My sister, my cousins, Ann’s husband, and Jake all come back to the great-aunt’s house where my parents and sister and I are staying. They’ve brought fireworks.
Ann, Morgan and I stand back, sipping wine.
“This looks pretty damn dangerous,” I say as Jason and Ann’s husband Jack go out onto the dirt road and set down the tube to shoot mortar shells out of. I was most concerned with getting good pictures, with listening to Ann give my sister advice about camping in Yellowstone, and with making sure Jake and Jason didn’t throw the ground-skating spinner fireworks too close to our feet. The explosions, kicking up dirt by our feet, or up in the air above the corn fields, were a loud, bright signal that this trip was worth it, that the July 4th holiday tomorrow would be exciting, that my cousins, despite their states-away distance and occasional Midwest mindset, were more important to me than I’d let myself realize. I saw in those flashing lights a brief glimpse of what it would be like if we managed to grow up without the petty jealousy and who-has-better-achieving-children bullshit that we had watched unfold earlier that night. In that moment, we didn’t really care who among us had higher paying jobs, were married or dating someone, was living in a downtown loft or a shitty carriage house, was a teacher or librarian, handyman or gun salesman. We laughed at the same jokes, and we believed mostly good things about one another. And though they threw them nearer and nearer, none of us would ever come close to wanting to light another’s foot on fire.
An excerpt from an untitled essay-in-progress July 16, 2010
Which is better? March 23, 2010
I’ve always thought it was better to be messy… I mean, if we all have the same amount of time in this world, and I have some dirty socks on my floor, doesn’t it just mean that I spent that time doing something else, possibly more meaningful?
Who feels totally at ease in an impeccably clean home? Doesn’t it always seem like people with impeccably clean homes have something to prove?
I’ve always thought it was better to be honest… I mean, no one ever got better at something from someone telling them “good job.” What makes me better is someone telling me which parts I got wrong. I don’t take criticism all to well on the inside, and I tend to let thoughts like “got this person must think I’m a moron for making this mistake” or “I don’t want this person to think I always make errors like that” or “I wish I had fixed this first, so that this person would see me as a little smarter or more capable” run through my head. But that’s just because I have this hyper-sensitivity/awareness about someone’s perception of me. I don’t NEED for everyone to like me or think I’m wonderful, but I do NEED for everyone’s understanding of me to be ACCURATE. What I can’t deal with is someone thinking I’m the kind of person who would XYZ when really, I wouldn’t.
What I really want is to be appreciated, recognized, honored, and laureled all the time, for everything I do that I think is wonderful. I know that the consequence of this would be disaster, but when no one notices what I’m doing, it makes me think they don’t know I’m the kind of person who does those great things, or has those great ideas, and then I’m back to be lumped in with all the other half-assers of the world.
Maybe I just have an ego problem. It kind of seems like the common theme here is ego. It seems like, whatever I’m doing, whether it’s leaving dirty socks on the floor, telling the truth, or (in my mind) revolutionizing the way high school English is taught, I want everyone to know that it’s right.
I mean, it is, though.
Looking forward to: August 7, 2009
1. Making jokes that are hilarious to me & so lame to my 10th graders.
2. Having 10th graders.
3. Being done with HR paperwork.
4. Decorating my classroom. I’m so into office supplies.
5. Learning cool new slang, using it, and ruining it for my students.
6. My students’ jokes. It will be tough, though, to cease laughing at my students’ use of “That’s What She Said.”
7. Talking about books.
8. Extra-curricular events.
I’m starting to see that I am really revealing myself to be a huge nerd. What’s worse is that I’m pretty alright with that.
The truth is, I am silently freaking out. About paperwork, about when I will have time to do what, about being ready for the first day, about other teachers liking me, about standardized test prep… and about my students’ attitudes.
There are moments, like today, when I was getting the books I’ll be teaching, that I am so excited I almost actually squeal.
There are moments when I am terrified of something happening and not knowing what to do.
There are moments when I panic about getting things done, doing them right, and everything actually coming together.
There are moments when I am so ready to be here, in this new apartment, with this new job.
There are moments when I feel the wave of regret of leaving where I left, who I left, the job I left, the students and former students I left.
Will it be better or worse? Did I just fuck something up?
