A Story in Three Parts or Why We Shouldn't Forget

Over the past few days at school, it's been a recurring conversation amongst faculty--the students we are teaching today are approaching the point where they don't remember the attacks. I asked my literature students how old they were when it happened and I heard a chorus of "Third grade." "Fourth grade." And then we sat down and talked about the role of literature in dealing catastrophe, and we read poetry. And though I spoke eloquently about literature stemming from the real world, literature as an attempt to re-shape the world into something that gives us meaning, literature's role in recording, processing, outliving tragedy, all the while I kept thinking to myself, you're trying to give them perspective on something you were barely old enough to fully understand yourself.

And here I'll slip out of my narrator's voice and address you directly: What follows is my narrative of that day. It's also my attempt to coax my narrative into something that says something, that makes sense of something, even though ten years later, words aren't entirely up to the task.

1.  That Day

On September, 11, 2001 I was fifteen, and I ripped my pants in health class. The desks were shoddy--mine had a jagged piece of metal that snagged on the denim, causing a one-inch tear on my right thigh. Usually I was quite careful getting in and out of the desk, but on that particular day, the principal had just announced the terrorist attacks at the end of second period. My first instinct was to talk to someone I knew, and so I hastily abandoned the desk and chased a friend out of the classroom.

As the day wore on, things got stranger at school. Teachers had stopped teaching. In third period History, the 6'4" history giant dubbed "Lord Nelson" reverted to the old-school and turned on the radio. We sat and listened for an hour. In fourth period English, our teacher was unable to secure a television for us to watch, so we spent the hour writing poems and talking in small groups. As I walked with a group of friends towards fifth period lunch, we found the missing televisions--they were set up in a ring outside the bank of Vice Principal offices where the lights had been dimmed. Some students stood with blank faces while they watched the feeds. As much as I wanted to stop, it didn't seem to be the aim of my friend group, so I followed them into a lunch line.

I don't remember the conversation at lunch, but I'm sure it teetered between nervous humor and dark hypotheses, skirting the issue, tentatively putting a toe in here and there but ultimately unable to fully engage the subject. While the structure of our day--a rigid skeleton of classes and passing periods marked by a polite electronic "tone" instead of a bell--had remained the same, the content had dissolved. We didn't know what to do with ourselves, we didn't know quite what to think. As we sat at the table, the lights started to dim and flicker--waves of fluorescence cascading across the ceiling high above our heads. I thought someone was playing with the light switches, maybe trying to alter the lights around the TVs, but then the lights in the whole, cavernous cafeteria went out at once. Idiots, I thought. We got up, discarded our trays, and made our way towards the central 900 hallway where people usually sat in friend clusters waiting for the next period to begin. At the intersection of the 600 and 900 hallways, we had moved far enough away from the outer doors that things were getting very dark.

The lights continued to flicker on and off and, what had appeared as majestic waves in the sprawling, high ceiling of the cafeteria, manifested in the narrower hallway as violent crashes of light slamming from wall to wall. Amid this chaos, I saw a classmate standing in front of a TV, legs apart, arms crossed, eyebrows hunched over his face in search of understanding. Then I saw Mrs. Homer running down the 600 hallway with a flashlight--the hem of her jumper swishing against her ankles. "Get out of the building! Get to an exit!" I quickened my pace, heading down the 900 hall towards the front doors. What was happening? Outside, the air was crisp as a flood of 600 students--half the student body--made its way out of the building, across the drop-off lanes and teacher parking stalls, over the mound of green surrounding the flag pole, clotting against the fence ringing the softball field. One of the Vice Principals jogged out of the building with a crimson red clipboard--"You're too close to the building! Get into the field!" Some people caught the sense of urgency in his voice and tossed their backpacks and stacks of books over the fence, hopping over after their possessions like a leapfrog game. I found the gate and walked through. I wasn't about to rip my jeans again.

We stood there for a while. The conversation careened into the land of terrorism--"Is there a school plot as well?" "Do you think it's all related somehow?" "Oh come on! As if they are sending little men in turbans around to all the schools in the mid-west." But, at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, it was hard to stop the thoughts from going there--a simultaneous take down of two of America's greatest assets--it's financial center and it's network of democratic education. So we stood. And we talked, nervously, inappropriately, sometimes insightfully.

As it turns out, there were electrical issues in the building that day. Some wires were crossed or every television in "on" mode overloaded a building notorious for cut-corners and shoddy contracting. Someone somewhere saw sparks and someone somewhere else smelled gas and then another someone somewhere else put the two together and assumed the building would explode. On a day when skyscrapers were collapsing, when fighter jets were in the air poised to take out commercial jetliners, when the Pentagon was on fire, an exploding school in central Illinois didn't seem out of the question. But there was an electrical issue, and they did let us out of school early.

Later my Aunt Lisa would report that we had made the news in the northwest corner of the state. I took the bus home, and immediately turned on the television.

2. That Afternoon

The first thing I saw was a reporter on a dusty street talking about a man shuffling his way past. "This man, in his $1000 Armani suit, covered in the ash of the World Trade Center." His suit? Who cares about his suit? And what ash of the World Trade Center? Where did it come from? What happened to that street? It was only later, after I watched the endless feedback loop of planes hitting the towers, that I understood the never-ending fireball and the collapse of buildings--floor after floor crumbling like the ash off of a cigarette--and the ensuing cloud, gushing around the buildings, chasing those who had made it out alive. I went into absorb mode. I sat in the overstuffed chair with my eyes fixed and mouth open.

Five hours later, my mom arrived home from work. She spent her days working with developmentally disabled adults and had not yet seen the images of the day. She sat down in "her" wing-back chair and we waited for the picture to cut back to images from earlier in the day. I had seen the pictures, so I watched her face instead. When the second plane disappeared into the tower opposite the accompanying fireball, her face jumped behind her hand as a rushed "Oh my God!" fell from her lips.

I remember being jarred by her reaction. My dad, when he arrived home from his teaching job, had seen the events as they unfolded. Any mark of surprise or fear had long since vanished, was already firmly burrowed deep in his spine when he walked in the door. But in my mom, I saw the full effect of shock and disbelief and fear rip across her face in one instant. It was deeply unsettling.

In a way, I was waiting for her reaction. Waiting to judge the severity of the events. Even then, cable news hyped up events all the time. Maybe 9/11 would turn out to be no different. Maybe mom's face would betray not nothing out of the ordinary but not as much out of the ordinary. Maybe this was just another part of the ever-present big, bad world outside of high school angst that I was only beginning to discover.

Every single one of those thoughts vanished the second I saw her face change.

3. Today

On Friday I ended my teaching day with a really fantastic class--we were talking about the power of sentences to contain complex ideas. It went over really well. I used that positive energy to clean my desk and dive in to a pile of grading. But it wasn't long before I was drawn into a conversation on 9/11 taking place between colleagues in the hallway. We talked about the experience, about what it was like in Illinois, about what it was like to be stranded in an airport, about what it was like in central Kansas, about what it was like at the college where they opened the theater and had students watching TV on the news. We talked about public reactions and personal reactions, about visits to New York City at various stages in the recovery and reconstruction. We just talked. It was a sobering subject but it was uplifting to have space and a time to connect over these issues.

While I remember very vividly the events of September 11th, I don't remember the day before. Looking back, it's strange how the events of that day and everything after seem to have popped into existence with one "beep" of the intercom and Mr. Wainscott's gruff voice announcing a "terrorist attack on our nation." The whole new modern world birthed out of that silver speaker in the wall just as Mrs. Brockshcmidt paused to take a breath from her lecture on the respiratory system or sexually transmitted diseases or cancer.

