Much Ado

The Touch Faucet

2010-06-06T20:54:00.001-04:00

From December 6, 2009

I was reading a National Geographic and I came across an ad for the touch faucet. It showed a lady’s arm, her hand covered in dough, gently touching the faucet with her clean wrist, and water coming out. The design of the faucet was sleek and beautiful.

I took the ad to Zac and without any introduction, I declared, “This is what we need.” Some might argue with my choice of the word “need.” Clearly, on a list of needs, a touch faucet ought to be far near the bottom, perhaps just above hot tub. But Zac and I were at the beginning of remodeling our kitchen, and we’d already turned down the salesman from Sears who claimed the faucets in his brochure cost $500. We would need a new faucet anyway…well, we needed a new sink, an under-mount, and when you’re spending so much money on a new kitchen anyway, it’s easy to justify a new faucet too. Especially if it’s a touch faucet.

We looked it up on the internet, and after watching a demo video, we found it was sold at Lowe’s for about $350 dollars. On our next trip to Lowes, we checked it out. To be fair, we made ourselves look at all the other faucets, determining that the touch faucet clearly beat all of them. The switch for toggling between sprayer and jet streams was on the back, so it wasn’t visible. The nozzle that came down was held in by a magnet, so the nozzle wouldn’t, after wear and tear, dangle. It had a sleek yet highly functional design and wasn’t that much more expensive than regular ones.

We bought it right then. It was the first time I can remember being directly influenced by an ad. I’m sure I had been subliminally or subconsciously influenced by many ads, but this is the first time I can recall seeing an ad for something I had never seen before and then almost immediately rushing out and buying it. But my brother always says, “You vote with your money” and I wanted to vote yes for great ideas combined with great design.

It was about two months later that the faucet was finally installed. Our kitchen had a new floor, with tile and grout instead of three layers of dated, torn linoleum. We had a new quartz counter top that replaced our wood-grained, early-eighties countertop with shiny metal strips in the joints. In those two months, we’d also had our yard completely landscaped. Those projects had been bigger and far more expensive, yet it was the faucet that gave me the most joy.

It worked perfectly. With the regular handle, I could set it to the desired temperature and pressure, and then every time I touched it, it came back at that setting. Being one who still washes dishes by hand, this was a significant convenience. After just a couple of days, I could barely take it anymore. The faucet was too good, too perfect. “Zac, we went down on Madonna too soon, too soon!” I lamented. (Click here for the lyrics to the Dan Bern song in order to get this reference). “We’re never going to be satisfied with another faucet. We’ll have to install it in every future house of ours.”

A day or two later, we were at the annual dinner for our Peace Corps Association, and Zac got to talking with some ladies who worked at RTI, a big company that does lots of international work. One of them mentioned to him a GIS contract in Zambia. We’d always thought of moving abroad again, having loved living in Namibia and China and always feeling wistful while just traveling through countries as mere tourists. Maybe this was the world calling again, saying “Come, there is more to explore, don’t settle for your quiet street in Cary (5th safest metro area in the nation, number one on a list of smartest cities) and your great job at that school (ranked somewhere between 20th and 34th best school in the nation)—isn’t it too easy? Aren’t you bored? You’re not even miserable enough to write anything anymore.” I got that glint in my eye, the glint that had taken us to Namibia and then to China. Zac said, “This would be good for my career.”

Then I thought of my faucet—my beautiful, perfect, touch faucet. I also thought of my tile floor and my quartz counter top, and my yard that now had grass and clearly defined islands, but mainly I though of my faucet—perfection of design and innovation married and installed in my kitchen, turning on and off with just a touch. I also remembered what I had hated about Africa: always being white, never fitting in, being stared at, being begged from, being unable to find chips and salsa. Our faucet in Namibia had been fine enough, except that sometimes, for a few hours or a few days, no water came out of it.

The next day, even with the wine worn off, Zac was still thinking of the five-year GIS contract in Zambia. I said, “What about our faucet?” He said, “It runs on batteries, we’ll take it with us.”

While doing laundry, I started to remember what I had loved about Africa: the challenge, the beauty, the chaos, the tenacity of the people. I remembered all that I experienced there that didn’t happen here where everything functioned so well: having chickens, hitchhiking, random luck, stunning nature…

Within a few days, Zac and I were living happily in Zambia. I was running a colorfully painted hostel, where the foreigners who came through participated in “culture corners” where they chatted with the locals and maybe even some more formal classes in English for the kids. I was still working out the details of the classes. The travelers could leave behind their stuff, which was then sold, thrift shop style, with the money going to local groups supporting orphans. I had kids too. My job running the hostel was flexible enough, and the labor was cheap enough to hire plenty of helpers. We bought watermelon juice at Shoprite and I learned to make homemade salsa. I ordered tortilla chips online or had friends ship them. There were also cooking classes offered to the tourists by local women. My hostel helped the economy and promoted cultural exchanges. I had forgotten all about my touch faucet in the same way that I completely forgot dishwashers existed while I was in Namibia.

Zac sent his resume to the woman. She replied saying she would hang onto it, but the details of the project were uncertain. They were not even sure if it would be an expat position—they would probably try to hire Zambians first.

With a tap on the touch faucet, Zambia ran through my fingers and down the drain.

Complex: What Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Electra Can Teach Us about Ourselves and Our Wars

2010-06-06T20:25:00.003-04:00

I love the story of Oedipus, although Oedipus himself is not a particularly likeable character. He is egotistical: When confronted with the suffering of his subjects at the beginning of the play he declares, “I know how cruelly you suffer; yet, though sick, not one of you suffers a sickness half as great as mine. Yours is a single pain; each man of you feels but his own. My heart is heavy with the city’s pain, my own, and yours together” (50). He is pompous in his empathy and selfish in his solution. When he accepts the charge of finding the former king’s murderers in order to end the blight, he readily admits, “The man who murdered him might make the same attempt on me; and so, avenging him I shall protect myself” (53).

He is also a braggart: When he first appears in response to the lamentations he says, “I myself am come who fame is known to all—I, Oedipius” (49). In twelve words he refers to himself four times. There is a bit of dramatic irony here as well, since the audience knows the real reason for his lasting infamy. But his hamartia is really shown when he doubts Teiresias’ prophetic abilities and brags about his own cleverness: “When the Sphinx chanted her music here, why did not you speak out and save the city? …You were no prophet then; your birds, your voice from Heaven, were dumb. But I, who came by chance, I, knowing nothing, put the Sphinx to flight, thanks to my wit—no thanks to divination!” (61). As Albert Camus comments, his emphasis on man’s ability to solve problems without the help of the gods reflects the paradigm shift occurring in Athens at the time: a transition from “a sacred society [to] a society built by man.” However, even atheists such as myself might still feel that Oedipus’ harangue against Teiresias is a bit overdone.

Oedipus is also unlikable because his anger so quickly turns to violence: When he is fleeing Thebes, he has a right-of-way skirmish with another carriage, and in a fit of road rage his kills his father and his father’s entourage (although he does not know their identity as such), ending his account of the incident with the unapologetic statement, “I killed them all” (75). Later on his journey to self-discovery, an elderly Theban shepherd refuses to answer Oedipus’ questions. Oedipus suggests torturing the answer out of him: “Here, someone, quickly! Twist this fellow’s arms!”(88). A moment later he threatens, “Die you shall, unless you speak the truth” (88).

He is also quick to accuse others: When the blind seer, Tieresias, tells him he is the cause of the plague, he refuses to listen and instead accuses Tieresias of being a crony of his brother-in-law Creon, whom he suddenly thinks is trying to overthrow him. He also jumps to conclusions when his wife, trying to protect him from the true knowledge of his birth and relationship to her, pleads “Seek no more! ….O may you never learn what man you are!” (85). Oedipus misunderstands and thinks she is afraid of learning that he is of lowly birth. Oedipus declares “My birth, however humble, I am resolved to find. But [Jocasta], perhaps, is proud, as women will be; is ashamed of my low birth. But I do rate myself the child of Fortune, giver of all good, and I shall not be put to shame” (85). Again, dramatic irony is employed here, because we know that he is the child of his wife, which is a great misfortune.

Thanks to Freud, most people associate Oedipus with a son desiring to sleep with his mother. However, Oedipus ends up sleeping with his mother precisely because he is trying to avoid sleeping with his mother. He doesn’t know his adoptive parents are not his biological parents, so when an oracle tells him the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, he immediately runs away from Corinth so that he doesn’t murder Polybus and sleep with Merope. It is in fleeing Corinth that he runs into his father at the place where three roads meet, slays him, then proceeds to Thebes where he solves the Sphynx’s riddle and wins marriage with the queen (his mother) as his reward. In running from the prophecy, he runs straight into it.

If you focus only on the murderous, incestuous parts, it would be easy to dismiss this story as merely an ancient Greek tragedy set in the days before it was regarded as important to let children know they are adopted and when gods controlled your fate. But I think Oedipus’s real problem was not sexual in nature, as Freud’s co-opting of the name would have us believe. His real problem was that he failed to see that he was the cause of the problem because he was so quick to accuse and blame everyone else. In this sense, we all have an Oedipus complex.

In the beginning, Oedipus sends Creon to Apollo to find out the cause of the plague, and Creon returns with this message: “There is pollution here in our midst, long-standing” (51) because the murderer of king Laius has not been found. There is no way Oedipus could know that it was him, at the point. But shortly after Creon’s report, Tieresias tells Oedipus point blank that he is “the man whose crimes pollute our city” (60). As Oedipus’ insolence makes Teiresias angrier, Teiresias says, “You have your sight, and yet you cannot see where, nor with whom, you live, nor in what horror” (62).

