Smythologies

Hives

2012-01-22T10:33:00.001-08:00

“Galaxy Glue, Galaxy Glue,
Life would go to pieces without Galaxy Glue.”
—The Incredible Shrinking Woman

The hives popped up on my toe first, a perfect circle of blisters. You’re allergic to tape, my doctor friend told me, which made sense. The toe had a large cut on the bottom of it, making it uncomfortable to walk and more uncomfortable to kickbox. I’d been taping it every day, with athletic tape, with band-aids, with scotch tape wrapped around the band-aids to hold them in place. Now my body was rebelling against the mystery adhesives I’d been casually strapping against my skin as though I had any idea what they were made of and whether it was bad for me.

I was relieved to hear it was an allergy. Easy, just stop taping it, I told myself. But avoiding tape didn’t seem to help. The hives spread, first to my hands, which they covered entirely so that I looked like I’d been burned. Then all over both of my feet. They were creeping up to my knees and elbows by the time I went to the doctor, who beat them back with two rounds of strong steroid pills.

Make a list of things you have been in contact with during the last forty-eight hours, the medical websites told me. Medicines, clothing, pets, foods. I remember Lily Tomlin in The Incredible Shrinking Woman, the housewife steeped in a cocktail of household chemical products—who could say which had caused her body to shrink away into nothing?

“It’s spreading internally,” the allergist told me. “And once your system is sensitized, anything will set it off. It’s like your body is set on a hair trigger.” And so anything did set it off: detergents, wool, leather, anything scratchy, the friction of a jujitsu gi against my hands. I became one of those allergic people who is scared of everything, who feels like the world is attacking her, though really it’s her own body that is staging the attack.

On good days, the hives lie low, waiting but not acting. They’re like the physical version of panic attacks—always there, threatening to flare up at any moment and ruin everything. Once my skin gets dry, I can feel them hiding on the palms of my hands, agitated little pores looking for a fight. And if I rub them the wrong way, if I touch something they don’t like, they jump to attention, rising up, daring me, just daring me to scratch them.

Scratching them is the worst thing you can do. That’s what allows them to reproduce, sending their little hivey spores through your entire body. Scratching the bumps on my feet will instantly raise the ones on my hands, the chemicals moving through my body at a speed that seems completely disconnected from anything I’ve ever learned about a bloodstream.

Once you start scratching them it’s impossible to stop—or rather, you don’t care if you stop, you don’t want to stop, because the scratching is like heroin and you don’t care who you have to rob or kill to get more. It’s that kind of itch that makes you remember why itch is a euphemism for horniness. Scratching it the best feeling in the world and horrible burning pain all at the same time.

One good thing I’ve learned about hives is that they can kill you, which makes it really easy to get a doctor’s appointment. Every time I told the appointment nurse what was wrong, her first question was, Is your throat swelling shut? Are you having trouble breathing? I learned to cut her off to save time.

“What is this appointment for?”
“I have hives.”
“Okay, ma’am, I need to ask you…”
“My throat isn’t swelling. I’m not having trouble breathing.”
“Great, thanks.”

“Contact dermatitis is serious stuff,” my doctor told me, shaking her head in sympathy over my mangled hands. “You need some pretty aggressive treatment to stop it.”

I wondered what would happen to me if I didn’t have medicine. Would I die of a something as seemingly benign as a skin rash? Or just live the rest of my life looking ever more like Freddy Krueger? What did people do hundreds of years ago, before they had steroids and cortisone? The answer of course, is that they mostly didn’t need them, because they didn’t go around strapping laboratory chemicals against their skin as though they had any idea what they were made from and whether it was bad for them. But when they did need laboratory chemicals, when the chemicals were the only thing that could save them from a deathly allergic reaction, they were out of luck.

The Duty

2011-11-29T23:14:00.000-08:00

I know a woman who had it for six weeks.
Six weeks! It could happen
To anyone, ripped as if by cancer and broken bones
From life and normal things. We pretend to be immune but,
Like cancer and broken bones, it calls us all in time.

Each day she rode the train from Livermore
To Oakland, my home. For her, it was going somewhere
She would not normally go. Quarantined in the county seat, she
And eleven of her peers called a man a murderer
Then went for beers. So it turns out

Their shared trial formed a bond, and they remain
Best friends to this day. Talk about
A positive attitude. "It could happen
To you," she says. But we all know,
Just like there's no such thing as true love

Or true justice or learning from suffering,
It wouldn't happen to you.

Like reasonable people, I live in terror
Of my summons. I always defer
To the twenty-third of December, which is not
A holiday. If you must come for me,
O Judge, come then. I'll be waiting, limbs
Stretched, bones ready for breaking.

Not Sleeping

2011-10-31T08:07:00.001-07:00

“He hates wasting time—a category that includes, for him, sleeping.”

–Sam Anderson writing about James Franco

I once heard an interview with an Israeli artist who had just won an international award for her art and activism. She was also the mother of two young children.

“How do you find time to do everything?” the interviewer asked.

The woman laughed carelessly. “Oh, I don’t sleep very much,” she said, as though this fact were amusing. “Four hours a night or so.”

This glib treatment of sleep is part of the mythology of the superheroic, those people who seem to achieve more in a day than is humanly possible. It makes sense. If you want to sleep for eight hours, then you must fit your job, your hobbies and passions, your family and friends and love life, your exercising and cooking and eating and house cleaning and showering and brushing your teeth all into sixteen hours per day.

I am always overcome by guilt when I hear these superheroes boasting about their inhuman feats of wakefulness. That is why you can’t seem to balance work, writing, kickboxing, seeing your friends and family and cleaning your apartment, I scold myself. I’m sleeping too much.

Look at actor James Franco. He did four years of college in two years, attended four graduate programs at once while filming about five movies and publishing a book of short stories—none of this is an exaggeration. He thinks sleep is a waste of time. Just think of all the awesome things I could get done if wasn’t wasting all that time being unconscious.

For most of my life, I too considered sleep to be a waste of time, some need my body was trying to impose upon my mind, as though it didn’t realize that my mind had more important things to be doing. I pulled regular all-nighters starting in middle school, drinking endless cups of microwaved instant coffee, blasting cassette tapes to keep from getting too sleepy or too depressed as I lay awake studying on top of my unmade bedcovers.

In college, I used to haunt the recreation room of my co-op into the early hours of the morning with my textbooks and my electric word processor, writing the endless string of essays that were my lot as an English major. At 3 a.m. I would take a coffee break with the speed freaks and architecture students, the only people who stayed up later than me.

I knew it wasn’t good for me. I had a friend in college who somehow got eight hours of sleep every night, until he started hanging around with me and some other night-owls.

“I feel horrible,” he told me one day. We had stayed up until four studying for our morning classes. “I’ve never felt this depressed. I feel like the whole world is horrible and disgusting.”

“Oh, that’s just because you didn’t sleep enough,” I told him cheerfully. “I always feel like that.”

I remember how my professors never seemed able to comprehend how sleep deprived most of us were, especially in graduate school. After a night seminar, one professor asked us if we were going home to watch the same TV show that she was planning to watch.

Our jaws dropped in disbelief. She thinks we have time to watch TV?

“No, we have to study,” one of us said.

“What, now?” she asked in horror. “It’s nine-thirty!”

Another, crankier professor chastised us for our distraction during the last week of the semester, the week when we all had four twenty-page term papers due.

“What’s wrong with you people? It’s like you’re all on speed,” she said, in a stern voice, not a joking one. From the way she said it, it was clear she did not think this was an actual possibility.

Now I am the clueless professor, relatively well-slept and herding a flock of exhausted students of my own. Lots of the time they can barely keep their eyes open. They lay their heads down on the desk, lifting them only to send frantic text-messages and enjoy their breakfasts of candy and energy drinks.

If you ask them to make a time-management schedule of their week, you’ll see why they’re so tired. Their schedules are packed from morning to night each day. Lots of them work two jobs. These jobs might only total twenty or thirty hours a week—that seems to be a typical amount—but that’s enough to suck up every available hour that they could be studying. They go to school from nine to three, start work at four, get home at ten-thirty at night.

“When will you do your homework?” I ask them.

“At eleven,” they say.

“Do you think that’s actually going to happen?”

They smile grimly. “Probably not.”

Often it doesn’t, and they come to class with their work half-done. But for something important like an essay, they do stay up and work, and they come to my class angry, disgruntled, hating the world like I once did.

It’s my job to cheer these students up and get them to do things. I use my perkiest voice, trying to buoy the room with the helium of my enthusiasm.

Come on, wake up! It’s ten o’clock! That’s not even early!

This semester, though, I signed up to teach too many units. I have classes and meetings all day long. There seems to be enough time in a week to prepare for my classes or grade my papers but not both. I am back to the old student way of life, where there are twelve time-consuming things to do before Thursday and perhaps enough time to do three of them. I’ve been sleeping five or six hours on weeknights. In college, this would have been a good amount of sleep, above average. But now I have much lower tolerance for feeling horrible and hating the world, so it seems like pitifully little, especially as it adds up over the course of the week.

Now I remember what it feels like to be sleep deprived from too much work. It explains the flashes of resentment I see cross my students’ faces when I hand out their writing assignment, as though by giving them what they’re paying for—writing instruction—I am subjecting them to some horrifying injustice. They can’t help it. When someone asks you do to something impossible, it’s hard not to resent them just for a moment, even if you are ninety-five percent sure that you will eventually buck up and do the impossible thing.

These days I am just as resentful as they are. I hand their graded assignments back grudgingly and begin to ramble my way through the lesson I have been up planning since four in the morning. So what if I’m not explaining it very well; I only slept four hours. You can have me coherent and unprepared or prepared and incoherent—your choice. Okay, so I spelled a word wrong on your handout. I’m tired. I’m really, really tired. Screw you guys.

Part of my job is to uphold a system that causes our students to feel this way, not for just one bad semester but every semester. I feel guilty about this all the time.

“How can we expect them to sacrifice sleep and health when we’re not even willing to do it?” I ask one of my colleagues.

“They’re in college, we’re not,” she said. “We paid our dues when we were in college and now we have earned the right to get a full night’s sleep.”

It sounds like the simple logic of hazing, but it’s more than that. We really don’t think they’ll learn everything they need to know unless they have more work than is humanly possible to complete. That’s the logic of education: you need to cram in as much as possible, as much as can be done in eighteen or twenty hours of wakefulness. The future success of America rests on your shoulders, and every hour you sleep is time you could have spent working.

Slaughterhouse Five

2011-10-01T16:40:00.000-07:00

I have very few regrets about never becoming a literary scholar.

Occasionally I get frustrated that critics don’t seem to notice the Brechtian influence in Tony Kushner’s plays (It’s really obvious. He talks about it all the time. Someone should notice it already). And I still get annoyed thinking about the complete misapplication of Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject in Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood. I mean, you’ve got an opaque, experimental novel about abortion doctors and people turning into plants and mating with dogs in your right hand and in your left, an opaque, poststructuralist piece of critical theory about the horror people feel when their physical and psychological boundaries dissolve—how could this puzzle be any easier to assemble?

Please don’t stop reading. I promise this is going to get more interesting. Well, to me, anyway.

My real failure, my greatest regret, the reason I should have doggedly pursued a career in academia into whatever town-nobody-wants-to-live-in it called me to, was to declare this:

Slaughterhouse Five is the most brilliant novel ever written.

I am pretty sure I am the only person who knows this. The more I explain this to people individually, the more they stare at me blankly and say, I always meant to read that, the more convinced I become that it was my duty to spread the word on a larger scale, that this was my true calling in getting an English Ph.D., and that I missed my chance.

People who haven’t read Slaughterhouse Five, and also many who have, think of it as a science fiction novel. They should, because it is. But it’s also something much weirder, which is a rare and precious eyewitness war account.

When Britain and the United States firebombed the heavily populated city center of Dresden, Germany during the final weeks of World War II, Kurt Vonnegut was there, a prisoner of war hidden away in an underground meat locker. After the bombing, he and his fellow POWs were released into the rubble that had formerly been a great center of German art, architecture and culture.

So here is Kurt Vonnegut, a writer, one of a handful of American witnesses to an atrocity great enough to be called a war crime by some historians, since there seemed to be no strategic justification for it. It was a show of force, the destruction of life, beauty, and culture, for no reason except to stick it to the Germans for all the suffering they had caused. At least that’s Vonnegut’s perception of it—a heartless act of war committed by his own country, “a massacre” as he calls it. (Though when an acquaintance, hearing this description, reminds him of the concentration camps, he says, “I know. I know. I know.”)

For a writer, this nightmare experience was a gift. He was a witness, a survivor, specially authorized to speak. As such, he could write a memoir, a history book, a historical/cultural critique. Or he could write a war novel, the kind of gritty, naturalistic epic that you can only write if you’ve really been there, if you’ve earned the right.

Vonnegut explains all this in the first chapter of Slaughterhouse Five, a metafictional introduction that explains how he came to write the novel.

“When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen.”

It was all laid out for him. All he had to do was write it down. Simple. What makes the novel brilliant is that he did exactly the opposite.

First, he stalled for twenty years. Whenever anyone asked him what he was working on, he told them it was his Dresden book. But he wasn’t really writing it. “Not many words about Dresden came from my mind then—not enough of them to make a book, anyway.”

And then, when he finally did write the book, it wasn’t the true-life story of a true-life veteran who had been through hell and lived to tell the tale. Instead, it was a novel about time travel and aliens and mediocre Midwestern optometrists suffering from acute depression and possible traumatic brain injury.

The main character, Billy Pilgrim, experiences roughly everything Vonnegut did during the war: he is drafted in the late stages of combat, hastily trained and improperly outfitted, and abandoned behind enemy lines. As a prisoner of war, he survives the bombing of Dresden in an underground meat locker and is then freed by the Allied troups. He could be a literary stand-in for Vonnegut, a boy-soldier who had no business on the battlefield trying to be an adult.

But Billy has two science-fictiony quirks that make it clear that this novel will not be a straightforward, serious tale of war. The first is that during his brief military career, he becomes unstuck in time. From there on out, he flops spastically in and out of different episodes in his life, creating the twisty structure of the narrative, which begins with Billy being drafted and ends with him being rescued from Dresden, with the rest of his entire life story occurring in a spiraling succession of vignettes in between.

And then, in case that first quirk just seems like some kind of metaphor, there’s a second, much goofier one. In 1967, around the time when Vonnegut would have been completing the novel, Billy Pilgrim is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who hold him as a captive in a zoo and mate him with a human pornographic actress named Montana Wildhack.

Having aliens in the novel seems to clearly mark it as science fiction. But it’s not serious science fiction, the kind where all the fantastical events are physically plausible and scientifically justified and allegorically significant. No, these aliens are really, really silly. The Tralfamadorians are green, shaped like plungers, topped with a single hand that has an eye in the middle of it. They admit without guilt to destroying the universe during a failed experiment (they travel freely in time so they know how the universe ends). Even their name is silly. And their project of breeding two humans (both of whom just happen to have silly names and outsized secondary sexual characteristics) as a form of entertainment could not be any more self-consciously ridiculous.

It’s as though Vonnegut wanted to take the lofty story of his war experience, the couldn’t-get-more-serious historical account that he was specially authorized to tell, and scribble crazy zigzags all over it with mismatched crayons. He even talks about outlining an early version of the plot with crayons, making a tidy timeline for each character. But that’s not what he did. He scrambled his timeline into a giant, messy tangle, illogically topped with not one but two of the most hackneyed science-fictional tropes imaginable.

Of course, this chaos is orchestrated carefully, beautifully even. Every narrative thread is neatly tied up, every scene thematically significant. But the feeling of messiness, silliness, arbitrariness is what Vonnegut wanted. “It is so short and jumbled and jangled,” he tells his publisher, “because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.”

Disgusted by his own authority to tell the serious, meaningful war story, Vonnegut takes that story and shreds it to a messy pulp, just to make the point: I will not tell a serious, meaningful war story.

I love about six hundred things about this novel, but this one first and most. To be given the special, authorized privilege to tell a survivor’s tale, and to sacrifice that privilege in the name of art, meaning, and human decency, is an act of beauty that breaks my heart.

Perhaps Vonnegut’s purposeful evasion of seriousness is the reason that his works do not receive the kind of critical attention afforded to great American postmodern authors. Almost all Vonnegut criticism seems to fall into the realm of explication—plot summaries, readings based on Vonnegut’s biography—rather than serious analysis that would explain the author’s significant contribution to modern literature and thought.

If I write that book of serious analysis someday, I will say this about the message (one of the messages) of Slaughterhouse Five: that it asks us to think about our own war stories. What did we learn from them? Are we better off for having gone through that suffering? And when we tell our survivor’s tales, complete with their morals and lessons, are we full of wisdom and insight? Or have we just convinced ourselves that we are, because it feels better to have something intelligent to say about a massacre?

Ann Arbor

2011-08-29T08:03:00.001-07:00

I went to an Alice-in-Wonderland-themed burlesque show in Hamtramck, Michigan with my friends from Ann Arbor. It was in a towering, abandoned factory, remade into a performance space. We took a freight elevator to the fifth floor. The hallways up there were as wide as my living room, lined with dust-clouded windows.

“Listen,” my friend said, pointing down the hall. “The train is coming.”

It came barreling around the corner, a motorized engine trailing three passenger cars, something children would ride at an amusement park. It zigzagged across the broad hallway like a startled cockroach, passing us by fifteen feet, breaking, driving backwards until it landed right in front of us.

“Get on! Quick! Everyone get on!” yelled the conductor, as throngs of giddy hipsters threw themselves aboard for the ride down the long hallway, around the corner, and to the doors of the giant production floor that would serve as the theater.

Inside there was a full band, sounding ready to play back-up for Tom Waits, while a tall, stately chanteuse purred songs about Alice, tea parties, things growing curiouser and curiouser. A Bettie Page look-alike pranced around the stage, dropping successive articles of baby blue clothing in her wake as she encountered the juggling Cheshire cat, the break-dancing playing cards, the Mad Hatter and March Hair suspended from the ceiling by hooks stuck under their skin.

In Oakland, where I live, or in San Francisco, this all never would have happened. Okay, maybe it would have happened, but it wouldn’t have happened in a hulking factory. And if it did, you would have missed it amidst the throng of culturally enriching activities happening every single night. And if you did go, your friend wouldn’t be dating the bass player and your other friend wouldn’t have slept with the singer. The performers would be part of a specialized scene, and they would have spent years cultivating the appearance, style, clothing, mannerisms, and jargon of that scene. You might be able to get into the scene, but it wouldn’t be easy.

The thing the local weekly newspapers always said about Detroit is: cultural isolation breeds creativity. It sounds condescending until you go to Detroit, which is like going to another planet where everything is backwards. Downtown neighborhoods look like abandoned farms, there are more boarded-over storefronts than populated ones, twenty-three year olds own giant houses, ethnic enclaves are the fanciest and safest places to live. It’s an incredibly beautiful, surreal place, a place that feels outside America, a place where anything is possible.

And so in Detroit, and in the cities that surround it, people create their own scenes and ways of making art. There’s not much to be daunted by: you just start, and people show up, because they probably know you from work or high school or the bar, and anyway there aren’t all that many things to do on a given night.

When I first moved to Ann Arbor, it reminded me of my hometown, Palo Alto. Not modern, Facebook-era Palo Alto, but the pre-dot-com Palo Alto of my youth. It was a quirky college town, affluent but not wealthy, smug about its own artsiness. The main difference was, when young people in Palo Alto wanted to go somewhere, we got on the train to San Francisco or Berkeley where we could sit in grungy coffee shops, have picnics in the park, buy ourselves used books and CDs and absurd clothing, wander past the street vendors and the real beggers and the other beggars who were kids just like us, only dirtier.

Ann Arbor is an hour from Detroit, but there’s no train. This is a car town, people told me. Why would the rich people in the suburbs vote for a train? They don’t want to take a train, they don’t want to go to Detroit, and they sure as hell don’t want poor people from Detroit taking a train into their town.

You can drive an hour to Detroit, but then there’s the question of what to do when you get there. There are lots of amazing things to do: there are great bars and music venues, museums, historical sites. But Detroit isn’t the kind of place you can just wander around. You’ve got to have a plan, a course of action, a series of places to go. Every trip I ever took to Detroit was like this: exit freeway, drive straight to destination, park in front (there will be plenty of parking) go in. If there is a second destination in mind, get back in car, get back on freeway, drive to second destination, go in. Repeat as needed. Try to sober up for the long drive home down dark country highways.

But like the Detroit Metro Times was always saying: the lack of ready-to-wear, easily consumable culture spurred people to create this culture for themselves. I never met so many people doing creative things as in Ann Arbor. Even a simple act like getting dressed was an artistic project. In California, when you wanted bizarre, interesting clothes, there were a million stores ready to sell them to you. In Ann Arbor, the clothing stores catered to practical Midwestern adults and preppy Midwestern teenagers, and if you did find something good, four of your friends would have the same one. I learned the art of customization from people in Ann Arbor: making legwarmers out of socks, decorating shirts and hats with colored sharpies, ripping the sleeves and necks and ankles off of things to make them cooler and better.

Anyone could found an institution in Ann Arbor. Every wildly popular thing was created by someone we knew, often someone in their twenties. We all knew the guy who started the karaoke night at the local club, and the three kids who ran the mixed-tape dance party, the women who organized the Totally Kickball tournament and the Burly Girly mud wrestling. And if you grew up in Ann Arbor, you would also know every family who had owned the barn where the wrestling was held and every kid who had lived in that barn when his or her parents kicked him or her out of the house. The odds were that if something interesting was going on, you would know the person doing it.

The last time I visited Ann Arbor, my friends had started a burlesque troupe. The house where they prepare and rehearse seemed familiar, and then I remembered I had been to a few parties there. Houses in Ann Arbor are like people; you seem to keep running into the same ones over and over. At one of the parties, people had spun flame-tipped chains in circles in the back yard. But most of the parties had been normal, just lots of drunk people getting drunker and dancing at 3 a.m., after the bars closed. Now the house is filled with drawers of glitter and lace and construction paper and the basement is a rehearsal hall filled with wrestling mats and trapezes. The performers make all their costumes and props out of cardboard and paint and things they find at the Salvation Army Store.

Their performances are pure Ann Arbor aesthetics: everything is rough and homespun and nerdy and badass. Unicorns prance to disco music, girls in pasties wash themselves in bathtubs filled with sparkling shards of broken glass, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock strip off their uniforms accompanied by the spoken words of William Shatner. I watched them rehearse—I would be back in California by the date of the performance—and thought about how I loved my adopted hometown, the place where I spent my mid-twenties writing a dissertation and trying to pretend I wasn’t a graduate student.

I can’t believe I am wasting my youth in the Midwest, I used to think sometimes, as I made the reverse-commute back home to California every winter vacation, just as all the other young people were leaving San Francisco to visit their families in the boring middle states. But now I think that there was no better place to be young, where the world was a canvas begging to be painted and anything you could imagine was possible.

This illustration depicts the lovely and talented Annie Thing of Ann Arbor's Tickled Fancy Burlesque Company. Check out their videos, especially the ones about Star Trek and unicorns.

Illustrations

2011-07-28T20:30:00.001-07:00

Danger

Pesty

Pink

Blind Dates

Roads

Being Aggressive

Testing Your Boundaries

Swinging the Other Way

Appetite

Tantrums

Going off the Meds

Lesbian Envy

Woman as Sexual Dictator

Palo Alto

Needles

Good Pain/Bad Pain

It's a Girl

Walking

Sex Writing

Lost Potential

Road Rage

2011-07-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

The other day, while I was exiting the freeway, something came flying off of the car in front of me. It looked like a dog. A spread-eagle, floppy-eared dog, flying from their car, about to smash into mine.

Instinctively, I moved my head to the side like I was slipping a punch, as though that would be of any help once this thing came crashing through my windshield.

But when the thing hit the glass, it flattened out and slid innocuously down the side of my car. Turns out it was a plastic bag, momentarily inflated by the wind of the freeway into a surprisingly dog-like shape.

When I first started commuting on the freeway, incidents like this—everyday incidents of imminent or seemingly-imminent danger—used to spike my adrenaline for ten minutes. A car swerving into my lane, water obstructing my windshield in a rainstorm, cars braking suddenly ahead of me. These situations occurred almost every day during my half-hour commute. If they went wrong, any one of them could injure or kill me or another driver. It was terrifying. How did people deal with this, the stress of a life-or-death struggle for survival each day, on the way to and from work?

Now, after years of my commute, my adrenal system has adjusted to these constant assaults. I recover from the terror of impending death quickly, in seconds rather than minutes. Ah yes, almost died again! Back to business! If I were safely aboard a roller-coaster, a scare like this would leave me shaken, frightened, exhilarated. But faced with an actual brush with death, drivers are calm, nonchalant, fiddling with the radio and thinking about lunch.

When we fly in airplanes, we are aware of the unnaturalness of the process. We are four-thousand feet in the air, hurtling forward at 500 miles per hour. This is nothing our bodies were designed to experience. We think about the space below us, between us and the ground, about what would happen if the bottom of that plane weren’t there. Even the more calm passengers gasp when the plane buckles and drops in a patch of rough air.

We should feel like that in a car. Our bodies weren’t made to move at eighty or even twenty-five miles per hour any more than they were made to fly thousands of feet in the air. We should have the same feelings of wrongness, of recognizing our own fragility as we pretend to be birds or cheetahs. But we are raised in cars, lulled to sleep as children by their gentle rocking motions, packed into their backseats for family trips, told that we are true adults when we learn how to command one ourselves. So we minimize the terror, or even come to enjoy it. People who are scared of driving are told they are crazy, that they have anxiety, that they require medication. They are not told, Navigating a two-ton vehicle that could easily kill you or someone else is pretty stressful. Maybe you shouldn’t do it.

Most people seem to believe the anonymity of the other drivers is what leads to the irrational anger that we feel when we drive, and I agree. It’s easy to be furious with someone you can barely see, someone driving too slowly, or too quickly, someone getting in your way. On foot, we stop for each other, hold doors open, give a wide berth to someone tapping a cane or using a wheelchair. On the road, we see not people but cars, faceless machines, machines that obstruct and endanger us as we maneuver our own machines around them.

But I think our rage must be fueled by a second factor: the constant, low-lying terror of death. The cars that get in our way are not only annoying us, like someone pushing past us on a busy sidewalk; they’re endangering our lives. Even when we are furious about someone too slow, someone getting in our way, the driving equivalent of the old lady pushing her walker down the sidewalk, I think it is our terror that enrages us. Surely, some part of our rational brains must have to shut down in order for us to not experience constant terror when we drive, and so we cannot think rationally. We don’t think, This man driving too slow in the fast lane is probably confused, or from another country with different rules, or unaware of his speed. Poor guy. I should be nice to him. No, we hate the man, make a point to glare at him as we pass by, cut aggressively in front of him as soon as we have passed him on the right. The qualities of kindness and empathy that are so carefully socialized into us as small children disappear, and all that is left is the logic of war.

Walking

2011-06-29T08:33:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, my favorite thing to do was walk. I would walk anywhere my protective parents would allow me to. I loved gardens and parks, places where I was allowed to follow trails and explore. When my family visited the Japanese tea garden in Golden Gate Park, I would make sure to cover every bit of terrain, looping back past the same areas again and again so I could follow every detour and alternate path. I felt certain there was some magic hiding where I hadn’t yet walked, that there was some amazing mystery I couldn’t leave unseen.

In high school, I was finally allowed to ride my bike instead of taking a school bus. I did that for about a month, and then I decided that I would rather walk. My parents thought I was being unreasonable the first day I told them I wouldn’t be taking my bike. It was only a mile to school, but adults in the suburbs didn’t walk distances like that. On my walk to school, I discovered all the things I had missed by driving and biking. Careful gardens of drought-resistant plants. Sculptures in windows and yards. Communes where Palo Alto’s persistent enclaves of hippies and artists preserved the Sixties version of our city. Patches of the yellow flowers whose stems tasted like lemon if you sucked on them. Crazy people walking the streets, cats, butterflies, interesting garbage and free things, lost notes and photographs. My walk to and from school was one of the most interesting parts of my day.

Walking became my major hobby outside of school. My friend Therese and I spent the entire summer after freshman year crossing our town from side to side on foot. Every day, we would choose a unexplored territory to walk to. That pedestrian overpass you only usually saw when driving on the freeway. Shoreline Amphitheater. Downtown Menlo Park. That seeming wasteland between downtown Palo Alto and the Stanford Mall.

People often reminisce about their love of their first car, how driving represented freedom. That’s how I felt about walking. You could walk anyplace. It was hard for me to wrap my brain around that kind of limitlessness. Using no resources except your own body, you could get to almost anywhere. You could get to all kinds of places that a car wouldn’t take you: the woods surrounding the Stanford campus, the deep ravine behind the mall, the hill with the giant rope swing on the way out of town. If you added public transportation, you could go to San Francisco, San Jose, or even, in theory, Richmond, Dublin, Pittsburg (wherever those places were).

I spent my twenties in universities. Every morning, from the age of eighteen to twenty-eight, I walked twenty minutes or so to the school where I took classes or taught classes. Sometimes I walked to a bus and took the bus to school. At night, I would walk to the coffee shop, the bookstore, the bar. Everywhere I needed to be could be reached by foot, like living in an old European city.

I haven’t walked like that for a while, now. I got one of those jobs that you can’t get to by foot, bike, or public transportation. For the first time in my life, my morning starts with me getting into a car. I used to counter my new driving lifestyle by walking everywhere I could. But over the last few years, I’ve lost my patience for walking, preferring biking or driving for their more immediate gratification of getting me somewhere in minutes.