But that wasn't everyone's experience. For some, the new modern world came when a plane was hijacked. For others, it happened when that plane showed up next to their desks at an impossibly low eight hundred feet. For my new coworkers in Kansas, it happened as the air national guard mobilized jets that shot back and forth across the skies of Cloud County.

For my dad it happened early in his workday, huddled around a television. For my mom it happened at five o'clock while her youngest son watched from the sidelines.

The value of that conversation in the hallway is immeasurable because we still haven't come to grips with the way 9/11 changed our country, our lives, our liberties, our sense of self. We sit around today comparing stories, trying to fit our timelines together, trying to connect the separate parts of an event into a seamless narrative as if constructing a narrative will make it okay again, will bring back a sense of peace to the world. It might be inadequate, but it's what we do.

The Space Between

The double-exposure here was the odd result of an iPhone application that fuses two separate exposures to create a picture closer to what the natural eye sees.  That and seventy miles per hour.

When was the last time you considered the space between A and B?  Not the space between Wal-Mart and the nearest Chinese buffet, but the real spaces.  The space where there is space.  Where there are no people.  Where the cows graze.  In the middle of Kansas, there is an abundance, a proliferation, a bounty, a wealth, a profusion of space.  It is this fact that I sometimes forget. 

I moved to Concordia on August 5th, and haven't really left since.  While going about my daily life, it's easy to trick myself into thinking I'm in a larger place.  Compared to my old jobs, for instance, I know about seven hundred percent more people here in Concordia.  My social calendar is practically (comparatively) bursting, and that means my tank of human contact euphoria dwindles at a greatly depreciated rate.

There's also the town itself.  It's a pleasant, gently-rolling place.  Compared to central Illinois, it's practically mountainous.  The hills and the trees work as a team to blur the boundary between "town" and "country" better than any place back home, and besides, my path of travel between work, home, and the grocery store rarely takes me near the edge of town anyway.

That is, unless I travel a block past the college where the road abruptly shifts from asphalt to dirt, a sure sign of the death of civilization.  There are other times when the size of the town jolts my stomach.  Picture it:  The college I teach at is located on the south end of town on a hill that rises high enough to support three wind turbines (pronounced terbin by the natives).  The land sweeps downhill* towards the northern edge of town.  If you travel down this hill on Lincoln Street, where the trees are spaced far enough apart, this hilly vantage point affords an eye-level view of grain elevators that mark the opposite border of town.  The grain elevators, you realize, are fifteen blocks away.

When I hit that particular spot, my psyche tilts a bit.  It's strange to be jarred from my complacency about the place I call home.  But it's when I consider what is beyond the city limits that I really get uncomfortable.  In-between Concordia and the Missouri border, there are approximately five towns in two and a half hours of driving.  Five.  In Illinois I could hit five towns in a thirty-minute circuit of my dad's house.  I don't even need to dive in to the details of the Rockford area I just came from, or the suburbs of Chicago the time before that.

I thought that, when I moved here, my biggest adjustment would be the culture.  Turns out I don't "do" much culture--give me a bottle of wine and a circle of good people and I'm set.  My biggest adjustment has been the isolation.  I try to avoid thinking about it.

And was doing quite well until I got a semi-impromptu invitation to a restaurant in Salina.  It all happened Saturday night at the coffee shop / bar (because why not be both?).  I was listening to a band with the aforementioned "good people" when I revealed that I miss sushi.  And I do miss sushi.  I could probably eat it every day.  No problem!  As it turns out, there is a sushi place in Salina!  Plans were made and Monday evening I was in the back of a car headed south.

Then my throat got a tickle.  I get tickles.  I have always gotten tickles.  I distinctly remember getting a severe tickle while watching a movie during Mrs. Reilly's sixth grade class.  Blessed lady that she is, she quietly nodded me out of the classroom so I could douse my defective throat with water.   Since then, the tickles haven't gone anywhere, and I've done my fair share of thinking about them.  (I'm a bit of a hypochondriac and at one point was convinced I had throat cancer.)  The problem with these tickles is that they do not go away easily.  Usually I resort to methodically swishing water, but there I was, in the back of a car, no water.  And, because I was journeying through the vast space between A and B, there was no sign of a convenience store.  I don't believe I spotted a creek either, although I did plan for that contingency by informing my seatmate he would be in charge of holding my shoes if I had to leave pavement.

I panicked just a little bit.  If the throat tickle doesn't go away, then surely I will cough and cough and cough.  And if I cough and cough and cough, the amount of carbon dioxide I'm expelling will far exceed the rate at which I am able to take in oxygen so surely, slowly, I will suffocate.  In the back of this car.  In front of these lovely people.  How embarrassing.  Killed not by a cultish hillbilly but by a tickle, the things three-year-olds laugh at.

The tickle eventually subsided and was replaced by a barrage of the nose-runs, but the event had gotten me thinking about that open space, the sheer quantity of it.  And the idea that it encircles all of Concordia for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles.  It just keeps going.  And that's strange for me.  I'm a community person, so small towns are good for me--but only because there are welcoming people.  Take away the people and, in Kansas, you're just left with a vast, practically-treeless swath of land that rolls like the empty ocean.

Today, after I finished my last class of the day, I spent an hour writing a quiz for my Intermediate English students. Part of the quiz asks students to insert appropriate transitions--transitions for time, addition, reversing direction, spatial relationships, etc. To test them, I wrote a sample paragraph and, because I couldn't find any other inspiration, I wrote about studying abroad. Two separate points in that paragraph target better sense of culture and of self: "Another good thing about studying abroad is the exposure to culture. Every place has its own, unique culture, but it’s really difficult to know what yours is until you see how other people live!" and " Studying abroad helps you develop a strong sense of self. Never before had I been confronted with so many different choices and challenges in a place with which I was completely unfamiliar." It's true, you know. Before you see what you aren't living in, you have no way of knowing what you do live in. And that process helps ground you in what ultimately makes up the long, complicated history of "you." Apparently my long, complicated history of "me" involves a slightly higher-level of population density.

To be honest, I'm not yet entirely comfortable with the sense of isolation here. But I probably will be someday. And for now, I'll just be grateful that I have a good job doing what I love surrounded by great people--isolation or not. (I'll also be quietly thankful for the hills and the trees that blur the boundary between town and country.) Oh, and for friends who get you from point A to point sushi, across the barren, nearly-treeless (comparatively) plains of Kansas.

*I have a new friend who would object, strenuously, to the appellation "hill"

Take a Friend to the Field

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm working on a new writing project that will hopefully have something to do with Malcolm Gladwell, puzzles, mysteries, and problems of contemporary student engagement.  It's been a while since I wrote something other than a lesson plan for my professional life, and it's always good to have a proverbial iron in the fire, even if I'm not facing the "publish or die" ultimatum that has a tendency to follow academics around.

But, let's face it, writing is hard.  In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes about "shitty first drafts"--an excerpt I force nearly every one of my composition classes to read.  In one paragraph, she lays out this anecdote:  "One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, 'It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do -- you can either type, or kill yourself.'"  And that's what it feels like sometimes.  Not all the time, but sometimes.