It’s a bit cryptic, and you can’t entirely blame Oedipus for not understanding. But what we can blame him for is that he doesn’t even try. He immediately starts accusing Creon of hiring Teiresias to say this about him, in order to usurp the throne. It is only when Oedipus sees for himself that he is the cause of the pollution that he finally believes it. Of course, we’re not all failing to see that we are living in incest. But we’ve all, I’m sure, failed to see that we are the problem. We are quick to blame others, as Oedipus blames Creon and Tieresias, and this clouds his ability to understand what they are telling him.

This crops up frequently in my own life, in fairly innocuous ways. I’ll get done doing the laundry and come up one sock short, and I’ll immediately think Zac has put it in his sock drawer by mistake, or that it’s lost under his pile of clothes. I generally blame Zac, silently, for anything that goes missing because I am the neat organized one who never loses things, just like Oedipus clings to the fact that he saved Thebes from the Sphynx, so surely he couldn’t also be the one bringing ruin to the city. But I’ll find the sock behind the hamper a week or two later, where I didn’t think of looking because I was so sure someone else had lost it, not me. At a restaurant the other day, we were dividing up the check, but ended up with $10 dollars too much. I had been collecting money and making change, and I was sure someone else had put too much in. Of course, when I finally demanded a reenactment of the monetary transaction, it was revealed that I was the one who had mistakenly put in the extra ten bucks. “Hah,” I said. “I’m like Oedipus. I’m blaming others for the problem and it turns out it is me.” Oedipus is really about seeing things clearly.

Freud also co-opted Electra from Sophocles, to name the lesser-known Electra Complex: When a girl, in love with her father, wishes to kill her mother. This one is a little more aptly named at least, as Electra does seem rather obsessed with her father, Agamemnon, and openly wishes for the death of her mother, Clytemnestra, and her step-father, Aegisthus. It should be noted, though, that most of the time she is pining for her beloved brother, Orestes, to return from exile and slay her mother and step-father, who are responsible for the murder of her father. It is her brother who actually kills their mother, as retribution for the murder of their father, which seems to fly in the face of Freud’s Oedipus Complex.

Electra can also teach us a few things, but not necessarily about matricide. Rather, it is a story about longing for revenge. The chorus counters Electra’s grief by reminding her that although her father is dead, and that’s a bad thing, “he has gone to the land to which we all must go” (107). Still, Electra feeds her sorrow and lusts for retribution. She sees it as a daughter’s duty. Her mother points out that she killed Agamemnon as retribution for Agamemnon’s murder of their daughter. Electra counters that Agamemnon had to kill the daughter, as Artemis was holding their ship hostage until she received retribution for a stag that Agamemnon had killed. We see the cycle of revenge that has led to this moment, and we are given a hint of the cycle of revenge that will continue. After Orestes successfully slays his father’s murderers, we can imagine that now Aegisthus and Clytemnestra’s children will be obligated to slay Electra and Orestus as retribution for their parent’s murder. So the moral, really, is don’t kill one of Artemis’ deer, her (read as Gollum would say it) precious.

When reading Electra, you want to root for the protagonist; you want to want Lady Clytemnestra to die, as Electra’s grief is poignant and she is treated no better than a slave. As a foil, Electra’s sister is also mad about their father’s murder, but she pleads with Electra: “Why do you indulge this vain resentment? I am sure of this: Mine is as great as yours. If I could find the power, they soon would learn how much I hate them. But we are helpless; we should ride the storm with shortened sail, not show our enmity when we are impotent to do them harm” (113). While yielding one’s principles in the face of obstacles is not very noble, Electra’s obsessive and excessive longing for revenge isn’t to be emulated either.

Sophocles’ Electra ends rather abruptly, after all her whining and pining, with her gleefully hearing her mother’s last wails, followed shortly by her step-father’s demise. I don’t find it the cathartic ending promised by Greek tragedy. Electra’s cruelty as she savors their deaths is not something you can or should identify with. At the end of Oedipus, you can pity him, because for all of his faults, he was not to blame for his crimes. He was an unfortunate, albeit egotistical, plaything of the gods. They made a prophecy, and any student of Greek mythology knows that the prophecies always come true. However, Electra and Orestes were not fulfilling any pre-ordained prophecy, but rather a man-made code that calls for blood retribution. At Clytemnestra’s death, the chorus proclaims, “The cry for vengeance is at work; the dead are stirring. Those who were killed of old now drink in return the blood of those who killed them” (149). This provides comfort for Electra, but for those of us who believe the dead stay dead and are no longer sentient, we know the dead can gain no additional comfort from vengeance. In a modern, secular society, we know man-made codes can be changed and adapted to avoid fates that only vengeful gods could foist upon us.

After Clytemnestra’s death, Aegisthus returns and Orestus takes him inside the house to murder him, explaining, “Go in, and die on the same spot on which you killed my father” (152). Orestus wants Aegisthus to die in the same way his father died, without realizing that he is therefore making himself the same as the aggressor he hates. The oppressed is now becoming the oppressor. Aegisthus has children of his own, who may one day kill Orestes in the same spot that Orestus killed their father. Orestus, unlike our modern superheroes that always show restraint and stop short of murdering the villains, crosses a line and forfeits any moral superiority that he might have had.

As a country, we have done the same thing time and time again. The hypocrisies are endless: We fought the oppression of the British empire, only to oppress slaves and native Americans. We defeated Hitler while being allies with Stalin and putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps. During the cold war, the US government, led by senator McCarthy, employed many of the same tactics against its own citizens that the communists were using against theirs. In fighting the enemy, we emulated the enemy.

Similarly, in our current war on terror, we have become terrorists. We violate human rights, kill innocent civilians, squash dissent, and endorse torture. We are Electra and 9/11 is our Agamemnon. Or maybe, more comparably, we are Artemis and the WTC is our stag. We demand an excessive recompense: toppling two sovereign governments and wreaking havoc on untold numbers of non-terrorists, which touched off a cycle of revenge and violence that has no foreseeable end. While the terrorist attacks were cruel and tragic, the victims have only gone where we are all going, where numerous Americans go every day due to other causes that we do not condemn as vehemently.

In going to these extremes to fight our “enemy,” we eliminate the moral superiority that separated us from our enemy. We are Orestus—feeling quite justified stepping into Aegisthus’ position and mimicking his murder, without seeing clearly that doing so eliminates the moral distinction between “us” and “them.” Being the victim of an injustice does not make us morally superior—it is only in our response to the injustice that we can show our integrity. Like Oedipus, our national narrative is pompous and egotistical, focusing on the good we have done, to the extent that we are blind to the sins we commit. Our anger, our fear, and our sense of superiority are faulty justifications for the perpetration of violence. The problem is as Aegisthus points out shortly before he is killed: “This house of Atreus must, it seems, behold death upon death, those now and those to come” (152).

Work Cited:
Sophocles. Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra. Trans. H.D.F. Kitto. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.

My Precious Snowflake

2009-12-08T19:50:00.001-05:00

My cat, whom I affectionately call “Piggy” and ironically call “my precious snowflake” but who is really named Ekulo, jumps onto my desk and curls up on the midterm exam I’m preparing for my freshmen, as if to say, “Don’t work so hard. Take a break. Pet me.” I pet her and her damp fur tells me it has started to rain outside. I press my ear close to her body to hear her purring and I whisper, “Piggy, Piggy” and I ask her where her sister is. She licks her paws. I look at her beautiful black face, her shiny whiskers, and her dense yellow eyes. While lost in the beauty and simplicity of a mere house cat, obtained from neighbor girls who were walking down the street with a cage full of “Free Kittens”—it was fate that brought us together—I think to myself, “If I died and my flesh were cooked and thrown to her on the floor, she’d eat me without a second thought.” I put her on my lap and go back to working on the midterm.

Time, and why Eternal Life wouldn’t work for me.

2009-07-14T12:45:00.001-04:00

As a teacher, I have a weird life—no nine-to-five job for me. I work all day, I work evenings, I work weekends, then suddenly, for two glorious months in the summer, I have no work. During the school year, I look forward to summer as the time when I can do everything I want to do but have no time for during the school year: clean out and organize my files, read copious amounts of books, explore new recipes to cook, purge my iTunes of songs I hate, research my retirement plan and develop a better investment strategy, exercise daily, complete projects around the house, clean the bathtub regularly, go to community events, read the entire newspaper, write…

Now that it is actually summer and I’ve been free for a month, here is what I have done: read one book (Ethan Frome, which is very short), caught up on the last 5 months of The Atlantic, exercised haphazardly, vacuumed out the car, read slightly more of the newspaper, played soduku when it was easy or medium, spent copious amounts of time petting the cats while listening to NPR, written some—but not as much or as profoundly as I had hoped, packed and unpacked for weekend trips, spent way too much time mindlessly surfing the internet, taken many naps, stared out the window, wondered why I have so many pens but can never find the right pen, etc… Not exactly the most productive use of time. I think I save up my laziness all year and then spend it during these two summer months.

So eternal life would be bad for me. I need stress and deadlines in order to get anything done. It’s like this: When I was a kid, I could spend a lot of time playing in the pool or the lake. Then one day, I joined swim team and it consumed my life for the next 6 years. While swimming endless laps, I always thought about how fun it would be to just play around in the water without having to work on endurance, speed, or technique. Yet when I was faced with a pool or lake without lane ropes and denuded of my cap and goggles, I was at a loss for what to do. I was bored. I needed a structured workout. Alas--I have spent so much of my life in school and doing homework, as a student then as a teacher, that when I am faced with vast amounts of free time, I inevitably squander it. It is a curse. I know once I’m back in school, like once I was back in the lanes, I’ll wish I’d made better use of this freedom.