For the last week, though, my car has been broken. I’ve been walking every day, to the store for groceries, to Piedmont Avenue to get tea and write. It takes longer, but I’ve already seen a lot of things I would have missed if I had been speeding past at fifteen or thirty miles an hour. I found a tree full of ripe loquats, one of my favorite foods. I found a free stepstool, something I’ve been meaning to buy for years. I have exchanged commiserating glances with people under umbrellas in the unseasonable June storm. I have passed lots of people that I see every day in the coffee shop and who I didn’t realize were my neighbors. I’ve stood on the overpass that I usually drive or bike over and watched cars speeding below me, and marveled to think that this is happening all day and night, only a few hundred feet from my apartment. I have learned a lot about where I live, my habitat, and the places between my home and my destination.

The illustration is based on a photograph demonstrating healthy walking posture from Esther Gokhale's Eight Steps to a Pain-Free Back.

Lost Potential

2011-06-01T09:23:00.001-07:00

When I told my graduate advisor I was hoping to teach at a community college, he asked me why I wanted to throw my career away.

“I want to teach someplace where everyone can go to school and where people are a little more equal with each other,” I said. “I don’t like all the hierarchy at the university.”

He gave me a pained look, like he had had this conversation before. “Everyone comes to a point in life when we must let go of our youthful ideals,” he said. “We need to make certain sacrifices in order to live a comfortable life.”

I’m embarrassed to say, these might have been somebody's youthful ideals, but not mine. In my youth, I loved the hierarchy of the university. Everyone has their rank and everyone knows their place. Tenured professors are at the top, then untenured ones, lecturers, graduate students, then undergraduates. And under them are all those who serve the academics: the poor janitors and cooks and security guards and secretaries who don't even know just how lowly they are, on the fringes of the real business of generating knowledge.

When I was an undergraduate, professors were nothing less than rock stars, amazing lucky bastards who had defeated insurmountable odds to achieve my dream job. I longed for the day when I would become one, when I would write the great, barely-comprehensible works of esoterica that would revolutionize literary studies for its rarified cadre of devotees and make me a household name in a very small, elite number of households.

As this dream became closer to a reality, it began to lose some of its luster. During graduate school, I worked as a cashier in a grocery store on weekends, and I found myself more comfortable with my coworkers than my graduate student colleagues. Many of my closest friends never finished high school. It didn’t matter. In the store, they were judged by how well they worked, how reliable they were, and how kind, how funny and clever. By the standards of the university, these workers would be off-the-charts low. If they enrolled in college in their mid-twenties, they would be “re-entry” students, the most marginalized sorts of undergraduates. They would never be the kind of people who really mattered at a university, the rock stars, recognized experts in their fields, people who demanded awe and respect.

A lot of my grocery store friends attended school at the local community college. There they paid affordable tuition to take classes with other students who were as varied as the workers at the store: young, old, parents, retirees, people starting over after layoffs or divorces, people from other countries. No one judged them because they hadn’t taken the traditional route straight from high school to college. All of them were untraditional in some way, and they all treated each other with respect. It sounded like a utopia to me: you mean you could take college classes without all that hierarchy? You could just pay your tuition, go to a class, study, all without being above somebody and below somebody else?

But once I started teaching at a community college, I saw that the students do have a sense of hierarchy, a hierarchy of institutions of higher learning, and they are at the bottom. My school is called Las Positas, but the students call it College Behind Costco, Thirteenth Grade, Lost Potential.

Having experienced both prestigious universities and community colleges, and having taught at both, I think the students get as good, or better, educations at the community college, where undergraduates are at the center of the institution instead of at the bottom.

When I taught at the university as a graduate student instructor, I was told repeatedly: don’t focus on your teaching. There were cautionary tales about young associate professors denied tenure because they had succumbed to the temptation of prioritizing their classes. There were the lessons we received in our single pedagogy course: don’t get too involved with your students. Don’t let them talk to you about their problems. They will try to suck your energy; don’t let them.

Talk to anyone trained to be a professor, and this ideology is evident. People in Ph.D. programs considering community college employment often say to me, “So, to get tenure in a community college, you don’t really need to publish that much.”

“You don’t need to publish at all,” I say. “All they care about is your teaching.”

“So, like, publications would look nice but that’s not their priority,” they say.

“No,” I say. “They don’t care at all about publishing. They would think of it as okay as long as it didn’t interfere with your teaching.”

They nod in understanding, but I can see that they are still perplexed, maybe even skeptical. How could they not care about publishing, I imagine them thinking? What else is there?

Community colleges are like bizarro universities. When I tell my colleagues that working at a community college was seen as throwing away my career, they are incredulous. But you’re still in academia, they say, baffled.

“They don’t consider community colleges to be academia,” I say. “They consider them to be teaching.”

For an academic researcher, our students would be the worst kind of distraction, teeming with the needs and demands that my pedagogy teacher warned me about. There are students with learning disabilities who flourish with some extra time and attention from their teachers, and there are students with such severe disabilities that some of their teachers question whether they should be in college. A high percentage of the students have lived through horrible trauma: medical crises, the death of siblings and parents, acute poverty and homelessness. Students come to my office hours with complaints ranging from family quarrels to mental health issues to car troubles to domestic abuse.

I remember similar students in the university. I would deflect their complaints, create distance, give them some canned speech about how everyone has personal troubles and we can’t allow them to interfere with our education. Now I can’t avoid these students and try not to get involved. Getting involved is part of my job description.

The worst part about teaching at a school that accepts everybody is that we have a large proportion of students who don’t care about their studies. Their parents are making them go, or they need to go to stay on their parents’ insurance plans, or they don’t know what else to do with themselves. They treat their studies as a chore and their teachers as bossy parents. They tell you that the reading assignments aren’t interesting, and when you ask them what topics would interest them, they say, “None, I guess.”

I always considered these students to be the major downside to teaching at a community college. But lately, many of my well-educated friends have confessed to having been these students in the past.

“Oh, that was me,” said a friend who is now working on a Ph.D. “When I was eighteen, I didn’t care about my community college classes at all. But later, when I was a little older and ready to go back, I knew where to go.”

That’s why I love community college. It is the opposite of the university, where everything rides on our performance for four years, where there’s no time for confusion and illness and insanity and waffling, where we will waste thousands of dollars if we mess this up. It’s not rock-star college; it’s garage-band college. It’s college for whoever wants it, whenever they want it, and if they need to leave for a while, it will still be here when they get back.

By the time I finished graduate school, I had even convinced my advisor of how great community colleges are, and he supported me in my new career. For me and for my students, it’s exactly the right place to be.

The illustration depicts a cover story from Las Positas College's Naked Magazine.

Good Pain/Bad Pain

2011-05-01T14:11:00.000-07:00

“This doesn’t hurt,” says my yoga teacher, as we squirm our way into the forward-splits. “You know what hurts? Stepping on a thumbtack. No one ever steps on a thumbtack and says, hmm, interesting.”

He squishes the ball of his foot back and forth against the floorboards, a pensive look on his face.

“Hmm, yes. Maybe I’ll just push this a little further.” He grinds his foot hard into the floor.

“No one says that. If you step on a tack, you say, Ouch! Get this thing outta my foot! That’s how you can tell it’s pain. You want it to stop.”

Any yoga student needs to learn this lesson: the difference between pain and not pain.

But if you think it’s pain, doesn’t that make it pain, you might ask? Isn’t pain nothing more than a perception?

Okay, then, point taken. Any yoga student needs to learn the difference between good pain and bad pain. Good pain is the pain of breaking through things that bind you up and restrict your motion, bunchy muscles and scar tissue. Bad pain is the pain of injury, of debilitating yourself. Good pain makes you better. Bad pain makes you worse.

It’s similar to the difference between sorrow and depression. Sorrow is horrible pain that you don’t really want to go away. I just need this time to be sad, we say. I’m not ready to be cheered up yet. You’re sad about something, and you need the sadness to help you understand that something.

When you’re depressed, you would give anything to stop it, which is why it’s really cruel to tell depressed people to stop wallowing and pull themselves out of it. Your painful emotions aren’t helping you understand anything, because they’re illogical and disconnected from your experiences. It’s odd to even call them emotions or sadness, because those terms indicate a response to something in the world, and depression is a response to nothing. It’s bad pain, pain that tells you something is wrong, pain that is a sign of damage.

If we are too frightened of pain that hurts us, we may shy away from pain that helps us. Dropping your body weight onto your tight hamstrings feels horrible at first, like you are going to rip your muscle in two. This isn’t an irrational fear; stretch too far, too soon, and it might happen. But without pushing the limits of your physical comfort, you’ll never become more flexible and mobile. So you need to learn how to relax with the discomfort, and know when that discomfort crosses the line between helping pain and injuring pain.

As my yoga teacher talks about pain, I look over at a young, attractive South American woman who has worked her way into a pretty nice-looking split. She looks familiar, and then I remember: she used to come to my kickboxing school. For a few months, she was my frequent training partner, often the only other woman in the class. She had never done martial arts before, but she had an appealing enthusiasm for kicking and punching, throwing her full weight into her techniques and laughing happily as her fist smacked against the pads.

The only problem was, she fell in love with someone in the class. I could tell, because she began training with her hair down, her long, brown tresses slapping her face each time she threw a kick. Then one night, when she waved at me from across the room, I didn’t recognize her—she looked like a different girl, with a blanker face, a photoshopped version of herself. Upon closer inspection, it turned out she was wearing a full mask of evening makeup, her cheeks rouged, her eyes shadowed in deep, smoky gray. The next week, she showed up to a wrestling class wearing pearl earrings and a cashmere sweater that felt soft against my cheek as we took turns throwing each other onto the floor.

The day that the object of her affections rejected her advances, she stormed out of the school with the jaunty walk and forced smile of a woman who wouldn’t let a man get her down. “Goodbye!” she exclaimed to me and another student as she passed us, in a voice that held back tears.

The toughness of her exit—the exaggerated spring in her step, the grimness of the smile—made me hope that she would triumph over this pain, that she would be back the next day, or next week, to show her beloved that she was too proud to let him scare her out of a class that she seemed to be enjoying.

But she didn’t come back until a year later, only to repeat the same pattern: more makeup each night, tighter clothing, until two weeks later she left in a huff, this time for good. I never saw her again, until now, when she had appeared in my yoga class.

I could imagine why this girl didn’t want to continue attending a school with someone who had rejected her. I have dated people from my kickboxing school. When we broke up, it was painful to see them in class, to have my private unhappiness infiltrate the space where I usually escaped my problems. The awkward greetings at the beginning of class, watching my ex-boyfriend wrestle with a new female student, waving goodbye on the way out the door as he listened to a message on his cell phone—every interaction was like a sharp little punch in the stomach. But these punches were more like the splits than the thumbtack. They hurt for a minute, but then I got used to it, and really it wasn’t so bad.

Maybe that South American girl could have worked through the pain and continued training. But the very fact that she didn’t shows that martial arts wasn’t the right discipline for her, anyway. Learning to fight is all about expanding your notion of good pain to include things that would normally be seen as bad pain: getting punched in the face, kicked in the stomach, slammed on the floor. It turns out that that the boundaries between these types of pain are blurrier than you’d think. Good pain can cross over into bad when you get a little bruised, or bleed a little, or sprain your ankle. Or those things might be good pain, pain that strengthens us, depending on how much discomfort we are willing to accept. I consider black eyes and broken noses to be too much pain, but I’ve seen people I train with shake them off like a stubbed toe. Maybe a bruised ego or a bruised heart is too much pain to encounter several nights a week. It becomes a question of weighing damage against growth, judging how much you can stretch before you snap.

Getting in There

2011-04-03T22:23:00.000-07:00

“I was thinking about your fight,” my friend Jim said to me.

It was one week after the fight. I had lost. Everything was great for about five days. I went to sparring class the day after the fight and sparred as well as I ever had. I couldn’t stop eating like I was cutting weight. Nothing but steamed vegetables and small portions of lean meat seemed like food. I couldn’t bring myself to drink more than half a glass of water at once. I kept waking up in the middle of the night wanting to do pull-ups. I was as high as a roundhouse kick to the head.

Then on Friday came the crash. I could barely pull myself out of bed. I couldn’t stop crying. I was sure my cat was going to die. And I was right—she died two weeks later. Everything was totally, totally messed up. I was a failure.

I ran into Jim while I was running errands on Saturday. The last thing I wanted to talk about was the fight. “Yeah, so I was wondering,” he asked. “How come you never kicked the girl really hard?”

I didn’t know what to say. Because she was flitting around really fast like a 110-pound girl can do and it was a little tricky to kick her at all? Because it was a tournament scored on points, so I was trying to kick her often, not hard? Because it looks a lot more impactful when you kick someone standing still holding a pad than a skinny little body in constant motion?

“I don’t know,” I mumbled. Truthfully, I was surprised to learn that I hadn’t kicked her hard. It was like asking a stand-up comedian why he didn’t tell any funny jokes.

I told one of my coaches about it later. “It’s easy to criticize someone’s fight," he told me. "What’s hard is to get in the ring and do it yourself.”

That’s something fighters say a lot: you have to give a person respect just for getting in there. Before I competed, it was one of those abstract things I understood in principle. It’s brave to fight a stranger in front of an audience. On that level, I understood it well, because I was too scared to do it. But afterwards, it meant something different. You can prepare as much as you want for a fight, but you have no idea what will happen once you are in the ring, who you will be fighting, or how you will be judged.

Martial arts teachers have to remind their students of this because the potential for thoughtless shit-talking is so high in a situation where new students are learning to critique their own form and technique. I’ve seen people running their mouths after tournaments: Bill should have kept his hands up better, a new student will say, shaking his head in disappointment. If the teacher overhears this, he’ll raise an eyebrow and say, I didn’t see you in that ring.

I have to be that teacher myself in my writing classes, talking students out of making comments that are thoughtless, insulting, or inane as they critique each others’ essays. Students who will readily admit that they don’t know how to use a comma and have never read an entire book are happy to slam away at other people’s writing with all the contempt of a New York Times critic. Anything that expresses an opinion is a rant, anything with complex sentence structures is torture, anything from before World War II is Old English.

They’re even worse about each other’s writing. On their peer response sheets, I had to make a rule against answering nothing to the question, What is the strongest part of the essay? Granted, there are many students who love to praise their classmates’ writing with as much unilateral enthusiasm as others like to criticize it. Neither approach will provide much useful help for a writer trying to improve a draft.

It’s easy to criticize other people’s writing—much, much easier than writing something oneself. Many of the things that aren’t working in writing are glaringly apparent, just like the things that aren’t working in a fight, and both give bystanders a sense of entitled outrage:

This paragraph doesn’t make any sense!
That guy kept punching you in the face!
You don’t have a main point!
Your kicks weren’t landing!

It’s easy to spot these obvious design flaws. Giving constructive feedback is more challenging. I know this as well as anyone. Constructive feedback is my job, and the fact that I give it quite well means I get paid one of those cushy, union-inflated government salaries. It’s not easy to look at a rough piece of writing, relax enough to make out the contours of what the author is trying to say, determine which parts are creating that meaning and which are detracting from it, and advise the author what to keep and what to change. I don’t want the students to be perfect at it. I just want them to turn off that automatic voice, the one that feels entitled to understand everything instantly and takes a confusing idea as a personal affront.

I think people are extra crotchety when critiquing writing because writing invades our brains, and so we take it very personally when we don’t like it. When we disagree with it, it has violated the sanctity of our thoughts by making us narrate the offending words. When we find it confusing or unclear, it has exhausted us by making us work to decode it. If, god forbid, we are forced (like my students) to read the entirety of something we dislike, we consider it as a waste of our precious time and brain cells, viewing it with a sense of persecution that we would never aim at reality television, marijuana, or Farmville.

Now that I’ve written a draft of a novel, I’ve gotten all kinds of responses, many positive, many critical. I’ve been lucky not to get too many mean ones, because the novel is only being read by people I know and who care about me. Occasionally I get one that hurts a little, though, because the person has rejected the novel wholesale:

I wasn’t sure what the point was.
I just didn’t like any of the characters.
I thought, why am I reading this?

Even though this kind of absolutely critical feedback is a little painful, I don’t mind it or feel upset at the people who voice it. When you put a piece of writing into the world, you expose yourself to far, far worse than that. Just like when you fight, you potentially expose yourself to be the idiot who got the crap beat out of him in front of an audience.

These are legitimate reactions when reading a book, and I’ve certainly felt this way about many books I’ve read. I probably wouldn’t tell them to the book’s author, though, because I can’t imagine how the author would fix these problems, or that they should. There’s no way this book will ever appeal to me. Like many books, including many of the world’s most celebrated works of literature, it’s not about people or things that interest me. If asked, I would probably say, “I just couldn’t get into it,” or “It wasn’t the kind of book I like” and be done with it.

I didn’t used to be so diplomatic. When I was my students’ age, I did at times rip into a work that didn’t suit my liking, whether amateur or celebrated.

That guy’s essay was total pretentious gibberish.
Jane Austen? How can anyone stand all that quipping?

Once I became a writing teacher, I stopped subjecting works-in-progress to this kind of criticism. But published writing, writing that was projected out into the world for public consumption and critique, was fair game.

Now, having experienced a taste of the other side, of being the writer as well as the consumer of writing, I think I will be as careful when I speak about someone’s writing as I am when I speak about their fighting. Even if I don’t like what they wrote, I will respect the fact that they wrote it and remember that it’s easier to pick apart a fight than to get in the ring yourself.

What to Eat

2011-03-06T21:39:00.000-08:00

Girls, they never befriend me
‘Cause I fall asleep when they speak
Of all the calories they eat.
—Marina and the Diamonds

“Did you know that most people have four to seven impulse moments a day, lasting 2 to 3 minutes, in which they are tempted to indulge in unhealthy foods?”

“Changing your eating habits will be easier if you have a plan. Putting together a plan means setting goals, tracking your progress, finding support, and rewarding yourself.”

“Anorexia affects both the body and the mind…You think about food, dieting, and weight all the time.”

The passages above are from the Kaiser Permanente website. This is what my heath care provider tells me about eating. Everyone is obsessed with unhealthy food. You need to carefully plan and regulate what you eat. But don’t think too much about it; that’s an eating disorder.

After Sunday sparring class, my male training partners stand around and eat tangerines and compare their diets. Somebody has cut out all grains and dairy. Somebody else has been eating as much animal fats as he wants, but no refined sugar. Another person only eats raw vegetable matter. Our teacher has just finished a cleansing fast. Two people admit to drinking their own urine for medicinal purposes. This topic can last for hours; there’s just so much to say.

One of my favorite videos from my kung fu school shows myself and another woman sparring. The reason I like it because of the off-screen conversation that narrates our fight. Just behind the camera, my teacher is talking to the raw vegan student.

“What have you been eating lately?” my teacher’s voice asks.

“High protein diet,” says the vegan.

“Really?” asks my teacher. “Where are you getting your protein?”

“Broccoli,” says the vegan.

“Broccoli has protein?” my teacher asks.

“Sure, lots,” says the vegan. “I’ve been eating mostly broccoli, greens, bananas, sprouts…”

You can just imagine how hard it is to wrap up conversation on such a fascinating topic. It lasts longer than the two-minute sparring round, so I never get to hear the end of it, which always disappoints me.

The health teacher at the college where I work tells me that it’s typical of athletes to be obsessed with food. Martial artists might be worse than most, because they often need to drop below their optimal body weight to compete. That, and martial arts are a cross between a sport and a religion, so people tend to understand their physical demands as ethical imperatives. Maintaining a minimal body weight isn’t just a strategy for competition: it’s what the Shaolin monks would want you to do, if you were training with them on a mountaintop in China instead of here, in Oakland, across from a Pizza Hut.

I think about food a lot. I’m pretty sure everybody does. If it’s true, as they say, that women think about sex every three minutes, and men about twelve times more frequently than that, and if we need food more urgently than we need sex to ensure the survival of our species, then it stands to reason that food might cross our minds during those brief respites between sex thoughts.

When I am being polite, I try not to reveal my thoughts about food. It feels uncouth to reveal such an obsessive inner narrative, like exposing your sexual fantasies to a casual acquaintance.

And like revelations of sexual fantasies, not everyone reacts favorably to discussions about food. When I haven’t been careful enough, I’ve elicited negative responses ranging from That’s kind of neurotic to Being so obsessed with food is totally unfeminist to You are giving me an anxiety attack.

“I always wonder if eating too much fruit is bad for me,” I said to the health teacher one day.

We were having a conversation about nutritional science, a subject taught in her department. My question about fruit was meant as an example of why I thought nutrition was such an interesting field of study.

“Well, how much fruit do you eat?” she asked.

“In the summer, I let myself eat as much fruit as I want. Sometimes I eat a regular dinner and then a second dinner composed entirely of fruit.”

I saw her face stretching into an expression that communicated, Oh, you poor person, you have some kind of mental disorder.

“Did that sound crazy?” I asked.

“Listen to your wording,” she said. “You ‘let yourself.’”

Okay, it sounds a little neurotic, I’ll admit, the idea of giving oneself permission to eat some things and not others. But even Kaiser Permanente told me to have a plan. How else can someone maintain a healthy diet? Eat whatever they want, and hope it turns out to be healthy? If I didn’t give myself permission to eat some things and not others, I would eat cookies all day long.

It’s doublethink—“the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Make healthy choices about food…but don’t think about them! Just do it, do it unconsciously, do it right, and for god’s sake don’t talk about it!

Blind Dates

2011-02-15T19:49:00.000-08:00

The tea shop I write in is a hot spot for blind dates. I am witnessing at least one of them right now. Amongst the students piled high in sweatpants and textbooks, the girlfriends grabbing dessert after a movie, and the weirdos like me, leaning over notebooks and staring out the window, are several couples, chatting over their tea. Which one of these pairs didn’t know of each other’s existence before a week ago?

That woman talking at length about how she came to accept her Filipino-American identity, while the guy across the table slouches his face into his hand and nods in understanding—they are way too comfortable to be on a blind date. Their later conversation reveals that they are gay best friends. That couple holding their cups in front of their faces, sipping their tea and barely speaking—a well-established relationship or a really bad blind date. Despite their reticence, they hold hands on the way out of the shop later on.

But the lady in the casual-but-cute outfit describing her time living in Tucson in a measured voice but with lots of hand gestures and words like cosmopolitan and juggernaut while her male companion drops the lid of his teapot loudly onto the table—these people have never met each other before, I’m sure of it.

The man takes out his phone to check the time.

“Wow, that’s a shiny phone,” the woman says. “Is it heavier than an i-phone?” She and the man take turns weighing two phones against each other in their hands.

This is the way you can tell the blind dates: their victims are talking about nothing. Either that, or narrating their entire life stories in a way we would never do to either a friend or a regular stranger. I was born in Hawaii, but I moved to Pennsylvania when I was a month old…I went to Berkeley for college and the University of Michigan for graduate school. It’s like a job interview, except both parties are being interviewed at once, and no one is relaxed.

I never wanted this sort of thing to happen to me. But my friend told me I had to do it. You haven’t even tried, she would scold me. How can you say you hate something if you haven’t tried it? She is married and has been with her husband for ten years. I suppose the idea of an awkward evening with a lonely stranger appeals to someone at such a point in life. It sounds fun, she told me. If I were single, I would totally do it!

Eventually I caved under the pressure and went on a handful of my own blind dates, one of them in this very tea shop. It was a perfectly nice little date. We had a lovely conversation about our families and what kind of music we liked. I asked him about his job. He was a film editor. It seemed like a pretty cool job to me. Someone would have to be passionate about an artistic job like that. It’s the kind of job people love. Did he love it?

Not really, he told me. It just paid the bills. He had gotten a two-year-degree that qualified him to do it, and it had provided him with stable work editing commercials for beer and prescription drugs. He performed his duties faithfully, with neither relish nor disgust.

What he really wanted to do was be in a band. “It was always my dream,” he told me, “but I can’t even play an instrument.”

“You could learn,” I said. “You should learn to play an instrument and then start a band!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, sounding dejected. “You have to be good if you really want to be in a decent band.”

Well that’s silly, I thought. “You work at it until you get good.”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think you need to have some kind of talent to begin with. I’d know by now if I were supposed to be a musician.”

Later, as I recounted this episode to my pro-blind-date friend, I felt like an episode of Seinfeld, with my ridiculous fussy reason for not seeing him again. I couldn’t even find concise words to encapsulate the problem.

“He wasn’t passionate about anything,” I tried. Well, that wasn’t true. He was passionate about the bands he liked to listen to. He had told me about a few already, adding that we should go to a show sometime.

“He didn’t have anything he was proud of,” I tried again. But this was still wrong. He was quite proud of his fancy stereo system, which he had described to me in loving detail.

“He wasn’t creative?” my friend suggested.

I’m not sure if this was dead-on, but it was at least a little closer. I wouldn’t need him to be traditionally creative, just to create something. It could be anything: a song, a poem, a computer program, a dinner, an automotive transmission. A perfectly edited beer commercial. Anything. Just something he cared about, something that he had actually done himself.

Considering I couldn’t describe this criterion in something shorter than a paragraph, it seemed like a petty reason not to date somebody. That’s how I felt after every blind date I ever went on, all four of them. Non-creative guy was my last one. I couldn’t take it anymore, shopping for people online like shoes, callously sending back each pair that didn’t fit my fussy standards. I emailed him and told him I didn’t plan to see him again. He took the rejection poorly, with lots of complaining and bafflement.

A week later, I sat in the tea shop, writing in my journal about how I regretted hurting the guy’s feelings. Maybe I should have given him a chance, I wrote. How would I even know if I liked somebody after one date?

This was the heart of the problem: how can people be attracted to somebody based on a date? Or two dates, or six, or twenty? How can you develop feelings for somebody that you only ever meet out of context, never observing how he deals with a challenge, or treats his friends, or does something he’s really good at, or does anything at all besides sit and drink tea and talk?

Should I go out with him one more time, I wrote? Or give up this whole dating thing altogether?

As if in answer to my question, I looked up and saw him walking past the window of the tea shop.

What is he doing here? In Oakland. In my neighborhood. In front of the tea shop that I told him I spent all my time in. He lived in San Francisco, and had talked about Oakland like it was an exotic vacation spot that he had never before visited. Was he trying to find me? Was he stalking me?

He walked by the window once more, then checked his watch and walked in, right past my table.

“Hi,” I said as he walked by.

“Oh, hi,” he said, looking surprised. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” I said, confused. “Funny seeing you here.”

“I’m meeting somebody,” he said, looking around. “Oh, there she is!” He walked to the back of the coffee shop, sat down across from a woman about my age, and began a stiff conversation.

“Uncreative Guy stole your date spot?” my pro-blind-date friend said, when I told her the story that night. She was laughing so hard she could barely talk. “That’s classic! He’s not even creative enough to come up with a new place to go.”

I suppose this showed that my intuition had been right: he really wasn’t very creative. Or maybe just not very wise. Either way, I had made the right choice.

I think what I hate about blind dates is really what I hate about dating in general: that it is treating a person like a commodity. But I don’t see any way around it. That’s how we get things. We shop for everything else we need: food, clothing, shelter, a school, a car. I suppose shopping for a mate is like shopping for a job. We all hate to do it, but we’re scared of where we’ll end up if we don’t.

Pink

2011-01-12T08:22:00.000-08:00

I love pink. It looks like health, spring, rosebuds and the cheeks of babies. Of all the decorative items in my apartment, I would approximate that forty percent are pink. Pink tapestry on the wall, pink glass votive holders, dusty pink velvet upholstering my dining chairs, pink stripes and spots on the leaves of my houseplants.

I have enough pink clothing to assemble an entire fuchsia outfit, hat-to-shoes. I did it one time in order to try to get excused from a jury. It didn’t work, so I sat at the day-long trial dressed like punk Barbie. The defendant, accused of assault with a deadly weapon, gave me a big smile as he entered the courtroom.

If he wanted his own pink outfit, he was out of luck, because in America, men don’t wear pink. That’s the only rule we have for colors. Everyone else can wear any color they please, but for half the population, sorry, no pink.

You might argue that there are other rules for wearing colors. You can’t wear a white dress to a wedding if you’re not the bride, and if you live in a neighborhood with gangs, your high school won’t permit you to come to class in red or blue. You can’t dress your baby girl in blue—unless it is a blue flowered dress with ruffles, in which case you can. A few limited rules…but when the guest leaves the wedding, or the student leaves the neighborhood, or the girl gets past the age of about two years old, then they are all free to wear any color without earning any concerned glances or snide comments.

Baby boys, on the other hand, are never dressed in pink clothes. There are plenty of flowery blue baby dresses, but there are no rugged boyish pink baseball jerseys covered in pink dinosaurs or pink fire trucks, because boys just don’t wear pink, period.

We all know the rule is arbitrary. At the beginning of the century, pink was the color for boys, a variation of aggressive red, while tranquil blue was appropriate for girls.

Still, like all our bizarre cultural mores, it seems only natural that pink is not for boys. A recent study tried to demonstrate the naturalness of this association, claiming that women have a greater innate preference for pink than men do, all the better for performing primitive women’s duties like finding ripe berries and determining if a child has a fever.

The methodology of this study was widely considered unsound, but it’s easy to see where they got their hypothesis. Little girls seem to love pink as soon as they love anything, just like all my friends’ sons have been obsessed with trains and garbage trucks since they were old enough to point and squeal. Pink was one of my favorite colors (second to red) when I was little, until mid-elementary school, when I decided that green better represented the non-frivolous person I wanted to be. But pink worked itself back into heavy rotation in my clothing during graduate school, when I didn’t care whether I was frivolous anymore.

For the first two years that I studied martial arts, I avoided wearing anything pink to class. I was often offered pink gear: We have pink boxing gloves made especially for women!

I didn’t want any part of it. I had seen women who wore pink boxing gloves, and there were two types of them. The first type were martial arts newbies who wanted to show that they were still cute and feminine, even thought they were learning to fight. That type made up approximately ninety-five percent of the pink-gloved girls. The other five percent—meaning maybe two women I knew of—were straight up badasses who could easily take out a man twice their size. They wore pink as war paint, a challenge to anyone who dared to view them as cute.