Every semester I get a new flock of students who, unless they have had me in previous semesters, are burdened by a ridiculous notion that good writing comes from some inner wellspring fantasy land where mythical creatures romp with angels through an English garden.  It couldn't be further from the truth.  Writing is like a wrestling match proceeding at funeral procession pace, it's both time consuming and arduous.  When you write, you have a conversation with a data set just like a mathematician or an archaeologist or a physicist or a biologist and, just like in all these fields, the data set is large and cumbersome.  In short, the data set is the world itself.  The world and all its people, customs, cultures, continents, and events.  The truth is that good writing comes from an honest, genuine look at the data, at the world.  And a good writer is a writer who isn't afraid of sitting down and grabbing facets of the world and either coaxing or banging them into some shape that reveals some tidbit or truth greater than the original parts combined.

Another secret that lies at the center of Anne Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts" is that it is difficult for practically everyone.  At the risk of copyright infringement, Lamott also gifts us this tidbit: 

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

I've had some students who really object to that passage.  Just so we're clear, Lamott is not playing God, she is merely playing the role of writer-comic, trying to make us laugh because, on a surface level, we have a tendency to judge based on religion and because, on a deeper level, it shows to what lengths a mind will go to either avoid or reason with the act of writing.  But it sucks, for almost everyone.

An unknown writer quoted in the Rock Valley College Writing Center once said "I don't love writing.  I love having written."  I like that quote because it hints at the sense of pride one gets for having written.  The writing itself is often torture, but the end result is somewhat herculean, even if the writing never goes farther than, say, a tiny blog nestled deep in the inner sanctums of the internets.  It's herculean because writing is at the heart of creating meaning.  Because we write, we have opened the door to changing, in sometimes small, sometimes big ways, the very world through whose data we have been either frolicking or tripping.

There's one other aspect of writing that can really get a person down--people only show up to celebrate after it's done.  No one walked up to J.K. Rowling in the middle of her work on book one, draft one of the Harry Potter series and said, "You know, you are doing really great, I mean, really great.  You're probably going to change the way a generation approaches reading."  Sure, Rowling might have had encouragement.  But there were no hard facts to quench the thirst for an answer to the question Is what I am doing here going to matter to anyone?  And, to be honest, good writing isn't always rewarded.  Not everyone ends up wealthier than the Queen.  Most people don't even get read.  Herman Melville died in relative obscurity before someone came along and declared Moby Dick a masterpiece.  Same thing happened to Kate Chopin who was quickly glossed over for contemporary canonization even after a modest success with The Awakening.  Writing is often lonely.  If you permit me just one more example, as I write this, I've appropriated the living room floor of an otherwise empty apartment where I am splayed out, propped up on a meager couch pillow.  Writing isn't glamorous and it certainly isn't a social act.

But there is a secret that helps me when I'm stuck in the idea phase for writing--where my brain plays ping pong with ideas, every once in a while spitting out some tender seed that might grow if planted in the right climatic conditions.  Even as friends are far away, I write with them around me.  Yesterday, when I got the wild hair to jot a few notes about a potential idea, I grabbed the notebook given to me by a good friend when we graduated from Illinois College in 2008.  I've recorded several things in it before--bad poetry, reflections on life, a few quotes.  When I'm not using the notebook, it lives on a shelf above my desk amongst other notebooks that have special meaning (other gifts from friends, notebooks that have sentimental value, Moleskine notebooks that simultaneously bring the clout of Hemingway and western civilization).  I pull the notebooks down based on some unknown calculation that outputs x as a function of my mood where x equals the type of inspiration I will need at any given time.  Yesterday, in the middle of a long weekend when I would have much rather been celebrating the end of summer with family or friends, the calculation determined I needed the support of a dear, dear friend.

Zen master Natalie Goldberg  says of writing "Have compassion for yourself when you write.  There's no failure--just a big field to wander in."  Good advice.  But I would also add, sometimes, if you imagine it enough, you can take a friend with you in to the field.  Thanks to friends who give me notebooks, I often do.

Deliberations about Deliberate Things

Just look at all of these potential distractions.
Routines are funny things. They pop up in the strangest places--who reading this doesn't have a shower routine? A series of deliberate, ordered motions that gets you from dirty to clean? Love them or hate them, I think they can tell us quite a bit about the way we process the world.

Every morning when I wake up I push myself through a two-hour routine. It starts in my bedroom when I shut off my alarm and prop my eyes open with two twigs I keep on my nightstand. Eyes successfully wedged open, I spend anywhere from five to thirty minutes waking up to the Internet: what happened on facebook while I was sleeping? Any new sales at Banana Republic? Any essential emails arrive? Then, before I leave bed, I tap on my iPhone until I've got the local NPR station broadcasting Morning Edition. I stumble to the kitchen. Once there, I blindly ricochet around until I have a cup of coffee. The morning continues that way, through a series of "getting ready" motions--eat breakfast, more coffee while enjoying the morning air on the porch, shower, shave, iron, get dressed, fill water bottle. By 7:30 or so I'm awake and ready to go to work.

Once at work my routine is less ordered. The only unchanging part of my days are the scheduled teaching times. Apart from those, I operate via a system of post-it notes affixed to my desk. I usually have three lined up in a row, each in various states of crossed-offedness. Each three inch square has a long list of tasks--"Photocopy Malcolm X handout," "Grade Comp I F ICW," "Upload CM 121 A grades to online database." When I'm not doing last-minute course prep, I work through those lists. I take lunch around 11:15, teach again in the afternoon, use the open hours at the end of the day to make sure I'm not in trouble for the next day. Then I go home.

Up until this point, my day has been fairly structured. I've had a set task or a general end point in mind the entire day. And it usually doesn't hit me that that is gone until I pull into long, uphill driveway for my apartment building. I grab my bag, climb up the stairs, remove my tie and shoes, spend a few minutes scratching the white cat so she will stop meowing, and find myself thinking Well now what do I do? There is always dinner to cook, usually some dishes to wash. Might be laundry I could do. But there isn't a set schedule, not even an end point to keep in mind. And that, as I have recently realized, is a problem for me.

It feels like I didn't used to have this problem. When I was a kid, I loved summer vacation. No school meant the freedom to go anywhere--in my mind. I spent hours building elaborate houses with blocks and skyscrapers with K-Nex sets. I drew floor plans and cross section drawings of houses, buildings, and ships. And once the buildings and drawings were complete, I would spend twice as much time imagining worlds inside of those spaces, inventing families, relationships, disasters, all the basic plot points of a good story. I made miniature movies in my head. Once I got going, you couldn't stop me. Every morning I would wake up, eat the breakfast my mom had set aside for me in the fridge, turn on the Discovery channel, and start in on my projects. After dinner I switched the TV to Nick at Night and did the same activities to Bewitched and I Love Lucy. And then I went to bed.

As it turns out, in designing spaces and filling them with people, I was practicing for one of two careers: architect, which I rejected after one semester at University of Illinois, or englishy person, which I am currently pursuing. Without knowing where it would all end up or if any of it had a purpose, I would get up and practice those arts diligently. And I was happy because I was living deliberately every day. I was living deliberately and I didn't even know it.

But life has changed since I was a child. Before I even knew what it was I had lost the innate ability to conjure deliberate life without thinking. Sometimes I think that my particular generation--those of us who are twenty-somethings right this second--lived through one of the most dramatic changes in they way our society interprets and promotes being human. We will be the last generation to remember what it was like to live in a completely different world.

