersect. My mother is talking about old sneakers or new sneakers and I keep my eyes focused straight ahead, and Eric Beech walks by, not seeing me. “Are you listening to me?” asks my mother. Breathing again I tell her to repeat the question. She sighs, frustrated already with this shopping trip.

*

“I know who that was,” my brother says.

We are sitting on a bench in front of the candle store, facing toward where my mother is choosing the perfect scent. Between her and us, crowds of people walk back and forth, their routes like the taut yarns of cat’s cradles.

“What do you mean.”

“I was there. I was at the softball game.”

In the store my mother is pensive as she studies a shelf full of candles. Her concentration is eerily impassive when she is alone.

“Which softball game?”

“The one where…”

He stops, maybe figuring something out. Even with all our differences, we are so alike. Sometimes I wonder if all our disagreements, our fights and our humiliations are rooted in our inescapable similarities, and our inability to deal with them.

“Nevermind.”

*

The summer drifts on and stagnates and slides away. Four weeks before school turn into one which turns into this past summer when I was at camp. If you ask me now what happened then, I wouldn’t be able to tell you for sure, because I hardly even remember. We lost the series with the teenagers after they pummeled us in the sixth game, in which I dropped two fly balls in the first two innings and sat the bench for the rest of the game after the boys said I couldn’t catch for shit, that I was all hype. After that I didn’t come back to the softball field for a long time. A few new kids from the city came to camp and joined the ten-and-elevens, and our group dynamic changed for the lazier. We were mostly interested in swimming and playing table tennis and hunting for salamanders in the forest whenever it rained. I would spend the days slouching on picnic tables in the pavilion with the other campers, never saying a word, or bringing up the rear in our large rainy-day hunting parties, the boys hauling huge pails, mass graves filled to the brim with these anonymous electric-colored amphibians.

Counselor Adam got fired for getting caught behind the counselor’s lounge with a bottle of beer, and we went the rest of the summer as a part of the twelve year-old group, essentially unsupervised as we romped through the forest and invaded the girls’ camp and created our own daily activity schedules. I started to ask my parents if I could stay home and watch television. No, said my mother, but you can help me run errands all day. I continued to attend camp to do nothing, until the color war during the very last week of camp when counselor Mark of the nine-and-tens named me starting leftfielder for the Blue team. Some of the boys tried to argue with him, saying no one had ever heard of that kid, but Mark replied that I had caught too many of his home run balls for him to ever forget me. I thanked Mark for believing in me and he sort of laughed and slapped me between the shoulder blades.

We had a good game that day, dispatching the Red team as our batters bombed the forest with the long ball, Mike and Anthony watching helplessly in the outfield. When it was my turn to hit I decided to go up to the plate, for once. It had been so long since the last time I had gone to bat—not since the first week of camp had I even tried—that I had nothing to think about as I stepped up and hit one the opposite way to where no one was standing in right-center. When I rounded third base the whole team was on its feet, waving me home, wanting that inside-the-park home run even more than I did. When the game ended Mike and Anthony gave me bear hugs and told me how much of a champ I was, and kept talking about it for the rest of the day.

Now I am a sixth grader and I don’t think about camp anymore. It’s getting cold out and soccer season has begun, and there is no trace of America’s favorite pastime in my life other than the occasional Yankees game I watch with my father at night. If I bring up the topic of camp my brother is quick to change the subject. “I hated that place,” he says at the dinner table one night. “I told you when we signed up that it was bad. Nobody listened.” My parents apologize, knowing he spent most of the summer in the tame and nurturing presence of the nurse when he wasn’t following around an unruly group of six and seven year-old brats whose vices he had probably discerned in the first week but could do nothing about. Regarding camp, I don’t voice my opinion because for some reason I suspect that it, too, will not matter in the long run. We are not going back.

Leftfielder, Part I

2009-07-11T15:48:00.003-04:00

1.

My parents have sent me to a new camp, because the old one went out of business and they need somewhere to keep me during the day while I am out of school. I’m ten and pretty independent. I can make my own meals if need be, I can go for walks by myself, I can ascend to the top of my class without anyone’s help.