I knew I wasn’t that second type of woman, and I didn’t want to be the first type, so I avoided all pink. Not just in my equipment, but also in any clothing I wore to my martial arts schools, including my training clothes and my street clothes. I didn’t want my male training partners to think of me as female, so like a baby boy, I wore blue, grey, orange, red, anything but pink.

Eventually I got so used to avoiding the pink shoes and t-shirts that make up a good percentage of my wardrobe that I forgot I was doing it. One day, a male classmate made a comment about pink being my favorite color. How did he know, I wondered?

“It’s a joke,” he explained. “You’re not the kind of girl who wears pink.”

“I’m not?” I asked, surprised. Why would he think that? Then I remembered: because I never wore it to class. Like the self-monitoring prisoners in Foucault’s panopticon, I had enforced the masculine no-pink rule upon myself.

After that, I started wearing pink all the time. I would wear my pink motorcycle boots to and from class, and pink t-shirts when I trained. I wasn’t scary enough to become a type-two pink-gloves girl, but I was secure enough to stop pretending I was a boy.

Lately, though, the boys at one of my kickboxing schools have taken to wearing pink. It started with some bright pink kickboxing shorts that the school was selling. They only came in sizes so tiny that none of the women could fit our curvy hips into them. They sat unpurchased in the display case until the very small, but decidedly male, Thai teacher started wearing a pair.

Of course, being a non-American, he probably didn’t believe that pink was a girls’ color. In Thailand, pink is traditionally associated with Tuesday and recently has been worn to show support for ailing king Bhumibol Adulyadej.

Whatever his own associations with the color were, leading class in his pink shorts, he was like the type-two pink-gloves girls, a tiny badass fighter daring you to look askance at his shorts so he’d have a reason to kick your head off. Soon he began adding more pink to his outfit: pink t-shirt, pink hand wraps, pink ankle supports.

Then all the boys at the school started wearing pink. The school purchased multiple shipments of pink handwraps to keep up with the demand. I suppose they are using the color to show that they are type-two scary men like their teacher. Or maybe they just think it's pretty.

Coke Chunhawat

Christmas

2010-12-24T15:01:00.000-08:00

Generally speaking, I’m a pretty privileged American. I am white, I’m able-bodied, I have a good education, a professional career, all the things that get me an invitation to participate in mainstream American culture.

But then, once a year, that culture engages in a month-long ritual that I have absolutely no part in. It starts in late November, as the decorations appear, and the stores launch their special sales and promotions, and every commercial on TV tries to convince some other viewer that something not normally thought of as a gift (a power tool, gold coins, a lottery ticket, a donation to a charity) would in fact be just the right gift to bring a glow to his loved one’s heart.

This cultural phenomenon starts out subtle and easy to ignore. By mid-December, though, it is all anyone can talk about. It is on everyone’s mind: “Are you ready for it? Have you finished your shopping?” People bring desserts to their workplaces and have parties to celebrate its impending arrival.

And then this fervor builds to a climax, and the day arrives. Everything goes abruptly quiet. Streets are empty, stores are closed, an eerie silence reminiscent of Superbowl Sunday overtakes the city centers and shopping districts.

Then it’s all over, gone as enigmatically as it arrived, and I reacquaint myself with this culture that has seemed so alien and bizarre for the last month, my culture, once again.

Christmas isn’t even a religious holiday anymore, numerous snotty high school acquaintances of mine used to inform me. Why don’t you Jews just give it up and celebrate it already? It’s the same question that gets asked of every minority whose minority status is based on a behavior: Why can’t lesbians just suck it up and marry a man? Why can’t left-handed people just use their right hand? Why can’t those Muslim women stop wearing that crazy veil?

From the outside, the question makes sense: why not celebrate Christmas? It’s fun, it’s festive, there are presents; what’s the downside? But people don’t just start celebrating holidays they have never celebrated before. Who would be the first member of my family to declare, This year, we’re getting a tree and buying a bunch of ornaments for it! This year we’re going to sing Christmas carols and putting up tinsel! This year, Santa’s coming for the first time!

My family has never done these things, and they don’t hold any meaning for me. The Jews I know who celebrate Christmas do so because they have Christians or former Christians in their families. I do know a few Jewish people whose families just love holidays and so decided to put up a tree or some decorations, but they’re a rarity. Religious Jewish people abstain from holidays celebrating Jesus on principle, but the rest of us view Christmas about like Kwanza or Ramadan, just with a lot more publicity: just fine, but not something that belongs to us.

When I was in high school, I worked at a Jewish gift and book store. When customers would ask us if we were open on Christmas, my boss would arch her eyebrows and say, “We call that day December 25th.” This was meant to answer their question: that day is not a holiday around here.

The message wasn’t always received: “So, are you open on December 25th?” people would ask.

“Unless it’s the Sabbath,” she would reply.

Although I worked at the Jewish bookstore, my family was not very religious. We didn’t go to synagogue when I was growing up. My parents sent my sister and me to a secular Jewish Sunday school at the Jewish Community Center, meant to enhance our sense of Jewish identity. There we learned about Jewish history, holidays, and ceremonies, but not about what we should believe or what God—or G-d, as my teachers called him—wanted us to do.

Before Sunday school, I didn’t always know what it meant to be Jewish, but I learned early what it meant to not be Christian. When I came home from preschool one day excited for Easter, which we had been informed was taking place that weekend, my parents had the grim duty of telling me that we did not celebrate that holiday.

“Why not?” I asked, disappointed at the thought of the candy and Easter eggs I would not be receiving as predicted by my teachers.

“Because we don’t believe in Jesus,” my father said.

Jesus. I had heard that word before. I was pretty sure it referred to something important.

“What if I do?” I asked.

“You don’t,” said my mother.

Not only did Jews inherently not believe in Jesus, but all the other characters associated with Christian holidays. I had to learn to remember that some kids were pretty sensitive about their delusions. In second grade, I got kicked hard in the leg by a third-grade boy because I said that Santa Claus didn’t exist. But he’s eight, I thought to myself, baffled that someone could be so naïve at such an advanced age.

Now that I’m old enough not to miss the presents and desserts, I still feel like I miss out on something because of Christmas. My teaching semester ends about two days before Christmas Eve. This has usually been a dreaded time of year for me. I have all the free time in the world, but all my friends are out of town or occupied with visiting family. I’m too tired to do something useful like clean my apartment or write the syllabi for my spring courses. It would be a great time to go shopping for some clothes…but no, it’s two days before Christmas, a horrible time to try to shop for anything. It’s dark, usually raining, horrible weather to go for a run or a hike. Whenever I get my annual jury duty summons, I defer it to December 23rd. If they want to hold a trial that day, I’m there; it’s the most useless time of the year.

This year, I had several invitations to Christmas parties. They were all with people I like a lot, and would have been fun enough, so I wondered why I didn’t feel like going. Then I realized: I have started to look forward to not doing anything on Christmas. Just like the Superbowl, it’s a rare chance to withdraw from the stream of our cultural calendar, to enjoy the meditative pleasure of disconnection and focus on ourselves. So maybe I do celebrate Christmas after all.

Palo Alto

2010-11-21T10:56:00.001-08:00

In a city of the future, it is difficult to concentrate.

—Radiohead, “Palo Alto”

During my first year in California, when I was nine, a group of local parents wrote and produced a theater piece called Perfect Palo Alto. It was a series of skits that lovingly mocked the eccentricities of my new home: Every single adult here works in computers! Our city is populated with well-to-do ex-sort-of-hippies! We’re all really liberal, overeducated, and self-righteous!

This is a weird place, I thought. No one would have ever written a play like that about Framingham, Massachusetts, or Nashua New Hampshire, the most recent cities I had lived in. What would you even say about those places? We’re a suburb of Boston! We have a big mall! And what practical New England parent would ever decide to write that play, much less be seen by their children and peers performing in it?

Palo Alto, I came to understand, was a weird town that prided itself on its weirdness. It was like that kid who makes sure to do everything on purpose to be as bizarre as possible; and, not surprisingly, it was filled with kids like that. Everyplace I went seemed haunted by a strange hippy heritage that traced back to the Sixties. Grace Slick and Joan Baez both went to my high school. My favorite coffee shop, Saint Michael’s Alley, used to be a hangout for the Grateful Dead when they were still the Warlocks. Only back then, the coffee shop had been housed in a different building, one that had long since been converted into the Varsity Theater, where you could watch Rocky Horror or Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation and imagine Jerry Garcia having a smoke there back when he looked like a Chasidic Jew.

The town reveled in its iconoclasm, the college-town in the midst of the Silicon Valley, the town only twenty minutes from San Jose that considered itself a steadfast satellite of San Francisco (an hour’s drive).

When my economics and government teachers explained the difference between liberals and conservatives, they would always say, “Conservative voters tend to be more prevalent in wealthier areas. Where we live is an exception, though.”

And was it ever an exception. Growing up in Palo Alto, Republicans were like polar bears; I’d only ever seen one on TV. Before an election, every front yard sign, every bumper sticker, every snide comment from an adult seemed to be preaching to a city-wide choir: Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton. A few of my fellow students claimed doggedly to be Republicans, in what always struck me as an Alex P. Keaton style act of contrarian rebellion. I never met a real Republican until I went to college—at U.C. Berkeley, a school I chose over a small liberal arts school primarily because I had heard there were Republicans there and I wanted to confirm that they really existed.

Palo Alto’s demographic and social weirdness, when I was growing up, seemed to stem from the fact that people mostly moved there for the school district. At a time when California’s schools were in a fast decline, Palo Alto’s schools were consistently rated amongst the highest in the nation. These schools kept the property values sky-high for the small, single-story, space-efficient tract houses that pervaded most of the city.

In nearby Atherton, every resident lived in a mansion, but they shared a lackluster school district with neighboring Menlo Park. This incongruity used to strike me as odd, until I realized that many affluent areas don’t care about the quality of their public education system, since the residents would all be sending their children to private schools.

But in Palo Alto, all of my friends’ parents were like mine: they had sunk all of their money into a small, expensive house so that they could send their children to a top-ranked public school. So while I grew up in a town with a high average income and high property values, no one I knew ever seemed to have much money. We all had parents who carefully budgeted, who fretted over the money we spent on clothes and food, who considered every purchase seriously: Do you really need that?

Thinking back, I realize that our parents could have been living in bigger houses, driving fancier cars, not worrying about every dollar, if they had chosen to live in cheaper cities with lesser school districts. Palo Alto self-selected for people who valued education—public education—over every other luxury in life, and that was what made it truly a town of weirdos.

The values of our parents seemed to have rubbed off on most of the students I knew. Certainly the interest in education did. Grades were so high that my school could not publicize class rankings for fear of keeping us from being admitted to universities. My 3.6 GPA put me in the 68th percentile of my graduating class.

But our view of money seemed to come from our parents as well. In a city with one of the highest real estate prices per square foot in the country, no one wanted to be seen as rich; instead, students tended to brag about how poor they were. Having a lot of money, or spending it frivolously, was something to be ashamed of. In my high school, it was considered horribly uncouth to have anything expensive or new. I knew one very rich kid whose parents bought him a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday, and everyone mocked him behind his back. He was one of the handful of people I knew who had a new car at all; most of my friends, like me, did not have a car, and none had a car manufactured after the Seventies. At the high school across town from mine, the newspaper ran a “Wreck of the Week” column featuring students boasting about the decrepit state of their vehicles. There seemed to be an acute understanding that we had not earned the money we spent on clothes or cars, and that wasting your parents’ money didn’t make you cool; it made you a spoiled brat.

This rule probably did not hold amongst the small crowd of “popular” kids, but no one cared about them. While they held some sway in middle school, by high school, they could no longer manage to lord despotically over the masses, hopelessly outnumbered as they were. All the horrors I hear reported from other high schools—the football players and cheerleaders and game days and school spirit—were all reversed at my school. Sporting events were under-attended, with teachers begging us to show up. School spirit was for losers. I never once heard a girl admit to being a cheerleader without an embarrassed disclaimer: “Actually I’m a cheerleader. But it’s just because I’m really into dance.”

I moved away from Palo Alto at what ended up being the dawn of the dot-com era. When I applied to college, I had visited the internet one time. By the time I graduated, my father was asking me whether I might want to put off the Ph.D. program I had just been accepted to and make a bunch of quick money as a tech writer, just like every other jackass with an English degree.

Whenever I came back to visit Palo Alto, every other car was a BMW or Jaguar, and there was a new yuppie restaurant in the place of each quirky old diner or bookstore I used to love. Saint Michael’s Alley had been converted from a grungy coffeehouse to a stylish gourmet brunch spot. The Varsity Theater became a Borders bookstore. All the eccentric little corners were swept clean, as if the weird haunted hippy town of my youth had never existed.

During those boom years, when I would visit my mom, I used to go for a run around my old neighborhood—a run that took me past Steve Jobs’s house, an unassuming neighborhood landmark—and each time, I would pass at least four houses knocked all the way down to their foundations. They were about to be built up again from scratch, now taller and with basements and bloated out to the far edges of their lots.

Like every affluent place, Palo Alto seems culturally improved by economic downturn. The bloated houses still stand, but I don’t see so many knocked down when I visit now. The roving crowds of dot-com twenty-somethings in cocktail attire no longer swarm University Avenue in search of mates. Palo Alto still makes me a little sad, seeing it from the outside, its sanitized plazas and former-dives where my teenaged friends used to write on the walls with Sharpies. Still, that is only from the outside. I have a lot of hope that the high school kids are still traipsing around like lost hoboes somewhere I never go, that young Grace Slick is there writing scandalous songs, hidden away somewhere my respectable grown-up eyes can no longer see.

Empire Building

2010-10-31T11:14:00.000-07:00

I never used to be able to stand A Prairie Home Companion. I would turn on the radio and there, like a cartoon hound dog with his mouth full of mud, would be the voice of Garrison Keillor, singing some old standard song that he had slightly rewritten the words to or telling some nonsensical rambling story about some mildly dysfunctional couple in Minnesota.

What is this, I would ask myself, quickly changing the channel. And why would anyone listen to it?

Then about a year or two ago, I suddenly became fascinated with the show. I would listen every week, waiting to hear what extremely similar thing would happen. Would a cowboy meet up with his old flame…again? Would a Midwestern expatriate writer have a guilt-ridden phone conversation with his provincial parents…yet again?

Once you embrace the logic of A Prairie Home Companion, it’s easy to get sucked in to the bizarre parallel universe it depicts. The show’s audience seems to love the predictability of it, the comforting if illogical repetition. They laugh hysterically at the same joke about Lutherans every week. They love the twisting personal narrative, often told in the second person (and right about then is when you realize…) that always ends up with the same song about rhubarb pie. They chuckle as Keillor inevitably finds himself romantically attached to a much younger, much more attractive woman, and even on the radio they can tell she’s out of his league. And when the show is over, they can even go on the show’s website if they want to delve more deeply in to this make-believe world where not only are all the children above average, but where the red states are full of old lefties and everyone loves gospel music and spoken word poetry and choirs performing the native folksongs of former Soviet Bloc countries.

Predictability like this brings a certain comfort with it. That’s why people enjoy sitcoms, or watching the same Saturday Night Live characters play out variations on the same gag week after week. The joke ceases to be funny and instead becomes soothing like a lullaby.

That’s how I found this alternate prairie reality, a strangely calming bizzaro-world. Each time I heard that Keillor had written an offensive article in a magazine (why gay people shouldn’t get married; why Jews shouldn’t write Christmas songs), I would go look it up, eager to see what new levels of curmudgeonry he had achieved. And because he existed in a half-reality where it was never clear whether Keillor spoke as himself or some sort of parody of himself, the ridiculous beliefs he espoused were more quaint than upsetting.

The more I read and the more I listened, the more I thought: I want an empire. Not a big, scary, hegemonic empire like Rome or the USSR or McDonald’s. Just a small, self-contained empire with a legion of devoted followers who are willing to celebrate my every bizarre whim as utter genius, to lovingly embrace my foibles, to delight at the same joke for years and decades on end.

I have been admiring a number of these small empires lately, and the one I really want isn’t Garrison Keillor’s, but Dan Savage’s. Like Keillor, the sex-advice columnist and gay rights activist has his own brand of logic and language, including a number of acronyms for concepts that are so fundamental to his reasoning that they require shorthands. A good lover is GGG, “good, giving, and game,” which means that you had better let your boyfriend suck on your toes if he enjoys it, no matter how boring or gross it seems to you. If you don’t, Savage will urge him to DTMFA, “dump the mother fucker already.” These abbreviations are so well-known to Savage’s audience that they often misuse them in incorrect and even disturbing ways, forgetting what they actually stand for:

I love my boyfriend but he’s moving out of the country in two months and we’re going to break up then. Should I stay with him for these last months or DTMFA?

I’m a mother of a twelve-year-old son, and I’m doing my best to raise him in a GGG manner.

As these terms suggest, Savage’s advice and opinions follow certain well-worn paths. Like Keillor’s audience, Savage’s devotees, including myself, know what to expect from him. Yet I read and listen to him with a voracious appetite that speaks to either the comfort of the familiar or perhaps some sort of subliminal brainwashing. And I have come to realize that many people I know are equally brainwashed.

For example, when I visited my sister recently, I started to mention something that Dan Savage had said on his podcast. I started summarizing a phone call that he had taken and responded to.

“To save time,” my sister interrupted me, “you can just assume I’m familiar with every episode of Dan Savage’s podcast.”

Sometimes I wonder if the men who rule the empires I admire ever get sick of them—sick of the routines, the predictable logic, the cute terms and sayings? Does Garrison Keillor ever wake up and think, I don’t ever want to sing that song about rhubarb pie again? Does Dan Savage ever get sick of having to talk about sex every single day? Does Ira Glass ever get sick of saying, And what happened next was truly bizarre, as though this is the first time he has ever narrated a bizarre occurence? As successful as they have been in building up their own recognizable brands and selling them to adoring audiences, do they ever get horribly, nauseatingly sick of themselves?

This is the reason that I would be a horrible emperor, not to mention a horrible CEO, middle-manager, public relations officer, or cheerleader; I would get horribly sick of myself. To be a representative of something, to be an unceasing champion, is a really draining job, one that requires a kind of confidence and perseverance that I don’t have a lot of. This is part of the reason I admire the people who are able to maintain an empire, because I appreciate how grueling it is to be the leader of a cult of personality.

I attend a number of schools that are run by a single person. Each of these schools reflects the vision and energy of its teacher: the flashy muay thai school with the blaring music and assertive display of clothing and equipment for sale; the tidy jiu jitsu school where there are specially designated spots for shoes and water bottles and sweaty students and dry guests; the yoga studio whose bare wooden floors are all business but whose ceiling is decorated with Christmas lights and flying monkey puppets; and the one I relate to most strongly, the kung-fu school treading so lightly in its rented gymnasium that it is only a school when we are practicing there.

Sometimes I see signs that my yoga teacher or my kung fu teacher are tired of their jobs, bored with us, their students, discouraged by the low energy of the class. Perhaps they are not really discouraged at all; perhaps I am projecting onto them the discouragement I feel as a student in a sluggish class, the discouragement I fear they feel because I would feel it in their place.

I know that if my suspicion is correct, if my teacher really is disheartened, bored, uninspired, that he can simply close the school. I have recurrent dreams that my kung fu teacher announces at the end of class one day that he is closing the school. I suppose this isn’t such an unreasonable fear, given that I joined his school after my previous kickboxing teacher closed his school in just that way, except he didn’t wait until the end of class: “This will be the last day,” he said casually, as his students jumped rope to warm up. “I’m cancelling the class. But go ahead and work out on your own today. See you later.” And he walked out the door.

This is the danger of a monarchy: it ceases to exist without the monarch. My uneasiness with devoting myself to a single school that could disappear at any moment must have something to do with why I feel more comfortable with a diversified portfolio of schools, even though my heart is fully invested in one of them.

But more, noting the empires created by my teachers, I often think: I am really glad I don’t have that power or that responsibility. I am a teacher, too. But I could quit my job tomorrow and my school would keep on going without me, just as they did before they ever knew I existed, unaware of me being born thousands of miles away the same year they were being founded, and just as they will after I retire and presumably long after I die.

If the only thing keeping the school alive was my own faith in it—if it ran on my energy alone—I don’t know if I could keep it open. Would I have given up during one of those semesters when all my students were disgruntled and bitter and I wondered what business I had being in charge of them? Would I persevere through those times? Or would I decide the entire enterprise was futile and go find some other way to spend half my waking hours?

Every time I walk into a class and my teacher is still there, I know he could have decided not to be, and I am grateful. My teachers might not be able to imagine how grateful, just as I often imagine my students would hardly notice if I were replaced with some other teacher or a t.v. screen or a robot. And I’m also grateful that, nice as an empire sounds sometimes, I have the security and freedom of not having to be an emperor.

It's a Girl

2010-10-12T23:16:00.000-07:00

As I sat on the couch holding Samantha’s newborn baby, her mother came through the front door carrying a small package wrapped in plastic.

“From Vivian,” her mother said, handing Samantha one of those ornate little envelopes that I had only seen on Chinese New Year.

“How much?” Samantha’s mother asked her.

Samantha opened the envelope and showed me the contents: a crisp new hundred dollar bill.

“Very good,” said Samantha’s mother.

She turned to me. “This is a Chinese tradition,” she told me. “When you have a boy baby, is traditional to bring money and meat.” She pointed at the package she was holding. I couldn’t see through the opaque white plastic wrapper to figure out what sort of meat it contained, whether it was chicken or beef, raw or cooked.

“For boy, you give money and meat,” she repeated.

“What if it’s a girl?” I asked. Samantha’s mother didn’t seem to understand my question. Samantha repeated it: “Ma. What do they give you if the baby is a girl?”

“Oh, if a girl,” said Samantha’s mother, nodding her head. “You still bring meat, but less money. Maybe twenty dollars.”

Samantha and I looked at each other and burst into hysterical laughter. Her mom joined us laughing, too. It was a sinister moment of female bonding as we laughed in shared acknowledgment of our lesser worth.

For two women raised in America like Samantha and myself, this laughter is partly directed at the quaint misogyny of less enlightened nations. A daughter is to be celebrated with one-fifth the enthusiasm of a son, we are thinking. How cute!

In America, at the moment of birth, a daughter is worth as much as a son. Nowadays, she could grow up to be anything—almost. As long as she doesn’t want to pilot a submarine or become a philosophy professor, the sky is the limit. Hell, if she’s white and Christian, we now have documented evidence that she could grow up to almost become president of the United States.

This is how I was raised—to believe I could be anything I wanted to be. My father imbued my sister and I with all the high expectations he would have had for a son, buying us erector sets and electrical engineering kits, staying up late doing mathematical proofs with us while we were still in elementary school, expecting us to magically know how to throw a baseball properly because it came naturally to him.

School confirmed this impression of equality for me. The honors math and science classes I took were equally populated by boys and girls, and the girls were often the strongest students. Many of those girls went on to become scientists and engineers. While I have not talked to most of them about their experiences, I don’t get the impression that they had to crack any significant glass ceilings on their way to these positions. The main obstacle they felt was loneliness, as the numbers of their fellow women scientists and engineers dwindled, as women like me and my sister tossed aside our technical aptitudes in favor of more traditionally feminine careers.

The ideology of equality in high schools like mine is why I’m never surprised when my students believe sexism no longer exists.

“Men and women are equal now,” a girl in hot pants and a halter top will say, and her male classmate will nod serenely in his baggy sweats and oversized tee.

If you ask them if men and women are treated the same in our culture, though, their narrative is strikingly different.

“My friend has a twin brother, and he’s allowed to go out whenever he wants and do whatever he wants, but she has a curfew. They’re the same exact age.”

“How do her parents explain the difference?” I asked.

“They say, You’re a girl and he’s a boy.”

I ask the students why parents would treat their children differently based on their genders.

“They don’t want their daughters to get pregnant,” the students say.

What if their sons get their girlfriends pregnant? Is that as bad?

Noooo, they all shake their heads. Definitely not as bad.

My friend who teaches health told me today that during a discussion of types of contraception, one of these same students volunteered a chastity belt as an option.

“I’m not writing that one on the board,” she said.

“I’m serious,” the student said. “If I have a daughter, she’s never going to be allowed to have sex.”

This is the logic that explains the articles opposing abortion that my students often bring in as part of a debate assignment. Young people need to take responsibility for their actions, the articles say. A young woman needs to learn that if she wants to be sexually active, there are consequences to that decision.

I’ve scanned so many of these articles, and found nary a mention of boys. Articles praising abstinence-only education will laud the positive outcome of far fewer high school girls having sex (or admitting that they do), without ever explaining if this same result was seen in boys; evidently the main goal was to stop the girls from having sex.

These little inequalities and indignities are well-known and obvious, tiresome and uncouth to talk about, so we don’t. No one needs to hear that we still live in a society where women are largely judged on how they look, while men are largely judged on what they can do. If you go out to a bar where men and women are looking for mates, it’s not worth the breath it would take to point out that the men are off-handedly mentioning how they can shoot a gun and they’re working on their pilot’s license and they are an ace at poker, while the women are flashing their cleavage and batting their heavily-mascara’d eyelashes and making the perfect cute face whenever someone points a camera in their direction. If he’s marginally handsome, so much the better, and if she’s really good at playing pool, well, that’s a small enough transgression to be sexy, as long as she’s really pretty.

Only stupid people play out these tired gender roles, you’ll say, and you’ll be right, mostly. I know plenty of women who are considered quite attractive, and whose attractiveness lies in their intelligence and skill—as long as they are also pretty and thin. However, I don’t know any women who aren’t conventionally attractive but who are largely courted for their intelligence, sense of humor, athleticism, or power. There are a million billion trillion men like this, who are funny-looking, with protruding bellies or bad clothing or pockmarked faces or the wrinkles that give them character, who are still considered models of attractiveness, sex symbols, because they are amazing actors or athletes or singers or businessmen.

You’ll say this has less to do with social roles and more to do with whom we are trying to attract. Men are fundamentally visual in their attraction, you’ll say, and women are less so, which explains why gay men are more likely than lesbians are to feel pressure to be good-looking. And you’ll be right, maybe. Maybe if we stopped feeling the need to be so damned attractive all the time, we could accomplish a lot more.

I think this hypothesis could explain the decided lack of femininity in the two recently appointed Supreme Court justices, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. Perhaps they needed to renounce the distraction of feminine self-presentation in order to focus on the achievements that got them to the Supreme Court. Or maybe that's what we need to believe about them. It almost seems that, to be seen as credible in one of the most powerful jobs in the country, women have to present themselves as men. The female mannerisms, the politeness, coyness, flirtiness that characterize femininity all suggest lack of credibility, a lack of focus on what's really important. Women can be judged by what we can do, but only if we are willing to renounce our femininity.

Maybe that’s why my friend and her mother and I laugh so bitterly at the greater promise that the Chinese see in their sons. It is not because the girl can’t grow up to do everything that the boy can; it’s because society won’t find her attractive if she does, and, we are horribly afraid, neither will we.

Going Off the Meds

2010-09-26T11:27:00.000-07:00

The first time that I experienced panic attacks, I was seventeen, and I felt like I was living in a horror movie. I would be walking down the street in the middle of the day, when suddenly the light would go all funny. The ominous overture to Carl Orff's Carmina Burana would be playing faintly in the background, except I hadn’t heard Carmina Burana before except in scenes depicting hell in movies. The color of everything would be sickly and wrong and I would feel all the blood in my body drain to my feet, and there would be the presence of some sickly grotesque thing that defied the normal order of the world, some dark thing come from the other side to suck me under.

This feeling would overcome me every few minutes, hundreds of times each day, so that life was rather like creeping my way through the hotel in The Shining, or maybe one of those new homemade-looking horror movies whose advertisements celebrate how “disturbing” they are.

The therapist I saw took me to the psychiatrist to see if he would recommend medication. He shot a dismissive glance at my gaunt figure and tattered thrift-store clothing and said, “If this is still happening in six months, we’ll give you some antidepressants.”

Six months, I remember thinking in horror. If this is still happening in six months, I’ll be dead.

Six months later, the attacks weren’t gone, but through weekly therapy, I was learning to control them, so that I could usually anticipate them and stop them before they got really bad. I learned that I needed to get a full night’s sleep and eat reasonable meals and not wallow in stress or immerse myself in bizarre, alienating music and literature, frustrating lessons, but ones that I suppose my body thought it was high time for me to learn.

Other than sedatives, I don’t think anti-anxiety medication had been developed back then. If it was, I certainly wasn’t offered any. Since that time, I have had several other bad bouts of panic attacks, and I have never been offered any sort of medicine by the psychiatric and medical professionals with whom I have consulted.

From the stories that I’ve heard, that you’ve heard, too, I am an anomaly. Friends, books, TV shows, magazines all tell us that psychotropic drugs are dispensed like corn syrup, an efficient solution to our culture’s wealth of mental disorders that avoids the expense of psychological treatment while providing easy revenue to the drug companies. At times, I have felt cheated—why haven’t they offered me any of these “overprescribed” drugs? Am I not screwed up enough to warrant a healthy dose of that Prozac they’re debating in all the magazines, that Paxil and Zanex that they seem to be prescribing for everyone else I know?

I especially feel cheated when I think of that horribly suffering teenager I once was, and wonder: couldn’t they have given me something? Surely there must have been something, some sedative, some kind of valium or Quaalude or horse tranquilizer that could have calmed down my overactive brain, rather than leaving me to pull myself, with grasping bloody fingers and a year of therapy, up out of that horror movie and into some kind of sane, properly-ordered mental functioning.