When I was eight years old, there was no Internet to speak of. We were still using outdated Apple computers in the one computer lab at my elementary school. My dad had a computer at home that ran DOS--I remember memorizing command lines to open up Mario Paint, but that's all it did for me. It didn't reach out. Somewhere along the line, Internet came into the home, along with AOL Instant Messenger. Soon, face-to-face conversations were dominated with comparisons of our online lives--"How many friends do you have on AIM?" became common conversation on the bus. Then it was reality television and a twenty-four hour news cycle. Somewhere in there I replaced my drawing and building routines with Internet design. I learned graphic design, HTML coding, and got really, really excited when I discovered CSS. Life started to move very, very quickly. Via the Internet, I was exercising the deepest levels of my creativity in a place with no closing time and no geographic borders. There was also no alone time--I started communicating with other young web developers around the world. By the time I was sixteen I had a parent-sponsored cell phone and was a texting genius. The lines of life became blurred--there was almost no place I was expending energy that wasn't connected to the big, outside world, no place where I could "turn off" the public side of me. Then there were cars and part-time jobs and being over-involved at school. Then there were college applications, and MySpace pages and Xanga blogs to update. Then I was off at college and facebook arrived during the first semester of my freshman year. In ten years, there was a monumental shift from a slow-paced, independent life to fast-paced, digital, interdependent, twenty-four hour lifestyle. The danger there is that I never disconnected long enough to relax and return to me. I learned to never leave the outside world. When friends have access to what I think while cooking dinner and getting ready for bed, when am I just being me? When am I cultivating me?

When I am at work I am outgoing, I am industrious; I am full of energy, even when I am held back by a cold. But when I am home, without a routine, without any definite goals, I sometimes turn into a different person. I can be discontent, easily annoyed, even despondent. I check facebook and Twitter every ten minutes. I often end up watching TV while simultaneously playing games on my cell phone, paying little attention to either task while I grow annoyed at my inability to focus on two different things at once. I don't feel whole or fulfilled.

Today was different though. I woke up well-rested and fully conscious that I had one more day off from work. When I stepped outside I was greeted by the first crisp, fall-is-coming day. I love this weather, when the air is crisp and clean. It's invigorating. Filled with such positivity, I thought about what to do with my day. Self, I said, what would you like to do today? Well, you could do laundry but it's much too nice a day to spoil with two hours of laundry before noon. You could find a show to watch, or you could read. Oh, oh, oh! Why don't you make a little nest on the couch and settle in for a movie? Now that, that is a good idea.

And so I did. I grabbed a pillow and a blanket, I loaded a Meryl Streep movie (Heartburn ) and settled in. But then I realized that my little nest was also a fantastic reading pace. So I grabbed my book (What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell) and I read. And as I read I got an idea for an academic article about student involvement that relates to technology overload and realized that I could also turn my nest into a workspace so I grabbed a journal and made some notes. And then it hit me. How strange, I thought, that all of my positive energy is feeding off itself and creating this giant clusterstorm of productivity and positivity. This feels an awful lot like when I was a kid, working but working on my own stuff. Huh, that's what Beth Capo said that one time at lunch when I accused her of being a robot--"You want to be working, but working on your own stuff."

Working, but working on my own stuff. Well that's...simple. But it's a lesson that I often forget. And I don't think I'm alone. To various degrees, we are all living in a society that is quick, shallow, and digital. It's based on microbits (or something) zipping along fiber optic lines. It's intangible. And so often it isn't real. I caught about fifteen minutes of an interview on NPR today--Shirley Turkle talking about her new book Alone Together. I haven't read it, but it's on my list. For now, her conversation had me thinking about the interdependence of the internet and how it shows up in life. At one point she said, "we think that because we grew up with the internet that it must be all grown up and it's just not." Applied to my experiences with the internet and general modern distractions from a recognition of, well, me, her message is that I/we am/are often lost in a big, interconnected, crazy way of life that we accepted before we knew the repercussions it would bring.

I don't know it means for culture at large but I'm pretty sure, for me, I'm going to be deliberately working on living deliberately, on activities that cultivate me. I'm going to stay busy by working but working on my own stuff. And that might involve the Internet, as long as it is deliberate. As long as I'm not escaping me in the process.

When in Doubt, Sit on Porch

I moved--to Kansas. A few brief months after my original post (where I mentioned I couldn't find a full-time teaching job), I was hired to teach at a small college in Kansas. So here I am. In Kansas.

It isn't a bad place to be. Once you get past the barrage of Dorothy jokes: Are you going to meet Toto? Make sure you pick a house that is bolted down. Do you need a pair of red crystal shoes? Pack your broom!

In seriousness, the town is small, but the people are welcoming. I have a full-time job with salary and benefits, I have an office, and have oodles of "kids" that I see every day. When I come home from work I am generally happy to be home. I cook, I wash dishes, I watch video content streamed to my television set. On most days I'm content.

But there are other days when it's a little harder to be content. You see, on most days I am busy and am content to think that my family and my closest friends are busy as well. They are off doing grad school and Peace Corps and jobs. They are in Minnesota, Ecuador, Illinois, Iowa, California, Oregon, Washington DC. We are all spread out. We are all separated. And that's easier to take. Easier than sitting around on a long weekend twiddling thumbs while the majority of my family gathers around a campfire and a sizable contingent of my friends gather in Illinois for a birthday party I couldn't attend. It's a silly thing to harbor a tiny bit of bitterness for the happiness of others.

And so I turn to my porch. I've found that the porch can cure so much of what ails me. It's a quiet place where I watch the cars drive by, where I watch the trees sway in the Kansas breezes / windstorms, where I watch people come and go at the law office next door.

And tonight, I will march myself a block down that street to a little bar / coffeehouse (because why not be both?) and hang out with some very fun people.

And someday my life will be as full and complex here as it was in Illinois, in Iowa, in Paris. Because that's just how life works out.

For now, when I'm in doubt, I'll just retreat to the porch.

Friendlies

This one I couldn't not write about. As I sit here writing this I'm chatting with a friend who is currently serving in Afghanistan. On the bed next to me is a thank you note from a friend currently serving in the Peace Corps in Ecuador. She will be receiving a glittery card in the mail very soon. Earlier today I talked (separately) with two very dear friends from college and yesterday I had the pleasure of having a lengthy phone conversation with a friend finishing her M.S. in Florida. I've also been keeping a constant stream of texts (word to the couple traveling the country by car) and facebook connectivity (thanks for the teaching tips). And to top it all off I have my siblings: I just spent the weekend hanging out with my sister who came up for a visit and I just had a couple hours with my brother who got back from a weekend out of town.

It's overly sappy but I'm grateful for a weekend of friends or, as I like to call them, friendlies. I've gone on one full-time teaching interview and am gearing up for another one this coming week. (Still waiting to hear about another position that is very close to my past and my heart.) I've got two courses coming up the following week that are still in the planning phase. Until then, I've entered the month-long, no-pay drought that comes hand-in-hand with semester breaks in a part-time teaching job (Did you see how many hyphenated phrases I just used? Holy cow.) Basically, I don't have a routine. Things aren't settled. There is no normal. And I have no idea when there will be. And it's messing with my brain. I seem to be incapable of focusing on any one task for any extended period of time (unless that task involves camping out inside the refrigerator or pantry and inhaling everything digestible with a calorie content).

And it's times like these when it is really nice to be surrounded, digitally if not physically, with friendlies.

Tiny Fractures

I've been avoiding this blog for a while. I've been avoiding developing a more calculated, effective, and "possible" writing plan here for an even longer while. After all, what is one to do when an activity (this here blog) that you have pledged all your ambition, perseverance, and discipline to becomes destructive?