The camp is off in the woods somewhere that I get to by bus. It comes and it picks my brother and me up in the morning, drops us off at home in the late afternoon. On the first day they assign me to a group of ten and eleven year-olds who all know each other already. They’re loud and social and they move about in little packs everywhere. I’m left with a few of the other boys who either do not know anyone also, or smell bad, or are weird. I don’t talk to any of them and they don’t talk to me. Walking along from one activity to another I keep my hands in my pockets and watch my sneakers kick up dust from the road.

Each day we are given a schedule of activities—basketball, arts and crafts, swimming, tennis—but by the second or third week of camp all we’re doing all day is playing softball. For some reason this is the sport all the boys like playing, and the only thing our counselor, Adam, will play as well. In the morning we convene at the pavilion, take attendance, throw our lunches in a refrigerator and then we go off to the largest of the fields. We come back to the pavilion at lunchtime and eat together at a picnic table. Sometimes I see my brother at this time, go over to his table and say hi just to make sure he’s doing all right. Twice in the first two weeks his lunch went missing from the fridge, and he cried all afternoon, even when they gave him a new lunch from the cafeteria. When my brother cries it’s like he doesn’t know why he’s crying, just reacting. I don’t know what to say. “Why is he crying?” someone will ask me. I would like to ignore them but I don’t. I shrug and tell them I don’t know, and make it seem like he’s just being a baby. Sometimes I laugh it off. I don’t know why I need to be here if nothing I say will help.

My brother always cries. He cries when I beat him in basketball and won’t let him rematch me. He calls me a quitter and bawls his eyes out in front of my mother, who stands there torn between her crestfallen child and the pettiness of the situation. He cries when I shove him lightly and he falls over on his hip like a bowling pin, screaming as if I’ve mortally wounded him. Whenever he senses pain approaching he cries, which is I think the biggest difference between the two of us. When I sense that pain is coming I elude it.

*

The softball field we play on is the largest of three at the camp. Some of the time we play against the twelve year-olds, whom we usually beat badly—I don’t know how this happened but we are much better at sports than they are. Some of the time we mix the teams up to make it fair. The rest of the time we just play home run derby. The field is surrounded by forest, so anything that lands beyond the tree line is a home run. When we choose positions in the field all the domineering boys go for the infield since traditionally it’s got the most prestige, but I realize early on that all the action is in left field and only left field, because all the good players can blast it out here at will, especially the counselors, who get to bat the most.

When my team takes the field I sprint out to left before anyone else can take it. I spend the days robbing people of home runs, like Griffey at the warning track. After a few weeks I get chosen for the camp all-star team, having developed certain fame for my dependability out there at the edge of the woods. Most of them don’t really understand where I came from or how I got there or why I never bother going to the plate to bat. The ones who know my name come over and give me a high five after each inning.

Playing left field is like waiting alone on a satellite. It is as if there is a big tube that rainbows from home plate all the way over the nebulous infield to the back-left periphery, where I stand knowing almost telepathically that the ball is about to skyrocket off the metal bat, a hundred feet in the air and come down right where I’m standing. When I hear the explosion I ready myself and watch it shoot towards me, move under it and hold out my glove. As the ball comes down my nervousness increases exponentially, and the split-second before it thuds into the glove I freeze up and can only hope that I’ve got it. I close my eyes in fear of missing it in front of all my teammates, all the players on the other bench, all the spectators and the batter who by now is rounding first holding out for the faint possibility that I will drop it. I am a famous statue erected at the edge of the woods. Relying only on my depth perception, the positioning of my left hand, and the finesse I will require after the pellet crashes down into open leather, I am afraid of the possibility that really there is nothing I can rely on at all.

The counselor of the eight and nine year-old squad, Mark, brings his boys to the field one day and they give us a competitive game, though they don’t win. I’m sure they’re better than the twelve year-olds. The eight and nine year-old leftfielder, Mike Wilson, is probably better at the position than I am, though my teammates would never admit it. The reason I say this is because he throws the ball back with better form than I do—he can do the crow-hop that all the major leaguers do on television. In terms of catching the ball we are equally reliable, I would say, but deep down I suspect he holds this slight technical edge.