Some things I am tired of. August 3, 2009
1. The notion that weird=art. (See: Bat for Lashes’s video “What’s A Girl To Do”)
2. Bands with great music, great lyrics, and singers whose voices ruin everything (See: The Fruit Bats, The Shins)
3. Putting things away
4. That commercial where someone sings, opera style, “I made this breakfast just the way I like it.” (Fairly certain it’s a Denny’s commercial)
5. Sour faces, rude people, some people’s pervasive fear of getting excited about anything.
6. Rude people who answer phones or provide customer service for a living. (I know your job sucks, but there’s no reason to spread it around)
7. Someone who either doesn’t understand or consider what I am saying, but instead chooses to plow on with their side of something, seemingly ignoring everything I have so thoughtfully explained. (I lost a movie I rented from Blockbuster Online. They sell this movie for $9. I reported it as lost, agreed to pay for it. They charged for $22. I call them, and explain to them very politely what happened. She says the standard fee for a lost DVD is $22. I go through the whole thing again. I understand that’s the standard fee, but they are charging me, someone who paid to rent the movie, $13 more than a person who doesn’t even have an account. She doesn’t understand, but doesn’t ask anymore questions. She just repeats that $22 is the standard fee. So I ask for a supervisor. While I am holding, I find the fucking movie. The supervisor tells me that she understands my issue–I didn’t even have to explain it–and they are refunding the entire $22. I never mentioned finding the movie).
8. The show Wipeout.
9. The AT&T guys installing the fiber optics in my building are all the time yelling “HOLD THAT DOOR” so they can get inside. How does a person get to be an adult without learning how to fucking say “please”?
10. Car alarms.
Luxury living. July 31, 2009
Moving almost always begets a nervous breakdown for me.
There is the normal stress of moving. Starting something new, not sure what will happen, or how things will work out. Leaving a place I was familiar with, people I knew and spent time with. Having to pack everything, move everything, unpack everything.
There are some aggravating factors, too. Like that I have at least two boxes that I packed when I moved out of the duplex I lived in in college, 5 years ago, 3 moves ago, and had a similar nervous breakdown. There are math tests I took 6 years ago, entire boxes of student papers from 3 years ago. So, not only do I have more stuff to move… there’s a hidden, neurotic reason these things are still around.
They have the cursed personal value.
I can’t get rid of anything my mother has given me… and that is a considerable amount of stuff.
I can’t get rid of anything associated with my senior year of college… and a great deal of that stuff is barely more than trash. In fact, I think there are empy cigarette packs that some friends of mine gave me with inside jokes written on them. So, yeah, actual trash.
There are endless notebooks. Class notes, journals, empty notebooks, boxes and boxes of notebooks.
Pictures, from before I got a digital camera. Of parties in college, my front porch the year I turned 21 and belived myself to be impressive by drinking on that front porch, endless piles of pictures.
Tomorrow, I turn 27, and I live in a new apartment, in downtown Ft. Worth. The building and parking garage both have limited access. Landscapers are here every day. There is trash pick-up, from outside my apartment door, every evening. There are swimming pools, a skyscaper view, and the building backs up onto river trails.
I have managed to curb the crap in my apartment in a workable way. The coat closet holds 6 boxes, and there are 4 behind the couch. Aside from clothes, everything else is put away. I am hoping to turn 10 into 2.
I am hoping to feel more deserving of this apartment once I can actually keep track of the crap.
I am hoping to stop romanticizing the town I’ve left, to stop feeling like “it was the only place I felt like myself.” That old town, where I lived for four years doing graduate work and teaching, is the only place I felt like myself… because it is the only place I ever was & because it helped mold me into the person I was… am? I know I’ll miss my friends. Hell, I’ll miss having friends around, no matter who they are. I can’t, though, miss the town. If I think objectively, this town has all of the best things, on a grander scale. And while that grander scale makes things less personal, less personable… I remember now that I never really felt “at home” in all those cool, hip places in my old town.
I felt at home at my home, at my friends’ homes, and at the two shitty bars we went to once a week.
The stuff I own, my possessions, I know would make for a funny essay subject. I’ve tried several times before, and again today, to write about them. For some reason, my stuff has made it to the list of things I can’t successfully write about. Writing teachers have theories about why writers struggle with certain material. Maybe writers don’t have enough distance, can’t prioritize because the subject is a sensitive issue; maybe the writer can’t edit him or herself on the subject because they are still dealing with it, meaning they would use the essay as some self-indulgent therapy ramble.
Would it be too cliche for me to say that I don’t think that it’s any of those things?