Movie Review: Eraserhead

2009-07-13T14:54:00.006-04:00

I watched the 1977 David Lynch film, Eraserhead, last night. If you have seen the movie, that first sentence alone should be enough to bring back nightmarish memories of the baby, the chicken dinner, the woman in the radiator, and the titular scene where Henry has a dream that he is decapitated and a core of his head is used to make pencil erasers. (If you haven’t seen it, I recommend reading the plot summary on the wikipedia entry to get some context.)

Eraserhead is the type of movie that is not enjoyable to watch. It doesn't make sense, in the traditional sense of the word sense; the images are claustrophobic or grotesgue; there is barely any dialogue; the special effects are rudimentary; and it is difficult to identify with any of the neurotic characters. And yet, the movie is brilliant precisely because it gives you so much to think about without steering you towards right answers. It’s unsettling—but it is by being unsettled that we are provoked to think. It is a movie that perhaps reveals more about the viewer than the creator of the film.

On the surface, it was Kafkaesque. It also reminded me of Little Otik as a movie about the fear of parenthood, the fear of having a child that ruins your life. It could also be compared to such recent films as Knocked Up and Juno as exploring the effects of an unwanted pregnancy on the dysfunctional couple involved. Maybe it is the male version of The Yellow Wallpaper: in Eraserhead the woman walks out and leaves the man to be slowly driven mad by the mutant baby's cries. Maybe it is a pro-abortion film, suggesting that fetal termination would have been a far better option than having the sickly mutant child later murdered by its deranged father.

Or maybe it is a treatise on the futility of enforcing the societal mold of the nuclear family in a post-nuclear age. The meet-the-parents scene in this movie is even more absurd and awkward than in the more recent movie Meet the Parents. The mother confronts Henry about having "sexual intercourse" with her daughter and insists that since an offspring has been produced, they must now get married. This, despite their dysfunctional relationship (perhaps literally embodied by the mutant baby?) and despite the parents’ lack of marital bliss. Babies and marriage must go together despite the fact that the marriage would be dysfunctional and the baby is not even a human baby.

Maybe Eraserhead is a comment on the perception of free will. Is the man in the moon pulling the levers just a man-behind-the-curtain that really has no power, or is he the embodiment of fate, really controlling the lives below? Henry and Mary certainly seem to be submitting to their fate--except when Mary has had enough of the mutant baby's cries and leaves. Although she seems crazier than Henry, maybe it is like in Catch-22 where going insane is actually the sane response to living in a dreary one-room apartment in a bleak, post-apocalyptic industrial town with a mutant baby that cries all night and a husband that is little more than flesh and frizzy hair. She is driven insane by her situation and gets out of it. Why does Henry stay? Even his tepid murder of the baby seems accidental--not like a conscious decision. Does he believe the man controlling the levers is really in control and he is just along for the ride?

This movie was also unique in that it was filled with sperm imagery. We are all used to phallic imagery, but how often do authors or directors go to the source and focus on those little spermies? An argument can be made (one must use passive voice when discussing these things) that the film is highlighting the disparity between the sex drive--that primordial urge--with it's evolutionary purpose--procreation. Who is actually thinking of cute cherubic babies (the epitome of sweet innocence) while doing the nasty (many sexual euphemisms actually reveal the societal view that sex is somehow "dirty"). This movie takes this contradiction and shows what would happen if society wasn't capable of doublethink. The "cherubic baby" is a horrific mutant--it is what the result of "doing the nasty" should look like. The societal attitudes towards sex have been manifested physically in the baby.

Then there is the fascinating relationship Henry has with the seductive girl-next-door. It is she who begins the limited dialogue of the movie by informing Henry that he got a phone call and is supposed to go to Mary's house for supper. So immediately we see him trapped between the sexy woman who clearly lusts for him, and his duty to his more homely girlfriend. He goes to the girlfriend’s, eats an awkward dinner, learns she had a baby prematurely and they must get married, they get married, she moves in, mutant baby cries, wife leaves and then--much time has passed since the initial encounter--the sexy neighbor shows up on the premise that she locked herself out of her apartment.

They make out for a while and presumably have sex, even although the sexy neighbor is clearly distracted by the crying mutant baby. The implication is clear: having a baby is a major impediment to hot sex. But, our recent viewing of sperm imagery must not let us forget that baby and sex are intricately linked. When the hot neighbor looks at the crying baby, is she wondering if she'll end up with something like that as a result of this encounter? She must--because she doesn't seem as interested in kissing Henry anymore, once reminded of the ultimate consequence. Henry, however, is in some sort of denial of the relationship between the baby and sex, or, he has compartmentalized it to where the freak baby is only a result of his sex with his deranged girlfriend, and this woman, being sexier, would not give him a child. Thus he has drawn distinctions, perhaps, between different types of sex. Madonna-whore complex, perhaps.

This was the only party of the movie where it seemed that Henry was being assertive and controlling his fate--he turns her face back towards him and continues to emphatically kiss her--clearly controlling her will and thwarting her urge to leave. It can be inferred that Henry’s sex drive is the only thing that can override his apathetic approach to life and his submission to his fate.

Later, Henry sees the sexy neighbor woman entering her apartment while making out with an older, ickier man. You can see Henry's disgust: of course he had somehow imagined he was special, not that she was a whore. Now he views her as a whore, but in doing so, he is now shown with a head that resembles the sperm imagery--but it also kind of resembles the head of the mutant baby. This blurring of images--sperm and baby--shows the biological relationship between the two entities. Furthermore, by replacing the protagonist’s head with this blurred image, we realize that he is really just a sperm-baby himself, while at the same time, he is viewed by the woman as being a sperm-baby. Babies are pure Id, and so is he, in that moment of hatred, jealousy, and disgust.

But hasn't he been Id all along? Doesn't society, with all its rules, just help us to hide (or repress, Freud would remind us) our Id among all our social conventions, particularly marriage. And isn’t marriage really just a way to legitimize--while at the same time separating--the connection between sperm and baby. When married couples have a baby, they're having a family. It's normal, natural, expected. In our minds, we think: they're married, they had a baby. We don't have to think about the fact that they had sex to have the baby. When an unmarried woman has a baby, we are forced to think about the fact that she had sex (since we don't have the word "married" to stand in) which makes us uncomfortable, and therefore she must wear the scarlett letter so that she too feels uncomfortable.

Now, what about the title and his dream where his head is used for erasers? On the one hand, I think it just means his head was soft, rubbery, not much in there. We hardly see any evidence of a personality or intellect throughout the whole movie. But there’s got to be something to the fact that it is being used for erasers, not just rubber bouncing balls or pillow stuffing. Is his head turned into an eraser because that is what we do with out superior intellect—use it to erase things, to choose what to block out and forget—such as the connection between sex and babies?

Marriage is like Homeownership

2009-06-25T21:55:00.005-04:00

I spent the eve of my 7th wedding anniversary sitting grumpily in the Boston airport. To pass the time, while my husband stoically waited in line to question our flight options at the Delta desk, I read an article from the July/August edition of The Atlantic entitled “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” by Sandra Tsing Loh. The article, in the books section, was promoted on the cover as “The Case Against Marriage” and the subtitle on page 116 was “The author is ending her marriage, isn’t it time you did the same?” All in all, a great article to read the day before my own marriage entered the ill-reputed 7th year. I would also like to note that I puked up my anniversary dinner. So if in retrospect I want to look for ill-omens, they have been dutifully recorded here.

Marriage is a tricky issue to discuss. I don’t want to write about my own or those of my friends and family, yet these are the very marriages that have informed my opinion and attitude towards marriage in the same way that Sandra Tsing Loh’s pessimistic outlook appears to have been influenced by her own marriage and those of a few of her friends. I did a cursory search of stats and info on the web on divorce and marriage, and the data appears to be in a muddle, depending who is twisting it which way. So I can’t really take that approach either.

So I’m going to use the following analogies to discuss the issue:

Marriage = homeownership
Living Together in a Long Term Relationship = Condo/Townhome
Dating = renting
Hookups = camping
Nothing = living at home

Marriage = homeownership
Like home ownership, marriage is not for everyone, although it is marketed as the ideal that everyone should achieve. It’s a big responsibility and takes a lot of work, but can be very rewarding if you like that sort of thing. People put a lot of work into their homes precisely because they own them. Similarly, marriage provides the stability of property ownership: people are inclined to work at it precisely because it increases in value, and the value helps them. A good marriage is a good thing. A bad marriage, like a poorly-maintained, falling apart house, is simply a drain of resources.

Living Together in a Long Term Relationship = Condo/Townhome
This works well as a middle ground between dating and marriage. You get to try out what it’s like to be married without quite all the responsibility. You don’t have to deal with the landscaping and the leaking roof.

Dating = Renting
People generally don’t put as much effort into their apartment because it is not theirs, and it is regarded as temporary. In a lot of cases, this is a good thing. It frees people up to spend more time on other endeavors that they find more valuable or interesting. The downside, especially if you're sharing an apartment with roommates, is the tragedy of the commons. Because the space doesn’t really belong to you, you’re less likely to take care of it. The upside is that if you don’t like it or it gets too run-down, or your tastes change, you can simply move on. You have more mobility, more freedom. You don’t have to wait to put the house on the market (ie—go through tedious divorce proceedings).

Hookups = camping
Being a very naïve, innocent person, I don’t know much about these. But I imagine they are like camping. Really fun and interesting for a short while, especially when you’re young, but definitely not sustainable. And you get a little dirty. It seems most would grow tired of it eventually and desire a little more stability. But for those who don't, camp on.

Nothing = living at home
And of course, there are those people who are just better off living in their mother’s basement playing video games. Nothing wrong with that.

My main point is simply that marriage is a really good thing for some people, and not so much for others. The problem is that when society, or culture, or religion, or parents, or peers, pressure people in to getting married (buying a home) as the norm, when in reality, there are many benefits to just dating (renting). People need to figure out what arrangement fits them. As home foreclosures and divorce rates show, marriage is not for everyone. But that doesn’t mean we need to get rid of it all together.