We begin to play the eight and nine year-olds every morning, and soon Mike Wilson and I become friends. Our connection is established naturally; he seems to look up to me as the elder leftfielder, and I am attracted to him since he is a veteran of the camp and a baseball maven. He has a friend, Anthony, who plays centerfielder for the eight and nine year-olds, and the three of us come to make up the outfield for the under-12 all-star team and for all the home run derby sessions. Anthony is pretty possessive of his outfield position but Mike and I are more laid back about it, so we are fine switching off between left and right field whenever all three us are out there, because we have learned that “there is no I in team.”

*

My brother usually sits next to me on the bus ride home, though I’d rather he find his own seat, his own friend. When he does I feel obligated to pay him attention rather than turn my back to him, put my feet out in the aisle and swear with the older kids. I like to throw my backpack down next to me, snap open a can of soda that I buy strategically in the last ten minutes of camp, sip it slowly and let it get warm and sticky in my hand as we make our way along the back roads, out of the woods and through the gas station villages. But with my brother there next to me I have to be the responsible sibling and include him in, at the very least, my own consciousness, if not the other campers’. The camp bus is a different place than the backyard or the bedroom hallway. I don’t know why, but fighting with him seems like the wrong thing to do. I think he is capable of exploding in worse ways than fits of tears, and I’m not even curious about what it might be.

With my little brother sitting next to me, I feel the burden but sometimes he’s more of a possession or even a sidekick. Like I have to look out for him. Like I have been charged with seeing his day through. I glance at him with the solemn, driven concentration that passes over me when the ball is hit to left field, and I feel my own vulnerability, reminded of all the mean things kids once did to me, too. Maybe I was made to be the older one so I could endure it once by myself, and then never let it happen to either of us ever again. Maybe all those times I pushed him down he wasn’t crying for his mother or his skinned knees but for me.

This is the only way I can really explain why I act differently toward him when we’re away from home. Once when he wasn’t on the bus as the driver started the engine, I shot to the front and shouted, “My brother isn’t on yet,” without even thinking about it. We waited until he came running across the parking lot with his counselor behind him apologizing for a lost bathing suit, broadcasting a wave goodbye as my brother slid into the window seat, and the bus began to move without any more incident or discussion.

The ride is long due to all the stops; my brother invents a game for us to play and he will usually succeed in coaxing me away from the aisle conversations. I want to be the center of attention or at least one of those who revolve around it, yet there’s no denying that my brother’s private thoughts are at least more interesting than the community alternatives.

I like how my brother and I are the last ones off the bus because it makes me feel like the last one standing, the anchorman of the route. My brother and I learn where everyone lives and memorize the order of drop-off, camper by camper. When our stop finally comes I hold my backpack on one shoulder and say thank you to our eternally immobile bus driver. She gives me a motherly smile and then I leap onto the road and wait for my brother to step down after me. We put down our bags and race up to the dead end of the street and back, as if we must put our own personal punctuation on the camp day before showing up home for dinner. No matter how big of a head start I give him he never wins because halfway there he gets scared of being overtaken and starts looking over his shoulder while emitting little bursts of vocalized glee, which slows him down enough for me to turn on the gas and blaze past him in a trail of hot carbonated laughter.

Life-deciding With Respect To Time And Place And Love And Money And None Of The Above

2009-06-28T16:37:00.004-04:00

After I drove across the country two summers ago I came to the conclusion that, though all the different parts of the United States do not look or feel the same, they sort of are the same if you're alone. Not that I was alone--I was with best friend and faithful co-buccaneer Joe Ward--but I couldn't avoid the reality that everywhere we went we were doing the same things (buying a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jelly/honey and then eating it as systematically as possible... hiking on foot to see amazing and famous things... napping in libraries... napping on the beach... considering or even looking for jobs and apartments... driving around in hot, sticky traffic... sleeping in a tent and telling stories under the moon).

Eventually I decided I wanted to go home because of, I think, financial reasons. I tell this tale again and again and it never gets old. Now me and my young post-graduate friends are searching for places at which to set up our lives, and it seems that the most popular thing to do is to move to the place where you get a job. Then that place becomes your home and subsequently your paradise. The definition of paradise, here, is different than the one we're used to, but I will insist on using the word paradise because suddenly is becomes very difficult to justify moving elsewhere. If there is a point here, it is that job usually dictates location, or, money still rules lives. At least, I think it rules mine, even if it is a very small amount of money. If I can be promised a very small but regularly-issued amount of money somewhere, I might possibly absolutely go there. Because then I can set up a home, make some friends, do my writing, go running at night, go to social gatherings on the weekends and assiduously monitor gchat at all other times. Aside from the weather, place must be an illusion.