The truth is, with my teaching schedule, I can't keep up a daily blogging routine. Not at the moment anyway. Blogging quickly became less of a joy, less of a way to explore the world in warm, sparkly, self-reflective light and more of the dragging fingernails on the chalkboard--the kind that make the tiny hairs on your arm stand up and trigger the visceral response of your sympathetic nervous system. As the workload piled up in the light of the inevitable daily blog, I felt like I was cracking. Tiny fractures splintering up and down my spine under the weight of my self-imposed obligations. If you aren't getting the picture yet, it wasn't pretty.

And so I was surprised to find how joyous reading through past blog entries was. I remembered fondly the tweaking I did to the layout over the first few days. I remembered the sense of possibility and the thrill of seeing the readership increase slowly every day. I remembered walking even more often with my iPhone in hand, ready to snap the one picture that would be the thread of gratitude in my day. It was exciting. And then I read an actual entry. And I didn't hate the writing. And I suddenly didn't hate that I took a break from the daily grind. It was strange.

And so I jumped behind the blogging dashboard and decided to write about gratitude for that feeling when you realize you have created a tiny something to be proud of and also that feeling when you achieve patience--even for the briefest of moments--with yourself.

In the future I want this to be a writing portfolio. Daily--or at least weekly--reflections on life coupled with snippets of my creative, scholarly, and professional writing. I'm practically bursting with writing projects at the moment. I've been in contact with an intrepid soul who's putting together an anthology of coming out stories so I'm working on that. I've been writing--sparingly--for the Rockford Indie Press and they want me to do a bi-weekly column (about what? I have no idea and am open to suggestions) so that's fun. I also spend many hours each day writing tiny comments in the margins of student papers. But for now, firmly entrenched in the downhill slope of the end of the semester, I can't do it all.

So for the time being I'll just sit on my blogging hands and be thankful that it is here, that I created it to begin with, that I don't hate myself for taking a break, that it will be here when I'm ready for it, and that it's here if you want it when I'm not.

Thanks for reading (and following) (and spreading the word) (and putting up with the number of times bloggers use the word "I").

Here's to tiny fractures and the things we do to heal them.

Bookish Judgment

Long ago on a forgotten blog I wrote about an experience with the aphorism "Don't judge a book by its cover." I was in high school. There was a student teacher. She wasn't the picture of perfection. She was gangly with limbs that poked blindly out of her shapeless clothing. Her hair needed the gift of shape and a good anti-frizz treatment. And her mannerisms were more masculine than mine which, as I have come to find out through personal experience and thesis-related research, really isn't saying much at all. At all.

I was content to go through my life with those judgments radiating outward but one day after school, my friend Emily had a question for this teacher. As I was attached at Emily's hip--as a part of my enjoyment of the enlightening freedom of a driver's license I was probably waiting to give her a ride home--I became a participant observer of the conversation. What I learned took my breath away.

This woman had been to war, this woman had been through poverty, this woman was pregnant, this woman was still pursuing her dream despite it having been delayed by some ten odd years. Color me shocked. In this light she became not a testament to God's cruelty but a testament to perseverance and human dignity. Perhaps because I naturally tend towards shallowness or perhaps because I blogged about the experience thereby making it more significant, this is my first remembered experience involving me judging someone else. This woman wasn't someone to be derided but rather someone to cherish as a cultural example. How could I have been so wrong?

I fled home in a fit of universal inspiration and wrote my little heart out about the experience. Then I uploaded the file to my web space (this was pre-Xanga, Wordpress, Blogger, MySpace, or facebook). Then I probably got an after-school snack and watched a Martha Steward rerun (because there were signs) in the golden haze of universal coherence and self satisfaction.

When I checked back I had a rather nasty comment. As was the trend, this blog was hosted on someone's private domain and as such no longer exists. If it did I could be more specific but the jist of the comment was as follows: "This blog entry is nothing more than teenage bullshit. That saying has been around for hundreds of years. It's cliche. Find something else to write about. You're a loser. Your whole blog sucks."

I stopped blogging for a while after that. But more importantly I think I internalized that message about my writing and about the larger sphere of life. In some sense it is true: people want to read about things that are new and interesting. Musing on an adage isn't necessarily profound. But it is also false and here's why.

I have this whole gratitude blog happening and, despite my lapses in the original plan of daily blogging, the mode of thinking where I question "What are you grateful for today? What today has changed your outlook on your tomorrow?" has lodged into my mind. And today I found myself grateful for a piece of writing that, albeit inadvertently, prompted the old judging books by their covers moment.

I'm currently enjoying The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English by Roy Peter Clark. It's incredibly thought-provoking if you A) like writing, B) teach writing, or C) have any shred of interest in the language in which you communicate. Clark starts out chapter eighteen with "In my senior year in high school, 1966, I played the keyboard in a garage band called T.S. and the Eliots. We played at school dances and sock hops and dominated the school party scene along with our rivals the Aardvarks, led by my friend Joe Edmundson. Joe and I wound up in college together and joined forces to form Tuesday's Children, playing songs form the Beatles, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, and our favorites, the Rascals" (89).*

Upon reading this, my brain immediately conjured images from a former student's presentation about the value of music in school. There he was. Shirtless, making the singing face, rooted in front of a microphone...in someone's garage. In the context of a student presentation it makes sense. Young, big dreams. But that image of a young didn't fit so congruently with Mr. Roy Peter Clark. I thought to myself Wait a minute. This guy is writing a book about grammar. About the glamour of grammar. No way did he ever play guitar shirtless in someone's garage.

Then I looked at the author's picture on the back flap. There, behind the receding hairline and the scholarly, professor glasses, is the hint of a smirk and twinkle of eye that would fit perfectly behind the frame of a guitar and mic. Despite my respect for his book, I had prejudged this man. Pigeonholed him behind his professor desk. Limited the value of his experience to the realm of "only" rather than "and."

And there it was. Again. That silly, stupid message about book judging and its consequences. So I guess the point is even if they adages are worn and make you think "well, duh" that doesn't mean they aren't true. Doesn't mean we don't need reminded of them every once in a while.

And the larger message for this blog is an affirming one for me and for my goals as a writer: writing is the perfect medium for exploring these "well, duh" moments. For translating lightning-quick flashes of realization into gratitude-worthy, applicable moments that really can be applied to tomorrow. And today. And yesterday.

So today I'm thankful for grammar books, for Roy Peter Clark, for author photographs, old blogs, new blogs, and jerk-face commentators who, even nine years later, inspire us to speak out about our world.

*© Roy Peter Clark--no copyright infringement intended.

What Happened to Your Blog or In Search of Home

I took a break from blogging. I was gone for four days. It all started when I went to the Central States Communication Association convention in Milwaukee. I didn't blog there because I felt that blogging would keep me from actually experiencing what was going on around me.

Ever since my mom died I've struggled with a few things--the obvious ones are fear of death, fear of anything ending, also fear of missing out. A not-so-obvious struggle has stemmed from the last of these three: I struggle with the desire and ability to not document the world around me. I'm petrified that if I blink, I will miss out on something. Some person, some picture, a song, a moment with friends, a time and a place to explore the world on a different level. And worse than any of these fears is the fear that I won't remember the thing I haven't missed out on. Every once in a while I find myself in a "documentation craze" where I realize that I'm spending more time attempting to remember events than actually living them.

I think that's probably what happened while I was at the convention. I didn't want to miss out on something in a misguided attempt to document it.

Iowa State scholars presenting scholarly things.

You see, the conference was more than just a conference to me. I realized during the first presentation I attended--a technology panel of my Iowa State people--that the convention's theme of "Home" was apropos. In no small way, I was traveling to a foreign city so I could reunite with my first professional family; with my professional, academic "home makers".