Click here for an article from The Atlantic making the case against homeownership.

From the Archives: September 11, 2001

2009-06-24T21:38:00.003-04:00

Back before I had a blog, I just typed my thoughts into a journal I titled "Is it morning or is it death?" after something I mumbled one time when I was half asleep. Here are, unedited and unabridged (except for a few names which are now represented by first initials), my entries for September 11 and September 12 of 2001:

September 11, 2001
There were four plane crashes this morning. Two into the world trade centers, one into the Pentagon, and one somewhere in Pennsylvania. The trade centers collapsed, the Pentagon doesn’t quite have 5 sides anymore. Debris is all that remains of the plane that crashed in PA.

I woke up this morning around 8:30am, at Z’s. He’d left for work already. I was listening to the news on NPR and working on my webpage. A little before 9, right at the end of Morning Edition, the guy said something about a plane crashing into one of the world trade centers. Then he said it was a perfectly clear day. By the time I thought to turn on the news on TV, thinking this might be something that video footage actually would enhance, a second plane had crashed into the second trade center. The tops of both buildings were billowing smoke. I still just felt numb and confused, nobody knew what was going on. I kept watching, not knowing what to think. Then, one of the towers collapsed. Right on the screen, in real time, I saw the building collapse. It was gut-wrenching. I imagined all those people careening to their death. I tried to call Dad, no answer. I called mom, and I choked up and cried. It was so awful. I can remember watching the challenger explode on TV with mom when I was very little, and I remember her crying and not understanding why. To me it was just another explosion on TV. Now I understand. Despite all the building explosions you see in movies, when it’s real, it’s real.

Later, I watched the second building collapse. When this happens, what good are words? I only felt things, I felt awful, I felt sad, I was horrified. All those people were just going to work, doing their job. But most of all, I thought of the fire-fighters and rescue workers who were now buried in 6 stories of ruble. I cannot recreate the feeling I felt when the buildings collapsed. And words are no help either.

Then the cameras suddenly switched to Washington where smoke was billowing out of the Pentagon. It took a couple of minutes, but finally eye-witness reports confirmed that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. I was alone with the tragedy to feel the full weight of it. Later, when A joined me, and D came over, and Z came back from work, the tragedy was weakened, was spread out among us, we could joke about some of the camera footage. It didn’t feel real anymore. After I saw the building collapse a dozen times, from all different angles and with different commentary, what could I feel anymore? It had become like a realistic movie where you keep rewinding one part. By this point, the people were dead and faceless, it was just a collapsing building.

The reporters talk about the symbolism of the world trade centers and the Pentagon, they talk about failure of intelligence. They say we were prepared for chemical or biological warfare, nobody expected the classic plane hijacking strategy. They say we failed, we weren’t prepared. But how could we be? A country, with open skies, is not invincible. But we think we are. We delude ourselves into thinking we are. But I know we are not. The US forgot about determination, about people’s passion. They think nobody can hurt us, but they can. It is a lesson we needed to learn. But what have we learned? They will heighten airport security, they will allocate more money for defense spending. They will try really hard to make us believe we are invincible. But it’s like life, you see. You can take all the precautions, do every right thing, but one day you can just go to work and have a plane crash into your building. That is the risk of being alive. To remove that risk is to end truly being alive.

The terrorists have succeeded. They have induced terror. Downtown Columbus shut down. Gas lines are out into the street. People are scared, and acting stupid, thinking stupid things. Their precious, safe existence has been disrupted. People are afraid of planes, of anyone that is a stranger. Terrorists do not play by the rules. Attacks can come from anywhere. People are terrified. CNN boasted the caption “America Under Attack.”

They’re calling for retaliation, the euphemistic word for revenge, for blood. Because no one can attack the U.S. and get away with it. But how many times do we bomb Iraq, and it hardly makes the news? And who are we going to bomb? I secretly hope the U.S. doesn’t find out who did it, so they won’t bomb anybody. But that won’t happen. Somebody will be blamed for this. But can the bombs be smart enough to attack precisely the people responsible? No, it will hit innocent civilians, who made no decision to attack the US, but are just going to work, doing their jobs. Just like the people in the trade centers, who made no decisions to hurt the people who evidently felt the need to hurt the US. It’s a vicious cycle. Blood calls for more blood, but we all bleed the same blood.

Maybe, because I am sitting here in my safe little room, and nobody I know has just died, it is easy for me to be calm. It is easy for me to view the casualties as the result of some new natural disaster. Maybe it is just easy for me not to hate the enemy, to not call it evil, to not desire revenge. Until it happens to me, I cannot ethically judge. But I can say this: I feel no hate, no anger. Only sadness.

The people who directly caused the crashes, they are dead. But the numbers don’t add up. Not enough of “them” have died to compensate for those of “us” who have died. The country rallies together, political differences are pushed aside, we must unite against the enemy. That is the mentality anyway. But you know, I think people secretly like this sort of thing. It brings a country together, gives people something to talk about, everybody will remember right where they were when it happened. Our country has never been so patriotic as we are today. But at the heart of patriotism I see not love of one’s own country, but hatred of an enemy. It is just a separation of “us” and “them,” “good” and “bad.”

I think maybe Nietzsche would say having an enemy is good, it keeps one on one’s toes. It gives you something to strive against, someone to show you your weak points.

I do not rejoice in the terrorist attacks. I am horrified. But maybe this will show President Bush that his anti-ballistic missile defense system is ridiculous. I know it is naïve and idealist of me, but I think a better preventative measure would be to reconcile with our “enemies.”

What final words can I type about this National Tragedy? I cannot comprehend the immensity of it. All the people whose world has just crumbled…The families disintegrated in the rubble…The love torn asunder…The agony…The heartbreak…All the frantic words that cannot contain the frenzy. We have lost our invincibility, and our innocence.

September 12, 2001
It is morning and it is death. I think everybody was hoping to wake up this morning and realize the attacks were just a bad collective dream. But they are very real and full of death. Right now it is 8:58 a.m. 24 hours have passed since I first heard that a plane crashed into the World Trade Centers. The crisis is already starting to be reduced to numbers. They can tell you how many planes, how many people on the planes, the times they left, the times they crashed, and we’re all waiting in anxious fear for the death toll to emerge. They will tell us the number of casualties, the number of injuries, but the numbers cannot begin to describe the tragedy.

So far, I am impressed with our country. The politicians may call for retaliation, but the Red Cross calls for blood donations. People are flocking to the blood banks all over the U.S., willing to give their own blood to help. People are flocking to churches, synagogues, mosques, to pray for the victims. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this unity our country feels isn’t just hatred of the enemy, maybe it is real love and concern for our fellow man. I was too cynical perhaps. We share a common fear, but we also share a common love. I remember S saying that the one good thing about wars is that they bring people together and give us a purpose—even if it’s protesting the war, like in Vietnam. Things like this test a country’s mettle. So far, we have been acting with fear, but also with dignity. I am afraid some overly patriotic psychopaths may try to harm or vandalize Muslim/Arab communities, but so far nothing like that has happened, that I know of. As to the fear, gas prices jumped sharply and gas lines are out into the street. I’m now going to Kroger to buy some newspapers, so I’ll see if there’s any food left on the shelves. People tend to panic.

I was wrong. Plenty of food, no newspapers.

It is afternoon now. More talks of retaliation. The attacks have been deemed an “act of war” by Bush. Secretary of State Colin Powell, whom I have much more faith in than Bush, has confirmed that this is being viewed as war. The weird thing is, right now it is still war against a nameless enemy, although everyone names Osama Bin Laden. The suspicions are toward Afghanistan, which is accused of harboring him. OBL himself denies that he did it, but he congratulated whoever did. I don't have an opinion on who did it, our government has too many secrets for me to really surmise anything. But I pity the people accused of doing this, all hell will break loose against them. Now they’re getting NATO involved: most countries, hold Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, are supporting the U.S. I know to maintain our political and military might, we must retaliate. But I still wish we wouldn’t. At least not on the large scale they’re discussing.

In movies, you can tell when the scary part is coming by the music. Life imitates art. NPR has been playing scary music all today and yesterday, in the interludes between the news. The news is something else all together. It has finally become real, not a calculated performance of the day’s events and issues. Now, people interrupt each other to cut to late breaking news, people are asking more questions than they’re answering, and for some reason, genders keep getting confused. Yesterday, a news clip of the street near the disaster showed a cop yelling at people to “go fucking home.” He was saying it again and again. Now how often will that happen on TV? That was only the first time though. From then on, when the clip was shown, there was no sound. I just love it when people are caught off guard like that though. Suddenly life becomes real, and not just a performance.

Bryan Michael Jenkins: “there is no x-ray for the soul.” I just heard this quote on the radio, referring to the discussions about increased airline security. I think it sums it up: we can never be 100% safe. People have free will.

Another thing I worry about is how fair and ethical the FBI is being in the investigation. The FBI has been under a lot of criticism lately, with spies found in its ranks and a botched case against Wen Ho Li. Will they do this right? Maybe I’m just suspicious but I fear they may frame a group for this crime. Maybe they won’t go that far, but they will no doubt interrogate and intimidate innocent people. In war, there is no fair trial. The innocent are condemned right along with the guilty.

Random acts of death and destruction

2009-06-22T22:40:00.006-04:00

We went to visit my best friend in Boston this weekend. Our direct flight there was delayed an hour due to bad weather in Boston. On the way home, we had to fly from Boston to DC then to Raleigh. Again, the weather had delayed flights all day, causing ours to be about three hours late. Needless to say, we missed the connecting flight to Raleigh and were effectively stranded in DC until our 7am flight the next morning. We’ve traveled a lot, but this had never happened before.

