Slush

I was walking through our campus and saw a woman who must have been a mother, waiting outside one of the girls' dorms. As she waited for her daughter, she was using her boot to plow around the snow that was rapidly turning to slush.

It's behavior that's so uncharacteristic for an adult (at least in public!) that one could be tempted to call campus security to escort the crazy woman off campus, but even if she was crazy, she seemed harmless enough. Anyway, who hasn't sometimes felt the call of playing with snow? For me, there's always been a certain appeal, on days like today when the temperature is above freezing but most of the snow hasn't yet realized it, to stepping on the snow to turn it into slush, perhaps making patterns through the choice of which fallen precipitation stays snow and which transmutes into a new state of being. There's just something oddly satisfying about this sort of thing.

Before seeing this woman out and about, I might have thought it was a guy thing--we have a tendency to amuse ourselves with fairly simple, made-up-on-the-spot games, either solo or with company, but obviously this child-like amusement knows no gender boundaries. It's probably good for the soul, to break out of our adult stodginess once in a while, to smush snow to slush, and not to rush.

Later in the day, I was walking our dog, Beaker, and I looked back to see our respective trails through the snow. Mine was a straight line between A & B, while hers looped around, back-tracked, and went off on tangents as whim--or her nose--moved her. At the end of the walk, we both arrived in the same place, but who had more fun getting there?

Frustration in the Stacks: A tale of the local library

I've always loved libraries. I loved going to story time, I loved getting books for my mom to read to me, and then I loved getting books for myself--there were always so many that I still hadn't read but wanted to! Today, however, the library was a sad, sad place.

My first clue should have been how dimly lit it was, but I've never subscribed to the pathetic fallacy. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Before Thanksgiving, Lauren and I went to the library to look for an audio book to listen to while we drove to Ohio. We found something or other to be marginally enthusiastic about. We also decided we'd better get some things for Thea, our 11-month-old. We checked out some board books and a DVD, and while we were in the children's section, we saw The Hunger Games audiobook. I'd heard very good things about the novel, so we picked it up and put the other title back. We weren't disappointed, but that's a review I need to write.

We were, however, disappointed when it turned out that they only had The Hunger Games and not either of the sequels. Since we're going on a long trip up to Rockville, IL tomorrow, we decided we needed that sequel, so I got it as a free book from audible (go to http://www.audible.com/podcast) as part of a trial membership. I'll probably cancel, though I'm tempted to keep it.

So, as I was saying before I dipped back into the past, I should have known from the dark and stormy look of the library that it would disappoint me. I went in to pick up some different board books and a different DVD for Thea, and what do you think the first thing was that I saw on display in the children's section? Catching Fire, the sequel to The Hunger Games. On audiobook. With a little "NEW" sticker on it.

In other words, I just wasted my free audiobook download from Audible. Thanks for nothing, library.
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And then, while I was looking for board books (I got a baby haiku book, a couple Sandra Boynton works, and some more entries in the "That's Not My [insert animal/object]" series), I overheard a conversation between two local high school girls. I'm fairly sure from their conversation that at least one was a senior (unless she's already in college but on one of those long breaks from Thanksgiving to New Year's that some colleges have), because she was talking about what she was going to do--or perhaps was doing--in college.

Now, my assumption would be that the adolescents who work at the library are some of the finer specimens of intellect that a given town has. I mean it's not the illiterate--or even the aliterate--who get jobs at the library, right?

The one girl must have been shelving a dinosaur book, because she was holding forth on how dinosaurs are "in the Bible ... at least indirectly." She didn't believe, in other words, that dinosaur bones are a hoax or God putting them there to test our faith.

"So they were destroyed in the Flood?" The other girl asks.

"No, Noah took all the animals on the ark. But he wouldn't feed the other animals to the dinosaurs, so they starved."

Where to begin? The fact that many species of dinosaurs were vegetarians or the fact that, if you actually believe this story, there must have been predators on board who, after all, would have to eat. Noah fed lions and tigers but took dinosaurs on board only to watch them starve? I mean, it's one thing to believe in fantastical myths. When I was their age, I did too. And even many perfectly capable adults do too. Fine. But how about a little internal consistency, eh?

I'm pretty sure my brain, falling into rhythm with theirs, shut down for a little bit there, stupefied as I was, because I can't recall the rest of the conversation, except that when the other girl asked about carbon dating, the one with the answers simply said that "the theory is good, but the science is wrong."