On the other hand, when I watch the struggles of the many people I know who have been placed on medication, I feel like I got out easy, relieved and lucky to have not been pulled into a deeper kind of morass—the engulfing cycle of being on medication and getting off of it.

I’ve watched a lot of people try to go off of their medication, and from what I’ve seen, the process of going off of medication for mental illness will in itself make a person mentally ill. I’ve watched some of the closest people in my life shake and cry and wail that they need the medicine, with all the desperation of heroin addicts. I’ve watched people adjust the dosage—just a little more now, now a little less, cut down by half, and if you completely freak out, go back up by a quarter. One friend who struggled with her romantic life went to her primary care physician to get referred to a therapist, and instead got prescribed Prozac; a year later, her struggle was not to maintain a healthy relationship but to get off the Prozac.

Of course, one obvious explanation for the anguish caused by going off medication is that the medication is needed, and that it is the only thing that was preventing the suffering in the first place. Your brain is like any other organ, and if your brain is sick, you may require medicine for the rest of your life, just as you would if you suffered from thyroid or heart disease.

This may be the case for some mentally ill people, but as far as I understand, it is impossible to diagnose conclusively who they are. There is no physical test to diagnose mental illnesses; they are diagnosed by symptom. It is as though I went to the doctor complaining of fatigue and thirst and, based on those complaints, I was assumed to have diabetes and put on a regimen of insulin. If my symptoms abated in a few months, it might be difficult to tell if this was due to the insulin or something else altogether. The only way to tell would be for me to stop taking the insulin, and see if I felt sick again. Except, since my body is accustomed to the insulin, I may feel faint and ill when I stop taking it, and this could be a normal sign of withdrawal, or a deadly symptom of my now-untreated illness, and it may only be my death that provides a conclusive answer.

I don’t mean to insult psychiatry as an imprecise science. I have seen many people I care about treated with drugs that seem to have saved their lives, and I will always be an avid supporter of anybody’s right to stay on a medication that is preventing them from being miserable, numb, non-functional, or delusional. I know firsthand what mental illness can be, and if the path to my own health lay in a pill, I would take it without hesitation.

A few weeks ago, on the second anniversary of the death of David Foster Wallace, I heard several radio programs discussing his life, his writing, and his battle with depression. Wallace had done something that I have seen so many people I care about do: he reached a happy, stable time in his life, and, no longer suffering the symptoms of his depression, he decided to go off of the medicine that he had taken for years.

The people in my life have done this with varying levels of success. A few people I know have actually managed to go cold turkey, and found that the depression they experienced as young adults seemed to have dissipated with maturity. But more often, my friends and family members have found that their depression returned. They may be able to take lower doses of the antidepressants, but can’t seem to go off of them entirely.

David Foster Wallace’s version of this process sends a chill through anyone who takes antidepressants or cares about somebody who does: when he stopped taking his medication, his depression returned full-force, and when he returned to his medicine, it no longer worked, and he committed suicide.

It’s the fear of this very sort of dependence that leads so many people I know to want to get off medication. What if there is some disaster? I don’t want to be unable to function without medicine. Unlike diabetics and other people who have a diagnosable, physiological need for a medication, people with illnesses like anxiety and depression are never sure just how dependant they really are, nor are their doctors. It’s impossible to find out just how dependant you are on antidepressants without risking your life or your sanity.

Now when I watch people I know try to reduce or go off their medicine, I give grudging thanks to that judgmental psychiatrist who did not want to give me medication when I was a teenager. Without a chemical remedy, I had to figure out how to make my own mind healthy. I learned a lot of skills that I have used throughout stressful times in my life, even times when my panic attacks have returned almost as strongly as the first ones I experienced. I have never had to wonder whether I really need a medication, to feel the temptation to turn to it when times are difficult, to try to distinguish anxiety caused by needing medication from anxiety caused by withdrawing from medication. I don’t believe that everyone’s mental health problems can be solved without medicine, but I will be forever grateful to know that mine can, and to have the tools to do it.

The illustration depicts Berkeley's Hate Man. I don't know if he ever went on or off his meds.

Inspirational YouTube Videos

2010-09-03T17:31:00.000-07:00

These are the words I most dread at the end of a student presentation:

And now, we’re going to show a video that sums up our topic.

Then it comes: four minutes long, the mournful tones of Sarah McGlaughlin or Suzanne Vega playing in the background, the heartrending images, the atrocious use of punctuation.

As soon as the students announce the video, I cringe. Never mind that these videos are a kind of visual and rhetorical assault on my consciousness, making me violated for having to watch them. If my students had created them, I would still beam with pride. The videos represent the very sorts of projects that we hope the students will create, in fact—their assignment is to create a Powerpoint presentation creatively presenting their research on a social justice issue. They are first-semester college students, many of whom have severe learning disabilities or come from continuation high schools where they were never assigned homework. If their discussions of the issues are a bit melodramatic, that’s fine; we are happy if they simply complete the assignment without having a nervous breakdown or punching one of their group members.

The problem with the videos is that they are someone else’s overly sentimental Powerpoint presentations, posted on YouTube so that anyone with an Internet connection can watch them, absorb their message, overlook their poor organization, research, and spelling, and use them as part of their own presentation on the same topic.

By presenting the videos as part of a researched presentation, the students imbue them with a sense of credibility or authority, as though they count as research. I can envision the students watching the videos and finding them more powerful than the actual data the students have collected; “Hey, guys, I finally found something interesting,” I imagine them saying.

The fact that these videos always appear at the end of the presentations is even more frustrating from the perspective of a writing teacher. Rather than end with their own ideas, findings, and voice, the students give away that platform to someone else, and worse, someone no more informed than themselves. The videos would bother me much less if the students would speak after them, explaining why they had chosen that video and what it meant to them. But instead, the video is given the final word, this anonymous authority rising out of the ether to lend imagined credibility and emotional power.

I have seen the same one about domestic violence several years in a row, a rambling stream-of-consciousness polemic. It juxtaposes a series of distressing images—a woman with a horribly bruised and swollen face, for example—with meaningless statistics, or cryptic bits of narrative, apropos of nothing that came before them—Forty percent of women say they have been abused by a partner; She is afraid to leave him.

Finally one year, I remembered to put a policy about YouTube videos on the assignment instructions: “Your presentation may include no more than one minute of any video that you did not create yourself.”

When presentation day came, one group ended by introducing a video: “We know you said that we shouldn’t have more than a minute of a video, but this one is really good,” they said to me.

Then the familiar music began, and the familiar series of domestic violence images and factoids began again.

I knew that every student in the group had experienced abuse, either in their parents’ homes or at the hands of high-school boyfriends, so I did not want to reprimand them for flagrantly dismissing the assignment instructions. But it saddened me to realize that they believed this cheesy video would be more powerful than their own words, ideas, and experiences. This is what years of schooling has drummed into their head: that if something is worth saying, it has already been said by someone more important than you, and you’re better off using that person’s words rather than your own.

I’ve noticed that many of the power figures at my college also rely on the voices of others to support, or make, their arguments. Our former college president was a great fan of inspirational quotations. They adorned her office, engraved into glass paperweights and printed on postcards. She opened and closed every address with them, relying heavily on the classics: Your playing small doesn’t serve the world, she would say, or The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. They were quotes attributed—verifiably or not—to great writers and thinkers. But I would bet my union-negotiated contract that these quotations were the only things that she, or most of the people who use them, had ever read by these esteemed authors.

The internet allows us to find a wealth of these kinds of dismembered quotations, inspirational words of advice from authors we have never heard of, without even having to leave our house and buy a book of them. My students have recently taken to opening their essays with barely-relevant passages by people ranging from George Bernard Shaw to Anthony Robbins, names that I am sure have no meaning at all to the students citing them.

With YouTube, we do not need to limit ourselves to using the words of published authors or well-known personalities or even people who know how to write. Anybody can put a video on YouTube, and it is possible to find a relevant, if poorly-constructed, opinion piece on any topic at all.

The college president took advantage of this expanded quotation marketplace in a speech welcoming all the school’s employees back to work after summer break.

“Last year, when I talked about leveraging abundance,” she said, “some people asked for specific examples to show what I meant. So this presentation has lots of examples.”

It turned out that these were not, as I presume “some people” (i.e. everybody) had wanted, examples of how colleges had leveraged their abundance, or suggestions as to how we might do so at our college.

No, the examples were YouTube videos. The first was a cartoon positing the premise that “everyone can be an entrepreneur.” Anyone who creates their own business is an entrepreneur, the video explained, whether that business is a lemonade stand, a yoga studio, or a software corporation. “I like the positive spirit of this video,” said the president. “It shows people taking initiative.”

She then showed a video of a nine-year-old boy who had given a motivational speech to thousands of teachers. “Do you believe in me?” he asked them, pointing into the crowd. “I believe in me.” The thousands of teachers applauded wildly.

“This video reminds us to always think of our students first,” said the president.

I imagine that the president used these videos in her speech for the same reasons my students use them: because they are fast, easy, and vaguely reminiscent of something like actual research. Finding original examples of local colleges using innovative strategies to stretch minimal resources (which is what I think leveraging abundance is supposed to mean) would take a lot of time, energy, and thought, not only to find the examples, but to thoroughly understand and explain them.

Don’t get me wrong: I actually love YouTube. I love the poorly-constructed opinion pieces, at least in theory, and often in practice. The democratizing of public expression is one of the best things about the internet. Everyone can express their views and have them read by strangers from around the world. Insecure students like mine can create a project that embodies their research, and then post it for their friends and families to see.

The problem comes when we allow things we find on the internet to stand in for well-thought-out arguments and evidence. With so much information instantly available, we begin to believe that doing research is as easy as shopping for shoes: point, click, it’s yours.

But just like with the shoes, it is easy to ignore the cost we will pay for our ideas, if we want them to be good. As an English teacher and a writer, I am painfully aware that good ideas are not free. We pay for them, not in money, but with our labor—the labor of thought, of real research, of reading real books cover-to-cover and formulating our own ideas about them rather than allowing them to speak for us. It’s a lot of work, but the rewards are worth it: really understanding what it is we are talking about.

Danger

2010-07-30T06:43:00.001-07:00

After our weekly sparring class, my friend paraphrased an idea from Marcus Aurelius:

When a gladiator has to fight another gladiator who is unpredictable and dangerous, he does not resent or hate this other gladiator. Instead, he thinks to himself, “Danger.” This isn’t a negative judgment of his character but simply a factual statement: in the arena, this person is a danger to me, and so I must be careful.

Actually I’m quite certain that the word my friend used in place of unpredictable and dangerous was spazzy. This might sound immature, but for martial artists, spazziness has a very particular meaning. A spazzy fighter is one who makes abrupt, clumsy movements. If you spar with a spaz, he is likely to injure you with something that was not a purposeful technique. Perhaps he will elbow you in the forehead as you lean in to throw a body shot, or kick you hard in the Achilles tendon as he attempts to sweep your foot.

So the way my friend paraphrased Marcus Aurelius was something like: When a gladiator fights a spaz, he should not be annoyed with the spazzy opponent, but simply think, “Danger,” and try to avoid getting hurt, without any further negative judgments.

In citing this idea, my friend was specifically thinking about his reaction to a specific incidence of spazziness in our class that day. The most instinctive reaction to a spaz for most people is annoyance and frustration: why does he keep doing that? Controlling these sorts of emotions—frustration, anger, annoyance, hostility—is one of the main principles of fighting, since they will distract a fighter from performing well.

Sparring is as much a lesson in controlling emotions as in learning to attack and defend successfully. One of my friends put it like this: “In soccer, you get angry when somebody fouls you. But if you are boxing, the person is supposed to be hitting you, so you can’t get upset with them.” Sparring would be a pretty miserable activity if you were to get upset every time someone hit you—you’d be angry and upset throughout all of your training, and would hate all your training partners.

Still, while I am usually quite content to be punched and kicked by graceful and clever fighters, I tend to think of spazzy sparring partners as my enemies. I don’t necessarily dislike them personally, but during the time I spend in the ring with them, they are likely to injure me and thus are my foes.

I took Aurelius’s hypothetical passage to mean that I should stop focusing on the antagonistic relationship between myself and the spaz, and instead direct my attention only to the immediate danger that he poses to me. When he does something that might injure me, I should not think, This guy is such an asshole, but rather, without emotion, Watch out for that move. It is sort of a love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin approach to sparring, except there is no hate for either the spaz or his spazzy moves: there is only the dispassionate assessment of the danger involved and how to avoid it.

This idea made a strong impression on me, and for months I searched in vain for the actual passage from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. When I asked my friend to help me find it, he could not remember ever having described it to me. You know, that passage about spazzy gladiators, I asked him? I don’t remember any passage like that about gladiators, he would tell me.

Still, even without the exact quote, I loved this idea, which seemed to me equally applicable to fighting and to the rest of life. I would think of specific friends or ex-boyfriends who were prone to hurt my feelings: Danger, I would think, as I calmly distanced myself. I would meet people whose lives seemed filled with excessive melodramatics: Danger, I would think, deftly sidestepping their overtures of friendship. It was nothing personal, not an expression of dislike or personal affront. It was just what I needed to do to keep myself safe.

Increasingly, I could apply this principle to almost anyone. That girl whose backpack kept bumping into me on the bus? Danger. That guy smoking a cigarette slightly upwind of me? Danger. That frustrating coworker? Danger. That ex-girlfriend of my ex-boyfriend? Danger and danger. I could write off almost anyone I didn’t want to deal with as a purveyor of danger, even if it was only the danger that they would annoy me. I could bob and weave my way through life, refusing to engage, positively or negatively, with anyone who would cause me the least bit of irritation or distress.

I began to suspect, eventually, that I was interpreting this passage incorrectly. And then, a few weeks ago, after every kind of digital and analog search through Meditations, I finally found the passage my friend had been referring to. One reason that it had been difficult to find was that Aurelius had not used the word gladiator; instead, he had referred to the circus, which could be a reference to other types of performative combat:

“If an antagonist in the circus tears our flesh with his nails, or tilts against us with his head, we do not cry out foul play, nor are we offended, nor do we suspect him afterwards as a dangerous person. Let us act thus in the other instances of life. When we receive a blow, let us think that we are but at a trial of skill and depart without malice or ill will.”

But besides this circus/gladiator disparity, the idea of the passage is a bit different than the interpretation I had been embracing. It says that we should not see our opponent as dangerous, that we should not be offended by the danger he affords us. Instead, we should see him as a helper, someone who is collaborating with us to make us better.

While this is similar to my interpretation, I was still viewing the “dangerous” person as a kind of enemy, at least during the time that we were engaged in an activity (whether sparring, a work meeting, a conversation). My refusal to fully engage with that enemy was indeed a sign of malice and ill-will, even though I thought it was not. It’s nothing personal, I would think, but viewing someone as a dangerous enemy to be deflected and avoided is certainly personal, just as it is personal when “Christians” tell gay people that their relationships are a sin, no matter how much they profess to still love the sinner.

In Psychotherapy East and West, Alan Watts argued that our binary language structures prevent us from seeing that even our real enemies, the ones who truly wish to hurt us, are also helping us: “An inadequate system of classification has made it too difficult to understand that there can be an enemy/friend and a war/collaboration.” Watts describes how a war between two “enemy” societies might in fact have positive benefits for both sides: keeping their populations in check, forcing them to hone their martial skills. Even as they consider their interests to be diametrically opposed, the two sides are collaborating in a single system, and their war is a kind of partnership.

While Watt’s example of war/collaboration makes logical sense, emotionally it is difficult to think of the brutal violence and death of war as something positive. Still, this mental exercise points out the relative ease of understanding people like the spazzes as my partners and collaborators. Certainly, they are making me better at sparring by forcing me to truly defend myself against whatever might come, whether that is a sanctioned kickboxing technique or an accidental headbutt. But also, they are strengthening my ability to cooperate in any situation, to not shut myself off to people who I find challenging, to compete with pure focus on my own performance rather than on the properness of their strategy. After all, my annoyance with them, no matter how detached, impersonal, or provisional, is a really just a way of causing myself discomfort and grief, sensations that could be completely avoided if I simply refused to get annoyed. While I might think my opponent is the dangerous one, my reaction to him is the true danger to myself.

The illustration depicts a black eye I received from an accidental headbutt.

Appetite

2010-07-15T17:35:00.001-07:00

A woman gave my friend Tom the following advice:

You should never date the person whom you are most attracted to. If you go to a party and talk to a woman that you find incredibly attractive, don't pursue her. Skip past the woman you find second most attractive as well. The woman who comes in third--that's the woman you should date.

"It's ridiculous," Tom said to me. "It's saying that your appetites are fundamentally wrong. It's like saying, if you feel like eating broccoli, don't eat broccoli. Eat a food you feel more indifferent about, like, I dunno, cheese or cucumbers or something. No, I say if you want to eat broccoli, you should eat broccoli."

Like my childhood therapist, who had an eating disorder, Tom tends to use a lot of food analogies. Lately I’ve noticed myself using them more and more, too.

"But Tom," I said, "what if you crave ice cream? I think that's what she's getting at. Maybe the person who appeals most to your appetite is actually the worst thing for you."

Tom scoffed. "That's not an appetite--that's a sickness. If your appetite isn't sick, then you crave broccoli, not ice cream."

This point was easy for me to concede, because I never crave ice cream. I do crave cookies, especially chocolate chip with walnuts, or peanut-butter, or anything with fruit flavor like the lime sugar cookies that I ate four of when my coworker brought them to a meeting. Luckily we weren’t talking about cookies, however; we were talking about ice cream, which I could do without, frankly.

"But Tom," I persisted, "A lot of people have unhealthy appetites; I think that's what she was getting at. I mean, look at me." I thought of a guy I had recently dated; let's call him Mr. Confused. "I had such a strong appetite for Mr. Confused, and he was horrible for me."

"No, no, no," Tom said. "You were not wrong in your appetite for Mr. Confused. He's smart, and attractive, and interesting. Hell, I congratulate you for bagging that guy." Tom sounded pretty enthusiastic. "Just because he couldn't handle being with you doesn't mean that your appetite was wrong. Your appetite was dead-on."

At the time, I took great comfort in this. What a nice thought--my appetite wasn't wrong. Mr. Confused just couldn't return my feelings for a complex array of really dumb-ass reasons. The problem lay with him, not with me.

There seem to be two predominant ways of understanding appetite. One is an optimistic, or we might call it Lockean, viewpoint: our appetites are fundamentally good, and will steer us towards what is healthiest for us if we will only listen to them. This model is promoted in a book I read recently about raw food diets. One of the benefits of this diet, the book claimed, is that after a brief, unpleasant “detoxification” phase, during which the dieter might feel nauseated, dizzy, listless, etcetera, the dieter will begin to crave healthy, raw foods and will no longer crave junk food and desserts. Tom’s reasoning followed this same model. A healthy person will have a healthy appetite for healthy foods; an appetite for unhealthy foods is a symptom of illness, or perhaps an illness in itself.

The pessimistic, or Hobbesian, view of appetite is the one the woman at the party was expressing. In this view, appetites are fundamentally deceptive or misleading. Tom’s friend believes that if we find somebody extrememly appealing, it is a sign that the person is bad for us. This is like when we are too full to finish our dinner but still hungry for dessert; our appetites lead us towards what is unhealthy and unnecessary. The doctor on the advice show Loveline agrees with this philosophy, often counseling women who are drawn to “bad-boy” types that they must choose someone who appeals less to their appetite in order to find a healthy relationship.

Paul Cameron, founder of the anti-gay Family Research Council, takes the Hobbesian position regarding what he considers to be the danger of homosexuality: “If you isolate sexuality as something solely for one's own personal amusement, and all you want is the most satisfying orgasm you can get—and that is what homosexuality seems to be—then homosexuality seems too powerful to resist.” In contrast, he says that, “Marital sex tends toward the boring end. Generally, it doesn't deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does.” Sex with men is clearly what appeals most to Cameron’s appetite, yet he finds it morally superior to marry someone for whom he does not have much appetite at all, like people who force down their daily portion of vegetables for the sake of their health, even though the only things they want to eat are cheeseburgers and nachos.

The Lockean philosophy sounds more appealing and reasonable because it portrays human nature as innately tending towards good—given the right information and options, we will choose the one that is beneficial for us. But of course, public interest in food options like the KFC double down or Friendly’s grilled cheese burger melt might steer us towards the Hobbesian view that our appetites are inherently destructive and need guidance from a benevolent leader or perhaps dietitian.

Last week, I went to a workshop on sugar, led by a nutritional counselor I know. She asked us to write down our questions so she could answer them. Several people asked her about the sugars in fruits, a category of food which is both “healthy” (natural, unprocessed, full of vitamins) and easily appealing to many people’s appetites. Of course, the very feature that makes fruit appetizing is the one that might make it somewhat unhealthy, its high sugar content.

“How much fruit is it okay to eat?” one person asked. “Can I eat as much as I want?”

The counselor couldn’t give us a clear answer on this. Instead, to her credit, she asked us how our individual bodies responded when we ate fruit: “Does it ever give you that feeling of having a sugar rush and crash? Have you been gaining weight? If so, you might want to gradually cut back on the sugar you consume from fruit. Maybe try eating a sour apple like a granny smith, instead of a sweet apple like a fuji.”

I was happy to see that I wasn’t the only person who grimaced. Fujis are my favorite apples; if I have to substitute granny smiths, I would prefer just to skip the apple altogether. I am someone who thinks a lot about what I eat and tries to make good choices, but I can’t stand the thought of putting limits on how much fruit I eat. In the summer, when strawberries and cherries and blueberries and mangoes and peaches and plums and every other kind of fruit I love best is in season, I eat really incredible quantities of it. I have no way of telling whether all this fruit is bad for me or whether I am eating too much of it. I know that high blood sugar has been shown to be a risk for cancer and other diseases, and I don’t eat much refined sugar, but all the fruit I eat could be undermining my health. I hate the idea the one type of food that is wholesome, nutritious, and endlessly appealing to my appetite might be bad for me.

Here is the Hobbsean philosophy of appetite in action: unchecked by some instruction about what is good to eat, I would eat enough fruit to potentially damage my health.

Ultimately, the problem with assessing whether our appetites lead us towards what is good for us and bad for us is that we don’t actually know what is good and bad or us. We have so many choices to satisfy our appetites, some pretty obviously good (broccoli), some bad (grilled cheeseburger melt). Michael Pollan describes the concept of the omnivore’s dilemma primarily as the process of avoiding toxins: “When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the potential foods on offer are liable to sicken or kill you.” This sounds as though our modern food practices should be simple: avoid things that will sicken and kill us. Rhubarb stems: good. Rhubarb leaves: bad.

But as the rest of his book demonstrates, even people who are trying to eat the most healthy food, both for themselves and for the planet, may not be able to do so. People buy “all natural” food, not realizing it is filled with unhealthy but natural additives. “Free range” chickens spend five of their seven weeks of life crowded into a warehouse, and are allowed access to a small yard, which they are too fearful to enter, for the last two weeks of their lives.

It is not so scary to indulge in our unhealthy appetites when we have willingly accepted their unhealthiness. Enthusiasts of the double down and the grilled cheeseburger melt are not trying to enhance their health when they eat those things; in fact, the appeal of those foods may lie in the willful flaunting of health. I certainly had no delusions, when I dated Mr. Confused, that he was good for me, though I’d like to think of him more as a chewy, home-baked chocolate-chip cookie rather than a greasy fast-food sandwich variant—something totally unhealthy but of such undeniably high quality that you’d be stupid to turn it down.

The real fear is that you might pick something you thought was good for you, but it turns out not to be. All that putrid, died-yellow margarine people ate in the seventies and eighties was terrible for them; meanwhile, they could have been eating actual butter. If Tom were to pass up the woman he was most attracted to and date the woman he found third most attractive, he might find her to be as bad for him as any other woman might be—because really, it’s almost impossible to tell who is good and bad for us, just as we can’t tell that our chicken did not ever go into its allotted bit of “range.” That would be the worst mistake, like forgoing the ice cream in favor of a salad covered in ranch dressing. It's not what you wanted, but it's terrible for you nevertheless.

Love is the Drug

2010-06-30T09:40:00.000-07:00

My friend introduced me to a very useful but little-known word, limerence. It means the pain that we feel when we are obsessively in love with someone, when we can’t stop thinking about them, when our mood directly correlates with whether we’ve seen them and how we’ve been treated by them that day.

This term was coined by a relatively obscure psychologist in the Seventies, and it has no obvious etymological roots. This inscrutability mirrors the nature of the concept itself: like a prime number, the idea can’t be clarified by dividing it into parts. Nor is there any synonym in English that parallels the word’s meaning. The closest would be obsessive crush, or unreasonable pining, or love so bad it hurts.

And yet, in our culture that elevates romantic love over all other kinds, limerence is an everyday byproduct of our need to find our own mates, rather than having them assigned to us by our families or other social limitations like caste, class, or proximity. We can pair ourselves with virtually anyone, and this unending possibility leads to unending disappointment as we project ourselves into the lives of inappropriate and uninterested potential partners, wondering why they can’t see how great we’d be together.

Using the famous Eskimos-have-fifty-two-words-for-snow logic, you would think English would have dozens of words meaning obsessive, unrequited love, love that makes people anguished, insane, irrational, love that distracts us from every meaningful thing in our lives, that makes us irresponsible, unreliable, unproductive, that makes our lives into a long visit to the oncologist’s office, hoping with all our being for good news, crushed but not surprised when the news is bad.

But aside from limerence, we don’t really have a word to describe this state of being, which might explain why the emotion itself is so difficult to remember or relate to until we are experiencing it ourselves. Every time I find myself in this condition, I am shocked by how physical it is, how immune to reason, how distraught I can be over somebody who I have absolutely no claim over.

Nor do we have simple words to describe all the other extreme psychological and physiological consequences of attraction: obsessive elation, a feeling that nothing else matters besides seeing the object of our affection, the diminished importance of everything we usually care about, horrifying loneliness when the person leaves town for two weeks, the certainty that we could never be enough for this person, wanting to kill the person, wanting to kill the person’s attractive friend/coworker/second cousin, wanting to kill ourselves, the lacklusterness of everything else once the person is gone, the forgetting of what the purpose of life was and how we got through our days before we met this person.

What we do have, however, are hundreds of thousands of songs alluding to this sort of love, songs that are as blank and inscrutable as the word limerence itself, except when we are experiencing love-related derangement, at which point the lyrics suddenly light up with flagrantly obvious meaningfulness. For example, crazy and baby are the most commonly rhymed words in pop songs, despite the fact that they don’t rhyme at all.

You drive me crazy, baby.
I go crazy for you baby.
Love is crazy, pretty baby.

Our stubborn insistence on forcing these two words together shows how acutely we feel love as a mental illness. And the consciousness-altering effects of love are evident in all the songs that link the words or concepts love and drug:

Love is the drug for me.
You are the perfect drug.
I want a new drug, one that makes me feel like I feel when I’m with you.

These songs all seem to describe the pleasant part of the love-trip, the drug “that makes me feel like I feel when I’m with you” rather than the drug that makes me feel like my life is completely pointless without you. We have to focus on this aspect of love or we would come to our senses and go cold turkey, just as we go out drinking for the high, not for the hangover.

Still, there’s a new love-drug song out right now,“Your Love is My Drug,” that describes the negative side-effects:

I’m looking down every alley.
I’m making those desperate calls.
I’m staying up all night hoping,
Banging my head against the walls.

Songs like these show that we instinctively understand the connection between love and drugs, that love makes us completely out of our minds, that it’s a bunch of chemicals that make us feel this way.

We tend to minimize and dismiss this insanity, but we feel it, and we see its results every day: students dropping out of college over break-ups, people ruining their hard-earned careers by having affairs with their coworkers, politicians sneaking out of the country to be with their lovers when they are supposed to be governing, people walking in front of trains because they can’t imagine a life without the person who has rejected them.

These are serious drugs that have consequences as bad or worse than cocaine or heroin. But we can’t outlaw them or wage a war on them, because these drugs are in our own bodies, and we can’t get them out until we’re dead.

Verbal Jiu-Jitsu

2010-06-18T08:34:00.001-07:00

“Are you challenging me to a fight?”

The statement above is an official sample of verbal jiu-jitsu, as sanctioned and promoted by the Gracie Brazilian jiu-jitsu empire. In their Bullyproof instructional video, Ryron and Rener Gracie explain how kids can use the principles of Brazilian jiu-jitsu to stand up to bullies. Their program emphasizes respect, self-discipline and restraint, and the avoidance of physical force. Verbal jiu-jitsu is one tool a child can use to assert dominance over the bully without getting into a fight.

This question was not what I had expected from the “verbal jiu-jitsu” section of the curriculum. I had anticipated a statement that would allow the child to stand up for himself—something like, “I am not going to do what you tell me to”— not an invitation for the bully to take a swing at him.

The Gracies explain that this is a strategic question that might produce several outcomes. The bully might answer in the negative, in which case he or she has effectively backed down and can’t continue harassing the child (according to the Gracies, although I envisioned alternate scenarios, like, “No, I’m just going to carry on making your life a living hell, if that’s okay with you”). Or the bully might answer in the positive, in which case he or she will have to make the first move in the fight, at which point the child is justified in defending him or herself. That’s when the physical jiu-jitsu comes into play.

In this way the question truly does mimic Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which anticipates a range of outcomes and responses in reaction to any single move. A jiu-jitsu lesson often sounds something like: You will pull on your opponent’s right arm with your left arm. If he steps his left foot forward, you will put your right foot behind his knee. If he kicks his leg back for balance, you will put your foot behind his opposite ankle. If he falls to the side, follow him and take his back.

So I suppose the question about whether the bully is actually looking for a fight is a good example of verbal jiu-jitsu. Rather than waiting passively and without a strategy, the child asks a question that could provoke several predictable reactions, and then prepares for each possibility.

