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.