And so we attended sessions and listened to presentations and networked, we fell off our diets and ordered room service and closed down the hotel bar, we reunited and supported and fertilized friendships in preparation for yet another drought. And it was wonderful.

...

But at the same time my sudden absence from the one writing project to save me from my depression / anger / fear has to be larger than wanting to fully live a weekend at an academic conference. It is also about a larger search for home.

I decided to undertake this blog project, to write daily about a search for a new perspective, to consciously put my work out "there" on a different level because I don't feel like I have a true home.

Academia, as much as I love it, isn't incredibly welcoming at the moment and, in some ways because of this, I don't feel truly rooted or grounded in Rockford. Adjuncting is the academic equivalent of itinerant labor. Its debatable, for example, how smart it is to put down roots when you are applying for jobs on both coasts and everywhere in-between.

And it must be said that this blog probably represents yet another project in a string of documentation crazes. An attempt to find an emotional footing in life by documenting, cataloging and storing every moment.

And so today I'm grateful for the friends who meet me at conferences and for the friends who remind me to get back to it when the conference is over. Life keeps plodding on.

Pointless Television

I don't know if I've been overloading myself but I felt relaxed today in a way that I haven't felt in a very long time. And it all happened because I was watching pointless television while dozing on the couch this morning.

When I was a kid I used to spend days watching the History Channel (back when it actually had shows about history) or Turner Classic Movies. I would grab my pencil, ruler, and latest drawing project and sprawl out across the living room floor. Once properly positioned, I would spend hours drifting between the fantasy world in the movies on the screen and the fantasy world on the page in front of me.

This morning my cold this still giving me trouble so I thought I should get extra rest. I turned on History Channel International (which, for some reason, still runs actual historical documentaries--like the Samurai program I watched this morning) and promptly took a nap. Even though I only had an hour and even though I had to quickly get up and scurry on to campus to tutor and teach, it was completely and utterly peaceful.

It was a tiny thing but it helped me reconnect, even if only for a brief second, with the person I used to be, absorbing the stories on the screen, unconcerned with grading and lesson plans and laundry and unwritten conference presentations and bills and summer jobs.

I hope to spend some more time like that very soon.

Creative People

Earlier today, thanks to the miracles of facebook news feed, I saw that a friend's song is now available for purchase on iTunes. I've been trying to shove this music down people's throats for months now, so I was excited to finally have a convenient way to add it to my iPod's mix (the easier to commute by).

Then I thought to myself, How perfect! I'm grateful for Erika Fatale (Rodger) and for all the creative people I know who have the guts to go out and really make it work Then I thought to myself, wait a minute--I already wrote that blog entry about Jack Roberts and The Study Band. And I could write it about Jared Bartman. And probably countless others.

In my head, it was set. I would write about creative people and link the blog back to my old blog. Simple.

It wasn't until I just went back and looked that I realized that I wrote that other blog entry almost a year ago today. Maybe there's something about this time of year that makes me yearn for something more creative. I can tell you that I wrote the original "creative people" surrounded by ungraded speeches with the threat of a thesis hanging over my head. I'm writing this entry surrounded by ungraded papers and the threat of unfinished laundry and an unwritten conference presentation. The situations certainly sound similar but I think what is really happening is I'm yearning for a world of different possibilities. And I think it's a world where "the dream" isn't dead. Where having a crazy dream doesn't mean you are crazy but that you have integrity of thought, mind, and action.

People like Jack and Erika remind me (once a year, apparently) that dreams are still floating around out there. All you have to do is grab one and hold on (and then work your ass off).

But that's why I started this blog, so that I would write every day. Day ten and still kicking. So thanks for reading.

Home Remedies

I'm sick. Not death throws sick or terminal illness sick. (Not even mental illness sick, although I have a few friends and at least one former roommate who will argue otherwise.) I have a cold. An ordinary, chest-heaving, throat-throbbing, Niagara nose cold. But I feel awful.

It's karma really. When I was home visiting my sister, she started to feel sick. Then she actually became sick. And I made fun of her. "Jesus, Rose. Go blow your nose." "Hey, Snuffaluffagus." "You aren't a very good sick person, are you?"

So I'm feeling feverish but I can't find my thermometer, my throat feels like an unrefined Brillo pad, and earlier today at the end of my second class I felt all dizzy and fainty like Scarlet O'Hara in bloomers on one of her couches (minus the seventeen-inch waist, obviously).

Anyway, tonight I'm thankful for my sense of humor (even if I'm the only one laughing and I'm doing it through night sweats) and Martha Stewart's home remedies. Including, but not limited to, homemade ginger tea with Wisconsin honey. Because it makes a throat feel good.

My World, More Complexly

Thanks to the observer effect, the act of writing this blog has changed the way I go through my days. In the short time I've been writing, I've developed a litany of things I'm grateful for--the interesting ones I try to write about in interesting ways, the commonplace (oxygen, electricity, television, books, all things that sentimental Hallmark cards are made of) I quietly note, smile, and then move on. But I am always questioning in the back of my mind. What am I truly grateful for today? In reality, the way the question is processed from initial utterance to organized, pixelated response changes it into something more like this: What have I experienced today that has changed the way I will think about tomorrow?

After a visit to the car wash today, I was all prepped and ready to write about car washes and the funnily-colored foam that they use--giving thanks for tiny bright points in your day and all that jazz. I snapped a picture of blue, yellow and purple foam, made a mental note, and then went on with my day. It wasn't until later, when I found myself listening to NPR's This American Life, that I changed my evening's writing agenda. I've long been grateful for the program but, with this writing project stalking about in the back of my head, I found myself listening on a deeper level.

For those of you who have never tuned in to the program (or listened to it through iTunes podcasts or the iPhone / Android apps), each week Ira Glass guides us through one theme and several acts or stories that relate to that theme. The concept of tough love, for example, is examined through the lens of a Georgia drug court and a particularly harsh judge. The concept of lost and found is examined through a lengthy narrative of a gang of kids exploring an abandoned house. The financial collapse is looked at through the state of housing rentals in Chicago. I've been actively listening for years, first during my lunch breaks at the Jacksonville Public Library. Sometimes the stories converge, sometimes they diverge. But there's always a theme, and there are always stories of real people, real events.

Today, while driving from my childhood home to my new home, I listened to "Will They Know Me Back Home?" which examines deployment syndrome and the various ways it hits people serving in the Iraq war--both to American troops and Iraqi interpreters hired by the military. During the course of the show I met people who were afraid to come home, people who were afraid to welcome troops home, and people who found homes--and their true selves--while serving in unexpected ways. While I was listening to these very contextual stories I found the basic theme of the show blossoming and flowering into other areas. Is this what that guy was talking about when he mentioned returning from extended stays in Germany? Did I change during my time in Paris? Am I changing now? Changing from what? What is identity, anyway?

...

In class last semester, we were reading a series of three articles that all used data from a scientific study that attempted to determine if women really did talk more than men. The articles all came to different conclusions which prompted discussions not only about gender constructs but also about the construction and perpetuation of cultural myths. I thought it was fascinating and was taken aback when a student asked "Who are these people? Who researches this? Don't they have anything better to do with their time?"

This incident reminds me of This American Life because the show gets made fun of for looking too closely at ordinary people / events. And it does look closely. It zooms in to the gritty details of being human, of drawing breath, of interacting with people. And it does so by detailing events and perspectives on those events that we might not get otherwise. Those events and perspectives might seem small, but they are displayed as the heart of concepts and those concepts have far-reaching implications. How else would I, a civilian enjoying the creature comforts of capitalist America, move from stories of shit ditches in Iraq to broad theoretical concepts of identity in one hour-long radio show?

