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.