We have no intention of sending our daughter to the local public schools, in case you were curious.

Parenting Addicts?

A friend's blog had an interesting collection of thoughts today on parenthood, four months in. I always love reading their take on parenthood, whether Ben or his wife Erin is writing, because they either have a male, younger version of our daughter, or else there's a lot that universal about parenting and they just say it all so well. One of the things Ben touched on today was an article in Slate by Shankar Vedantam called "Parents Are Junkies: If parenthood sucks, why do we love it? Because we're addicted." I'll quote some of the same passages Ben did, because they're just that perfectly representative:

Parents spend endless hours commiserating with one another about the travails of parenthood. Yet when researchers present data about children and unhappiness, parents rise up in protest. Research may depict parenthood as a bile-inducing, rage-fueling, stress-producing ordeal, but parents tell us that becoming parents is the best thing they ever did. Nonparents write off this reaction as defensiveness—if you've screwed up by having a kid and don't want to admit it, you pretend to be happy—but parents regularly choose to have more than one child. If parenthood were as subjectively awful as the objective research implies, wouldn't all parents stop at one child? It's one thing to claim that a stubbed toe doesn't hurt, and quite another to aim a second kick at the chair.

Parents, I would argue, are hardly unique in spending hours commiserating about the travails of what they do: ever hang out with teachers? We talk about the kids. If you get a bunch of people from the office together, I bet they complain about the stupid people who call customer service or the middle-management boss who can't deal with people, rarely gets caught doing his job, and picks his nose semi-discretely (but obviously not enough so that it isn't an open secret). In short, anyone who has someone to commiserate with about work, does. And there are a lot of parents out there. In any case, there's a fair point to be made there. The article continues:

Parenting is a grind, and most parents are stressed out much more than they are happy. But when parents think about parenting, they don't remember the background stress. They remember the cuddle and the kiss. Parenting is a series of intensely high highs, followed by long periods of frustration and stress, during which you go to great lengths to find your way back to that sofa and that kiss.

We have a name for people who pursue rare moments of bliss at the expense of their wallets and their social and professional relationships: addicts.

Hmmm. I see what he's getting at, but I just don't quite buy it (yeah, I know--the first step is admitting you have a problem, right?). To me, it's not that parenting, in particular, has a lot of frustrations, disappointments, stresses, and heart-break, along with occasional rewards--that's life. Could it be that we've got it so good in the Twenty-first Century that real life looks strange to us? That we expect life to be one big amusement park, a brave new world where we take the good and avoid/ignore the bad?

Once, growing up more or less meant taking on the responsibilities of a job, a family, a place in society or your community, dealing with hard realities, and finding meaning--and joy--in the midst of it. Increasingly growing up seems to mean just getting older and getting a job to get more toys. We're not junkies, we're grown-ups (I've written before, elsewhere, about how getting married and having children are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for becoming mature, so I'll let that gross generalization stand). Ben wasn't talking about this precisely, but he was right to write that "All of the things we did before we became parents were fun. Now all the things we do as parents are fulfilling, and fun, in different ways." Fun is nice, but fulfillment is where we really touch life.

But maybe that's just the addiction talking. Maybe I'm just too far gone....

Days that will live in memory

While we've still got some time left in Pearl Harbor Day, I thought I'd throw this question out, gleaned from a comment on a friend's blog:

What's the earliest world event memory you have?

In a sense, I remember the election of 1984. I was in second grade and just about everyone in the 2nd grade favored re-electing Ronald Reagan. In fact, Mondale/Farrar probably got as many votes in my class as he did in all the rest of Ohio. However, it's not like I remember any specific event, like election day. Couldn't tell you a thing from memory.

So: the first world event memory I really have is of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. I had stayed home sick from school, I was watching the Scrabble game show, which was interrupted by news of the disaster. We were glued to the TV for the rest of the day and filled at least one VHS tape recording the news coverage. It seemed like the right thing to do, though I don't think we ever watched it again or even know what became of it.

Please do share your own memories.

Easy Lies

Given how much easier than the truth lies can be, it's amazing that the kids I work with ever tell the truth.

A boy came into my office today to apologize. I'd gotten an e-mail earlier in the day from one of our tech guys, telling me that the young man in question had come in with a shattered screen and the story that he'd left it on his desk Saturday night, and someone came into his room while he was sleeping and vandalized it. He came into my office, however, to follow up on an e-mail he'd sent earlier in the day, apologizing for making up a story to relieve himself of culpability: the real story, he said, was that he'd fallen asleep watching a movie and apparently knocked it off his top-bunk bed while he was asleep.