I can’t write about my stuff, or my old town, not really… because I don’t want to. Writing is a highly analytical process. Perhaps there is none higher. I don’t want to have to make the kinds of admissions, face the kinds of demons, deal with the implications that would be brought forth by my endless analysis of these subjects.
My essays are highly funny. Perhaps there are none funnier. But they are serious, too, and both the comedy and the seriousness is born of my willingness to make fun of myself. There are matters I just can’t self-depricate on. Old town and stuff aren’t the only ones. Sometimes things change, sometimes I finally find a way to do it.
For now, I’ll just watch my dog look out the window, and wish with him that we had something better to do.
The best years, some of the worst people. February 20, 2009
I loved college.
Every expensive minute of it.
No, no, not every minute of it. I think there was a day when I thought, “if I throw myself down these stairs, I bet I can go home.”
I know that I’ve romanticized it greatly since it ended, but I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with that. I don’t yearn to go back, I don’t spend my days missing being in college, wishing I could re-drink all of those keg beers. I simply try to unremember things like being left out, not really fitting until the second part of my junior year.
It is pretty easy to unremember my freshman year, as ugly and un-fun as it was. As boring and sad as it was. I think I was always uncomfortable that year. Plus, there have been many beers between 2000-2001 and 2009.
It is equally easy to focus on my junior year–finally living with someone I liked, finally not feeling like the unwelcome guest at the party, the one invited because no one knew how to avoid doing so. There were road-trips and movie marathons. There were nights spent in boys’ dorm rooms, doing something better than having sex: hanging out.
My senior year was unquestionably the best. My friends then were really my friends, they are (mostly) still my friends. I fit with them, I didn’t have to be quieter or pretend to be less messy. I didn’t have to pretend like I wouldn’t rather be drinking. There was a party every night. There were roommates who were (clinically, certifiably) out of their fucking minds. There was stumbling home, there was the discovery of drunk Taco Bell, there was keg after keg, porch after porch. There were Carefree Monday Afternoons, a hat party, a cross-dressing party, a happy hour every Friday that lasted at least 8 hours. There were cops and there were camping chairs. But there were also real friends.
What I try to not think about most of all is the sheer number of fucking assholes who were there. Not at the parties and on the porches; only a few slipped through the filter of the capable men of ** and the Duplex. But everywhere else. These bad people, male and female, had this power to make me feel like an outsider, like an inferior member of the species. They didn’t care about learning, except for the ways it could make them rich or find them husbands. They were what many would think of as standard-issue frat boys and Gamma girls.
I try to avoid thinking about the weirdos, the creeps, the ones who thought anything that didn’t serve them directly and immediately wasn’t worth anything. There were people everywhere, at my private, Christian college, being self-serving pricks, usually while wearing crosses and contemplating missionary work or a summer stint with Habitat for Humanity. As if they cared about humanity.
They were resume packers before they showed up on our green, historic, comfortable campus, and they served that end throughout the 4 (or 5) years.
So, can someone tell me why I accept their friend requests on Facebook? Or why I look to see where they are working? Or why I feel bad that they have better jobs, have traveled to better places, are married, look cute in their pictures, have photo albums doing things more fun than I am doing?
I know it doesn’t matter. I love my life, and my job that pays me nothing. I love my students who can’t use apostrophe’s*. I am excited (and nervous, terrified, etc) about the job I’ll have next year teaching high school. I consider my life fun and full of excitement. I have better friends than anyone else I know (who isn’t friends with me, of course). I go on trips. I spent my summer at my parents’ lake house. I work hard and I have a Master’s degree.
I know it’s possibly, hell that it’s even likely, that some of these same bad people look at my Facebook page, and long for a lake house, friends who are this much fun, people who can be counted on, fulfilling jobs, goofy shit I find myself doing, or even just a creative sense of fucking humor.
But I am still looking. And thinking:
Someone married that fucking guy? Jesus, there must seriously be something wrong with me if B____ D____ can hook a spouse and I can’t.
I can’t believe that total loser lives in Scotland now. I mean comethefuckon. He is incapable of appreciating it the way I would.
Wow, look, that c-face from across the hall my junior year is a bank president. Look at her house that is bigger than every place I have every lived put together. Look at her two kids, sexy husband, cocker spaniel and heated in-ground pool.