Whenever I hear the term verbal jiu-jitsu, I wonder to what degree it is possible, or advisable, to view a verbal interaction as a martial art. On the one hand, we often face situations where we are trying to use language to achieve some end, to gain power over a situation or get something we want, and strategic use of language could help us do that. On the other hand, all dialogue can be seen as trying to get our own interests met; so how do we know when to call off the battle and just talk?

Most of the time that I hear the term—and I hear it a lot, mostly on NPR—it seems to refer to a use of language that is misleading or tricky, either in a positive way. A common statement like, He is a master of verbal jiu-jitsu, might be a compliment or an insult.

When I hear the use of the term to mean trickery, I often wonder what the speaker thinks jiu-jitsu is. The word jiu-jitsu means “the way of yielding,” which refers to using an opponent’s force against him, usually to trap him into a technique that causes pain and damage without much force, such as a joint lock or choke.

I imagine that the concept of verbal jiu-jitsu came from someone who actually knew what jiu-jitsu entailed, someone who observed similar uses of deflection and submission in language. But now, the concept of jiu-jitsu is as blurry as the line we are toeing—or is it towing?—in that other dying metaphor. It reminds me of a recent complaint, sent in by an NPR listener, about the use of the word kabuki to refer to something that is a sham, a performance that is just for show. These Japanese terms may lend an air of worldliness to our critiques of our own culture, but not if we don’t know what the words actually mean.

Occasionally, though, I see verbal jiu-jitsu used to mean something related to the actual principles of jiu-jitsu. One good example is from a website critiquing an exchange between President Barack Obama and Senator John McCain:

MCCAIN: I would just make one comment. Why in the world, then, would we carve out 800,000 people in Florida that would not be—have their Medicare Advantage cut? Now, I proposed an amendment on the floor to say everybody would be treated the same. Mr. President, why should we carve out 800,000 people because they live in Florida to keep the Medicare Advantage program, and then want to do away with it?

OBAMA: I think you make a legitimate point.

MCCAIN: Well, maybe….

OBAMA: I think you do.

MCCAIN: Thank you very much.

Despite some typos and spelling errors on the website, the person who called this verbal jiu-jitsu was actually working with an idea of dialogue as a martial art. He writes, “When Obama does not meet rhetorical force with force of his own McCain quite simply does not know what to do next and so he just stops.”

In other words, Obama is using the force of McCain’s attack against him. McCain expects a disagreement, and when he is confronted instead with an agreement, he rotely disagrees with it, which leads him to disagree with his own initial statement: “Well, maybe [I make a legitimate point],” he says. This reflects a classic martial arts principle: if your opponent pushes, you should pull; if he pulls, you should push. McCain pushed Obama, expecting him to push back—when Obama pulled instead, McCain lost his balance and fell on his face.

One other place this metaphor gets fully teased out is in a Wall Street Journal interview with David Mamet. The article’s title, “Mamet’s Jiu-Jitsu Isn’t Just Verbal,” refers to the playwright and filmmaker’s six years studying Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which was the topic of his movie Redbelt.

In contrast to its title, the article spends quite a bit of time explaining how Mamet’s jiu-jitsu is verbal. Most obviously, as a playwright, he is known for his obsessive focus on the slipperiness and trickiness of language.

In the article, Mamet explains how he applies lessons from jiu-jitsu to conflicts in his regular life. For example, when Mamet was betrayed by a friend, he asked his teachers how he should handle the situation.

"My teacher Renato, of course, came back with 'Don't carry someone else's weight. Let him carry the weight; let it come back to haunt him.' This is one of the central tenets of jiu-jitsu. When you carry the other person's mass you tire yourself and so lose your ability to think clearly. That was the group's way of telling me to let the situation go, to walk away—which I did."

But when Mamet uses so-called verbal jiu-jitsu on the interviewer, he really just gives obnoxious, evasive answers to the interviewer’s questions. When the interviewer asks how Redbelt relates to Mamet’s other work, Mamet responds, “It’s later.” When the interviewer asks if there are differences between the use of language in this film from his earlier ones, Mamet responds, “None.”

The interviewer considers these deflections—which many people would just call rude—to be linguistic martial arts moves: “Mr. Mamet proved as slippery as a well-oiled grappler,” he writes, in preface to this section of the article.

This made me wonder, when we think we are being martial artists with our speech, how often are we just being rude and obnoxious?

Like Mamet, and perhaps like most people who study martial arts, I have tried at times to apply these arts to verbal interactions. I sometimes feel a thrill of power as I sit through a heated debate at a meeting at work and keep myself from engaging in the pointless bashing of conflicting ideas against one another. I sink into a kind of meditation, waiting until all of their respective punches have been thrown. Then, if there is still time, and if I think I have anything productive to add that will help resolve the problem, I will say it. If not, I don’t waste my energy countering force with force.

I know this strategy is working because it’s had the unfortunate side effect of getting me dragged to a lot of meetings—I’ve been told that I am seen as a good mediator. However, I am often also told that I freak people out when I am sitting, blank-faced and disengaged, waiting for the arguers to wear themselves out. Which makes me wonder—am I like Mamet? When I practice the martial art of discussion, am I being strategic, or am I just being an asshole?

Ultimately, the idea of showing off one’s clever wrestling moves in conversation is misguided. With the exception of some boxers and professional fighters, who like to use talk to bolster their confidence, real martial artists don’t talk a lot. They listen, and they speak selectively. That’s the real verbal jiu-jitsu, knowing when you need to assert your views and when you don’t. I’m not always so good at it, but I’m learning.

Roads

2010-06-10T08:19:00.000-07:00

Every morning, I drive on the 580 freeway thirty miles southeast to my workplace in Livermore. I spend at least an hour every day on this freeway—speeding past all sorts of plants and walls and dead animals and garbage and cityscapes and views of the bay that I could barely begin to describe, if I’ve noticed them at all. The freeways are a bizarre no-man’s land, somewhere we go every day, but not anywhere that we think of as a place. In fact, we do all we can to pretend the giant roads don’t exist, building high walls to shelter our neighborhoods from their noise and dirt.

I’ve been thinking a lot about freeways lately. Like approximately twenty percent of people I know, I recently read Cormack McCarthy’s novel The Road. In case you’re one of the other eighty percent, The Road follows the story of a father and his young son as they navigate the perils of a post-apocalyptic world where almost all living creatures have died in some unnamed disaster. The father and son travel by foot down a state highway, pursuing the bleak hope that conditions will be better further south and closer to a coast.

Lots of stories use roads as symbols. In the hero’s journey, the structure described by Joseph Campbell that underlies legends and adventure stories from around the world, the road of trials is the central part of the story, the series of mystical challenges that the hero must overcome.

George Lakoff’s theory of conceptual metaphors helps explain why roads are found in so many narratives. Lakoff points out that almost any event that follows a progression can be symbolized as a journey. People tend to talk about their lives, their romantic relationships, their education, and their careers as journeys. And the metaphor, or perhaps the metonym, for a journey is often the path that it follows, the road itself. So if I ask you how things are going with your significant other, you might say:

We’re at a crossroads.
It’s been bumpy.
We’re encountering obstacles.
We’ve reached a dead end.

This metaphor of road as progress explains why so many stories center on roads. The road becomes a manifestation of the forward movement of the plot. Dorothy follows the yellow brick road as it leads her to every character and obstacle she is destined to encounter; and when she gets to the end of the road, the story reaches its climax. In fact, we might see the road as a symbol for narrative itself.

Roads are such a fundamental part of so many stories that they tend to become invisible, just like the actual freeways we hide out of sight. But the road in McCarthy’s novel is something different. It isn’t just a pathway for the stories and the characters to follow. It’s a thing. The characters walk along it, but they also sleep on it. They kick ash out of it, and climb over dead tree limbs and abandoned vehicles that litter it.

It reminds me of another novel, Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, which also depicts a journey down a road that has been largely abandoned by a fallen civilization. The two novels share a fascination with how one might use roads after the cars that they were built for are gone, along with all that went with those cars: the anonymity, the safe distance from one’s fellow travelers, the orderly rules. It is jarring to see a freeway as a place where people might walk, eat, sleep, fight, all the things that people usually do at their destinations, not on the roads that take us there.

Since the characters are not flying down the road at seventy miles per hour, readers can see it for what it really is: one of the last, most enduring signifiers of what it means to live in a society. Even after society has crumbled, the roads remain, providing an open path for travel and a promise that they will lead to a destination. When everything around has fallen into chaos and there is no promise of the food, shelter, protection that a society affords, the roads still provide a service, a trusted path, so that travelers don’t need to worry about navigating their journey.

Roads signify civilization because they assert mankind’s dominance over the mystery and disorderliness of nature. They take an uncharted territory and impose human ideas of logic and organization onto it. The Roman Empire was famous for its use of roads to signify their imperial, “civilizing” power. The roads reflected the logic of the empire, all of them leading from Rome to a conquered territory.

In America, roads symbolize social welfare and democracy. They are one amenity that Americans across the political spectrum can agree our government should provide. Conservatives want to limit government’s role in providing education or health care, but no one argues that we should privatize the roads. Roads are for everyone, the ultimate public service, shared equitably by rich and poor alike. Of course, roads in rich areas are better maintained than roads in poor areas, and poor people are often harassed when they drive on roads in affluent neighborhoods. That’s why freeways are the ultimate symbol of democracy, the connectors between places, taking us out of our own neighborhoods and cities and states and into any other place we wish to go.

During recent debates about nationalized health care, Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey wrote, “A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't any. This ‘right’ has never existed in America.”

I thought at the time: we don’t have a right to a lot of things. There is no constitutional right to public education, or transportation, or a fire department, or police or military protection, or roads. But I’m really glad we have all of those things, since they connect us to one another and shape us into a community.

Tantrums

2010-05-28T00:36:00.001-07:00

I love a good tantrum. There are few things I find so adorable or intriguing than a two-year-old child standing in a line somewhere, at a grocery store or a bank, flying into a screaming, quivering mess of rage. This scene rates up there with a robin lovingly placing a twig into a nest or a spider methodically immobilizing a fruit-fly or a seven-pound Chihuahua trying to pick a fight with an indifferent golden retriever.

It’s one of those moments when we witness nature in all of its beautiful, brutal illogic, and we can really enjoy it because we are only, in this moment, spectators, no more responsible for quieting this unknown child than we are for rescuing a fly from a spider.

Childless people aren’t supposed to think that tantrums are cute. I’ve seen my friends bristle. Can’t they control their child, they sneer? I’d be happy to discipline your son for you, ma’am.

I think I might feel similar annoyance if it were my child, or some child I was responsible for, who was disturbing everyone’s tranquil day at the bank. But if it’s not my job to make the child be quiet, I can really enjoy the beauty of the tantrum, a display of unchecked emotion the likes of which adults pay good money to see in melodramatic tearjerker films and action movies, because we so rarely get to see such a thing in our normal adult lives, and when we do it’s usually not pleasant.

Bored, tired, hungry two-year-olds don’t just cry. They wail. They sob until they shake and hiccup. Their faces crumple in utter, inconsolable anguish.

As adults, the only time we cry like that is when somebody dies or when we have our hearts very badly broken. We never allow ourselves to wail in agony simply because we are tired, because we are hungry, because we feel needs beyond what is possible or plausible or even rational. We tell ourselves that such behavior is self-pitying, self-indulgent, babyish.

I used to have a rule, when I was a teenager, that I was not allowed to cry. It was a rule that I broke a lot at first, but with practice, I got pretty good at complying. I associated crying with self-pity, and I felt that it was very important not to ever feel sorry for myself. Self-pity was a foolish, self-indulgent, wasted emotion. Crying was a sign of weakness and defeat.

As an adult, self-pity has become one of my favorite emotions. I find it sweet and nostalgic, like looking at old photographs of that teenager who was so determined never to feel the emotion that has now ironically come to be equated with her.

Perhaps my love of self-pity comes from the fact that, the older I get, the more convinced I am that my emotions come from my body. You can’t really stop yourself from feeling angry when you are treated unjustly, even if you know your anger is counterproductive, or from grieving when someone dies, even if you know it was the right time for them to go, or from falling in love, even when you know it’s a bad idea. The more I pay attention to it, the more self-pity seems to spring from that same carnal, physical place, that same cocktail of chemicals in the brain and blood. When I notice it, it tends to be a good sign, an effect of pushing myself and of feeling things fully.

For example, when I am working out, self-pity is a sign that I am training hard enough, just to the edge of running myself completely into the ground. I stumble into my kickboxing class, exhausted from the other kickboxing class and the running and weightlifting that I just did, and I think, a thought that is not expressed in words but in some more primal, pre-verbal language: I can’t. I catch clichéd, melodramatic phrases floating through my head, like Morrissey lyrics playing in the back of my brain: Why do I have to do this? Why is my life so hard? I’m so, so tired. I don't think it's possible to be this tired.

Once I become aware of these thoughts, I smile in pleasure. They are like old friends, and I know it’s a privilege to get to be pushed to the place where I feel those things. Their illogic is part of their beauty, because our emotions are so often illogical, and that is what makes us bodies and not just minds. It’s only when we try to align our emotions with logic that we evoke all the bad connotations of self-pity: self-centeredness, self-righteousness, lack of generosity, blame. To enjoy self-pity, we need to accept that we have bodies and emotions that make us feel bad sometimes, and that there is no one at fault for those bad feelings; they’re just a crappy part of being alive.

I had lunch a while ago with my friend Samantha and her two-year-old son. He told her that he didn’t want to eat anything. She ordered him some fruit and yogurt, telling him that if he didn’t want to eat it, she and I would.

When the food came, Sunny sat staring at his beautiful bowl of creamy yogurt and plump, ripe berries.

“Are you going to eat any?” Samantha asked him after twenty minutes had passed and he still had not touched his food.

“No!” he said, shaking his head decisively.

“Not even one little bite?” Samantha asked, holding a tantalizing red raspberry under his nose.

He clamped his mouth tight and shook his head again.

“If you don’t want any, we’re going to eat it,” said Samantha. “Karin, do you want some fruit?”

I grabbed a giant blackberry out of the bowl and put it in my mouth. “Mmm, yummy,” I said, trying to persuade Sunny to share my enthusiasm.

Instead, his face erupted into a rictus of utter despair. Like thunder following lightning, it took just a moment for the uncontrollable sobbing to break.

“What’s wrong?” Samantha asked him, seeming honestly perplexed, as the couple behind her turned to stare. “Why are you crying?”

Sunny was weeping so forcefully that he could barely talk. “Because…now…I can’t have it all!” he wailed.

This illogic is what makes tantrums so beautiful. They express some fundamental part of the human condition, pure want, pure dissatisfaction. When I see children screaming in a store, often their parents aren’t even trying to reason with them or appease them or punish them, because the tantrum has taken on a life of its own, disconnected from its original cause. They aren’t crying because Mom won’t buy them a stuffed animal or a candy bar, or because they have to stand in a boring line instead of going to the park right now. They are crying because the void of want is so vast and gaping that it is impossible to fill. Two-year-olds are realizing, for the first time, that once we get to the point of lamenting that void, it is too late to fill it, and all that is left to do is scream.

Lesbian Envy

2010-04-29T21:50:00.001-07:00

Staring out the window of the coffee shop on Piedmont avenue in Oakland, I can’t help but notice the prevalence of what seems to me to be the predominant cultural group in a town known for its diversity: lesbians. They flood the sidewalks, walking purposefully or browsing casually, carrying book bags and wheeling baby carriages, drinking coffee, laughing, hugging and holding hands.

The lesbians are easy to spot, because they are the most stylish women on the street. Their clothes fit well, move comfortably over their bodies as they walk. Their haircuts are jaunty and well-kept-up and purposely asymmetrical. Their sneakers are ironic. Everyone admires their good looks as they pass by.

Or maybe it’s just me. I’m always jealous of the lesbians, especially the couples, in a way that I am not jealous of the many equivalent heterosexual couples passing by. When I see a man and a woman pushing a stroller down the street, I think, He’s restless, she’s bored, they love the baby but are also stressed out by him. I know logically that the lesbian couples must face the same realities and challenges of couplehood and parenthood. But somehow I imagine that, because these relationships do not represent the societal norm, that they aren’t subject to the same monotonies and ruts that typify heterosexual relationships. You don’t just wake up one day and find that you’ve fallen into a lesbian relationship: This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! No, a lesbian relationship is a conscious choice, and therefore it must always be well-thought-out and worthwhile.

I’ve always been jealous of lesbians. From my perspective, their sexuality seems so straightforward, because they are constantly in the position of having to assert it. If they want women to know they are available as partners, they must dress or behave in ways that communicate their sexual preference. If they want their coworkers to stop trying to set them up with annoying guys from the office, they can say, “Thanks, but I’m a lesbian.” If men want to date them, they can confidently say, “Sorry, I’m a lesbian.” I can only imagine how simple and satisfying that must be.

In contrast, while I’ve only dated men, I have a very hard time identifying myself as a heterosexual. I suppose I probably am one, mostly, but I don’t think I’m a very good one. I don’t find myself attracted to men very often, perhaps once a year or so. It takes me a lot of effort to get interested in men or decide I’d like to be in a relationship with one of them.

I imagine that if I were a lesbian, I would never be ambivalent about who I was attracted to, because it would be part of my declared identity: I am attracted to women, damn it! And I imagine that, since their sexuality is so central to their identity, lesbians get to exist in a permanent state of adolescent-style girl-craziness. Which many of them do, at least amongst my friends. But of course I’m only noticing the ones who are like that, because they are vocal about their lustiness, whereas I don’t tend to notice the ones who, like me, barely date, though I know one or two of those types of lesbians as well. But when I am sitting in the coffee shop envying the cute dykey women in their funky sneakers, I imagine that they are all accomplished daters, female Casanovas, confident ladies’ ladies.

If just the fact of being a lesbian isn’t affirming enough, there is a wide palate of lesbian subcategories to choose from. One young friend of mine used to fret over this decision for hours: “What kind of butch am I?” she would agonize, thumbing through a book about radical gender identity that was ten years older than she was. “Am I a stone butch? Or am I more of a soft butch?”

“I think I’m more like a stone butch,” she would speculate, “because everyone thinks I'm a boy. But the book says that stone butches don’t take their clothes off or let anyone do anything sexual to them. That’s definitely not me.” Finally, she read about a type of butch who was highly masculine but didn’t mind taking her clothes off or receiving sexual pleasure, and she happily took that on as her identity.

My friend Charlotte also describes herself as a butch (I presume her love of girly hobbies such as fashioning arm warmers out of tube socks or making clever little zines to entertain her friends would characterize her as a soft butch). She styles herself like a 1950s sitcom husband, with button-up shirts and sweater vests and a trim haircut that emphasizes her square jaw line. Charlotte’s girlfriend calls herself a femme. She likes to wear low-cut dresses, stiletto heels, and fancy lingerie.

The two of them often talk about butch/femme dynamics. They have one story where a carful of seemingly heterosexual young women gawk in envy as Charlotte walks around the car to open the door for her lady. Presumably, they have never experienced such an act of chivalry from the men that they have dated. In fact, those women might not even want their boyfriends to open the door for them, because it would suggest that, as women, they are helpless. But when both partners are women, then the traditional masculine and feminine courtship behaviors are a matter of choice, voluntary and arbitrary roles in a game of gender that everyone can agree is socially constructed. The roles that seem so limiting and obtrusive when they are imposed by nature, or tradition masquerading as nature, are suddenly creative and inspiring.

My friend Luke has a similar jealousy of gay men. He is an unwavering heterosexual, but he credits the development of his sexual persona to inspiration he found from gay men, especially the fictional characters on the television show Queer as Folk.

“The men on that show are so confident about their sexuality,” he would tell me. He was particularly inspired by the central character, a promiscuous playboy. “He has no reservations about going after whoever he wants. He’s completely self-assured and entitled. I used to watch that show and think to myself, that’s how I want to be.”

Functioning in a heterosexual world, Luke had always felt conflicted about pursuing women. He felt crass and objectifying for his tendency to want to have commitment-free sex with most of the women he encountered.

In contrast, the men on Queer as Folk never needed to worry about belittling or demeaning another gender. Since they were all men, they were all socially and biologically equals. There was no reason for remorse or ambivalence for objectifying someone who had an equal capacity for objectifying you right back.

Luke asked his gay roommate whether being a gay man was really the wild smorgasbord of anonymous sex that the TV show depicted.

The roommate nodded sagely. “It’s crazier than that,” he said. “It’s crazier than you could imagine. Think about it. We’re talking about sex that only involves two guys. Of course it is.”

When Luke told me the story years later, his eyes became wistful. “Can you imagine?” he asked. “Two people who could both appreciate the pleasure of anonymous sex, without it having to mean something?”

While our aims are different, ultimately Luke and I fantasize about the same thing: a sexual identity that is clear-cut, unproblematic, well-defined. Heterosexuals don’t get to define themselves by their sexuality; or at least, it is seen as uncouth to do so after the age of about nineteen. Our sexuality is the assumed norm, and we never feel the need to say, “As I heterosexual, I feel…” or “Perhaps it’s my heterosexuality that makes me perceive the world in this way.” And so we muck around in a hazy swamp of what is supposed to be normal, and therefore does not need to be examined, discussed, or defined.

Our envy is born of privilege. Just as Anglo-Saxon Americans avoid the stigma of being ethnic, but also the benefits and pleasures of having a recognized ethnicity—so heterosexuals, whose sexuality is supported by every American institution from marriage to taxation to health insurance to death, miss out on the pleasure of having to construct an identity around a renegade sexuality. What we give up in self-knowledge, we gain in the blissful pleasure of never really having to think about it.

Totalizing Systems

2010-04-21T00:50:00.000-07:00

You might believe that God rules the universe, that every action occurs according to God’s will, that all decisions can be judged according to whether or not they comply with God’s prescribed set of morals, as described in the Bible.

You might believe that nothing exists outside of your own mind, that only your own thoughts are known to you, that everything else is an illusion created by your own psyche. Or you may believe that it is impossible to know for certain whether anything beside your own mind exists; and therefore, you will treat everything outside your own mind as though it does not exist, just to be safe.

You might believe that the laws of physics determine every action in the universe, including your actions, movements, thoughts. If you decide to jump off a bridge, it is because of electric signals in your brain set into motion at the time of your conception. If your psychiatrist convinces you not to jump off the bridge, her words, the thoughts that gave rise to them, your thoughts and actions in response to her words were all effects of the physical interactions of particles in your brains and bodies and in the universe around you, and all of this was determined at the beginning of time and cannot be changed any more than we can change the force of gravity.

When I was in college, I discovered a totalizing system that saved me from being stuck with the B grades that seemed to be my perpetual fate in my chosen major, English. When I started studying English, I wasn’t sure exactly how the graduate students who graded my essays wanted me to analyze works of literature. I would try to make causal arguments about the characters’ actions, or discuss the psychological distinctions between two characters. My graders were never impressed; they didn’t agree with my premises or the conclusions I was drawing from them.

Then I discovered a field of study that I was really, really good at: linguistics. And I figured out that the study of language could be applied readily to analyzing literature, because literature is nothing but language. I discovered that a whole tradition of structuralist and post-structuralist literary critics agreed with me, approaching literary texts as an assemblage of words and sentences, descriptions and metaphors, not as hypothetical worlds populated by imaginary people.

This strategy of interpretation became my doctrine, and it saved me from all the inane disagreements about character motivation that I had had with my graduate student instructors. Characters had no motivations, because the characters did not exist. No one could argue with this fact. One professor, my senior thesis advisor, would actually shoot me a guilty, apologetic look every time she made a statement like, “Hardy implies that Tess of the D’Urbervilles was raped, but a lot of readers think she really wanted to have sex with Alec.” She did not need to voice her acknowledgment aloud: Tess of the D’Ubervilles doesn’t want anything, except in the sense that Thomas Hardy’s narrator says that she wants it—she is nothing but a collection of words and descriptions, not a real person who can act in defiance of the author who created the illusion that she exists.

This approach to literary analysis seemed to be objection-proof. I wrote an essay about Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past that compared the similes used in the first half of the giant novel (comparisons to concrete objects) to those used in the second half (comparisons to abstract ideas). I invented some explanation of what this change meant, relating it to the novel’s themes of self-doubt and self-acceptance. I wrote this essay during the five hours before it was due; I was taking the class pass-fail, so my grade didn’t really matter.

I got an A, and some gushing commentary from my graduate student reader about what a solid analysis I had achieved. I knew why my grade was high: there was no easy way to argue against my analysis. I had carefully documented examples of similes from beginning to end; and who would want to bother going back into that giant tome to verify that the pattern I had identified was correct? By focusing on purely linguistic elements, which are the only factual truths about literature, I made myself invincible as a literary critic. Everything I wrote in college from this point on got a grade of A or even A+, all focusing on language-based truths that were impractical or impossible to refute.

I liked this newfound power—the power to wield a system that I had mastery of, one that impressed and confounded my professors, one that could be used equally on any text, because, ultimately, they were all cut from the same cloth, just a bunch of language.

By the time I got to graduate school, this way of thinking had gotten pretty old. Of course the characters didn’t really have motivations. Of course they didn’t have histories, families, futures, identities. But I was ready to write about those things again, anyway, illusory though they were, because they comprise the meaning of literature, and it occurred to me that I did not want to spend the rest of my career ignoring the point of what I was analyzing just to be invulnerable to criticism.

The idea that literature is nothing more than language was the first and last totalizing theory that I ever subscribed to. It isn’t a theory that applies to everything in the entire universe, as a true totalizing theory would. But it applied universally to every work of literature—in fact, to every written or spoken text.

Since the time I gave up my own theory, I have found myself on the wrong side of a number of others. One semester, I had a student who used to come to my office hours every few weeks to debate with me about Christianity, which he was a strong believer in; in fact, he was training to be a minister. I normally wouldn’t engage in religious debates with anyone, much less my student, but he was a strong and interesting debater and I liked hearing what he had to say.

“My moral system is absolute,” he would say to me. “I believe morality comes from God, so I can always defend my values and beliefs. If you believe that your morals are defined by your society, you have to accept that other societies have different morals. How are you going to tell them that it’s wrong to commit murder?”

He was right, of course: it is a messy process to make any moral argument when morality is relative. Your argument is likely to contradict itself at times, or end up anchoring itself in absolutes (“it is wrong to cause suffering”) that cannot be proven any more than my student can prove that God doesn’t want us to murder people. This is the nice thing about totalizing systems; they’re tidy and consistent and avoid hypocrisy.

The issue of absolute versus relative morality arises whenever we discuss conservative and liberal politics in my English classes. Conservatives know what they believe, and state it outright: We are for big-business. We are against abortion. We believe America is the greatest country on earth, and we support traditional American values.

Liberals tend not to state concrete beliefs, but rather systematic principles: We might not agree with what you say, but we will defend your right to say it. We are pro-choice (not pro-abortion). We believe it is important to respect other people’s beliefs.

Predictably, the conservative position is internally consistent, while the liberal one is conflicted. How can we justify respecting other people’s religions and cultures, except when they fundamentally disagree with our own values? Theocracy is okay; preventing women from getting an education is not okay. Communism is okay; suppressing the free speech of your opponents is not okay. Of course, in these cases, the values that are violated are part of what we call human rights, values we hold so sacred that we don’t even see them as values but self-evident morals. Which I believe we should, but I can’t explain that belief through recourse to any absolute morality. If someone asks me why I hold those values to be self-evident, I will ultimately have to respond that I just do. And that, of course, is a horrible basis for an argument.

If we wish to avoid such messiness, we must believe all sorts of counterintuitive things that will make consistency out of a messy world: that there is a god who cares deeply about our dietary habits and who we have sex with; that America is the greatest country on earth; that all of our actions and thoughts can be predicted by the laws of physics. These beliefs are orderly, and once we have embraced them, we will never be lost, illogical, confused, or frightened again.

Going First

2010-03-21T10:26:00.000-07:00

Someone I know recently died in an accident. It wasn’t the kind of accident that occurs during normal activities everyone does every day, like driving or showering or walking down the street. It also wasn’t the kind of accident that results from an activity so risky that no one is surprised when it goes wrong, something like white-water kayaking or flying an “experimental aircraft.”

My friend died doing something both dangerous and mundane, the kind of thing that makes parents declare that their children are trying to get themselves killed. He died from a skateboarding accident. He crashed his skateboard, hit his head, was in a coma for a long time, and then finally, just when chances for his eventual recovery had started to look up, he died.

Besides his death being incredibly sad on its own, it bothered me a lot that he had died skateboarding. Something about it seemed like suicide to me, like he had chosen to die on purpose. I couldn’t figure out why I felt this way. After all, he skateboarded everywhere, all the time. There couldn’t have been anything special about the day when he crashed; it was probably just an ordinary day, until things went horribly wrong. But I couldn’t get rid of this creepy feeling that he knew it was coming, that it was planned somehow.

I tried to shake the idea that there was some underlying significance to all this, that it was the end to some kind of parable or puzzle or syllogism.

“I suppose it could have been anything,” I said to a friend of his. “It could have been a car accident.”

“No,” said the friend, shaking his head vehemently. “It’s important that it was a skateboarding accident.”

That’s how I felt, too, but I didn’t like what this interpretation suggested. It meant that it wasn’t random, not a freak accident, that his death had meant something. But what could it mean, other than a referendum against the kind of life that we were all living, lives full of small dangers, unnecessary risks, hobbies and habits we all convince ourselves are safe, or safe enough?

Our friend was a brave guy. That’s one of the qualities that always struck me most about him. Without a hint of apprehension, he would do all kinds of things that to me seemed pretty scary: travel to China to study kung fu, practice crazy jumping back flips, spar on a raised platform with no protective gear, move to Guatemala on a moment’s notice when his ailing mother needed help, and, regularly, get on his skateboard and fly down Monte Vista, a street so steep it’s difficult to walk down without stumbling.