While he was there, we got to talking about his classes, and settled on his humanities class, since it's a class that I think he could be doing better in. He started telling me about the project he was working on, a persuasive essay that is, vaguely, about "atheism vs. monotheism." He told me then that he had been an atheist for four years, but that he's recently become an agnostic.

I asked him if he could tell me what the difference was and, although he thought he could, he turned out to be wrong. That's fine with me, as it gave me a chance to discuss the difference between metaphysics and epistemology. He seemed to get it.

"What did you major in?" he asked me. When I told him English and music, he seemed surprised, and wondered how I knew so much about religion.

Oh, where to begin? The value of a broad, liberal arts education? Instead, after clarifying that, after all, I was actually talking about philosophy rather than religion, I told him that I'd also grown up going to church (religiously, so to speak), that I'd paid attention in Sunday School, and that I'd thought seriously about the issues involved. And then, sometime in college, I realized I didn't believe in God any more.

That really shocked him. If I'm not mistaken, it seems that his switch from atheist to agnostic, although he seemed to understand agnosticism as something like "spiritual but not religious," was motivated less by actual belief and more by a desire to fit in. Well, make that not stand out so much. As an atheist, he was a target, in some of his peers' minds just one step above--or perhaps sideways from--a satanist. Other Christians, you can write them off as basically the same as you (albeit with some disagreements). Other religions, you can rationalize as different paths to the same goal. An atheist, though, even if he doesn't say anything more than "I don't believe in God," is a direct challange to the believer's beliefs. An agnostic, on the other hand, isn't nearly so threatening. They may still want to convert him, but he's not "asking for" a fight in the same way.

Like I said: given how much easier than the truth lies can be, it's a wonder kids ever tell the truth.

It seemed to really mean something to this young man to find out that someone else is "on his side." We are not only in the heart of Indiana, but we're at a school that requires attendance at some kind of religious service each week. Most of his peers are active and outspoken believers, and any who aren't probably don't talk much about it. I've been comfortable in my own skin long enough that it's easy to forget how hard it can be to stand up for what you believe when doing so makes you different--and for many people, that will be different in a bad way, not just an interesting one.

At some point, he made a comment to the effect that atheists tend to have the smart people on their side--the scientists, the reasonable, what have you, but I had to caution him against generalization. There are, I reminded him, lots of very smart Christians. And Muslims and Jews, and on and on. Likewise, as an atheist, you will find people "on your side" who you wish weren't: people who haven't thought through their views or don't have a good reason for believing what you have spent a lot of intellectual energy to arrive at. No matter whether you're talking about religion or politics or anything else, you will usually find that, whatever your position, there are idiots who agree with you and very intelligent people who don't.

I felt I had to make this point. When you're not quite comfortable owning your beliefs and your identity, it can be easy to put things into black and white, us and them, terms, to write off those who disagree with you. Not only is that often inaccurate, but who likes sanctimonious people anyway?

Saturday Morning Introduces Me to Holidailies

Among other things, I'm the guy who says yes to going in at 8 am on a Saturday to teach yoga to a high school swim team, even though I've never taught yoga before. I've already recently introduced myself when I launched this blog, so to answer the Holidailies prompt, I thought I'd go in a different direction so as not to be a mere re-hash for those readers who've been with me for years.

I am neither our local fitness instructor who leads weekly yoga classes around here nor am I my friend from college who spent a month last summer at an intensive yoga teacher training workshop, so I did feel a bit underqualified to be leading this class. But then, I have been dabbling in yoga off and on for almost two decades now, and one of those decades has been spent teaching English and/or music at the high school and college levels, so neither yoga nor teaching daunts me on its own.

And that, right there, says a fair bit about me. First, I'm a dabbler. I prefer the term Renaissance Man, but those are just two sides of the same coin, you say potato, I say Frontier Russet, German Butterball, Keuka Gold, Purple Majesty, Rose Gold, or Yukon Gold. What it amounts to is knowing a little bit about a lot. Look up in the header, you'll see some of the lot that I know a little of. And I like trying new things.