And yet, I am and also will be obsessed with place because each one is so different than the next. Because I feel so touched and inspired and lightheaded in some places, bored and angry and depressed in others. I will never be prepared to fully admit that the different feeling each place gives me is not because of geography or culture but because of the changes, the turmoil and the exhilaration in my mind. My feelings should control how I perceive place, not the other way around, but somehow I don't think I can ever accept this. San Francisco will always be magical to me. Central Michigan will always be infuriating. Most people will always grimace when someone mentions a town like Pittsburgh even though they've never been there; conversely Americans will get wide-eyed when they hear someone talking about going to Rio de Janeiro though it's one of the most impoverished places on the planet. And even when we go to these places we still might retain our preconceptions afterwards rather than allowing the place to make us feel differently (barring the occurence of a traumatizing event, like my father getting robbed at knifepoint in Puerto Rico--understandably, there is no game show prize package large enough to lure my parents back there now, sunshine and lagoons and potential statehood and all).

*

Some truths:

--> I miss people too much.

--> The cross-country road trip may have been dreamt up on account of brute Kerouacquian adventurousness, but it was mapped out and itinerized according to people rather than place. What I mean by this is that we chose where we were going by which of our friends would be where in the U.S. at what time, not which parts of the country we wanted to see the most. If it was the latter we would have gone to Montana and Oregon. We would have spent more than 3 and 1/3 days in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, White Sands, Flagstaff, Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam(n), and Las Vegas combined. We would have never come within 500 miles of Kennan, Wisconsin, where our friend Ron was running oxygen tests on soil all summer.

--> The places to which I have applied to teaching jobs for the fall have nothing to do with location or state-of-their-economy, I realize. I'm applying almost exclusively to the places where my friends are.

In all honesty I think this last one demonstrates the disconnect between the things I value and the things most other people value once they reach their mid-to-late twenties, or so. Granted I am 23, which is not mid-to-late twenties, so maybe I am justified in my lack of bravery here--bravery to go off on my own, create a life by myself and admit that living is about continually starting new relationships rather than clinging to the old ones. It's admitting that we are constantly changing as people and minds, and what was once comfortably ours may not fit anymore. This is what the wise ones will tell you, anyway. Most people I know value first and foremost some kind of job security ("Why, in this economy...") over all else, and so they are willing to adapt accordingly. Then again, some of my favorite people have no wisdom at all, only do what makes sense emotionally at each present moment, and end up living extraordinarily admirable lives on account of their raw spirit and integrity.

I grew up thinking that I was being raised by some of the wisest and least impulsive people in the world. When I was twelve I found out that my parents got that way most likely because they both married right out of college, realized they had made terrible mistakes, divorced and then lay low for a hot decade and a half. That's how they became so careful, and how they came to preach their anthem of sound judgment and fiscal responsibility to me every day. Even with the impulsive marriages I believe I come from a long line of unbrave people. But now approaching this season's crossroads I am beginning to see how bravery and wisdom will have very little to do with whatever decision I make. Wherever I go, whatever job I take and whomever I live with, I will initially see fit to call myself immature or cowardly or spontaneous or conservative or careless or bold. But like the construct of place, a life decision is only definable after you've actually done something with it. Boston gets the definition "lonely" because I spent the bulk of this year in my studio apartment sleeping, stressing and stir-frying. That's grad school for you. And I guess I could sit here and question the decision of even coming to grad school this quickly and for this program, but it's probably too early to tell. It's possible that if you ask me in twenty years it'll still be too early.

If I wait for my decisions to justify themselves they probably never will. This is why when I make them I want to immediately forget about the actual act of life-deciding and concentrate only on what I need to do next so that I may one day find myself in a really good place. Then when someone asks me if I made the right decision I can say "Of course!" without flinching and without doubting the truth of it.