I had often been inspired by his bravery. When he returned from China during a time that I had been feeling ambivalent about sparring, the stories of his trip motivated me to face up to difficult challenges. Watching how easily he could pack up his life and travel, I reminded myself not to get too attached to my routines. If he can do it, I would tell myself, it must not be so bad.

His death reminded me of another one that occurred five years ago, when my coworker’s sixteen-year-old daughter flew off her dirt bike, which she was riding with her father, and suffered a fatal injury to one of her internal organs. I didn’t know her very well, but after she died, I learned she was another brave person, someone who, like my friend, inspired people around her to try to be braver themselves.

Just after she died, her mother told me that her friends were keeping her MySpace page as a memorial, and when I went to look at it, in addition to about a thousand heartbreaking messages from distressed teenagers, I saw her brief self-description, which included this:

I love my dirt bike, even though I seem to fall off it all the time!

The eerie foreshadowing of these words chilled me when I read them. Could she have known, I asked myself? As with my skateboarding friend, I imagined for a moment that she had chosen her death, or that it had been somehow fated. It just seemed so unlikely that she would specifically mention the falling off; why would she say that, if she hadn’t anticipated what it would come to mean?

Then I thought about the potential for creepy omens on my own online presences: so many jokes about getting beat up, getting hit in the face, so many pictures of injuries and bruises. It seems impossibly far-fetched that any of this would lead me to serious physical harm, just as the falls must have seemed reasonably safe to her. And they were; she was just really, really unlucky in how she fell. We can all be unlucky, whether getting thrown by a dirt bike or kneed a little too hard in the face or hit by a runaway bus as we cross the street. So it’s back to the car accident comparison. Are these deaths, which seem so particularly haunted, the result of the same kind of wrong-place-wrong time bad luck that causes people to die on the freeway or in the shower?

Is that the only lesson, I wondered, as I thought about these two deaths? That same old lesson we’ve always known, that you never know when it will be your time to go, that it can happen any time, in any way, for seemingly no reason at all? And if the brave people go and get killed doing things that are supposed to be safe, what lesson does that teach the rest of us? The implied message seems to be that maybe it’s not a good idea to be so brave—but that’s hardly an acceptable lesson to take from the lives of people who inspired those around them to be adventurous and take risks.

I looked back at the girl’s MySpace page this week, which would have been her twenty-first birthday. I saw that her friends are still writing notes to her on it, five years later. They tell her about their problems, and tell her that she is an inspiration to them, how they think of her as they enter scary new phases of their lives, starting college, moving away from home, dating. Some of them say that they imagine her as she would be now, as a young adult, and they look to her for wisdom about decisions in their own lives.

I reread her self-description and saw something I had missed last time. Below the part about falling off her dirt bike, it said that she loved softball and basketball, and, she noted, that she loved to play “full contact—it’s more interesting that way!” If I saw those words five years ago, I didn’t remember them, though if her accident had occurred during one of those sports, these words would have seemed as foreboding as the ones about her dirt bike. It turns out, she wasn’t psychic regarding her own untimely demise. She was just a brave girl who loved to do scary, exhilarating things, just as my skateboarding friend did.

The lesson I will keep with me from my friend is the same lesson I always learned from him, which is to be brave. I though at first that his death negated this message in some way, that it showed that taking risks does not pay off. But now, like the young adults seeking strength and guidance from their friend’s memory on MySpace, I feel inspired by my friend’s memory to be braver, even about the prospect of my own death. My friend did so many things that I found terrifying, and when he did them, they came easily, fearlessly, effortlessly. Death is far less scary to me now that he has gone through it. I think to myself, if he did it, it must not be so bad.

Adam Caldwell's drawing of Joseph in the hospital.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Joseph and Monica, both greatly missed.

Wikipedia

2010-03-07T08:55:00.000-08:00

The student looked at me with a mixture of horror and awe. “But…you’re a teacher,” he said. “I’ve never heard a teacher say that before.”

What did I tell this student that scandalized him so deeply? Did I tell him that school is useless and he might as well drop out and get a job? Did I invite him to smoke marijuana in the parking lot? Did I admit to him that I think that guy in the back row—you know, the one who spends all of class text-messaging—is a total fucking asshole?

No, in fact, what I did was advise him to look up some information on Wikipedia.

But teachers hate Wikipedia, my students say to me whenever I suggest that they use the site.

My students are correct. Teachers discuss Wikipedia with that same edge of sickly distain they direct at all the institutions that are destroying American intellectual life: Reality television. Video games. Christianity. You can just see them shudder a little as they say it.

Just last week I was at a meeting about information competency—in other words, how to find, evaluate, and use information—and the other teachers and librarians there were predictably bashing the online encyclopedia.

“We want students to know where to find good information,” said one teacher.

“Not Wikipedia,” said another. Everybody laughed.

“But there’s lots of good information on Wikipedia!” I said.

Everyone looked at me with patient tolerance, because they’re community college teachers and thus not allowed to show open scorn.

They explained grudgingly that Wikipedia is an okay place to start a research project but not good as a main source, a point that we could all easily agree with.

I know why teachers, and I suppose everyone else, makes fun of Wikipedia: because it’s unreliable. Of course it’s not a good source to cite for a research paper: the authors are anonymous and multiple so there is no accountability for the information in the articles, and incorrect information can be inserted accidentally or intentionally. But it’s a great starting place for all kinds of research projects.

It’s of course useful for finding the kinds of information that could also be found in a print encyclopedia:

I chose John Donne as the subject of my research paper because I really like one of his poems, but I don’t know anything about him—where do I start?

I’m supposed to write a paper on acupuncture, but I don’t even know what that is!

But Wikipedia’s extensiveness and inclusiveness also means it answers questions that would be difficult or impossible to find in a print reference source:

Our team is supposed to debate against Euthanasia, but all we can think of are religious arguments. Are there any other main arguments against assisted suicide?

Who were the pioneers of hardcore punk?

What kinds of awards are given for websites?

Wikipedia is great for finding out information such as this—information that is Internet or pop-culture related, that is very new or frequently changes, that depicts various conflicting viewpoints and thus might be seen as not objective enough for a traditional encyclopedia.

The ongoing ridicule of Wikipedia in American culture seems to me a deep form of self-hatred. I have to imagine that those mocking it still use it on a regular basis; even the librarians can’t be going to print encyclopedias or published articles every time they want to know a small piece of information like the capital of Mongolia or the year Pink Floyd’s album Wish You Were Here came out. I’m an English teacher with the skills to find all kinds of “credible” information, and I use Wikipedia on a daily basis. I hear an interview with an actor or author on the radio; as I listen, I scan Wikipedia to discover what movies the actor was in or what books the author has written. I meet somebody from a country I don’t know much about; Wikipedia tells me a bit about the history and culture of that country. Of course, the information I find is not 100% reliable; but neither is the information in a print encyclopedia, which is certainly less up-to-date and is also prone to author-based error.

Critics of Wikipedia point to its democratic nature as evidence of its badness. They decry it as an affront to the idea of expertise, to the valuing of credible sources of information. But much, or hopefully all, of what can be found on Wikipedia is created by experts. My friend is a biologist with special expertise on a genetic cause of cystic fibrosis; she contributed heavily to the entry on this topic. Another friend used to be in a punk band; she contributed enough information about the band to turn its page from a minimal stub to a full-fledged article. Both of these friends are experts: one in biology, the other in the history of her own band. And in both cases, their respective entries would surely be far more informative, detailed, and factually correct than their counterparts in a traditional encyclopedia, if such articles even exist.

The first time I used Wikipedia was for my job. I was showing the movie Crash (disambiguation: the 2004 film about racial tension in Los Angeles, not the 1996 film about people who are sexually aroused by car accidents) in one of my classes. The class had a lot of students who were recent immigrants, and I anticipated that they would have difficulty following film’s heavy use of slang and American cultural references. I decided that handing out a packet including character descriptions and a scene-by-scene synopsis would help students understand the film; however, I did not want to write them myself. I looked all over the internet, but could only find brief overviews of the film’s plot.

Finally, about to give up, I clicked on that link at the top of my search results page, the link I had been ignoring not only during this search, but during the previous five years since it had first started appearing at the top of every search I did.

So this is the evil Wikipedia, I said to myself, as I scrolled down the page and found, to my delight, exactly what I had been looking for. I printed the page and copied it for my students, saving myself approximately two hours of scanning through the movie, writing down all the details of its plot and characters. Needless to say, I was thrilled, and I began touting the wonders of Wikipedia to my students the very next day, as I handed out photocopies to my students.

Even in this early encounter, rife as the page was with awkward sentence structure and typos, I was viewing the work of an expert: in this case, one or more people who saw the movie and had the patience to write down the plot, which was all the expertise I required.

I have loved Wikipedia ever since. What I love about it most is that it centralizes the knowledge of all of these different types of experts: the scientist, the band member, the movie fan. These experts are everywhere, laying low, not admitting or even knowing that they are experts. But if, ten minutes before class, I want a list of the characters in the movie we’re about to discuss, or if, at eleven at night, I get curious what spin-off bands were created by the members of Spitboy, they are the best experts I could ask for.

The Dorks

2010-02-23T23:30:00.000-08:00

The dorks hang out in a small dining room off the the side of the Las Pecinas cafeteria. At any hour of the day you’ll find them there, filling up the little square tables across from the vending machines—dorks of all shapes and colors and ages and sizes.

It seems as though every table has at least one laptop; more often, there are several competing laptops, their owners conversing over the tops of their unfolded screens. But upon closer inspection one table does not bear a computer. The occupants of this table are spreading a colorful pack of ornate playing cards across its surface like a tarot reading.

They are debating loudly whenever I go in there. Their tone is urgent and impassioned, but I don’t understand what they’re saying. It’s heavy with dork jargon, like, “The way Voltaic Key works with the Phyrexian Colossus is classic,” or “For a good Tank who is watching the mana level of the Healer, it can be even MORE annoying because the DPS getting the group into combat again just further slows down the Healer from regaining mana and allowing the group to move forward with speed.” I sometimes try to memorize snippets of their conversations so I can investigate what it is that they are arguing about, but it’s like trying to recite a sentence in a language you’ve never heard before. By the time I get back to my office, the syllables in my head are all garbled and the words are out of order.

I love the dorks, and these showy debates are one of the main reasons. Las Pecinas is a college, yet the side room is one of the only places where I hear the sounds I associate with college, students obsessed with some intellectual principle, defending it with all the unwarranted zealotry of the newly converted.

I seldom hear this sort of fervor from the student body at large. As I traverse the campus, I pass homogeneous groups of students: three tall boys in basketball jerseys, two white girls in tight leggings and sheepskin boots, four Afghani women in headscarves. What I overhear of their conversations is seldom academic in nature, and never sounds like a debate. They are often talking about their plans for the weekend, whether they will go to the club. Or they are discussing one of their friends: I totally can’t stand her boyfriend! Often what I hear is offensive: What a retard! Dude, that’s so gay. I was like, if you’re not gonna learn English you should just go back to Mexico.

The most academic-sounding discussions I hear are when they assess their classes or teachers: That test was hella hard, or Yeah, my econ teacher’s okay but she’s kind of scattered. The most serious students seem to be accounting their progress through their course requirements: I have two more bio classes to go, and then I can transfer.

The odd times that I pass a student saying something like, I don’t know if I can support socialism, or But are people always entitled to freedom of speech, I want to hug the speaker, even if I disagree entirely with his or her views. You have an opinion, I want to congratulate them! Welcome to college!

It seems that many of the students at my school have some of that high-schoolish distance from what they are learning that is the hallmark of compulsory education. It is no wonder that students sometimes call Las Pecinas thirteenth grade. The students are sweet and earnest and hard-working, but they often seem to regard their courses as a series of hurdles rather than a body of information.

The subjects that the dorks are debating are not usually academic either, other than the occasional snippet of what sounds like computer science. But they are the closest thing that I regularly hear to that impassioned intensity of thought that to me means college.

The very fact that there are dorks, that this social category exists, that they can be located to one corner of the cafeteria, speaks to the high-schoolishness of my college. I always thought one of the best innovations of the transition into college is that the cliquey social distinctions of high school ease up. At a place where everyone is there to learn, ostracizing some people because they are too passionate about knowledge—because they discuss it too loudly, because the knowledge they enjoy is too esoteric—seems declassee.

In fact, it seems that being a dork is the very reason somebody should come to college. Isn’t college a place where people are supposed to care too much—about medieval history, the phonetic system of native African languages, distant corners of the galaxy, particles too small to be seen in a regular microscope? About transcendentalism, existentialism, Sufism, phenomenology? Shouldn’t all of the students be shouting loudly about something no one else understands, making fools of themselves? Shouldn’t the vending machine room extend beyond the walls of the cafeteria, through the library and the classrooms and the quads and the parking lots, to every place where there are college students?

Tea and Coffee

2010-02-06T09:51:00.001-08:00

Today on the radio I heard a song about the decadent pick-up scene on tour after a rock concert. It includes these lyrics:

I’m just sipping on chamomile,
Watching boys and girls and the sex appeal.

I will be uncool enough to admit that I really like this line; I have several times listened to the entirety of the rather silly song just to hear it repeated in the chorus. It paints an image that is very familiar and very appealing to me: surrounded by lasciviousness, the singer is removed, her beverage a dowdy contrast to the flirtatious behavior around her.

This image makes me think about how I feel when I drink tea, which is something I do a lot—in fact, something I am doing right this very moment, and most of the moments I write this blog, which I usually do at a tea shop. It is fitting to drink tea while writing essays. Tea is about laying low, distance, contemplation. It is not aggressive; it is subtle and civilized. It is the drink of countries with kings and queens, or emperors, a drink that calls for a Zen garden to be designed around it, for a polite mid-afternoon snack to bear its name. It is the drink of calm tradition, of order and reason.

In the song, the singer is drinking herbal tea, which is not even really tea—this is the ultimate in contemplative detachment, not even an actual drug, just herbs steeped in water.

I drink tea every day, many times a day: strong black tea in the morning, astringent herbal teas throughout the day, grassy green tea at night when I need to keep working. Almost all of it is thin and light, neutral hot water stained so slightly with a tinge of vegetation.

The coffee I used to drink each morning was completely different. I would slap myself awake with its bitterness, like a scalding hot shower, the only thing sharp enough to cut through the haze of sleep. If you are addicted to coffee, it tastes like something you need. It has the richness of a blood tonic, thick and dark like beet juice, like a hot cup of bitter, slightly poisonous blood.

Tea is quiet about everything, including its cultural significance; it is easy to forget that it exists. Coffee, on the other hand, screams its significance with a voice as shrill as its harsh, bitter flavor. It is an icon, as overloaded with cultural meaning as chocolate and whiskey and wine. It represents the mind’s power to manipulate the body, to defy the body’s needs to for sleep and calmness and rest. It magnifies stress instead of relieving it. The fact that it is bad for us gives it a sense of nonconformity—and yet it is the sanctioned fuel that powers our culture of overwork, the one drug our employers will give us for free.

I stopped drinking coffee almost three years ago. My office-mate at work coincidentally stopped around the same time. But before that, she used to set her coffee maker to have a pot brewing as we walked in the door in the morning. I remember how the smell would hit us as we walked into the little office, how we would grab our cups and sink into our chairs and stare at our computers and groan, “Mmm, coffee.”

Now when I walk into the office, it smells like the little pots of tea she brews on the small industrial desk we use as a beverage cart. Often the office is steamy with lavender from her Earl Grey. I drink strong English Breakfast from tea bags. Everything is calm and manageable. We still need to drug ourselves into wakefulness and workfulness, but now we do so in a way that, we reason, is healthy, full of antioxidants, possibly prolonging our lives and keeping us from getting colds and infections—possibly. We are civilized, and we have grown up.

Needles

2010-01-18T17:03:00.000-08:00

The other day I watched my friend Samantha get a tattoo. She got to talking with the tattoo artist about his clients’ various bad reactions to the tattooing process.

“I had one lady scream so much I had to stop working on her,” he said, guiding what looked like a small electric drill over the lines he had drawn in ink on her arm. His own arms were fully encased with twisting patterns of red and black. “She just kept yelling, ‘Fuck! It hurts so much!’ I was like, sorry, we can’t do this anymore.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Samantha. “I’m an acupuncturist.”

“Oh,” he said knowingly. “So you use needles, too.”

“Yeah, and I have a lady just like that,” she said. “Every time she sees me, she says, ‘You are not going to stick a needle right there.’ And I say, ‘Oh yes I am.’ I have to fight her about it every time. It doesn’t seem worth all the trouble.”

“Oh, but I would be like that, too,” said the tattoo artist. “I hate needles.”

Of course we laughed at him.

“I know, it sounds silly,” he said. “My doctor always makes fun of me when I don’t want to get a shot. He says, don’t you work with needles all day long? And I say, yeah, but not hypodermic needles.” He shuddered a little at his own mention of them.

“Yeah, actually, I hate them too,” said Samantha.

“I hate how long they are,” the tattoo artist said. “And what I especially hate is when they put them in sideways and you can see the needle sliding around under your skin.”

It’s a very human thing to be scared of things that puncture our skin. Most of the shots that we get don’t hurt that much—not any more than banging our heads or stubbing our toes, things we don’t live in terror of—but we just don’t like the principle of having things stuck into our flesh, ruining the illusion that our bodies are permanent and coherent manifestations of our souls and not a bunch of malleable matter, just like everything else.

My cat was not scared of shots at all. Whenever she had to get a shot at the vet, I expected her to cry and protest as the needle was inserted, but she would just look slightly nonplussed; her more violent objections were reserved for the rectal thermometer. When I had to give her subcutaneous fluids at the end of her life, I was far more disconcerted by the needle than she was. She would sit calmly once she resigned herself to the fact that I wouldn’t let her move around, which was the only thing bothering her about the procedure.

When I have to get a shot, however, I anticipate it nervously all day. I had to have a tetanus booster a few months ago, and I was sure it was going to be excruciatingly painful. My previous tetanus shot was fourteen years earlier, when I cut my foot on the filthy driveway of my apartment building. The next morning, at the university clinic, the nurse chastised me for not having come in as soon as I cut myself. Then she reopened the wound on my foot and spent five minutes flushing it out with a hypodermic needle the size of a turkey baster.

Then she gave me the tetanus shot. And then she told me that I looked like I was going to faint, and wouldn’t let me leave until I had consumed a packet of saltines and a little can of juice.

Preparing for my recent tetanus shot, I tried to discount this memory—it couldn’t have been as painful as I remember. But when I told a few coworkers that I was going to the hospital for a tetanus shot, they all said, Oh, I hate that one. That one hurts a lot. They rubbed their upper arms and winced as they remembered.

I was pretty shaky by the time I got to the hospital.

“Why are you so bruised?” the nurse asked me as I pulled up my sleeve to expose my arm. I had several purple spots on my upper arm from being grabbed, and a large round bruise on my bicep where someone’s heel had landed as I tried to catch her side kick.

I was tempted to make a joke about my boyfriend beating me, but then I remembered that I was at a hospital. “That’s from kickboxing,” I said.

“Well, be careful,” said the nurse, rubbing alcohol on my upper arm.

“I don’t like needles,” I told him, as he prepared to stick one into my arm, hoping that he would distract me with some conversation.

“Yeah, nobody likes this shot” he said. I felt a prick on my arm, the smallest little pinch.

“That’s it,” he said. “Not so bad, right?”

“Wait,” he added. “Didn’t you just say you’re a kickboxer? And you’re scared of a little needle?” He started laughing.

I did feel pretty stupid, considering the shot didn’t hurt at all. But I feel better knowing that nobody likes shots, not even people who make their living sticking needles into people.

Well, that is, except for the people who like getting things stuck through their bodies: piercing enthusiasts, masochists, those people who get suspended by ropes through their muscles as a hobby. I assume they like having their bodies cut into for the same reason that most people don’t like it, for the same reason people want to go spelunking or climb up the sides of cliffs or fly in airplanes: because you’re really not supposed to.

Bachelors

2010-01-07T09:40:00.001-08:00

When I showed up at my friend Nelson’s house, his sofa was gone.

“It was really torn up,” he said. “I’m going to get a new one.”

He paused for a moment, hesitating to explain further.

“I’m thinking of getting a leather couch,” he said, a wary tone in his voice, as though he was testing my reaction.

Our other friend, Prospero, looked at me expectantly.

“I have a leather couch,” I said. “I like it.”

“What color is it?” Prospero quizzed me, his voice conveying that my answer would carry some significance.

“Black,” I said.

Prospero furrowed his brow. It seemed that I had given the wrong answer. “Hmm,” said Prospero.

“Why?” I asked.

“Prospero thinks that getting a leather couch means you’re a confirmed bachelor,” said Nelson. “Especially if it’s black.” His tone seemed to indicate that I had invalidated this theory.

Nelson and Prospero are both single, childless men in their forties. I’ve been noticing that virtually all of my older male role models seem to be destined for permanent bachelorhood. They travel a lot by themselves, for work and fun. They have set routines that would make it difficult for them to share their lives with someone else. I gather from comments they make that they sometimes date, but they don’t ever talk about who they are dating or bring the people they are dating around to any social events that I am at.

This is the key element defining bachelorhood: the lack of interest in finding a partner who will be integrated into one’s life in a meaningful way. Wikipedia says that one usage of the term refers to “men who do not have and are not actively seeking a spouse or other personal partner” (my emphasis). In other words, the term suggests not only unmarried status, but a commitment to an ongoing life of singlehood.

Many of my older female role models are single as well. But their attitudes about relationships seem to be different than those of my male friends. So far, my female role models all express the goal of finding someone to be in love with, to spend the rest of their lives with, even when this goal is contradicted by their tendency to date men who do not share it. My friend Loretta is very similar to Nelson and Propero: she is in her forties, independent, owns a house, has an active social life, and is usually dating somebody whom most of her friends don’t know very well or at all. She doesn’t get to be a bachelor, though her gender is one of the only things keeping her from being one. The only other difference is that, unlike my male bachelor friends, she claims to be looking for a permanent partner, though I don’t believe it’s a priority for her.

The distinction between bachelors and unmarried women is that the men are seen as mysterious and independent, while the women are a confusing aberration. Men are given permission for their relationships to not invade the core of their identities. People assume that a bachelor is dating somebody, and that it doesn’t really matter who that person is. But a woman who does not integrate her lover into her social life is seen as sexless (she must not have a lover) or as predatory and masculine (think of Samantha on Sex and the City), a loose woman who, as she enters middle age, will have her own gender-specific term applied to her: cougar, a word that gets applied to women who date younger men, even when the age difference is as small as five years, a gap that is not considered noteworthy if the genders are reversed. As a society, we don’t have a ready-made concept for a mature woman who is single, independent, and sexual.

Women don’t get to be bachelors. We have words like “spinster,” “old maid,” “maiden aunt.” Our decision to remain perpetually single is not glamorous but rather pathetic, a sign of our lack of desirability or sexuality. When entertainment magazines call an older male celebrity like George Clooney a “bachelor,” it adds to his mystique, precisely because of the sense of individualism and even selfishness that it suggests. When they refer to an unmarried woman, like Cheryl Crow, she has simply failed in her attempts to stay with the men who she has been publically connected with.

Why did Prospero associate leather couches with bachelors? Presumably because they have many of the qualities favored by bachelors: they are durable, practical, easy to clean, not fussy, not warm or excessively comfortable. Those are, incidentally, all of the reasons that I enjoy my leather couch.

“I guess I am sort of a bachelor,” I said to Prospero.

Or at least I hope to be one. I’m still at an age—my mid-thirties—where unmarried people are still considered to be not yet married, where we have not entered into the post-childbearing era of confirmed bachelorhood yet. I figure I have until forty or so before I am officially an unmarried lady. I’m hoping by then that the meanings of words will have shifted, and I will get to be a bachelor instead of a spinster.

Swinging the Other Way

2009-12-23T16:26:00.000-08:00

“Your lifestyle is evil,” says the brown-robed monk to the medieval layman. “You must change your ways.”

“But I’ve always been like this,” says the man.

“It is unacceptable to the church,” says the monk.

The punch line of this comic strip, which hangs on the door of the office next to mine, is that the layman is not, as the narrative hints, gay. Rather, he is left-handed. The implied commentary is that Christianity’s condemnation of homosexuality is equally ridiculous as its earlier condemnation of left-handedness.

While the comic strip is set in what appears to be medieval times, the situation it depicts is much less antiquated than that. Both of my grandmothers were naturally left-handed. Both were converted in grade school to writing with their right hands, and they spent the rest of their lives passing as right-handed. My father’s mother wanted me to be similarly converted; I remember her exhorting me to color with my right hand when she would babysit me, until my right-handed parents told her to cut it out.

I really like the comic strip because I have always felt that the gay and the left-handed were natural compatriots. We are a similar sort of minority, a minority based on an unusual behavior or preference rather than something visual like race or cultural like religion. We are aberrations that pop up within a family, whereas most other minorities are raised in a family of others like themselves.

For those whose gayness or left-handedness revealed itself at an early age, both conditions have been attributed variously to genetics, hormone exposure in the womb, and early childhood influences, though none of these connections can be proven absolutely. And just as homosexuality can, for many people, be a conscious choice made in adulthood, so left-handedness can be learned by those not naturally inclined towards it, generally because someone lost the use of his or her right hand.

This issue of innate characteristic versus choice is a high-stakes debate where homosexuality is concerned. George Lakoff points out that liberals tend to see homosexuality as a genetic fact, while conservatives tend to see it as a choice. I ask my students why this would be, and they always figure it out right away:

If something is a choice, then it can be a wrong choice.

I always think the entire premise of the debate is odd, because I have met many gay people who have known they were gay since their earliest memories, and many others who made conscious decisions to become gay in their twenties and thirties because they felt logically that they would have better relationships with people of their same gender (though yes, predictably, these were all women).

Ultimately, whether it is an innate behavior or a conscious choice doesn’t really matter; what matters is that everyone should have the right to do what is most comfortable or desirable for them, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else.

I first discovered being left-handed was an identity category, and an abnormal one, when I joined my first-grade class, a week after school had started (I had been moved from a different class).

“Are you right-handed or left-handed?” the teacher asked me in front of all of my new classmates, immediately after introducing me.

I must have looked confused, because she clarified: “Which hand do you write with?”

I thought about it for a moment and then raised my left hand.

“Great,” she sighed, her voice annoyed. “You’re the only one. Now we’re going to have to order you some scissors.”

Throughout grade school, I faced similar minor persecutions. I was chastised constantly for my poor handwriting, my inadequate scissor-handling skills, my difficulty mirroring moves in gym class that were modeled by a right-handed teacher. In sixth grade, we were required to write in-class essays in erasable pen, which is impossible for left-handed people such as myself, who, due to the enforcement of right-slanting letters in our remedial cursive classes, write with our hands curled above the pen, thereby smearing the runny ink all over the pages and our hands. In what I still think was a really masterful stroke of smart-assed passive aggressiveness, I learned to write upside-down for these in-class essays, a skill I still have to this day.

These inconveniences were small, the same kinds of little indignities that all kids face, but they reinforced the idea that being in the minority was something to minimize, to work around, to avoid inconveniencing others with. As an adult, I have seen so many left-handed people try to learn to kickbox right-handed because they did not want to keep asking for special explanations of how to do things. It seemed easier to just do what everyone else was doing. Some of those people, like me, had teachers who caught their deception and forced them to train left-handed; others trained for years in a less-comfortable stance before attempting to retrain themselves as southpaws.

These kickboxers make me think of my grandmothers spending their entire lives writing with their less-coordinated hand. I think of all the gay people forced to pass as straight through the ages, those who got married and carried on affairs on the side, or perhaps just dreamed of it. I think of all the left-handed people writing and working and doing sports with their non-dominant hands, and how many never reached their full potential as athletes and artisans and even writers because they could not use their more-skilled hand.

The needs of minorities are always seen by the majority as frivolous and inconvenient, whether they are needs for political representation, needs to read about people like ourselves in school, needs to be able to marry our life partner of choice, or even just needs for scissors that have the left blade rather than the right blade on top. We need to stand up for people’s rights to have these needs met, especially when we find ourselves in the majority, when it would be easy enough not to care.

Pesty

2009-12-13T00:22:00.000-08:00

When I woke up on Saturday morning, my cat was already begging to go outside. “Meow,” she said, shooting a meaningful look towards the front door as I passed her on my way to the bathroom.

“Now?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

I live in an apartment building, so my cat can’t wander the halls unsupervised. I didn’t feel like following her around the building; I wanted to sit around, drink tea, and read things on the internet.

“Meow,” she said again, walking briskly from the door to my feet and then back to the door.

“Wait until I make tea,” I said.

A few minutes later, tea in hand, I grudgingly opened the door. Despite all of her expressed urgency, she hesitated to venture out into the hallway once the opportunity became available.

“Out,” I said, pushing her into the hall with the side of my foot.

She put on a little show of being indecisive about where to go, with so many options available. But I knew exactly where she was headed. Soon enough, she had turned towards the staircase. I followed her down the stairs and into the hallway below. She stopped briefly to sniff the crack under the second door before continuing to her ultimate destination, the one she had been visiting faithfully every day for the last two weeks.

It was a greasy-looking spot on the floor between the second and third doors. She stopped, sniffed it, then abruptly threw herself head first onto it, rolling nimbly onto her back as the side of her face hit the ground. She rolled around on the spot for a moment, then regained her composure. She seated herself at the side of the spot and proceeded to sniff it again, her expression contemplative. Her concentration remained unbroken as a large male neighbor came lumbering past her, something that normally would have sent her flying back up the stairs towards home.

“What’s so interesting?” I asked her, leaning against the wall and blowing on my steaming tea. “Did a dog pee there? Did someone’s garbage leak?”