I KNOW it doesn’t matter. I KNOW that in the ways that do matter, my life is richer, better and more meaningful. And even if it isn’t better, it is all I could ever need, it is literally amazing, as in, it amazes me on a regular basis how simply great my life is. I am usually so excited to be me, I don’t notice there’s something to be jealous over. I usually wish good things on all people, knowing that my good fortune is just wrapped in a different package.
But, really. Comethefuck on.
That guy?
Teenage devils. February 6, 2009
Should I be bothered that I am a better teacher than the people teaching me to teach?
Should I be bothered that the state requires me to learn how to teach, even though I’ve been teaching for 4 years?
Should I be bothered that, in order to sustain and fulfill my life, I’ve accrued $70k in debt?
To be honest, I am most bothered by the fact that I don’t even know how to get a job once I’m done learning to do a job I’ve been doing. Maybe, somehow, these classes will make me a better teacher. But how are they going to help me get a job?
One of the FAQs on the Ed department’s Teacher Certification program website is “Will the department help me find a job?” The answer is simply “No.”
Perhaps I should have a different department, eh?
Though my MA will earn me only a little more a year (when I do, eventually, find a job), I don’t think it was a wasted effort, or even wasted money. I think that those three years, that that writing, those experiences were intrinsically valuable. I don’t know that I would have named a price so high, but I would never say I’m not glad I did what I did.
I did wish this process was easier, though.
I want to teach English to high school students. I am ready to sell my soul to the teenage devil. I am ready to lay down my life for standardized tests. And I am willing to do it all for less money than I could make doing little more than checking my Facebook as an office worker. So why isn’t someone making it easier?
There is an abundance of well-educated, under-employed people in this county, this state, this city, this effin’ neighborhood, even. Why aren’t we being snatched up, courted, wooed and escorted into jobs that need filling, that change lives, that meet important needs?
Why do I have to fight to do the right thing?
I am still going to do it, and I won’t complain (more than this). But what about all the equally qualified folks who are up for the job but not this strenuous process?
Break. December 21, 2008
When I was a student, summer and winter breaks were great. I spent a week at home with my folks and the rest of the time at my house, with my friends, doing what college and grad students do. Mostly drinking, smoking cigarettes, playing cards while drinking and, on one occasion, convincing my friends not jump from rooftops to cure their boredom.
So what if, now that I am at least a partial grown-up, I don’t want to spend the entire time drinking? What if I want to watch good movies and read good books and spend time writing and creating things. What if I want to do all of the things I wished I had time for when I was teaching/grading, but never get around to?
My students’ papers needing to be graded always supersedes my desire to read a great book or write something I’ve had on my mind.
So here I am. The break I have been dreaming of for months. I have the pile of great books, the list of essay ideas.
So here’s the list of things I’ve done so far on my break:
1. Read three of the four Twilight books.
2. Made a photo collage for our family Christmas card.
3. Baked cookies.
4. Drank some beers. But it doesn’t count when I’m in my parents’ house. That’s not like partying. At least not a good kind.
5. Watched at least four episodes of NCIS.
6. Watched a Christmas movie on the Hallmark channel.
7. Ordered useless shit on Amazon.
9. Made a Best of 2008 set of Mix CDs.
I am bored. But, simultaneously, want to do nothing that requires an abundance of upper-level thinking. Because my brain already knows what is coming next semester.
A blog for real-life grown ups. September 23, 2008
I am an adult. This means that I deal with my feelings instead of hide from them. This means that I make jokes that aren’t cool but am alright with that.
This means that I take people seriously when they talk about their feelings. because that’s what I want from my friends.
This means that when I screw something up, I don’t just mentally acknowledge that I screwed it up, I say it to the person or people involved.
Being an adult doesn’t mean I’ve lost my fear of being honest about myself and my feelings. It does, though, mean that I admit this fear to the people being harmed by it.
It also means that I don’t just acknowledge my flaws in the painfully self-aware way that all my fellow writes have been doing. I admit to them. And, finally, I try to do something about them.
I know this reads like a high school journal entry. But I just get mad at people who are otherwise almost perfect, people whose primary flaw is that they are not just emotionally retarded (literal meaning of the word “retarded”) but who also think it’s OK for them to be this way.
My students’ willful ignorance makes me so troubled that some days I sit in the classroom after they’ve all left, staring at the back wall, forcing encouragement into my mind, trying to think of a way to interest them in something.
But people my age, people I love and care about and spend time with, they aren’t willfully ignorant. They are contagiously curious. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be all over my life. But there exist among you the willfully immature, the willfully childish. Really, what you are is selfish.