Second, I'm a teacher. First, I was a student, and I've always loved being a student. Not that there weren't aspects of it along the way that I didn't like, but for the most part, I liked learning about a lot of things and I was fairly good at it. I hope that I have been, in my time, a fair teacher as well: certainly, that's an inclination of mine, to explain things, to guide inquiry, to help. I've taught choirs, and general music classes, and various high school English classes. I've coached tennis and soccer and basketball. And I have an 11-month-old daughter, which surely means a lot of teaching on the horizon. But, I should hasten to add, although I'm currently working in education, I am not employed as a teacher.

In any case, these are the characteristics that found me leading a yoga class on Saturday morning: dabbling, teaching, and being willing to pitch in and help out. By the time it was done, I felt great, not only because I'd put myself through an hour and a half of yoga but also because the team seemed to genuinely appreciate it. I can't count how many of the girls left saying "I feel really good!" And that makes me feel good.

No single anecdote could introduce me--or anyone else--but I hope you'll take this as a handshake and keep coming back.

Open Letter to Adolescents Who Feel Alone

I wrote this to a former student of mine after I saw a recent Facebook status: "This year, i was on the varsity football team. My friends call me one of the popular kids. I have 528 friends on Facebook. And I've never felt more alone in my life." It was written to him, but I suspect there's a universality to my reply.
----------------------------------------------------------I know it's not like we've kept in touch beyond (presumably) seeing each others' status updates on Facebook since my wife and I left *****, but seeing your status from this morning, I felt compelled to send you a note.
So here's how I see it. Popularity is about people knowing you and people liking you. It's a nice thing, but it doesn't prevent anyone from feeling lonely, because loneliness is not about how many people you know or whether or not people like you. It's about connection. It's about feeling known and understood and loved. And I think it's probably the case that most adolescents don't really feel that. Mostly, especially boys, they don't express it, but that doesn't mean that they don't feel the same way. Of course, some do feel that kind of connection in their lives and others don't have as much of a need for that kind of deeper connection because they live their lives on the surface. That's not you--you're a young man with more depth than that, and so it's not surprising that you feel alone and that the feeling bothers you.

I don't have any easy answer, but I'll throw some ideas around and you can see if any of them "stick" for you.

Have you seen or heard about the "It Gets Better" campaign where celebrities (and regular people too, I think) are making videos to tell gay teens that it gets better (and how it gets better)? The thing is, regardless of whether one is gay or straight, adolescence is often a tough time. Thanks to puberty, you've got quite a few years where your body and brain are hopped up on hormones and your brain and body are still developing, and at the same time you're trying to navigate a social world that's filled with people who are also going through those physical and mental changes, many of whom are still more immature than you are. But it gets better: you and your peers grow up, your body and mind, even if you're still growing, settle into a sort of equilibrium. You and your peers get better at forming real connections with each other, and more of your peers recognize the need for that.

That leads me to another thought--you've probably heard it said that girls mature faster than boys. In the first place, it's true, and in the second place, when it comes to emotional things, girls are just flat-out more attuned to the emotional world. That's why, I think, a lot of more "sensitive" guys, deeper guys, tend to have more meaningful friendships with girls than with other guys when they're in high school. And that can be one of the difficulties of going to an all-boys school: fewer people are at the stage in their lives where they "get it." But it gets better.

I'm also reminded of a passage from Thoreau's book Walden: "We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers." In other words, there's something lonelier about being around lots of people--and I think this is true even in the virtual sense, looking at all these "friends" on Facebook--when you see all these people and you don't feel connected with them. For Thoreau, he feels less lonely when he's actually alone than when he's out among people, and I think that points to something else: when it comes down to it, the most important source of happiness you have is yourself. That is, you need to be comfortable with yourself, you need to be happy with your own choices, you need to have something to do that makes you happy, that inspires you. That's not to say that relationships aren't important, that other people shouldn't be a source of happiness: family, close friends, and casual friends in the right circumstances all contribute to a happy life, but it starts with you.

And here's the thing. Yeah, it's true that I don't really know you, I'm not claiming to have some great insight into who you are or evn to know who you are. But from what I did know about you, you've got a lot going for you. I firmly believe that you've got the tools you need to make a good life for yourself--and for those around you.

I don't know whether any of this helps. In the strictest sense, you didn't ask for my opinions or my advice, except in the sense that by putting yourself out there on your Facebook status, you were asking for something from somebody. So I hope that, in some sense, this helps. If you want to talk about what you're feeling, I'd be happy to listen. I'd be happy to give my two cents, too, or just to listen to what you have to say, whatever you want.

In any case, I wish you the best.