She was too busy to answer me. She stayed in the spot for five minutes with no sign of growing bored, her nose to the ground, while I sipped my tea.

Finally I couldn’t stand it any more.

“That’s plenty,” I said, scooping her up with my non-tea hand. I carried her back upstairs to the apartment, where she immediately began to meow again.

“No,” I said. “Too boring.”

I took my half cup of tea over to my desk and sat in front of my laptop. I sipped it as I replied to an email. Then I logged into Facebook, where I examined a series of photographs that a friend-of-a-friend took on a trip to Italy with her girlfriend. Her girlfriend is cute, I decided.

My cat sat on the floor next to my chair as I clicked through pictures of the cheerful couple riding in a gondola. I think I heard her sigh audibly as she watched me.

My cat Pesty died just before Thanksgiving this year. I wrote this piece about her in September, before I knew just how sick she was. I was lucky to have her for twelve years; she was a wonderful, lovely kitty.

Testing Your Boundaries

2009-11-30T00:10:00.000-08:00

I lay on my stomach on wrestling mats while a strong man pressed what felt like his fist or elbow, or maybe some other kind of blunt weapon, into my lower back, putting the full weight of his body behind it. I tried to focus on breathing, drawing in breaths as deep and regular as I could make them, because this hurt a lot. The spot he was pressing into felt like the precise origin of the nerve that had been cramping up my lower back, tightening my right hip, sending flashes of pain down my calf and into my ankle.

Despite the fact that I had been in almost constant pain for several months, this fist or elbow accessed extra-deep pain that I didn’t realize was hiding there, like the pea under the mattresses, a crippling vulnerability that I did not know I had.

“Hmph,” said the thai massage practitioner, releasing the elbow. “You’ve been testing your boundaries.”

Testing my boundaries? What do you mean?

“Have you been throwing roundhouse kicks?” he asked me.

Of course, I wanted to say, scandalized. I could feel my face conveying my horror. Please, please don’t tell me I can’t throw roundhouse kicks again.

When I had my first encounter with the sciatica, I couldn’t stand upright for a day, could barely walk for a week, couldn’t touch my toes or lift my leg more than two feet off the ground for two months. It was now a month and a half since I had started throwing roundhouse kicks again, and I didn’t know what I would do with myself if he told me I had to stop.

“Yes, but…” I said, about to explain how I was throwing them so carefully, light, not full-power.

“For someone coming off sciatica, it’s pretty risky to be throwing them at all,” he said. “That’s testing your boundaries. Seeing how much you can do before you get injured again.”

I started to protest, to justify my actions: No, no, I was being careful.

“It’s okay, everyone does it,” he said. “Everybody wants to test their boundaries. That’s why we do so much stuff that hurts us.”

I know lots of people who seem perfectly content within their boundaries, who don’t feel the compulsive drive towards self-destructive activities, whether they are "healthy" or "unhealthy." Still, I had to agree that for most people I know who are heavily involved in any athletic activity, there is an element of self-destructiveness driving them. This isn’t just true of martial artists, though the self-destructiveness is a bit more self-evident in their sport. But I’ve seen people pursue hobbies like spinning or Pilates with equal reckless abandon, working out through colds, flus, bad backs, sprained shoulders.

My friend Julian plays soccer with a compulsiveness that could easily be called an addiction. He continues to play through all sorts of injuries that should rightfully preclude him from athletic activity, not just a game here and there, but all-day marathons. His Facebook updates regularly look something like: Supposed to be resting my hurt knee. Playing three games today, two scheduled and one sub.

It’s an addiction, certainly. But at least it’s a healthy addiction, people tell me, usually after pointing out that running sprints in between two kickboxing classes might be seen as a bit compulsive.

One common definition of addiction is behavior that we cannot or will not stop, despite its negative consequences. Are our twisted knees and sprained ankles and wrenched backs and broken toes and fingers negative enough consequences to counteract all the positive outcomes of our training? Are our healthy addictions really so different than all of our other types of compulsive boundary testing?

My adorable punker student Miranda was complaining about one of her friends:

“I hate going out with Sammy because she just wants to get drunk. I keep trying to explain that I don’t do that,” Miranda says.

“You don’t drink at all?” I ask her.

“No, I don’t see the point,” she said. “Sammy is like, ‘Let’s get a bottle of chartreuse and drink the whole thing.’ And I say, ‘That’s going to make you throw up.’ And Sammy smiles and says, ‘That’s okay.’ And I’m like, ‘Really? That’s what you want? Really?’ I don’t get it.”

It’s good that she doesn’t get it, but I do, and there’s a good chance that you do, too. All too clearly, I remember that drive to drink myself half-unconscious, the weird unlikely pleasure of stumbling around like a half-witted idiot, of feeling poison in my body that was not quite enough to make me sick, but almost.

When I began doing martial arts, I suddenly lost all interest in drinking. The reason was not, as my friends presumed, because I needed to be rested and healthy for my workouts, although that was certainly a concern. Instead, the part of my psyche that had decided that semi-oblivious intoxication was a great idea was now sated. Throwing roundhouse kicks by the hundreds, continuous punches for minutes on end, running on a treadmill after class when I was so tired that even walking was difficult, getting punched in the face and kicked in the leg and slammed to the ground—these activities seemed to satisfy the same need for self-punishment and sickness that drinking previously had.

Miranda has approximately eight piercings in her face and ears, several tattoos, and is considering getting designs branded into her skin.

“Do you think your friend enjoys drinking the way you enjoy getting piercings?” I ask her.

She wrinkles her nose skeptically. “Maybe,” she says, indulging me.

She might disagree, but it seems to me that the negative consequences are part of the appeal of so much that we do. Why else do we work out until we’re sick and broken? Why do we poke holes through our bodies and inject ink under our skin? Why do we purposely cultivate unnaturally large muscles, drink poison for fun, eat chemicals that make us hallucinate, follow strangers home from the bar, work until 5 a.m., drive down country roads at 120 miles per hour, pick fights with people we care about, breathe in burning smoke to help us “relax,” fall in love with people who make us miserable? Why would we hurt ourselves if it didn’t make us feel good?

This illustration is a drawing I did during my first year of martial arts training, depicting my love-hate relationship with bruises.

Being Aggressive

2009-11-15T22:03:00.000-08:00

A girl comes flying in at me, her arms whirling like a pinwheel, throwing punches and kicks all at the same time, a writhing ball of fury and rage.

What did I do to this girl again? I search my mind for some past offense. Did I make fun of her poor arithmetic skills back in fifth grade? Or did I unwittingly erect a shopping mall on top of her ancestral homeland? Did she think I was flirting with her boyfriend? Because I definitely wasn’t, but you know how some girls get. Or maybe she overheard me making a dismissive comment about her pink boxing gloves…

Oh right—this girl wants to beat me up because we are in a kickboxing tournament. So I suppose that’s her job. Come to think of it, wanting to beat her up is my job, too.

Why did I want this job again?

In the moments before this fight, I thought: I am going to lose, and I don’t care at all. Actually, that sentiment might be backwards. What I was really thinking was, I don’t care at all, and so I am going to lose.

I knew that’s a bad way to think, so I began saying a mantra to myself: Want to win, want to win. It wasn’t a statement but a command. You need to want to win.

I felt like I was faking wanting to win through the entire fight. I knew that body kicks were supposed to score the most points, so I thought, You want to win, so throw more body kicks. I made sure that every time my opponent threw any punch or kick, I would throw one or two body kicks in return.

That should be enough to win this thing, I thought, counting up the kicks. Because I want to win.

But this girl wasn’t counting her kicks. I’m not sure what she was thinking, actually. She was flying around so quickly that she never planted enough to hit me with anything that hurt at all. So I don’t know if she was really trying to hurt me—if that were her goal, she probably could have done it. (And I don't say that to dismiss her abilities, because I wasn't trying to hurt her, either). But she definitely wanted to win, wanted it with all her being; every movement manifested desire to dominate, to aggress, to be the best, to be on top.

This desire for dominance is perhaps something I just don’t have in me. I love “friendly” sparring, with my friends or with strangers. I love seeing if I can keep up with an opponent, seeing if I can withstand whatever that opponent throws at me, figuring out ways to trick that opponent into opening himself--or occasionally herself--up for a kick or punch.

I don’t know if those feelings will ever translate into me being a good competitor. I do get angry and competitive when I spar sometimes, usually when I feel like someone is hurting me. That never happened during my fight. I never felt scared, hurt, attacked, all the things I am used to feeling during my regular sparring with people who are bigger and stronger than me. I felt more annoyed, irritated, like being poked over and over by an annoying twelve-year-old playmate.

I had anticipated that once something hurt, my desire to hurt my opponent back would kick in. That’s what fighters always tell you: You think you don’t want to throw hard punches at this person, until he starts throwing hard punches at you.

I have experienced this enough times in my training, times when I was terrified, when I felt, with good reason, that someone was trying to hurt me. The thought that always comes into my head at these moments is: I am going to fucking kill you.

I've always thought I would be scared of my competitor in a tournament, and always expected that this desire to kill would be a central feature of any competition I did, for better or for worse. But that self-defensive rage never kicked in during my fight against this 106 pound ball of antagonism. I mean really, can’t we settle this in some more civilized manner? Why am I fighting you again? I felt completely calm, logical, aloof. That’s actually how I had wanted to feel, and I had worked very hard on being calm and collected as I approached the tournament. Unfortunately, being calm and collected may not actually be the best way to goad oneself into an irrational fury.

The worst part about my want to win mantra is that I then did feel angry and upset when I lost. But I was counting, I thought, indignantly. I threw like a million body kicks! If I just needed to look more aggressive to win, I wouldn’t have bothered throwing all those kicks.

Being disappointed that you lost is the most horrible part of not wanting to win enough, because then your not wanting to win seems like the most pitiful sort of sour grapes: well, I didn’t want to win anyway. So really, I am not sure if I did or didn’t. But I do know what I thought as I watched my opponent jumping up and down before each round began, barely able to contain herself, as I stood waiting quietly: Whatever she’s feeling over there that’s making her act that way, I can’t imagine feeling like that.

One of my teachers told me that I needed to do at least one more competition. “You need to do one more so that you can win,” he said.

“I won’t win,” I said. “If I’m doing it just to win, I’ll lose, and then I’ll have to keep doing them and it will just make me lose more and more.”

“Don’t think like that!” he chastised me.

But it’s true, or at least I can’t see any other truth at the moment. I know this is not a particularly objective or logical moment, a week after this fight, when I am trying to process what it meant and how to think about it. And I know that these conflicting feelings are part of the point of competing, that it is supposed to teach us deep lessons about who we are and what our place in the world is. Right now, I feel my place in the world is not in a competition or a performance, not testing myself in some formalized public way, or that if I do so, it’s only for what I got from this, which was some really helpful video footage that I can study to improve my sparring. Right now, I feel that I will always lose, because I just can’t imagine wanting to win enough to make it happen.

One of my favorite things I got from this fight are the photographs my friend Amy took of me, with perfect lighting for drawing. And yes, I did this one myself, with heavy coaching from Adam. I have been working on my coachability.

Being Skinny

2009-11-02T12:00:00.001-08:00

For the last few months, I have been having an experience that I gather would be envied by most adult Americans; I have been losing weight without trying to. A few small changes to my diet and exercise regimen have had the inordinate effect of causing me to drop about ten pounds, which is almost eight percent of my former body weight.

This weight loss has exposed me to something else that I wasn’t pursuing: unsolicited approval from casual acquaintances. This is especially true at one of my kickboxing schools, where I have been receiving a number of compliments.

A sweet but slightly unhinged middle-aged woman who takes every chance she gets to try to knock my head off with wide, looping haymaker punches appears behind me as I am warming up and pats me on the shoulder.

“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” she says, smiling, as I turn to face her.

“I suppose,” I mumble back, embarrassed at being complimented for this.

She smiles encouragingly at me. “You look good,” she adds, before heading off to grab a jump rope.

A friendly young kickboxer stops me on my way out of the gym. “You’ve really slimmed down,” he says.

I nod and shrug, not sure how else to respond.

“You’re not psyched about it?” he asks me.

“I wasn’t really trying to lose weight,” I reply.

Now he looks unsure of how to respond. We are clearly speaking different languages.

“Well, you look really fit,” he says finally.

This is a compliment that I can comfortably, even happily accept. “Thanks,” I say.

Of course, I have to appreciate their desire to say nice things about my physique; still, a part of me is tempted to respond with snotty answers:

I just got over pneumonia.
I have cancer.
I have an eating disorder.

After all, it seems to me a bold assumption that a person who has lost weight a) did so intentionally, b) did so in a healthy fashion, and c) is happy about it.

I’ve never felt good about being complimented on my weight, and I don’t compliment other people on theirs. Weight is bound to fluctuate, so the backhanded compliment is always implied: you look good now, but when you gain that weight back you won’t look as good.

The praise that I have been getting communicates to me that I needed to lose weight, which I don’t believe I did. Ten pounds ago, I was far from overweight; I was what most people would call thin, curvy, and athletic in build. I ate an extremely healthy and light diet, my weight was smack-dab in the middle of the “normal” BMI range, and I trained vigorously about fifteen hours per week.

I wasn’t trying to lose weight, nor have I ever tried to lose a significant amount of weight as an adult. The changes in diet and exercise were just to increase my fitness level, adding daily pull-ups, increasing my running speed, cutting some starch out of my diet. These were all things that I have done in the past, for limited periods of time; but for reasons I am not totally sure about, right now seems to have been the perfect time for these changes to stick. I can understand that I look fitter at this weight, but I resent the implicit suggestion that I was significantly less fit, or really less acceptable in any way, at my previous weight.

Perhaps the greatest reason I am not “psyched” is because I don’t feel that I necessarily look better at a lower weight. I have been enjoying looking more muscular and less soft, but I’m not sure this look is what I’d call attractive, at least not in any feminine sort of way. I associate my own skinniness with hard work, self-discipline, and a certain level of deprivation. Ever since I was a teenager, I have noticed that I am sexually validated for being skinny, yet I feel more ascetic and disembodied at my lowest weight. My figure is too spare to be sexy--my chest and hips are smaller, and my clothing floats around me like it's on a clothes hanger.

When I think of the woman and men I find attractive, they generally have a decent portion of body fat covering their nice, limber, hard-earned muscles. Sexuality seems like it should be associated with appetite, with indulgence, not with plain beans and steamed kale.

A friend of mine wrote an article once discussing women’s feelings of inadequacy when they compare themselves to models in fashion magazines. She urged women to think of these “perfect” models as objects of attraction, and to ask themselves: Am I attracted to this skinny, fashionable, painted woman? If not, what kind of women am I attracted to?

My own answer was easy: strong women, physically and mentally, smart women, creative women, women with wicked, clever facial expressions, brave women, women who are as wonderful with a BMI of 27 as they are with a BMI of 18.5.
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Thanks to Sondra Gates for letting me use the drawing of She-Hulk, which she purchased at an auction benefitting breast cancer research. I was especially excited to learn where she got the drawing, since one of my favorite strong, brave, and creative women is currently undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and yet somehow manages to throw crazy scary hooks and roundhouse kicks every week.

Messing Up

2009-10-25T21:27:00.000-07:00

As I walked through the Las Pecinas College library last week, I saw a student sitting with a drawing pad in his lap, holding his left hand suspended in a fixed pose over the paper.

His bodily position looked a bit odd to me, but also uncannily familiar. I realized that he was drawing his own hand, which is something that I’ve also been doing a lot lately. My friend Adam has been teaching me to draw, and a person’s own hand is one of the best things to draw, because it allows the student to work on showing planes and angles and foreshortening and, more importantly, it’s always available.

I looked down at the student’s pad, and was disheartened to see that the hand on his paper was way better than those I’ve been drawing. The lines were crisp, assertive, conveying a confident sense of the shape and bulk and gesture of the hand.

In contrast, my lines have a quality that I have seen described as labored. That’s a good term for them. It’s obvious, looking at the heavy, jagged borders of my drawings that I dragged my pencil over them slowly, painstakingly, agonizing over each minute change of direction.

I like to carve my lines in little tiny increments, like frosting a cake, manipulating and smoothing them as I go. This technique feels comfortable, but it’s all wrong. It produces lines that are cramped and fussy. “Don’t hen-peck your lines,” Adam says, standing over me as I draw. “Stop scratching at them.”

If I were writing, the lines I am drawing would be an overuse of adjectives, or flowery description, or excessively quippy narration: they draw attention to the creator of the drawing rather than to the drawing itself. A viewer shouldn’t be noticing the lines of my drawing any more than he should be thinking, “Check out that descriptive language!” when he reads a novel. Instead he should be thinking: there’s a hand.

I know that I need to learn to make the beautiful, confident lines that Adam urges me to create. But when I try, my drawings become distorted and misshapen, because my lines, while assertive, are in the wrong place. That’s the difficulty with being assertive about something that you are just learning; you may be asserting the wrong thing.

“It doesn’t matter,” Adam says. “No amount of drawing hen-pecky lines will teach you to draw a good line. You have to draw the good lines even if they’re wrong.”

That’s the problem with learning confidence: before you earn it, you have to fake it. It’s like wrestling. To execute a take-down, you have to shoot in with confidence, even if that confidence is completely unwarranted. For somebody who has great respect for wisdom and experience, it feels counterintuitive to assume a position of confidence when I know there is perhaps an eighty percent likelihood that I am going to screw the move up.

Luckily, I have now studied enough art forms to know that it’s often necessary to mess things up in order to make them better.

It’s like in kickboxing. You can tell a kickboxer again and again to fix her roundhouse kick, but she won’t want to. Step out, you’ll say. No, in that direction. She steps out properly once, twice. The third time, she reverts back to her old footwork. That’s because the new footwork, while technically superior, doesn’t let her throw the kick as hard, doesn’t feel as balanced and comfortable, can’t be done as quickly. Some day, the new footwork will make her kick twice as hard, but not without a period of frustrating awkwardness.

I’ve been that kickboxer a dozen times, not wanting to mess up my roundhouse kick in order to fix it. I remember throwing kicks at a pad, and I was throwing them hard, I thought, based on the gratifying banging noise my leg was making against the pad. But the holder of the pad pointed at my front arm and said, “You’re dropping that arm every time you throw the kick,” which meant that my face was unprotected for a moment.

Fixing my mistake prevented me from getting the same momentum into my hips. As I practiced with my hands properly blocking my face, my kicks became lighter, quieter, less gratifying. It took me months to regain the same force, although I finally did, and now my hands were in the correct position.

One of the other things I have learned about mistakes is that they are never new. I now know that my small hand drop is a common mistake, one that I see many experienced kickboxers make when they are trying to get extra power into their kicks. We flatter ourselves to think that our mistakes are novel and that we are disappointing our teachers through our unprecedented errors. But errors are predictable, as is our perception that they are unique.

When I started to do yoga, I would always cross my legs the wrong way in one particular pose. “Why do I always do that?” I asked, when my teacher had corrected me for the third week in a row.

Now, throughout the several years I have studied yoga, I have heard my teacher make the same correction countless times, to countless new students. And about fifty percent of the time, the corrected student reacts just as I did, down to the word: “Why do I always do that?” the student asks aloud.

These students are like me, wondering why they would reverse their leg position, lacking the perspective to recognize the answer: because everybody does that.

My students do the same thing, berating themselves for the same difficulties and mistakes that I have seen in a thousand student essays, including my own.

“I can never figure out how much to summarize the plot,” says a student writing about a novel. “I always put in way too much summary.”

Everybody does that, I tell the student. It’s not just you. You’re not the only one who writes vague or confusing thesis statements, who cannot find any way express an abstract, complex idea except through a grotesquely gnarled and winding sentence, who struggles with the transition from one paragraph to the next, who gets to the end of the essay only to realize that you now believe the opposite of what you originally set out to argue. These are the same difficulties writers have faced throughout history, since the dawn of time—the same clichés that will negatively affect their writing in the following areas: clarity, originality, and the ability to make critical arguments—the same opportunities that have been handed down to us as a gift from those who came before us and have made all of our mistakes a thousand times over.

Now the student will need to go back through his essay, clearing out the extraneous plot summary in each paragraph and replacing it with fresh, healthy argumentation. It will take a lot of work, and he’ll lose over a page of hard-earned writing that he was counting on to meet his four-page minimum. But when he turns in those final four pages, they will be stronger for the loss, free of sloppy lines, assertive and accurate and confident.

Woman as Sexual Dictator

2009-10-08T20:57:00.000-07:00

So few women recognize the power that they hold over men. If women only realized how badly men wanted them, they would use their sexuality to get whatever they want.

A particular country-inflected pop star has been in the news as often for the fluctuations in her weight as for her musical successes. She was the darling of the entertainment magazines when she lost about ten pounds off of her already slim figure in order to have the tightest possible buttocks for a role in a movie that required her to wear tiny shorts. She was then chastised heartily by the same magazines when, several years later, she gained over ten pounds, bringing her five-foot three-inch frame from a svelte 110 pounds to a “chubby” 124 pounds.

She eventually lost that weight, but then recently made the cover of virtually every major entertainment magazine because, at a recent performance, she looked to have gained about twenty pounds. All of the photographs on the magazines were from the same single performance, as though she had only gained the weight for that one day. Now she has lost much of that weight, although one magazine recently noted that she was so distraught of the unexpected death of her dog that she had “stopped losing weight.”

Of course, by regular-people standards, this woman has never been close to overweight. Her low weight of 110 pounds, according to the body mass index (which is just a fancy name for a height/weight ratio), was at the low end of the “normal” range, while her gained-twenty-pounds weight of 135 puts her at 23, near the top of that normal range.

And BMI aside (it’s a poor judge of healthy weight at any rate), in the normal world, a 135-pound, five-foot-three-inch woman is what we would consider average.

I think of this woman, of her rise to hotness glory and her fall from hotness grace, whenever I hear people say that women have a deep, untapped source of power stemming from the fact that men want to have sex with them.

I’ve heard tell of this mystical power for as long as I can remember. I raged over it in my teenaged journals: this power that isn’t power at all, the power not to do something but of somebody wanting to do something to you, power that can turn on you at any moment and leave you ugly, undesirable and humiliated.

Now with more perspective, I’m still skeptical about my potential ability to lord despotically over men based on my chromosomes and anatomy.

As power goes, it’s a backwards sort of power, in the sense that it is conferred by the person who is supposed to be the subject of that power. When a dictator takes power over a nation, he does not need the approval of the people that he will lord over. If a Mafioso has the power to kill you and your family if you don’t seat him at the table he wants at your restaurant, your decision that this power is not real or valid will not change the reality of the situation.

So I suppose that sexual power is more like a democracy, where power is given willingly and can be taken away at will also. In a democracy, a leader must cater to the wishes and whims of his constituents, and that changes the kind of power that he has, which is why we more often call it service than power.

Likewise, the woman who wants to use her sexuality as power must cater to the whims of the men she seeks to dominate, in this case, maintaining her sexual desirability, which often lies in inverse proportion to her domineering nature. So for example, if a girlfriend wants to use her sexual power to make her boyfriend clean the apartment once in a while, he may just decide to cast his vote for a new challenger in place of the incumbent.

If a woman wants to wield her sexuality as power, and you decide that you don’t want to have sex with her to start with, her power is gone, instantly, and she is disgraced. Take the example of the famous pop star. As long as she weighs 110 pounds and wears tiny shorts, she is at the pinnacle of feminine power. But when she weighs 135 pounds and wears an unfortunate pair of unflattering jeans, she is humiliated, a laughing stock, she has let herself go, despite the fact that she is considerably slimmer than the average American woman.

When people talk about women’s sexual power, they are fantasizing that women could have dictator-like power over men, when in fact, at the very best, she is more like a civil servant.

This myth of woman as sexual dictator comes from the fantasy that male desire could be bottled and put to some use. I imagine the thought process, at least for men, goes something like this:

I am soooo attracted to Woman X and Woman Y and Woman Z. I don’t think those women could have any idea how much I desire them. But if they knew, they could use it against me in some way. And I wouldn’t even mind, because it would be erotically thrilling to have my desire used against me.

But of course, the power of Woman X, Woman Y, and Woman Z only comes from the fact that this fellow, Man XY, cannot be with them. The moment Woman X became the lover of Man XY, Woman Y and Woman Z’s power would skyrocket.

Not to mention Woman Q, who has been admiring man XY for years, but is not his type. She has no power over Man XY at all. Which is too bad, because she’s the only one who really wants it.

It reminds me of a scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Before Paul D. has sex with Sethe, he finds the web of scars on her back to be irresistibly compelling—a living, breathing tree growing on her back, calling to him with its powerful life force. But as soon as he has sex with her, it devolves into a grotesque, seething injury.

So as compelled as we are by the myth of the all-powerful pussy, this power is as ephemeral and undefined as the power of the British royalty, as unwieldy a weapon as those F-22 stealth jets whose production was halted because they couldn’t fly well in the rain. It is cotton-candy power, sweet and tempting until you put it in your mouth, at which point it disappears.

The Heavens

2009-09-29T18:57:00.000-07:00

My friend Adam is a skeptic. He doesn’t believe in unseen, unprovable phenomina like conspiracy theories, ghosts, or gods. If he’s going to believe in something, he wants empirical proof.

One day when we were talking, I mentioned something about horoscopes. “You don’t actually believe in that, do you?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure how to answer. If he was asking whether I believe that people’s personalities are shaped by celestial patterns, that all people born on a particular day, or even during the same month, would share a set of identifiable traits based on the position of the planets—then no. If he was asking whether I believe that knowing somebody’s astrological sign affords some worthwhile insight into his or her personality—then, I suppose, yes.

I’ve always been interested in astrology and horoscopes, and it seemed dense of me that I had never thought about whether I actually believed in them. They’ve always just been there, like Democrats and Republicans, black, white, Asian and Latino people, like terriers and schnauzers, and every other useful but probably fictitious categories we classify things and people by.

Horoscopes had always been one of my ways of understanding all sorts of personal relationships, starting with my family. My mother and sister are a Cancer and Pisces, respectively, both signs known for their emotionalism and sensitivity. My father, on the other hand, is a Virgo, a logical, Mr. Spock kind of sign. My own sign, Gemini, represents duality, which seemed to explain my status as the peacemaker between the two factions.

Our professions also reflect these traits. My emotional mother is an artist, while my logical father is a computer engineer. My sensitive sister is a psychologist. And I, the mediator, am an English teacher, which means that my job is largely to help people with different viewpoints and perspectives to communicate with one another.

My first serious boyfriend was a Virgo, born on the same date as my father. After we broke up, I looked up our compatability in a book my roommate owned called Love by the Stars. The book said the following about Gemini-Virgo couples:

You are joined by your mutual interest in intellectual pursuits. However, aside from that fundamental similarity, you are not naturally compatible. The Gemini will perceive the Virgo as uptight, rigid, and overly serious, while the Virgo will find the Gemini to be flighty, disorganized, and prone to silly distractions.

I couldn’t believe it; the description seemed to have been written by someone who knew me and my ex-boyfriend personally. It turned out that my next relationship, with yet another logical, serious Virgo, followed this pattern as well.

How could I not believe in astrology, after all of this evidence of its predictive and explanatory powers? And yet how could I believe in something so patently untrue, from a strictly empirical point of view?

Reflecting on these patterns, I realized that they are less a belief than a mythology, a pattern more literary or symbolic than scientific. Certainly not every Virgo in the world behaves like my father or first two boyfriends, and not every Gemini acts like me. Still, these categories have always been a part of my consciousness. They have shaped the way I understand the world for so long that if I decided to excise them as illogical, I would lose a shade of meaning as rich as art or music.

It’s a lot like religion, really, because I use that to explain my life, too, even though I don’t strictly believe in it.

Monday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Proper Jews stayed home from work and attended services, praying and fasting until sunset.

I didn’t do doing anything at all to observe the holiday this year, and I haven’t for many years. I used to observe this holiday every year, you might say religiously. It took on a special significance to my family when I was seventeen, just after my mother’s father died. Yom Kippur was on his birthday that year, and my mother, sister and I fasted and attended services on Stanford campus near our house (my father was never much for synagogue; he went to work). My mother brought printed copies of my grandfather’s eulogy, since my sister and I had not been able to go to the east coast for his funeral. After the service, we sat on the grass and read the eulogy, and then we shared memories of my grandfather. It was a very sweet and sad afternoon, its significance heightened by the dreaminess of hunger.

By the time we were ready to go home, my mother felt too lightheaded to drive, so I drove, being extra attentive to traffic since I was also fairly woozy. When we got home we could not find the copies of the eulogy, which had been in a folder along with some pictures and documents. It turns out I had left them on the roof of the car, back on Stanford campus. I drove back to Stanford, now in a really surreal haze, and found the folder, scarred by a dusty tire-print, in the parking lot. I expected my mother to be angry with me, but she said, “It’s okay. We’re all just really out of it.”

This was a special day for my family, and for a while, Yom Kippur became a meaningful family tradition in a way that other Jewish holidays were not. My mother still observes Yom Kippur fastidiously each year, but I stopped long ago. It seemed that the significance of the day was more about family history and the headiness of hunger than about religion. Even if there is a God, I don’t think It would be interested in micromanaging us to this level. With all the activity and matter in the universe, what kind of Supreme Being would busy Itself worrying about what I eat?

Cartoon--"Compare and Contrast: God Versus Superman" written by Karin Spirn and illustrated by Adam Caldwell.

Hard Work

2009-09-22T00:05:00.001-07:00

If you ask Chris Evert who was the better athlete, herself or Martina Navratilova, she’ll tell you it was Martina. The former rivals (who are also close friends) went on Oprah together last year. "Martina's a natural athlete," Evert said. "She could have been a champion at any sport she chose. I wasn't like that. I was a champion in tennis because I loved the sport so much, and I focused so hard on my game” (or something along those lines; I’m paraphrasing).