The guy at the desk where we booked the flight said that hotel vouchers were only issued for mechanical problems (ie—when the delay is the fault of the airline, not the forces of nature). But he said we could go to the Baggage Service desk downstairs and get a coupon for a discount at a hotel. We thought we’d check it out, because if it wasn’t too expensive, it would sure beat spending the night at the airport. The guy running the Baggage Service desk was unsure of what exactly to do and we ended up with a hotel voucher instead of just a discount. We didn’t lie to get it, but we sure didn’t tell him he wasn’t supposed to be issuing us a voucher. Sometimes the system’s incompetence and bureaucracy screws you, but sometimes it benefits you. I figure it all evens out in the end.

With surprising ease, we took the free shuttle to the Hyatt, checked in, and had about 6 hours of sleep in a nice bed before taking the free shuttle back to the airport the next morning. I should also note, as I had previously complained about hotel rooms, that the one at the Hyatt was more interesting and better-decorated than the generic hotel room I’m used to. The art on the walls was abstract, of course, but at least it had bold colors and lines instead of the pastel blurriness that adorns the walls of my typical room.

We couldn’t get over how lucky we were. We had been preparing to stay in the airport all night, rent a car and just drive home, or perhaps take a taxi to a far away crappy motel we could afford. All the choices were either expensive or uncomfortable or both. Instead, we ended up with a very nice room for free. The only draw back was that we didn’t have a decent supper or breakfast. I had two packs of my emergency instant oatmeal with me though, and I used the hot water from the in-room coffee maker to cook a cup for supper and another for breakfast. It was a bit surreal to “drink” my oatmeal out of a coffee cup, as I had no utensils. I was lucky I even still had them, since I only brought two with me, and my stomach trouble had tempted me to use them many times, but I held out thinking I might really need them later. (I always do this, to the point of absurdity—where I never use things that would have been very helpful at the time. In this case, I was vindicated.)

I write about my traveling travails to illustrate a point. Hang in there. It’s coming.

This incident reminded me of a time in my childhood when my crazy grandma (please note: both of my grandma’s are religious; this one is deemed “crazy” because of her personality) told me about her tire blowing out in her car while she was driving. She insisted, in a very preachy way, that this was proof God was looking out for her, because she didn’t get hurt. Even at a young age and as a believer, I remember thinking, but not saying, “How do you know God wasn’t trying to kill you by blowing out your tire? Maybe it was the tire or car manufacturer that actually saved you.”

This same thought pattern emerged in one of my students’ stories, summarized here: A girl gets injuries approximately every two years while growing up, culminating in a bike accident at age eight where she fell off her bike and broke her jaws (it would have been worse but she was wearing a helmet). The accident occurred right in front of a nurse’s house; her mom reveals that it must be her grandpa Frank in heaven watching over her.

Insert my same critique of my crazy grandma’s story: How do you know your grandpa Frank isn’t trying to kill you, hence the recurrence of bike crashes, and that maybe it is the helmet manufacturer, via capitalism, that is watching over you?

The troublesome thought pattern, which is very common, goes like this: Something bad happened, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, therefore some celestial being must be watching out for me. I am special, and that is why I survived.

I could apply the same thought pattern to my relatively trivial experience of airport delays this weekend: God was watching out for us and gave me a premonition to not eat my oatmeal. He also caused the confusion that led the Baggage Service guy to issue us a voucher instead of a coupon. But I don’t think that’s what happened, and here’s why: I’m ok with the idea that life is random.

Many people aren’t comfortable with the idea that some things don't happen for a reason. They need to believe there must be reasons. But of course, they don’t follow all the way through with the logical progressions of their thoughts. If grandpa Frank was watching out for her, why wasn’t he, or other grandpas, watching out for all the other little girls who died in bicycle accidents? Why was God watching out for my grandma with the flat tire, but not the holocaust victims? But I don’t think people think it all the way through and see the absurdity of their beliefs. They just believe, “I survived, I probably shouldn’t have, therefore a supernatural force is protecting me.” They don’t think about all the other people who probably should have lived, but died.

Here is how I understand that life can be random. All of us, at some time, have either purposely or accidentally killed an insect. Maybe the ant was on the sidewalk and I accidentally stepped on it. Maybe the spider was in the bathroom and I purposely killed it and flushed it down the toilet. Maybe the beautiful butterfly was flying over the highway as my windshield slammed into it. Even President Obama recently impressed the populace by his astute fly-killing ability. Nobody stops to think about why insects live or die, or our role in their life and death. It just happens. As my flip flop or windshield is to the insect, so the world is to us. I don’t judge the morality of an insect before killing it just as an earthquake doesn’t target a specific person. I don’t think God is using me as a vehicle for killing insects any more than he works in mysterious ways through cancer or tornadoes to kill some and spare others. Frankly, I don’t think god exists.

This doesn’t mean life is pointless. There are many things we can do to improve our chances—like the adaptations of insects. But there is also an element of it we can’t control and that has no rhyme or reason, and we have to accept that and stop making up silly stories.

Hitler and Saddam

2009-06-18T21:36:00.006-04:00

Over the past year of teaching, I noticed how the students often referenced Hitler as an example of the epitome of evil. On the one hand, I was happy that they had some knowledge of history and that they were applying it in different contexts. On the other hand, I was dismayed that he was the only historical supervillian ever mentioned.

Now, before I get accused of being anti-Semitic, let me clarify that I do think Hitler was bad, perhaps even the most bad. My problem is not that he is regarded as evil, but that he is regarded as evil to the exclusion of other historical misbehavers such as Stalin, Mao, Pol-Pot, Ida Amin, etc. (NOTE: etc = and many more that I don’t know about.)

To be fair, my own history education in high school was pretty weak, and I too would have only been able to conjure up Hitler. I’m only aware of Stalin because I was a nerd and borrowed educational videos from the library. I only know about Mao because I lived in China and ended up reading a lot about the Cultural Revolution. I only know about Pol-Pot because I visited the killing fields in Cambodia. I only know about Ida Amin because I watched the film The Last King of Scotland followed by a little internet research. So I only really know about the others through self-education. And I’m sure there are many others rulers who committed equally horrific atrocities that I am not fully aware of because my travels or movie watching hasn’t come across them yet.

The fact that Hitler is the main/only evildoer taught in schools leads me to propose a rather minor conspiracy theory relating to the education of our youngsters in the ways of evil dictators: Maybe the others are being omitted or overlooked because we, the great and infallible USA, did not fight against them. They don’t fit into our master narrative of being the country that fights against injustice around the world. How do you explain to kids that we stood by during the Rwandan genocide?

Think about it. Hitler makes a very convenient symbol of the epitome of evil not just because he was so calculatingly horrible, but because the USA fought against him and won. Never mind that the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was what actually prompted the USA to enter the war. Hitler makes a very convenient story. We were never his ally (as we were with Stalin) and we took (belated) action against his regime (as we didn’t with virtually every other evil dictator).

Which leads me to my theory about Saddam Hussein. After the weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize and the connections to Al-Quaida and 9/11 were debunked, the mouthpieces insisted that Saddam’s atrocities to his own people alone justified the invasion. He was a really bad guy, the USA fights bad guys, therefore the USA fights in Iraq. It’s a very simple, happy narrative, that people can easily understand because that’s what the USA did with Hitler.

(UPDATE 6/24/09: Apparently, Stephen Colbert has been reading my blog. See this video of Stephen Colbert's interview with Simon Schama on 6/22/09 in which he states that if you don't fight Saddam, you love Hitler. The interview is over 6 minutes long, so if you're short on time, the relevent part starts around 2:10 and goes to 2:45.)

The problem, of course, is that the world is and has been filled with lots of bad guys that the USA doesn’t/didn’t fight. My favorite part of the Saddam story is that it falls apart so easily if you look just a millimeter deeper and realize that the USA was friends with Saddam during the time he was committing the atrocities that allegedly justified the invasion so many years later.

Furthermore, the idea that the USA fights on behalf of the oppressed is not born out. Again, I only know through self-education related to my travels that the great USA postponed Namibian independence from Apartheid-ruled South Africa by at least ten years. The USA supported the apartheid regime (and had Nelson Mandela listed as a terrorist threat) because the Namibian resistance movement, SWAPO, had support from a communist group based in Angola.

Was communism really so bad that it justified the oppression of people on a race-based caste system? Isn’t the theory behind communism at least a little more in line with American values than enforced inequality? Of course, the historical context is relevant—this was still the cold war—but seriously, apartheid?

Besides, I think the USA should have just sat back and let communism run its course. I believe that the world operates, at its core, by Darwinian principles. Therefore, a flawed system such as communism will naturally implode, without all the wars. In fact, the wars just strengthen communism by providing a common enemy for the people to rally around. Read Animal Farm by George Orwell.

I’m not saying that the USA should or shouldn’t fight bad guys and bad regimes. I’m just saying they should be honest about the real reason they’re doing it. For example, another reason given for invading Iraq is that we wanted to bring democracy to the Middle East, and they oppress their women. Following that logic, shouldn’t we be invading every country that isn’t a democracy and/or oppresses women? Of course, following this line of reasoning is simply unsustainable. Therefore, there must be other reasons we fought Hitler, and other reasons we invaded Iraq. The simple narrative of the good and just USA fighting oppressive regimes around the world is flawed.

To Have or Not to Have

2009-06-16T20:35:00.006-04:00

I was flipping through a little notebook I keep in my purse when I came across some notes I made a couple of months ago while waiting to meet my ESL student from Saudi Arabia at a Starbucks. I will transcribe them here, then attempt to explain them.