Having an idea does no one any good.
Feeling bad about something does not help anyone.
Admitting that you are “difficult to be around” doesn’t make you easier to be around. Four of my friends have said something like this. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that all of them are men.
Your feelings about me, our friendship, our time together, they do me no good. They benefit me in no way. They change my life in, at most, a marginal way. What you do is what matters.
You see something that needs to be done and you do it.
You see someone who needs something and you get it for them.
You have the time, you do it so someone else doesn’t have to.
You don’t keep score.
You don’t wait for someone else to.
You go beyond admitting your faults to actively trying to improve on them. Even if this means asking for help in doing so. Especially if it means asking for help in earnest.
I’ve been writing an essay for a while. An essay about being old. Of course this approach is humorous because I’m not actually that old. Writing an essay is a mysterious process. It requires that I admit that my life is tremendously interesting, or, at the very least, it requires that the way I see my life and the world in which I live it, is valuable outside of my immediate life.
What I wasn’t expecting, though, was to discover how much I like being old.
It means that the only reason I need to end a relationship of any kind is that the other person isn’t ready for a grown-up, real relationship. I’ve ended friendships for this reason in the very recent past and it was relatively painless. For me.
And, upon reflection, I have no remorse about abruptly ending value-less relationships, because I know that I shouldn’t be in a relationship that provides me with nothing. To a less-than-adult, these relationships are crutches: access points to other people, guarantees that we’ll have something to do, validations of our likability, something we see as easier to maintain than terminate.
We cannot let people hold us hostage, though. Not for any reason.
I have so many friends. I have so many true friends. But they are not a beacon of my value as a person. Their quality as people and as friends, even the number of them I have in my life, in indicative of both my quality of friendship and my capacity to truly value them.
I don’t expect someone to be my friend if I don’t value them.
So why would I be friends with someone who is so clearly selfish that they cannot go beyond admitting they aren’t a very good friend? Someone incapable of genuine apology? Someone who escapes at the sign of trouble?
If I think my friend is mad at me, I can’t stop trying to solve it. Why is it that so many people just ignore it, knowing that the person will have to let it drop?
I’m not afraid like I was when I was 18. Not afraid of being seen as dramatic, no longer allowing someone else to make me feel or act like a crazy person. My response is, I assure you, warranted. I am, again, hyper-logical, hyper-vigilant, hyper-self-aware.
And here is my secret source of mental power. I don’t care if you think I am over-reacting. I don’t care if you think you don’t deserve to be admonished.
I am too patient and too caring and too forgiving and too trusting and too kind and too generous and too fucking good to my friends. If I stop, it’s because I should have long ago. If I stop, it’s because I realize that I wouldn’t let someone treat my friend or sister the way you are treating me.
Here’s how to fix it:
Quit being a fuck.
Quit talking about quitting being a fuck.
Quit merely admitting that you are a fuck.
Quit being a fuck.
I remember you being very different. August 16, 2008
Let’s say that you went to college with this guy. And you just loved him. Every time you saw him on campus, you found a reason to talk to him. You were friends, sometimes you hung out, sometimes you had lunch together in the caf or sat around on a front porch at a party talking. You weren’t crazy stalker asking questions about him getting people to talk to him about you. You just acted kind of goofy whenever you talked to him. You were the only person around who knew half of anything about music and you always argued about it with him, in that spirited, excited way you argue when you finally find someone your equal in such an argument.
He made you a CD of all his favorite music, and you still have it, 4 or so years later.
He was a safe and comfortable person. Someone you didn’t obsess over, but someone you couldn’t shake out of your brain when you left school. Unlike those countless people who you hung out with sometimes but whose names you don’t still remember, this guy somehow manages to come up in your memories.
If you think of that time his band played some shitty show a few blocks from campus, you think: “Why wasn’t I braver? Bolder? Why didn’t I realize then what I realize now?”
But it’s infrequent that you think of him. Let’s say though, for the first time in months, you think of him one morning and realize you had a dream about him the night before. A dream where the two of you were married and in love and comfortable with each other.
And so you find him on Facebook.
And you do realize now what you hadn’t before.
He’s kind of stupid. And he spells things wrong. And he quotes stupid movies. And his favorite books include novelizations of the Star Wars movies and Harry Potter. And that’s it. And there is a joke about oral sex. And his favorite movies Dumb & Dumber and Baseketball.
It would, don’t you imagine, change the way you look at a lot of things in your past.