This American Life proves that there is value in looking closely at things because, as it turns out, some of the smallest details have a huge impact on how we go about living our lives. And that is far more valuable than many people acknowledge. It's also why I am grateful for This American Life.

Foamy Vomit

When this little girl came home from the pet store, she was nervous and threw up all over my Sunday church clothes. I'm pretty sure it was foamy vomit. White.  And I'm positive she gave me "I'm sorry" puppy-dog eyes as soon as she was finished. Now, fourteen years later, she's deaf and has a few inoperable tumors, but she still has the same amount of pep she did that morning after I forgave her for the vomit foamy vomit incident and played fetch with her.

It's a short blog today because, after spending hours bent over a stack of papers and then even more hours bent over job applications, I'm exhausted. I've popped in a movie, devoured most of a pizza, and just opened a beer. It's a personal night.

But on the way back to the car after picking up that movie, this cute little dog was sitting on the center console between the front seats with her ears perked up, watching my every move at the redbox. When I got in the car she gave me a quick nuzzle before she settled into her passenger-in-the-car position: perched at the edge of the seat, nose resting against and spasmodically sniffing the air vent.

She's my partner in crime, the foamy vomit dog.

Campground, Campground Burning Bright

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology and some misguided financial planning, I made alot of international calls while I was living in Paris. I remember one call very clearly. I had just come up from the La Fourche Metro stop and was making my way toward my house on rue Nollet. I hadn't eaten lunch and was trying to decide between French McDonalds and a street vendor's panini when my sister called my cell phone. She asked me how my day was going while I wondered why she was calling me from the other side of the Atlantic. There was also a strange hint of excitement in her voice.

Then it dropped. She was excited because she had decided, along with my dad, to buy a camper.

"To do what?" I asked.

"Why, to camp! We are going to become campers."

Campers, I thought. People who camp.

It took a minute to sink in, and as it did I pondered the chic wardrobes of the Parisians charging down the streets on their way, I was sure, to smoke French cigarettes and drink champagne at a dainty bar. I pondered the Metro, thanks to which I could glide from one cultural landmark of the western world to another. I pondered the elegant hierarchy of the Napoleonic, Haussmannesque architecture so typical inside the walls of the Péripherique highway. I also pondered my own identity, a shape that I had carefully crafted based on my new, modern, trendy, culturally-aware Parisian life. And here was my sister. Describing in excruciating detail my family's retreat into what I was sure would be the banjo-playing, camping countryside.

I was horrified.

A month or two later I was back in the United States and one of my first dear-God-please-save-me-from-jetlag activities was going with my sister and dad to officially pick up the camper. It was a tiny pop-up, the kind that is only three feet tall until you crank it to human-height. It didn't make me feel any better.

...

But now, two years later, my attitude has changed, the camper has been upgraded, and I planned my trip home based partly on the first weekend of camping season. Those of you who know me well are checking the URL of this blog, trying to figure out if it is some bizarre web-hacking trick, if it is really me writing. It is. Camping might not be my preferred way to pass the time but it certainly is a welcome weekend adventure three or four times a year when the world gets me down and I want a night of open skies, warm fires, and genuine people.

Right now it's just over fifty degrees. The clouds are gone, the stars are out, and the conversation is going. I'm typing this at the picnic table, fifteen feet from the fire, just beyond it's warming glow. But when I finish this sentence, grab my beer, and rejoin the fireside crowd, I'll be very, very thankful for that fire. And for the people surrounding it. (And that my family invested in a camper.)

It's Interesting

Earlier this week I blogged about Maps Home. I enjoyed writing it almost as much as I enjoyed imagining my path of travel during a slightly dead moment of my day.

Today I put that theoretical purple line to practice as I laced my way through the suburbs and then zippped southwestward across the state. As it turns out, long drives give you time to think and sometimes you end up thinking about out-of-the-way things.

Take the very notion of interstate driving for example. Have you ever thought about the mechanics of the system? The physical and theoretical guts ticking away behind the scenes to bring functionality to the largest network of roads in the world? For example, from the moment I rolled on to I-290 in the northwestern suburbs to the moment I rolled off I-72 in South Jacksonville, I was on one seemingly endless stretch of pavement. I didn't have to stop my car even for the briefest of moments. I realize that this is sort of the point of the system and to marvel over it is sort of like marveling over the earth-shattering technology of a toaster but it's still interesting to think about if really let yourself.

The way the roads are marked is also interesting. At any given entrance, a particular highway might seem to stretch straight north and straight south, for example, but, in the grand scheme of things, this road might actually end up dead-ending at, let's say, the west coast which is not at all north or south. Tricky, no?

The text on any given interstate sign follows a similar pattern and this all gets to the heart of what I like to call the "final destination." It's sort of like riding the Metro in Paris (or any other major public transportation system). You might only be going from Louvre Rivoli to Concorde--two stops down on line one--but you travel in the direction of La Defense--the end of the line. It isn't really complicated but the logic does take a second.

And so today, as I was driving, I risked life and limb (the road was practically empty) to snap this quick picture (while somehow keeping both hands on the wheel) as I ramped up, over, and around (it was safe, dammit!) on a winding path towards home. It's simply interesting.

As an analytical sentimentalist, nothing thrilled me more than seeing a Chicagoland sign that simultaneously pointed and didn't point to home. Was I traveling to St. Louis? No. But that sign meant that the particular branch of twisty, rampy, seemingly unending pavement would eventually spit me out somewhere between St. Louis and Chicago. And it did. And now I'm home.

David Sedaris

When I was a closeted young man I couldn't even begin to accept myself because I was so supremely confident that there wasn't a soul, not a single person in my daily life, that would accept me. Not my friends, not my family, certainly not the women I had serially dated after discovering that holding hands with a girl during high school passing period did a fantastic job abating the calls of "gay" and "fag." Being gay wasn't Christian. It certainly wasn't normal. It was most definitely wrong so why should anyone accept me for it?

Then I got caught having internet conversations with a guy. We would chat about the world. He would try to convince me being gay was fine. I would retort with Bible verses and quotes from popular culture. We would flirt. An ex got his name from my computer and, when she confronted him, he spilled the beans on me.

It's difficult to describe what that felt like because, before I knew it, people knew and were actually rejecting me--not for being gay but for actively lying to them for years. In my desperate (albeit misguided) attempt to cultivate a support system in the shape of a false life, I had unwittingly undercut it all. I remember getting off the phone with a girl who I thought was my last tie to the life I had so carefully constructed. "I can't do this alone," I told her. Her terse response was "you can because you don't have a choice."

...

I made it through that night and then another night and then another but that doesn't mean being gay felt normal or acceptable. I moved through the world hating myself for something I also knew I couldn't control. Then, one day while browsing in the Waldenbooks store at the mall, I came across Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. I read through the first few pages and it seemed funny, refreshing. I purchased it and, that night as I read half the book in bed, I learned that this man, the very man who had penned the words in my hands, was gay. This is the absolute first time I had this experience and it happened completely by accident.*

And, strangely enough, Sedaris seemed happy, or at least seemed to have developed some fantastic coping skills. In essay after essay, tiny pictures of a potential life flowed from the page into my head. Maybe, I thought, maybe I can do this.

So it was a wonderful surprise when The Progressive arrived in the mail today with a fresh interview with David Sedaris. Now I can finish this blog, draw a warm bath, pop a bottle of Stella Artois, and catch up with the man who changed my life for the better.