Accid. Pregn
At sister’s house
Her husband put pill in OJ
She didn’t want to get preg b/c job
Maybe it was for the best—if you want to plan you’ll never have kids.
"Even now, I probably want more than one but it’s never the right time."
“I wasn’t very attached to him for the first three months”
Time wise?
“You learn to be more efficient”
How to show larger scope?
No more teen pregnancies
Most women at least 25-45 when have kids
Overplanned
Cringe every time hear “playgroup”
Hiking—see parents w/kids and she thought it would be fun to take a kid hiking—to get excited about going over a bridge
Hear teenage girls recount fights w/moms
Don’t want kids

If I’m the next J.K. Rowling, that is my equivalent of the napkin notes that launched Harry Potter. Except my hero isn’t a boy wizard, but a woman in a futuristic society where the default has been changed—instead of taking pills to prevent pregnancy, the default is that women don’t get pregnant just by having sex. They must now take pills in order to get pregnant, thus making every creation of a child a conscious choice rather than the accidental result of a sexual encounter. I first came up with this idea while eating lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Ohio with one of Z’s roommates. (I’m recording all the details of the conception of this idea under the delusion that it will come to fruition and somebody will be interested.) Some of the notes are my own thoughts, some are quotes from friends, some are ideas for the story.

I started working on this idea in a slightly more coherent fashion than notes scrawled in a notebook. This is what I typed on the eve of my 29th birthday:

Default

Half of pregnancies in the US are unintended. There must have been a time when all pregnancies were unintended. Could there be a time when no pregnancies are unintended?

I want to write a story about this idea. Is it a cliché to write a story about writing a story? Write what you know, but all an aspiring writer knows is what it is like to have an idea and to want to write about it.

What would the world be like if the default was changed—if it were impossible to accidentally become pregnant? What if instead of birth control pills, an aspiring mother had to take birth release pills? But it is impossible to answer that question without creating a dystopia, even although it would probably be my idea of a utopia.

This is personal of course. For those of us who do manage to use birth control effectively, it is an agonizing choice. Because it is a choice, I fear it could be wrong. If all pregnancies were accidental, it would be out of my hands, I would have to accept it. Sometimes I secretly hope that at the right time, I will magically get pregnant. You can’t regret accidents the same way you regret choices. Any other choice in life can be changed, except perhaps crimes. If I buy a house I don’t like, I can sell it. If I take a job I don’t like, I can quit and find another one. If I major in the wrong thing in college, I can get a different degree. If I married the wrong person, I could get a divorce. But a kid--I’d be stuck with that for at least 18 years in a dependent state, and emotionally forever.

Every time I see a cute kid, a kid I would like to have, I think, yeah—maybe I’ll like being a mom. Then I shudder at the word mom. I hate the word mom only slightly less than the term “play date.” I have enough trouble making friends for myself, how am I going to make friends for my kids? And I probably won’t like their friends. I can picture the nightmare now: dropping a kid off, hoping it won’t embarrass me, trying to make small talk with the other mom—but not really caring about crafts or shoes. But even worse than that is the thought of another kid coming to a play date at my house. Will I have to try and entertain the kids? Make interesting snacks and games? Break up fights and pretend to care about hurt feelings, boo-boos and tears?

It’s not that I’m so pretentious. I talk to my cats and meow back at them. I can lose my dignity willingly for a cat—but for a kid? For someone else’s stupid kid?

But then I think of this youtube video of a cute little Indian(?) girl, probably adopted by rich yuppie parents, and she was giving a funeral for the fish, before it was flushed down the toilet. The girl was so sincere and articulate, and the parents couldn’t even keep the fish’s name straight. I thought: I’d be sure to know the fish’s name. I would care. So maybe I have it in me, to care about a child at a fish funeral.
______

About a week after I wrote that that, I was at my grandmother’s funeral. Funerals always make me want to have kids, because they remind me that one way of achieving immortality is through your progeny. Being an atheist, I don’t believe my grandma is in heaven—but she lives on through the memories of her children and grandchildren. Granted, it’s not quite eternal life—since after my generation, the memory of her will be gone—but there is some sort of genetic immortality in the continuation of her genetic code.

About two weeks after I wrote that, my sister had her first baby. She said it changed everything. She said suddenly work didn’t matter, nothing mattered except her little baby. I’ve only seen photos so far, and she is really the cutest baby in the whole world (such is the power of genetic relationships) and I’m beginning to understand why parents are crazy. They can’t help it.

Another change occurred in me last weekend when we went to KY and spent some time with Z’s little niece and nephew. I bonded with them effortlessly (which rarely happens with me and kids, which is maybe why I have an aversion to them in general—I don’t think they like me, so I don’t like them.). I had a sea change that weekend. I finally reached a tipping point and felt that I really did want kids, that maybe I could do it after all. Previously, being around children always made me feel like curling up and sleeping.

Most of my reasons for not having children thus far are logistical. Due to my colitis, I often don’t feel well, so the prospect of being pregnant is not very appealing. It still seems easier than the bureaucracy of adoption though. Another reason is that my job, teaching, takes up vast quantities of time during the school year. I want to wait until that magical “third year” of teaching when everything suddenly gets easier. So far, I’ve been a first-year teacher four times, and it’s quite tiring. I can’t imagine having any time or energy left for a child. Finally, I don’t have a very good support network. Who would babysit the kid? My parents and Z’s mom live nine hours away and although Z’s dad lives only an hour away, he’s got three little kids of his own. We have no other family nearby and no friends that are of the babysitting type.

I have been heavily unfluenced by several readings of Charlotte Perkins Gillman's The Yellow Wallpaper and so I am fully convinced I will go insane if I stay at home with a baby. I think I must work in order to maintain sanity. I always go borderline crazy during the summer when I'm home all day, but at least I have the freedom to read and write in addition to listening to NPR. I imagine a baby as something that consumes every waking and many sleeping moments.

I should also confess that I have been influenced by a crazy little film I saw back in college, called Little Otik. A woman that desperately wants a baby but can't have one adopts a little tree stump as her baby. Through the magic of magical realism, it comes to life, but consumes everything including (spoiler alert) its parents. I think it is a highly symbolic and probably accurate depiction of how children end up consuming their parents.

Despite these logistical and psychological problems, I’m now starting to think kids might be the next challenge, the answer to the ennui I feel about traveling. Doesn’t everything become new and exciting again when viewed through the eyes of a child? In my cryptic notes, I made reference to a time we were on a boring hike in Umstead State Park and there was a family coming our way towards a bridge. The kid was really excited about crossing a bridge. I remember thinking that that is why people have kids—although they’re a ton of work, there is a sort of rebirth for the parent through the birth of the child.

Legalize It

2009-06-15T21:50:00.005-04:00

I was researching my disease in preparation for my doctor's appointment tomorrow (in case there had been any treatment innovations in the last year that I should ask about) and I was joking that I should get a nicotine patch, since that reportedly helps. Z suggested I research medical marijuana. All I could find was one sketchy case study, which, my scientific training tells me, is not an adequate sample size. A little more Googling turned up a website where people rate treatments and write their comments. It turns out many people self-reported that smoking pot helped relieve the symptoms of colitis when nothing else worked.

In reading the posts, I was struck by how often the people complained about marijuana being illegal, given that the side-effects of it were less severe than the side-effects of the prescription drugs they were on. One women described herself as a law-abiding Christian and was quite conflicted about using pot, but alas, it was the only thing that effectively ameliorated her painful, debilitating symptoms. I'm sure the cancer websites abound with stories of people who smoked pot to get over the nausea of chemotherapy and stimulate their appetite.

The question is: why is pot still illegal?

I'm sure there are many conspiracy theories. I'm only familiar with the one from the 4/20 episode of Family Guy; something about hemp being competition for the the paper industry, so a paper tycoon had it banned.

My favorite stupid conspiracy theory comes from one of my former students: The government can't figure out how to tax pot, since anyone can grow it, so they don't want to legalize it since they can't make money off of it. I gave my student a brief lesson in economics as follows: There are lots of things that people can grow, but they don't, because the big farms (which the government is quite capable of taxing) would be able to produce superior plants for cheaper. Think of any garden: we could all grow our food for free, but we don't because it's too much work and it's easier to get it at the grocery store. The same would be true for hemp.

I'd like to present my own theory:
The biggest advocates for legalized marijuana are too stoned to organize properly.

I've really had very little contact with the pot-smoking portion of the world except through books, movies, and my students' not-so-discrete worship of the drug culture surrounding pot. So I really don't know much, and most of my opinions about pot's effects on one's ability to get anything done are primarily based on the song from Afroman "Because I got High".

I think the biggest argument in support of pot is that there are so many things that are far worse that are legal. Plus, there aren't really moral principles at stake, because so many people take drugs to alter their moods anyway, such as antidepressants, medicine for anxiety and ADD medication. A lot of these drugs are even given to kids to help them do well in school. So we're clearly sending mixed messages, that only some drugs are ok to alter your mood but not others.

I understand the counter point, that marijuana is a gateway drug and there's a slippery slope from it to other drugs, but then wouldn't that be true for all drugs? Having trouble focusing on your homework? Here, take this drug. Do you feel depressed? Take this other drug. Do you want to mellow out? Take a hit on this bong. There isn't a real difference.

Plus, everyone is already addicted to caffeine. Many people literally cannot start their day without a cup of coffee. I don't actually think this is a problem, but if we want to make broad judgements that any substance addiction is bad, that any chemical which alters the mind is bad, then caffeine should be included.

I would write more about alcohol, and how it is actually probably more damaging than pot, but I think that argument is already out there, and we all know prohibition didn't work. Which leads to another issue: just think how much money, time, and effort is being wasted on pot. If it were legalized, there would be revenues instead of expenditures.