*

To be continued...

The First Job

2009-06-21T12:33:00.004-04:00

I moved to Boston in May of 2008. A few days after moving in I hit the streets in search of a job. I went to every restaurant in the Back Bay and was told, each time I filled out an application, that they'd call me "sometime in the next couple days," but nobody ever did.

I tried the employment office at Boston University and got some phone numbers of people who needed housework, gardening, computer help, etc. The first person who hired me was an appraiser of jewelry and real estate who lived in a huge Victorian house in Brookline. She was about 70 and smelled like rotten fish. After carrying all Nancy's groceries in from her car I was given the task of retyping her fifteen-page proposal for a Native American museum in Montana, a place she had visited once and had afterward felt so enchanted that she began to formulate a timeline for the museum's construction.

She took me up to her ancient IBM computer on the third floor and demonstrated to me her circuitous and overcomplicated way of checking e-mail. I offered to show her a faster way, one that would avoid two restarts and help familiarize her with the versatile functions of a mouse, but she said, "No, that's not the way to do it."

Before I did the typing, Nancy performed a page-by-page tutorial of the document. All she needed, I realized, was an identical copy of the document, since she had scribbled things all over the original copy but had not saved the document on her computer. I was there because she could type at a rate of only 5 words per minute, poking keys one by one like buttons on an elevator.

She went downstairs and I retyped it, correcting spellings or grammatical errors when they came up, reformatting paragraphs and capitalizing the words that began complete sentences. Afterwards, she came up to proofread it and was mildly pleased, with a few exceptions. "Igneous is spelled wrong," she pointed out, backspacing through the entire word one letter at a time and replacing it with her own imagined version. Even on her early '90s version of Microsoft Word the dotted red line appeared beneath the misspelled word. "Actually," I said, "it has an 'e' in the middle." She moved her face close to the screen and examined the word. "No, no, this is the way."

She pressed on. With each disagreement we had, she gave my recommendation due consideration, then ignored it. It was as if I was trying to show a four year-old why it would be better to color inside the lines, or to use brown for the dog's face instead of electric green.

Finally I taught Nancy how to save the document so she wouldn't have to retype it again. "Oh, that's okay," she said. "I won't need to type it again after this. This is the only version I need." We went downstairs and she told me to come back in two days because she needed to clean out the cellar. "I'll pay you then. I don't have much cash in my wallet right now."

Not one to be pushed around, I told her I wanted my $24 now. I sat down and waited at her kitchen table, a disaster of old calendars, portfolios, bronze antique lighting equipment and plastic fruit. I felt like a mannequin in the display window of the Goodwill store. She ambled over to Willy Loman's suitcase on the ground and pulled out a pocketbook, from which she drew some bills. "All right. Here's twenty-five; three hours of labor, plus a little something extra." She winked at me and asked if I would need directions back to the train station. I said no, so she gave them to me. Nancy was especially skilled at turning basic life instructions into meandering tales about her business tycoon sons. "Wait," she said, and found a map of Brookline beneath a pile. She began reciting the history of the region. I learned about Brookline's Seven Hills of lore before I slipped out the screen door during a break in the soliloquy.

The next day Nancy called me.

"Hello," she said. "After you left yesterday, I reread the document. I want you to know that this was the most unprofessional, outrageous thing anyone has ever done for me. To think someone I hired to retype my work would go back and edit my work for me? There are mistakes on every page. To think a boy like you would take the liberty of adding his own flourishes to the work of a published author like myself." She was relentless, giving it to me one chorus of nastiness after the next as I stood listening outside a coffee shop. "You have some nerve, coming into my house and sabotaging my work, and then demanding payment for it all. You are inept, sir. Let me tell you, you're never going to make it as a high school teacher. Those kids are going to eat you alive." Out of the slew of diatribe she unleashed upon me, this last remark was the most incisive.

"I'm sorry," I began, when the storm seemed to subside, but this was all the rebuttal she allowed me.

"Do not come back," she barked.

She hung up. I went back into the coffee shop and tried to figure out whether to laugh, cry, forget about it or commit retaliatory acts of vandalism. Perhaps it was fate that I had provoked the wrath of the crustiest old hag in Boston on my first job.