*Full disclosure: It's true that, when I introduced Alex Sanchez at his Illinois College lecture, I claimed that his Rainbow Boys was the first book that did this for me. It wasn't. It started by accident with Me Talk Pretty One Day and then on purpose with Rainbow Boys. Turning it the other way around made for a better introduction and, come on, the guy was listening to me introduce him. Like, in the same room.

Maps Home

"You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose."
-Dr. Suess Oh, the Places You'll Go

So my friend Claire is an interesting mixture of sweet and insane. On the night of my birthday party she pulled out Suess's Oh, the places You'll Go and started reading. Little did she know that my dad offered that book--complete with a lovely dedication ("...you need fear not as you have already shown that you can push on through darkness and light...")--as sagely advice way back in 2004. I still pull it out periodically to remind myself that life is okay (and that Suess was a technicolor genius).

I was thinking about places today as I sat in the large, nearly empty adjunct office at Harper College waiting for class to start. I'm going home this Thursday for my sister's birthday weekend and some refresh and recharge time with our family dogs. As I will be heading home through the suburbs--those tricky places--I decided to do a quick directions search and I stumbled on a little revelation.

The way the purple path sweeps down from the city to the "country" of central Illinois took me a minute to grasp. It isn't a route I've traveled before, at least in that particular direction as a functioning adult driving from my job to my childhood home.

Then I started thinking of all the other places I've lived.

I did a brief stint at the University of Illinois in Champaign.

That was followed by a much longer stint at Illinois College in Jacksonville which is just minutes from my childhood home.

While I was studying at IC, I lived briefly in Paris.

Then I ended up at Iowa State University in Ames.

And now I'm in Rockford (which quickly followed a barely-there blip in Woodstock).

It became clear to me that I've been to many places but I've always been grateful for the map (and the subsequent trip) home.

Taking Care of People

I woke up this morning feeling slightly more than defeated. Last night, I fell deeply into my current book (The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer) which, combined with my impromptu post-birthday-celebration daytime nap, kept me up much later than usual. In a misguided attempt to get at least seven hours of sleep, I pushed my alarm from 7:00 to 8:00 and woke up sorely missing that lost hour as I scrambled to adjust to additional Writing Center hours tacked on to the beginning of the first full week of teaching since Spring break started to cycle through my various schools. When I opened my email to find that a batch of student emails intended to go out last Friday had misfired, I knew I was in for it.

Five hours in, I hauled my slightly brain dead self out of the basement adjunct office at Rock Valley College and made the trek to the Student Center for a sandwich. Given the state of the day--I was making progress but wasn't yet able to believe there would be a light at the end of the tunnel--I wasn't expected to be pleasantly surprised. I just wanted to get in a quick early lunch before I started the six-hour marathon of tutoring, copying, teaching, teaching.

On my way back to the office, I noticed a student representative of the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship standing next to some signs announcing "Justice Week" and "Stopping Slavery." Having recently read through half of Kristof and WuDunn's Half the Sky I knew this man must be representing the issue of human trafficking and the sex trade. I stopped at the table and volunteered my services.

For those of you who don't know, human trafficking and the sex trade along with a third-world distaste for and distrust of women are major issues whose statistics (and real-life, human stories) are not only tragic and heartbreaking but also deeply, deeply disturbing. Here are some snippets from the June 2010 Vintage Books edition of Half the Sky:

"The total number of modern slaves is difficult to estimate. The International Labour Organization, a UN agency, estimates that at any one time there are 12.3 million people engaged in forced labor of all kinds, not just sexual servitude. A UN report estimated that 1 million children in Asia alone are held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery. And The Lancet, a prominent medical journal in Britain, calculated that '1 million children are forced into prostitution every year and the total number of prostituted children could be as high as 10 million'" (9).

"...in the peak decade of the transatlantic slave trade, the 1780s, an average of just under eighty thousand slaves were shipped annually across the Atlantic from Africa to the New World. The average then dropped to a bit more than fifty thousand between 1811 and 1850. In other words, far more women and girls are shipped into brothels each year in the early twenty-first century than African slaves were shipped into slave plantations each year in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries..." (11).

"Surveys suggest that about one third of all women worldwide face beatings in the home. Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined" (61).

The book is riddled with staggering numbers that make a person wonder why this isn't mainstream news everywhere, every day. It also forces you to stare first-world and male privileges in the eye. Before anyone accuses me of transmitting "liberal guilt"--whatever that is--let me say that these stories shouldn't make you feel guilt, they should make you angry. They should prime you for action.

The only trouble is figuring out how to help. I had to stop reading the book half way through because I was too depressed and felt incapacitated. What was I supposed to do to help these people? There are brilliant stories in the book about people--even first-world people--dropping everything and volunteering at hospitals and safe houses for abused women. It's fantastic but it isn't practical for me. And when you walk around dealing with legitimate everyday troubles in a first-world country (I didn't get enough sleep, my car needs an oil change, my internet is slower than normal today, my student loan debts are too high, etc.) it's hard to simultaneously add on the human rights struggles of women in a world where humans not only refuse to take care of each other but insist on harming each other for profit. Even on a good day it can seem equally difficult to ignore the problem and face the problem head on.

That's why I was delighted to see Intervarsity spearheading a Rock Valley College coalition of student groups with the goal of raising $600 to support the counseling and education of a young girl recently rescued from the sex slave trade. I grabbed the Justice Week Classroom Announcement sheet, a plastic cup (see photo above) and my copy of Half the Sky. I read the announcement in both of my classes today and am officially collecting spare change from my students and anyone I catch in the adjunct office. In ten minutes I collected $4.81 and expect to get more on Wednesday when students are planning on bringing change to class. And I'm just one person. The drive goes on all week so if you are interested in donating from wherever you are, you can mail me a check made out to Marc Malone to the following address:

Marc Malone
Adjunct Instructor of English
Rock Valley College
3301 North Mulford Road
Rockford, IL 61114

Today I am grateful that, when people come together to take care of people, it's possible to make a dent in someone's life in a place far, far away. It reminds you that, despite its horrors and inequities, humanity can be a beautiful thing.

Day One: Traveling Bags

As of yesterday I'm officially twenty-five and to celebrate, I invited a few close friends to stay for a weekend. We spent our time enjoying food, drink and conversation and, as everyone packed their bags for home and the real world this morning, I snapped this picture of traveling bags.

Last year I had a monster birthday party in Ames, IA where I was working on my MA in English Literature. I invited thirty people to a dinner with a champagne toast followed by a trip to my favorite bar. It was a grand time meant to bring together all of the people I lived my life with--at school, at work, in my social life. Everyone got an invitation. This year though, I didn't feel quite like celebrating my life in the same fashion. The economy is still in the dumpster, especially for those of us in education who, thanks to the trickle-down effect of budget systems, are just now feeling the repercussions of the collapse. So I find myself, in some ways, paused between dreams. I haven't been able to secure a spot in a PhD program--not enough funding to go around. Nor have I been able to find a full-time job teaching English at community colleges--even more chronically underfunded than humanities departments at major universities. On good days I still find joy but on bad days I feel really, really stuck. When it came time to plan my party, it wasn't time for champagne toasts made at the head of a thirty-person dinner. I wanted to spend my birthday with my oldest friends, the ones who have provided both physical and emotional shelter over the years. I only invited five people and each and every one of them had to travel anywhere between two and six hours to join the party.

And so today I am thankful for traveling bags and the people that carry them, especially those dearest of friends who carry them on their way to visit me and end up leaving with tiny pieces of my heart.