I don't really think I've said anything new here. Maybe the only difference is that I'm making this argument as someone who has never smoked pot. Does that make a difference? Somehow I think it does. It's like straight people supporting gay marriage. They have nothing to personally gain by it, so it legitimizes the issue by showing that a rational, impartial person also supports it. Is this the way it should be? Probably not. But if it helps at all, I'm just going to throw it out there: I'm straight and I support gay marriage; I've never smoked pot and I support legalization of marijuana.

UPDATE (16 June): Today's paper had an article on the front page, with the headline Momentum builds for broad debate on legalizing pot

Going down on Madonna too soon

2009-06-14T21:37:00.008-04:00

We went camping with some friends this weekend. I used to love camping, but the experience is different now from seven years ago when we took several trips during those lovely months of unemployment between our graduation/marriage and Peace Corps.

I think the main difference is that we've traveled so much in the intervening years. Stone Mountain, awesome as it is, is less awesome than Table Mountain in South Africa or Brandberg Mountain in Namibia. This isn't to say I don't appreciate the dark coolness of a forest, the bright perkiness of ferns, the luxurious carpeting of moss--I still enjoy and appreciate a good romp through the forest and the views visible upon arrival at the summit. At least the hike this weekend was much more impressive than our typical Sunday morning hike around Umstead or the Eno River. But I've hiked through Taman Negara, a 130 million year old primary forest in Malaysia, and the rain forests in Costa Rica and consequently the hikes around here seem mundane by comparison.

This is the problem with travel. The more I travel, the less awe-inspiring it is. This must be how drug addicts are. I need more and more just to achieve the same high. About two years ago, I finally went to New York City. When I got back, my mom, who had been there when the twin towers were still standing, quizzed me about how amazingly tall all the sky scrapers were. I failed to be adequately exuberant. The problem was that by the time I made it to NYC, I’d already been to Seoul, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. While the New York skyline was impressive, I wasn’t looking on it with virgin eyes.

I think Dan Bern expresses this problem best in some of the lyrics from his song entitled "Tiger Woods":

I got a friend whose goal in life

Was to one day go down on Madonna

That's all he wanted

That was all

To one day go down on Madonna

And when my friend was thirty-four

He got his wish in Rome one night

He got to go down on Madonna

In Rome one night in some hotel

And ever since he's been depressed

'Cause life is shit from here on in

And all our friends just shake their heads

And say, "Too soon, too soon, too soon,

He went down on Madonna too soon

Too young, too young, too soon, too soon"

Of course, referencing Dan Bern songs is another problem all together. But his raunchy lyrics perfectly capture my problem. Although I haven’t seen everything, I have seen ancient ruins, great cities, quaint villages, mountains, volcanoes, canyons, rain forests, rivers, and beaches and I've really had a glorious life. But perhaps I had it too young, too soon.

On the flip side, I'm glad I traveled in my younger glory days because the other thing I learned from our little camping excursion this weekend is that, at the ripe old age of 29, I'm already starting to think camping is more trouble than it's worth. I probably spent as much time preparing and then unpacking from camping as I did actually camping. I had to round up all the gear, plan and pack the food, prep the house, plants and cats for a weekend away--then camp for two nights--then unpack, wash, dry, put away everything...And all this to sit outdoors feeding the mosquitoes and sweating up a giant rock and down again. In the summer, when I’m out of school, I can afford to spend a day before the trip and a day after, but during the school year, the prospects of taking a weekend camping trip are slim.

Perhaps the main thing that keeps me camping is that I loathe hotels. Hotels are bland, characterless, artless places. They’re like The Alchemist or Tuesdays with Morrie: comfort for the masses. When I was a kid, we camped so much that a hotel was a rare treat. But now, at least at my price point, all hotels are the same: mass-produced, cookie-cutter rooms of mediocre blandness.

Again, it is traveling that has ruined me. The hostels we stayed in while traveling were always brightly painted, unique places--and cheap. We suffered a little of course, with shared bathrooms, hot stuffy rooms, noisy roommates, lack of privacy, and uncomfortable beds. But sometimes there were real winners that cancelled out the suffering. More importantly, each one was unique and memorable. And anyway, when you're traveling, you're not supposed to be hanging out in your room. We had one of the worst rooms ever in Hong Kong, and for that week, we became like street people. We'd leave the hostel as soon as we got up, and we wouldn't return until we were ready to fall asleep. We spent evenings sitting on benches just watching the people go by.

Which brings me to another reason camping is starting to annoy me. I feel woefully under stimulated. This is another way I, or perhaps the world I live in, have changed in the last seven years. These days, I am almost always engaged in some sort of mental activity: reading, writing, planning lessons or grading (during the school year) and listening to NPR or podcasts, or watching a movie. My brain is always being stimulated. Sure, I spend a large amount of time daydreaming, staring out the window, collecting my thoughts, and petting the cats, but camping involves very long stretches of time where nothing is stimulated except my eyeballs and my main mental activity consists of deciding what needs to be put away in the car at night in case it rains.

Rooms full of books

2009-06-11T23:16:00.005-04:00

It is when I am confronted with a room full of books that I most lament being mortal.

I went to the book store today to pick up two new novels that we’re going to teach in 9th grade next year. Rooms full of books always intimidate me. While I’m happy there are so many books, I hate facing the fact that there are so many books I will never read. Reading the books I’m teaching, making lesson plans and grading take up most of my time during the year, so I usually just have time to read one or two books during winter break, one during spring break, and then as many as possible during the summer. Last summer I spent most of my time searching for jobs and painting, so I only read maybe 5 books. For being an English major, I’m actually a slow reader. Plus, I have to divide my precious time between reading books and reading The Atlantic Monthly and the newspaper too. I also have a backlog of National Geographic, Discover and Newsweek. I’ve given up on keeping up with Newsweek. It’s a good week if I even pay attention to the cover. I figure National Geographic is timeless, so I usually put it off. I swore I cancelled my subscription to Discover but it keeps coming. In the summer I listen to NPR all day, so often I’m just sitting there petting the cats and listening to the Diane Rehm show. There is not enough time to be well-informed and devour great literature.

Luckily, there are plenty of books in the bookstore that I can dismiss, such as one I saw today that was a woman’s memoirs of her promiscuity as a teenager. I opened it to a random page and read a few lines, just in case the promiscuous teen developed into a writer, but alas, the lines were mundane, something like, “I wore a mini skirt and a tight top. My desire for Brad choked in my throat. He was drunk.” Ok, it was a little better than that, but that’s all I remember. And I’m not saying I’m really a better writer than Ms. Promiscuity, just that I can recognize and appreciate good writing, and hers wasn’t it. Mine isn’t it either. Yet.

So I bought the two books for school, A History of Love, which I quoted from earlier, and Peace Like a River. I don’t think I’ll like the latter one as much as the former, although I’m biased against both of them because the titles are terrible. I also bought a grilling cook book, a new planner (since we teachers are perpetually linked to the school-based year, my planner ends in June), and an Irvine Welsh novel with a weird title because I liked Trainspotting so much. I have a rule against reading two books by the same author, with the exception of Shakespeare. I have theory that all authors really just have one story, and one way of telling a story. It is true for Shakespeare too, but his language is the epitome of mental arousal, so I make an exception for him. This is a relatively new rule, based on my observations by reading more than one book by the same author in the past. If I recognize any similarity, and I always do, it drives me nuts. I feel cheated. But the Irvine Welsh novel was on the bargain shelf, and it passed my flip-to-a-random-page-and-read-a-few-lines test.

My book stress is always momentarily ameliorated when I’m going through the shelves of books and I see works I’ve read before. I feel a momentary relief and think, “Phew, at least I’ve read that one.” One more drop in the ocean. It was also weird to see the book I’m currently reading, Reading Like a Writer by Fransine Prose. What a convenient last name for an author. I’m reading the hardback and the book store had the paper back. I’ve had the book on my shelf for a while, maybe a year and a half, but had to wait until I was ready. Sometimes, if there is something I think I’m really going to like, I save it, because I want to always have it to look forward to. This backfires sometimes, when mentally I’ve moved on from the place I was in when I wanted it. Luckily, it worked out in this case. I figure the book will compliment my summer of reading and writing.

Opportunity

2009-06-10T20:58:00.004-04:00

Every Wednesday afternoon for the past year, my husband and I have been volunteering with a local refugee family. Our family is from Burma, although the two kids were born in the refugee camp in Thailand. Having lived abroad ourselves, we felt we would be well-equipped to help a family going through the same situation here. We first got the idea from watching the documentary God Grew Tired of Us about the lost boys of Sudan—the children who fled during the civil war. The film chronicled a few of the boys, now men, as they journeyed from the refugee camp to the U.S. for resettlement. Upon their arrival in the U.S., there was a person who showed them their apartment, how to use a flush toilet and toilet paper, how to go grocery shopping….I wanted to be that person.

At a Peace Corps event half a year later I met a former Peace Corps volunteer who now works with Lutheran Family Services, an organization that helps refugees who are assigned to resettle here. The only problem was that if you signed up to help a family, you had to do everything—furnish their apartment, help them go to doctor appointments, help them find a job, help with transportation…it was too much for just us. Usually church groups, with a well-organized network of resources and plenty of retirees with lots of time, are the ones to sponsor families. And I am not part of a church group. I applied for any open jobs with the organization, but they didn’t seem interested in me.

Then, about a year later, I met another former Peace Corps volunteer who worked with the local branch of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI). She said her organization had several different volunteer options, where individuals or groups could be involved. So we went to an orientation, and they paired us with our family. They had just arrived about two weeks ago—a husband and wife and their two kids. The husband was my husband's age, and the wife was two years younger than me. Their son was going to be starting third grade and their daughter was going to start kindergarten. They spoke some English.

It was the beginning of August when we drove to the apartment complex where USCRI placed many of the refugees upon their arrival. Most refugees in this area are from Burma or Burundi. We heard rumors that there was some racial tension between the two groups, as the lighter skinned Burmese shunned the darker skinned Burundis. Oh, the irony. Which brings me to a little tangent. Popular culture (movies, books) lead us to believe that the oppressed are somehow morally superior to their oppressors (think of the Holocaust and slavery) but really, the only difference is that one group is in power, and the other is not (consider the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the way the resettled slaves enslaved the local population in Liberia).

We met our family and talked a little bit about what they wanted from us. It seemed they mainly wanted us to help their kids with their homework. The case worker, who herself was a refugee, told us that the local elementary school gave students a homework folder every Wednesday. So we agreed that it would be good for us to come every Wednesday afternoon. Then, seeing as how school was going to start in a couple of days, we took the father and some relative of his that spoke better English to Wal*Mart to buy their kids some school supplies.

Thus began our weekly trips to their sparce, cockroach infested house. As time went on, the pile of shoes by the door grew, new pieces of random furniture showed up: a cot, another sofa, a large folding table, chairs. They also accumulated a broken computer, toys, bikes, and a bookcase to hold their growing fleet of shoes. USCRI got the dad a job busing tables in the food court at the mall, and the mom works for a laundry service. They make minimum wage, ride the bus to work, have friends take them shopping, and for the most part, they seem to be doing just fine.

The most interesting part has been watching the kids. The son, aptly named Y Two K since he was born in the year 2000, and the daughter, named Mu Hser, didn’t know much English when they came. Y2K could communicate basic information, but Mu Hser just knew a few zoo animals, which is actually quite useless. Although animal names are one of the things ESL teachers love to teach kids, (I know, because I was one) it is actually quite useless to know what a giraffe and elephant are.

As the year went on Y2K never seemed to have much homework, beyond a few math problems or a word search. My husband would spend time with him talking about his toys, or going over a map. We bought some picture dictionaries to help the kids improve their vocabulary.

Meanwhile, Mu Hser and I progressed through the kindergarten curriculum: a new alphabet letter every week, colors, sight words, patterns, and finally, basic addition. In the beginning she didn’t understand much of what I said, but she did ok. Around Christmas is became clear that she was understanding English better, but she still wasn’t speaking much. By Easter, there was a breakthrough. She started speaking. The grammar was bad, the pronunciation was mangled, but my little Mu Hser was finally speaking.

Part of this breakthrough may have been due to her developing friendship with Luu, a Vietnamese refugee who lived in the next apartment building and was in her class. Since they had different native languages, they had to speak to each other in English.

Luu was at the apartment today when I came by. It was the last day of school today. They had had a “beach day” on Monday, which they tried to tell me about. “We play games, no write. Just have fun.” Today they got their grade cards for the year. Luu was being promoted to first grade, but Mu Hser was going to repeat kindergarten. Mu Hser said, “Luu cry. She no want go first grade.” I looked at Luu. She nodded. “I’m scared.” We practiced some flash cards with pictures and words. Luu was clearly outshining Mu Hser, who was preoccupied with eating the smarties candy she got at school that day.

They showed me the movie their teacher gave them—a compilation of pictures from throughout the year. Mu Hser and Luu were mixed in with all the American-born kids, and I thought about the American dream. Their parents didn’t want to come here—they really wanted to return to their own country, just not at the risk of their lives. So here they are, and although the parents may never rise much above menial jobs, I’m convinced their kids will be just fine. They’ll be fluent in English in another year, and they will be able to achieve whatever they want.

Which brings me to my real motive in writing this. (I teach my students that their thesis must go in the first paragraph, and here I am—burying mine in the 13th paragraph!) I see these kids and I am confident that although their parents were refugees—literally coming to the US with nothing—they will grow up to be middle class. This is why it is hard to say that there is some system keeping poor people poor. Being poor has nothing to do with it. Their parents are limited due to their lack of education and English proficiency, but the kids, just by going to public schools, will be able to get ahead. So should the children of any poor parents. We see this with the stories of Obama and Sotomayor. It isn’t easy, but it is possible. Y2K and Mu Hser may not grow up to be a president or supreme court justice, but the opportunity is there.

Goals

2009-06-09T19:28:00.010-04:00

My goal for the summer is to write every day that I am home. I want to do this for several reasons. My first post might as well be about why I want to write.

First of all, I enjoy words more than anything. I believe that if I have a personal legend, it is to write. I hate to start this blog out with a reference from a book I loathe, but unfortunately, even a crummy author can lead me to thinking. I read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho recently because I had to teach it. When I bought it at the book store, I even commented to my husband that "This is not the sort of book I would normally read. See the shiny letters?" I do judge books by their covers, and any books with shiny letters are up to no good. That was an omen. (For the record, I do not believe in omens, but it is a little joke because The Alchemist adamantly supports omens. Alas, the curse of referencing books that the reader may not have read.)

The Alchemist is basically a poorly written self-help book disguised as a novel. I knew I hated it while I was reading it, and it was hard to hide my distaste while teaching--I had to work hard not to roll my eyes and reveal my cynicism with my tone of voice. But I truly came to despise it when I was making the quotation identification portion of the test. Normally that is my favorite part of the test creation process. I get to revel in my favorite quotes without the annoying task of trying to come up with questions about them. The only criterion is that the quote has to have something that gives away who said it--it cannot be generic or unidentifiable. It was while making this part of the test that the extent of Coelho's weakness emerged. Most of the quotes could have come from anybody in the story. The characters weren't characters. They were all just mouthpieces for the author's own quacky beliefs. For example: “Courage is the quality most essential to understanding the Language of the World” (Coelho 111).

I ended up having to use mundane quotes like:
“I found these one day in the fields. I wanted them to be a part of your inheritance. But use them to buy your flock. Take to the fields, and someday you’ll learn that our countryside is the best, and our women the most beautiful” (Coelho 9).

Another reason I want to write is because if an idiotic book like The Alchemist can not only get published, but be widely read and heralded, then I ought to at least try my hand at it. I ended up reading the Bible that way. I read in Dolly Parton's autobiography (I was young, bored, it was laying around the house...) that she read the whole Bible. It was the first time it occurred to me that any one would actually read the whole Bible. And I thought, well, if this bimbo read the whole thing, then certainly I can. So I started with the new testament, then read the old, then read the new again. There's a lot of crazy stuff in that book that they don't tell you about in Sunday school.

In addition to judging a book by its cover, I also judge it primarily by the way it is written. My love for a book depends very little on the content of the story. I like it when an author expresses fresh ideas, or has a clever way of describing something. Most of my favorite books are about topics that are extremely foreign to my own life. A brief list: The God of Small Things, Lolita, Clockwork Orange, Trainspotting, The Shipping News, Macbeth, Nine Hills to Nambonkaha, The Death of Vishnu, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Second to the way a story is written, I like rich character development. I like complicated, interesting characters. For example, I just started reading A History of Love, and already, on the first page, in the first paragraph, I can tell this is a well written book:

“The place isn’t big. I have to struggle to keep a path clear between bed and toilet, toilet and kitchen table, kitchen table and front door. If I want to get from the toilet to the front door, impossible, I have to go by way of the kitchen table. I like imagine the bed as home plate, the toilet as first, the kitchen table as second, the front door as third: should the doorbell ring while I am lying in bed, I have to round the toilet and the kitchen table in order to arrive at the door. If it happens to be Bruno, I let him in without a word and then jog back to bed, the roar of the invisible crowd ringing in my ears.” –Nicole Krauss

The Alchemist has extremely boring prose, no fresh ideas, and terrible character development. But I probably hated it most because wrapped in that mundane prose was a message that I believe is indeed true. We should all figure out what we want (our personal legend) and do what it takes to acheive it. So, the book was actually effective (grrr!) in that it made me think about what I really wanted. What is my personal legend? I want to be a writer. But the problem is, anyone who writes is a writer. I want to be the next Shakespeare. I want to be a brilliant writer. I want to be able to do what the writers I love can do: Take the mundane and make it brilliant. Write sentences that cause mental orgasms in readers.

But as anyone who is reading this post has now realized, I am a far cry from an accomplished writer. Enter Malcolm Gladwell. Over winter break I read his book Outliers and what I liked so much about it was that it gave me hope. One of the things he points out in the book is that genius isn't as much of a "gift" as we're led to believe. Most accomplished people spend 10,000 hours on their craft before they have their breakthrough. So if I wrote for 417 days straight, I might stand a chance.

Having a dearth of friends and an overly reflective mind as a teenager and college student, I logged a lot of hours in journals. While living in Namibia as a Peace Corps volunteer and working as a teacher in China, I wrote many finely-crafted e-mails. So I've got some hours in, but I need more.

And, my secret wish, which I might as well put out there from the beginning, is the irrational wish that this blog will magically get discovered, someone will realize my brilliance (which will hopefully emerge over the next 10,000 hours of writing) and offer me a publishing deal.

Another reason I like to write is that I like to produce something. I like the idea of producing a lasting artifact of my thoughts. I seek immortality through writing, since I have rejected Jesus Christ as my lord and savior. While I'm on it, I've also rejected all the other imaginary gods, prophets, and saviors. I don't want to seem biased. I wonder if a high proportion of writers are atheists?

Have I covered why I want to write? Let me summarize: I like writing, I want immortality, I believe if I write a lot I will get better at it, and I despise bad writing (like Coelho) so I want to improve so I don't have to despise myself.

Of course, as an English teacher, I know that fine writing requires a lot of editing and revising, and perhaps on blogs there really isn't an incentive to continually go back and revise. I'll have to think about this.

The other problem that plagues me is that I don't think I can write fiction. But I am intrigued by the idea that through fiction, you can tell the truth. Maybe I can be like David Sedaris--take the truth and embellish it, construct it into a story. Anyway, I plan to just write what I think, and maybe I'll be the character. And I know I'm true, but the readers can consider me a character.