Evert’s statement suggests that there are two ways to achieve greatness: through talent or through hard work. Of course, in practice a successful person would need some combination of both of those things; no one would argue that Evert wasn’t athletic or that Navratilova didn’t work hard.

But we often expect that talent trumps hard work, that a person cannot excel at a sport or hobby or profession or field of study without some observable, natural proclivity for it.

As teachers, we can’t help but judge our students this way. Some students are just never going to get it, we say, often about students who have been given very few chances to get it before now.

Students judge themselves this way, too. I’m just not good at English, they’ll say, often in an introductory English course, like someone walking into a new yoga class and declaring, Don’t bother teaching me; I am horrible at yoga.

Whenever I parallel my own teaching to the subjects that I currently get taught at, mainly martial arts, I think, This whole school thing should be less about assessing and judging and more about learning. A student who can’t write a grammatical sentence shouldn’t be chastised and humiliated any more than a student who can’t throw a straight right cross; both students just need instruction and practice.

Although I am reminded of my role as a teacher each time I attend a kickboxing or yoga class as a student, sports taught me how to be a good teacher before I ever knew I would become a teacher myself.

When I was in high school, I was pretty good at all the subjects I studied in school—except physical education. I wasn’t horrible at it. But if there was a C on my report card, it was probably next to the letters P.E. Most of my gym teachers ignored the kids like me who weren't great at catching a fly ball or running a mile. And while I always enjoyed running around and getting exercise, P.E. was always my least favorite subject because it was frustrating and humiliating to have my teacher rolling his eyes and insulting me if I couldn’t master the art of the layup during our two weeks of allotted basketball instruction.

I had one great P.E. teacher in high school: Mr. Hart. He was also the photography teacher. He seemed like a pretty interesting guy. He was the only P.E. teacher I ever had who actually ran and did sports with us instead of just watching. He was into windsurfing and scuba-diving, and he brought his own equipment so we could try it in the swimming pool.

But my favorite thing that Mr. Hart did was create obstacle courses. It was a requirement of P.E. classes that we run three times a week. Sometimes, instead of just running the track, Mr. Hart would have us run all around the P.E. area, up and down the bleachers, through the trails in the bushes, jumping over hurdles, stopping at the pull-up bar to each do a pull-up. I could never do pull-ups, and my other P.E. teachers would have just yelled at me to try harder. But Mr. Hart came and lifted up all the students who couldn't do pull-ups, and encouraged us to pull as hard as we could to train our muscles so we could learn to do them on our own.

In Mr. Hart's class, I discovered that I could be good at sports and working out. It's not my natural area of strength, but I like to work hard, and I can learn a lot if someone will teach me.

Now that a large portion of my adult life revolves around a sport, I regret that I so often sat on the sidelines as a teenager because I didn't think I could do a good job.

Back during Mr. Hart's class, I had a revelation that has stayed with me throughout my years of being a student and a teacher. I thought: You know, those other teachers never bothered teaching me to do sports because I wasn't good at them naturally. But if someone would just teach me, I could learn. I became angry at the years of teachers who hadn’t taught me anything, who had ignored me or insulted me because I wasn’t naturally gifted in a subject that it was their job to teach me.

And then, for the first time I can remember, I thought in horror of all the students who weren't naturally good at math and English and other academic subjects (which I was naturally good at) and how their teachers might be treating them the same way, as hopeless cases not worth teaching.

When I tell my friend Marie this story, she says, “Like all my math teachers. They just ignored me and hoped I’d go away.”

When I became a teacher, I vowed to be there, like Mr. Hart, for students like Marie in math and me in P.E., students who are ready to learn, if only someone would be patient and teach them. In the time that I have worked in a community college, where we accept all students at any skill level, I have met some English Martina Navratilovas, superstars who are just waiting to unleash their innate skills upon the world.

But I’ve also met dozens of English Chris Everts, and I have seen them rise to great success and achieve things that their teachers would never have thought possible—that I wouldn’t have thought possible—because they are tough and scrappy and ready to fight for the knowledge and skills that are their birthright as humans.

Like You’ve Never Been Hurt

2009-09-13T23:49:00.000-07:00

Dance Like No One’s Watching. Love Like You’ve Never Been Hurt.

These words of inspiration annoy me a little whenever I pass the car, parked along my bike route to my favorite tea shop, that bears the bumper sticker upon which they are inscribed.

Wouldn’t you be an idiot to love like you’ve never been hurt? That’s how you love the first time you’re in love—when you haven’t been hurt yet, at least not by somebody you’re in love with—and look how that ends.

If you’re thinking, Well, I’m still with the first person I was in love with, and it hasn’t ended in horrible pain yet—just wait. I’m not being cynical; it’s going to end, one way or the other.

I remember the first time I was in love. I thought I was meant to be with this person, thought we should go to graduate school together, get a matching set of English PhDs, find one of those double job openings that are oh-so-common in the academic world, which would fortuitously enough be in some wonderful exotic city, and spend the rest of our lives writing obscure books and having babies.

When this plan did not pan out, we decided to continue living together in our three-bedroom apartment as roommates anyway, because, we reasoned, we were best friends and mature adults. You can imagine how that went. Suffice it to say, we drove our third roommate away by provoking horrible childhood memories of his parents’ divorce. My now-ex-boyfriend was forced to date women in secret for fear of upsetting me, and I lost ten pounds because I couldn’t stomach any food if he was in the apartment.

I’ve been in love a few times since then. I can’t say that I loved the same way, with the naïve expectation that the relationship would last forever, that this person was the one, my soul mate, that if this relationship fails then a part of my life has failed. I will never think any of that again, and if you’ve paid attention when you’ve been hurt, you probably won’t think it, either.

The advice on this bumper sticker, which, I just found out, dishearteningly enough, was written by Mark Twain (I assumed it was written by the same committee of hippy marketing experts who coined such bumper-sticker wisdom as Mean people suck), reminds me of something that my kickboxing teacher frequently says to me:

Don’t be scared to come in.

By come in, he doesn’t mean into my kickboxing school, although if I were thinking logically I would probably be scared to walk through the front door. No, my teacher says this when I am staring at a man who outweighs me by at least thirty pounds, who is faster and more experienced than I am, and who without a doubt will throw a very powerful, fast side kick at my stomach the moment I come six inches closer to him than I am now. Since I know he is going to do this, I should be able to avoid it happening, but so far, the only way I can prevent it is by staying approximately three feet away from him at all times, which is not conducive to fighting somebody.

Don’t be scared to come in, says my teacher, watching me tango with this opponent. He moves a step closer; I back up a step. He moves to the left; I move to the right.

Don’t be scared to come in. I know better than to be an insolent student, but I can’t help myself—I shoot my teacher an indignant look. Don’t be scared? Do I look like an idiot? Do you see his front leg, cocked and ready to throw the side kick at me before I have any chance of reaching him with any part of my body? Of course I’m scared!

I know what my teacher means: Don’t let your fear prevent you from coming in. That’s what we usually mean when we say “Don’t be scared”—be scared, but do it anyway. That’s the definition of bravery.

And I know what Mark Twain meant, too: don’t let your past experiences of being hurt affect your ability to love, without reservations, in the present and future. Just like fighting: when you get kicked hard in the stomach, you don’t stop fighting; you go back in. But you don’t go in like you’ve never been kicked in the stomach. You’d be an idiot to do that.

The Presidents

2009-09-07T10:44:00.000-07:00

“I wanted a less prestigious job with a lower salary,” said the man on the radio.

He had left his job as a politician to become a pediatric nurse. He would be interviewed on a show coming up later tonight; this was just a promotional sound-bite.

“But seriously, he loves his new job,” said the radio announcer.

I was surprised, because I had assumed his comment was serious. Was it really so absurd that someone would want to escape the pressures of a prestigious, high-paying job? Wouldn’t lots of people want to switch to something with less stress, less responsibility, even less money? What about CEOs, movie stars, politicians? What about the president?

I have watched a number of people attempt to become president of a number of things during the last few years. The process that it takes to become a president would itself be enough to make most people wish for a less-prestigious and lower-paying position.

There was, of course, the race to become president of the United States. Lots of people wanted that job; they raised millions of dollars, campaigned day and night, hired speech writers and campaign managers to craft elaborate strategies for outsmarting the other people who also wanted to be president. This president was chosen democratically, and almost every adult citizen of the country was allowed to cast a vote for his or her choice. So the people who wanted to be president needed to try to please large numbers of citizens.

There was also the selection of the president of my college. While the people who wanted this job did not have to raise money or hire helpers to design their campaigns, they did go to great lengths to try to get the job. One flew all the way from Chicago to interview; another gave a speech to representatives of the entire college despite the fact that she had broken her leg the evening before. She must have really wanted the job.

This process gave the impression of some democratic overtones, in that members of the campus community got to submit their opinions about the job finalists. These opinions were passed on to the board of our college, who were free to read them, consider them, and then choose whichever candidate they wanted. The candidates’ job was to please the campus community but to please the board even more.

One other race that followed a democratic model was for the presidency of the college’s academic senate (which is like student government for teachers). All the teachers at my school had the opportunity to vote. The democratic integrity of this process was marred, however, by the fact that only one candidate chose to run, and only after some fairly intense coercion.

This last presidential election was the only one I could really relate to. I can’t imagine myself attempting to become president of anything—the country, a college, the campus book club—except under some pretty serious duress. I definitely wouldn’t be running against anybody, because if someone else wants the job, by all means, she can have it.

Sometimes I try to imagine wanting to be a president. It’s a stressful job, certainly. The president of my college needs to make crucial decisions about our budget and policies. She knows she will often face criticism for those decisions, and if her decisions aren’t good, she could damage or destroy the entire school. That seems pretty stressful.

On top of that, there is the stress of having to be the face and voice of the college. I don’t really feel that I represent my job when I am not there, at least not in an active way. If I decide to spend the weekends wandering around the local mall in ripped-up sweatpants, no one will say, “I can’t believe an English teacher from Las Pecinas College walks around dressed like a slob!” I am allowed to make negative comments about my school, if I so choose, without violating the specifications of my job description. But being the president of a college is a twenty-four-hour job. No matter what the president is doing, whether walking her dog or shopping at the store or, say, visiting a strip club, as long as she is publically viewable, she represents our college and is expected to act accordingly, which means that she should avoid strip clubs if she wants to be seen as doing her job properly.

Why would somebody want this job, I wondered, as I watched the candidates giving their speeches to the college. Sure, it pays a lot more than my job, but I don’t see that the added responsibility is worth the money. I would opt for the lower-paying, less-prestigious job any day.

Now imagine being president of this entire country. Think of all the things you could never be caught doing: making an insulting or critical comment about your own country. Making an off-color joke, an insensitive remark. Spacing out and forgetting what you were talking about mid-sentence. Forgetting the name of a country. Farting in public. Playing air guitar. Getting drunker than you meant to. Making obscene hand gestures. Buying pornography. Going to a sex shop or a swingers’ party, even with your spouse.

It’s like being a celebrity, except you make less money and are expected to maintain your dignity all the time.

Because I don’t want to be president—of my country, my college, my academic senate—I really appreciate those who are willing to do those jobs. I guess I think of them sort of like the person who cleans the toilets; it’s a dirty job, and I’m really glad somebody is doing it.

Sex Writing

2009-08-28T08:38:00.001-07:00

Note: If you have been reading this blog to your small child before bed, you might want to skip this post.

Recently I’ve been enjoying a column about bondage and discipline (otherwise known as BDSM, which stands for some slightly convoluted and contested mash-up of bondage and discipline, dominant and submissive, and sadism and masochism), written by a dominatrix called Mistress Matisse. I found the column through the website of my personal guru, Dan Savage.

I have always enjoyed reading about sexuality, and it has often dawned on me (usually because my friends tend to point it out) that this interest seems incongruous with other parts of my life.

This is what they’re getting at: I am the kind of person whose frequency of having sex correlates directly to me dating or being in a relationship with somebody. And I often go years without dating or being in a relationship. You can finish the syllogism yourself.

So why do I like reading about sexuality so much, when so often the information is not immediately applicable to my life? It’s not because it’s arousing—a lot of writing about sex is strikingly un-sexy, involving a lot of technical details, tips about technique, philosophical discussions of various kinks that the reader may find distinctly not to his or her taste.

The thing I enjoy about sex writing is that it deals with the philosophy of how our bodies interact with our psyches. Sexuality is like food or illness or disability or athletics. It’s difficult to integrate the biological realities of our body with our sense of ourselves as social and intellectual beings.

This conflict between physical and social self is one of my favorite subjects to think about, and sexuality is one of the most entertaining venues through which to consider it. A lot of what is written about sexuality applies to how we understand our own identities. For example, in his advice column, Dan Savage responds to a reader who describes himself as “slightly homophobic,” and who was therefore horrified to have engaged in sexual acts with a male friend during an ecstasy-fueled party that turned into an orgy. Dan Savage responds:

“Studies have shown that homophobia, slight or otherwise, correlates neatly with homosexual urges. Why? Because a guy who has 98.2% hetero desires and just 1.8% heterosexual will, to protect himself from his homosexual urges, cultivate a slight case of homophobia. This slight case of homophobia serves to reassure the 98.2% straight guy that he’s really 100% straight.”

This response, while well-phrased, is common wisdom, but in combination with the question that elicited it, it’s fascinating. The reader is distraught because he committed a number of sexual acts that didn’t fit with his sense of self. Instead of viewing the situation factually—I had a sexual experience with a man; therefore, it seems that, occasionally and under very specialized circumstances, I am attracted to men—his response is mortification, thinking that he has gone crazy and made a horrible mistake.

Savage’s response begs the question: why would somebody who is 98.2% straight need to convince himself that he is 100% straight? I think, among other reasons (like living in a homophobic society), that this points to fear about fluidity of our identities. We spend a lot of time and energy constructing consistent personae, and we often stake quite a bit on those personae: our relationships, our friendships, our jobs, our status. If a straight man is a little bit gay, or a masculine man is a little bit womanly, he feels his sense of who he is, what he likes, what he represents is threatened.

Even if we don’t live in terror of having our sexual or gender identities disturbed, we are scared of losing our identities in other way, often for good reason. A momentary lapse of identity could cost us our jobs—for example, if we decide to forget our identity as employee and scream at our boss. For some people, it could cost us our lives, such as if an otherwise brave and resourceful soldier has a lapse in those qualities.

At the same time, Savage’s response also alludes to how limiting it is to not have any flexibility in one’s identity. Having a rigid identity means that we cannot be empathetic, because we cannot find some part of ourselves that is different from our overriding identities. If I cannot accept the possibility that I have parts of myself that are gay or straight or male or female, how can I understand those who are gay or straight or male or female? How can I understand those who do not fit into these categories so neatly?

I have particularly enjoyed reading Mistress Matisse’s column because of the connection it draws to life beyond the bedroom, the dungeon, or the Folsom Street Fair. And not just because of the ways that we are dominant or submissive in our regular lives, which is a common explanation of how BDSM connects to non-erotic life. What I like about her column, and about much writing about BDSM is that it focuses so explicitly on the physical realities of sexuality, and, by extension, the physical realities of having a body and being human.

Most people presumably have sex assuming or hoping that it will be exciting—i.e. sexy—but BDSM practitioners work actively at creating that excitement. People who are into BDSM have to plan their erotic encounters carefully. They have to buy special equipment and learn techniques for causing intense sensations (a.k.a. pain).

This leads them to think a lot about how bodies work. For example, Mistress Matisse wrote the following (in her personal blog, not her column) about her first time inserting her fist into a man’s rectum:

“It’s tremendously intimate, too. I could feel his heart beating. It’s sort of amazing to feel that and think, Well, yeah - your hand isn’t that far away from it!”

In this situation, Matisse isn’t just having a sexual encounter, but learning more about the capacities of our bodies, and how our bodies and psyches react to extreme circumstances. I don’t foresee a situation in which I will need much of the practical information in this blog post, and yet I learned a lot from it, not the least of which was what it feels like to have your hand fully inside of another person’s body—and isn’t that something worth learning about?

Sausage-Making

2009-08-20T12:18:00.000-07:00

Legislation is like sausage. You want the outcome but you don’t want to see how its made.

This metaphor, sausage-making, has been all over the news for the last month as the federal government tries to create a health care plan. At first, the NPR announcers would explain the full simile every time they discussed the issue: You know, it’s like what they say about lawmaking…

Now they no longer bother to explain the origin of the metaphor; they simply refer to the legislating process as sausage-making. When the intricacies of one proposed health-care model get too complicated to discuss any further, the commentator dismisses the line of discussion with, It’s all part of the sausage-making process. Or when a guest expert is questioned on some flaw in his or her favored plan, the expert will say, But this is all just the sausage-making. The implication is that these details are so messy and unpleasant that the public would do better to just shut them out—cover our ears, shut our eyes, la la la I can’t hear you making that sausage—and enjoy the delicious outcome when it is delivered from the kitchen in its appetizing and seemingly sanitary state.

And yes, in this metaphor, the senate is the kitchen. The chefs are on August recess this month, so today I heard this on the radio: The Obama administration is still trying to make sausage even though there are no senators in the kitchen.

Clearly sausage-making has become a conventionalized term, a micro-cliché meant to encapsulate both the ugliness of the legislative process as well as the implication that the public would be better off not knowing about this ugliness. Like most clichés, it started with a clever idea but has now become a lazy shorthand, an expression that permits us not to dwell too long on its meaning.

This type of lazy analogy seems like a bad thing, but the analogies at the beginning of the sub-prime mortgage crisis were even worse. These analogies did not have a conventionalized meaning; instead, they were being used to actively argue for a particular course of action.

Think about it, the expert on the radio show would say. If your car is about to go off a cliff, you don’t slam on the breaks. You steer away from the cliff.

This, self-evidently, proved that the government should impose a moratorium on foreclosures. Or maybe it was that the government should not impose a moratorium; I can’t remember what the cliff represented exactly. The commentator didn’t have much time to speak, and in lieu of explaining why his plan would work, he used the metaphor. He probably thought that it would be attention-catching and memorable, which it was; unfortunately, I can’t remember his actual argument.

I heard so many of these analogies on the topic of the mortgage and banking crisis that I needed to write them down to remember them all:

The economy is like an ocean; it rises and falls, and consumers are like a boat… For a plant to grow, it needs sunlight and water; it won’t grow if you stick it in a closet… If a person is overweight, he needs to cut out unnecessary parts of his diet but not key nutrients…

All of these analogies would have been fine illustrations of an argument, but, in almost all cases, they were given as the main explanation in support of a particular argument. Why do you think regulations would stifle the creative forces of the market? Because the economy is like an ocean. Why do you think we need to invest government money in the housing market? Because the economy is like a plant.

I heard one analogy that I thought was actually helpful: “People say that the mortgage and banking sectors should be unregulated, that the market will regulate itself. You wouldn’t say that about the meat industry.” We regulate the meat industry because we know we can’t count on the market to protect something as important as our health; likewise (according to the analogy), we can’t count on the market to protect the public from poor lending practices and their disastrous results for the economy. This analogy, which compared regulation in several areas, actually seemed to be part of the argument, as opposed to a metaphor that was being inflated into something more.

The critical thinking textbook I teach from says this about false analogies: “In a false analogy, one compares two things in which the key features are different.” I always tell my students that I don’t quite agree with this definition, since almost any analogy compares things that are different; that’s the whole point of an analogy. The book gives an example of a mountain climber who argues that while his sport is dangerous, people die taking showers, too. The book claims that this analogy is false because mountain climbing and showering are different: “To construct a more convincing analogy, the mountain climber should compare the risk in mountain climbing with that in another high-risk sport such as race car driving.”

This suggestion seems strange to me. If the mountain climber’s point was that many daily activities contain an element of risk, why would he compare climbing to race car driving? What would it do for his argument to compare two similar things?

However, when I think about the metaphors used for the economic crisis, I start to agree with the authors of my textbook, that sometimes analogizing similar things is more persuasive than different ones. The housing industry works something like the meat industry, and it is helpful to compare the role that regulations play in both markets.

I believe that the purpose of the analogy is what determines whether it is false. When you’re trying to illuminate an abstract concept (such as the value and necessity of taking risks), you may need to bring together wildly different ideas and draw unlikely connections. Mountain climbing is nothing like taking a shower—and yet, how fascinating to think that many people die showering each year, and yet we never fear taking a shower, while we might fear mountain climbing based on one horrific story. So difference works in this kind of example.

However, when you are trying to advocate for a law or government policy, and your sole argument is a horribly oversimplified analogy, I’ll have to object: the economy is not a plant, a car, the ocean, or a sausage!

Facebook

2009-08-12T00:32:00.000-07:00

Jennifer—Used to keep up with world news before I got on Facebook. Now I never look at the major news sites. I feel guilty!

Comments:
David—But I bet none of your friends write for the major news sites.

Karin Spirn's Note: Six Thoughts About Facebook
1. When I was growing up, I never got excited about looking at anything on a computer. The computer was for typing my homework and maybe playing a video game if there was nothing else to do. I never came home after a long day and planted myself in front of the computer to relax. I never looked at the computer every ten minutes while doing chores or talking on the phone. I never got out of bed during a 3 a.m. bout of insomnia and sat in front of the computer.

It seems like another world, looking back, a strange and incomprehensible place.

2. When I was sixteen, my father took me to his Silicon Valley office to look at something on the computer.

“I want to show you this new thing,” he said. “It’s called the Worldwide Web. Groups or businesses can have a page on here, and you can look at it.”

I tried to imagine what he was talking about: a sort of giant, computerized want ads.

“The colleges you want to apply to will all have sites on here,” he told me with excitement. He fiddled around, typing in something or other.

“See, like Berkeley has a site, right here.”

He showed me the U.C. Berkeley home page, which had some logos and pictures of the campus. It looked about as exciting as a brochure.

“Wow,” I said, giving the screen a cursory glance.

“You should play around on this site,” he said. “See, you can click on these buttons and it will tell you about the school.”

I sat down and did some polite clicking around. Admissions policies, campus map, photographs of a few buildings. I had seen most of this before, on paper or in person. The fact that it was now on a computer made it if anything less accessible, not more.

3. Click on the link for “almost twenty years later,” and you’ll find me checking my email and Facebook account any time there is a computer nearby. My students, most of them teenagers, as I was when I found the internet too boring to be bothered with, cannot stop staring at the computer screen. Teachers don’t want their classes scheduled in a classroom with computers because the students will compulsively check email, MySpace, Facebook.

The most obvious reason for this shift in the appeal of the computer is the vast wealth of information available on the internet. But when my students are screwing around online during class, they are not reading about current events or even celebrity gossip. They are on MySpace and Facebook, reading about themselves. They are looking at pictures of themselves and their friends. They are writing silly notes and reading their friends’ silly responses. They are scanning their friends’ pages, hoping to find some juicy bit of information to cheer up their depressing day of schoolwork, a photograph of the boy or girl they like, some hint that he or she likes them back.

That’s what makes the internet more than just a regular source of information, so much more exciting than a library, bookstore, or newsstand. It is filled with news not just about the outside world, but about ourselves, our friends, what our friends think about us. Large parts of our identity are housed online, on our homepages, our profiles, our blogs, and those of our friends. The computer has gone from being something utilitarian, as neutral as a stopwatch or a calculator, to become a part of ourselves.

Karin—should stop rambling on about Facebook and go to bed.

4. If your work involves sitting in front of a computer, Facebook is almost like having all your friends at work with you in a big, virtual room. It’s ingenious, really. We’re all sitting in front of our computers, stressed out and lonely, all day long. Why shouldn’t we be exchanging witty quips with our friends? Then we can almost pretend that we are not at work at all, that we are out at the bar, some strange sort of bar where our childhood best friend and that nice girl from our yoga class suddenly team up to advise us on our love lives or career choices.

5. I wonder if our need to create this bar scene as we work is an indication of our alienation as workers. Sitting in front of a computer is a lonely sort of work. Perhaps if we were out working on the farm or tending to the house with our herd of assorted children, we wouldn’t feel the need to be connected to the simulacra of friends who are miles and miles away.

Marie to Karin—you said you needed to go to bed. Why are you still on here?

6. Then again, I share an office with a friend, and we sometimes use Facebook to communicate. We have been known to write Facebook comments to each other while sitting in the room at the same time. We are both typing on computers, so sometimes it makes sense to continue communicating using that tool. Plus if we were to simply make our amusing comment aloud, it would not be on display to entertain the others in our online work-bar.

Karin—This reminds me of that joke we used to make about how our students take a walk.

Comments:
Marie—Two students take a walk wearing headphones, listening to their ipods, and texting each other for conversation.
Karin—We’re just like them.
Marie—Well, they are the future. Scary, isn’t it?

Going Hard

2009-08-09T21:23:00.001-07:00

The timer rang, indicating the round had begun. I threw a few light jabs at my partner. She stepped in and returned a hard cross to my head. Not quite I’m-trying-to-knock-you-out-hard, but hard enough to make my brain feel a little bruised. We exchanged a few more punches, and again the hard cross landed on my nose, followed by a powerful hook that hit me in the temple.

I stopped. “Are we supposed to be going that hard?” I asked her.

This was my first time really sparring in the new boxing teacher’s class. Two days ago I had taken this class and we had done light sparring, with no headgear, lightly tapping each other with our punches. He hadn’t given us any direction on how hard to hit now that we were wearing full gear. I had assumed it would be harder, but not this hard; this was like a real fight.

“What’s going on over there?” the teacher asked.

“She wants to know how hard we’re supposed to go,” my partner said.

The teacher turned to me, his face serious and angry. “Don’t stop fighting to talk,” he said. “If you have a question, ask me.”

He paused for a moment to let this instruction sink in, then added, “Go hard!”

So, with those expectations clear, I began to throw hard punches back at my partner, and she threw hard punches back at me. By the end of the first round, she looked a little shaken and she informed me that my nose was bleeding.

We each fought five more rounds like that, two with each other and then three with other partners. The entire time we were sparring, our teacher was yelling insulting comments, some of them at us, but blessedly, more of them at the other students.

“You look horrible out there,” I heard him saying to a grim-faced young kickboxer. “You should be doing better. You’ve competed, in kickboxing not boxing, but it’s all the same thing, competition. You just look horrible.” He shook his head, his facial expression conveying a mixture of disappointment and disgust.

After class, the teacher instructed us to huddle around as he made a speech.

“I’m not angry,” he said. “I may seem angry, but I’m not angry. I’m just frustrated. I just want you all to get better so that if you keep sparring or maybe compete, you’ll be used to what it’s like in a fight. I don’t believe in learning at the fight; I’ve always been against that.”

I’m a teacher, and what I’ve always been against is any type of pedagogy that involves insulting students. Teachers who scrawl Not English in the margin next to a grammatical error committed by a recent immigrant or who use the phrase I’m disappointed in their final comments have always horrified me. How are the students supposed to learn if the teacher takes every mistake as a personal affront? Do we really want students’ main goal as they write to be avoiding mistakes?

One of the reasons I love teaching writing is that it is a process, and there is always room for improvement. Even the most disastrous essay on Shakespeare or Michael Moore or An Educational Experience That Had a Positive Impact on My Life contains the seeds of great writing. Much of the greatest writing begins as a shitty first draft, and focusing on the negative is not only depressing, but counterproductive, since it is both the teacher’s and student’s job to find those moments of potential and nurture them; simply avoiding crappy writing is not enough to constitute great writing. A writer who fears grammatical errors, clichés, missing topic sentences, or incorrect analyses will become too paralyzed to write anything at all. So mistakes are encouraged, especially those sorts of mistakes that come from experiment, pushing a bit further, taking risks and trying new strategies.

On the other hand, I realize that we have a certain privilege, as writers, to be able to make mistakes. What if I were teaching my students something that they could not afford to mess up, something like heart surgery or bridge design or how to pilot a commercial jet? My liberal, nurturing, let-them-make-mistakes attitude would hardly work in those cases. Even for my friend who works in a machine shop, a tiny miscalculation can lead to the destruction of a ten-thousand dollar piece of metal or having to start an almost-complete project all over again.

In fields where a mistake could cost people their lives, the training reflects a no-mistakes-permitted philosophy and is often geared towards weeding out those who are prone to error. The training to become a doctor has become so competitive in terms of factual knowledge that I often fear that the doctors of my generation will all have horrible social skills, since they have to compete ruthlessly with their colleagues and forgo most social events just to make it into medical school. And while this does worry me, truthfully, if somebody is taking a scalpel to my brain, heart, or any other important part of my body, their fabulous bedside manner means nothing if they can’t remember the correct place to make the incision.

I know that the tough-love attitude of such areas of study has its own rewards. My friend who just finished her medical residency told me that not only was the arduous schedule worthwhile, but that she actually enjoyed the long, sleepless nights.

“I think there’s some self selection,” she told me. “The people who get into this field enjoy this sort of thing, working thirty-six hour shifts. You kind of get into it. Actually, the older doctors always say we have it easy. They worked like fifty hours in a row during their residencies.”

I often wonder, could people learn to be good doctors without going through this ordeal? Do the long hours contribute significant knowledge that could only be obtained through the efficiency of a sleepless apprenticeship? Or does this apprenticeship simply serve to weed out those who, under the pressure of overwork and exhaustion, might get confused about which finger they were supposed to be amputating? Either way, one can see the value in having to jump through a few fiery hoops on your own before you attempt to do so carrying a passenger on your back.

This brings me back to my boxing training. On the scale of necessary perfectionism, boxing falls somewhere between English class and brain surgery. It’s a lot more dangerous than writing essays, but no matter how much you mess it up, no one but (in the very worst case scenario) yourself is going to die. But the question remains: if I don’t go hard while I practice, will I be able to handle going hard in a competition or street fight?

My fear is that I won’t—yet I don’t want to train that hard, at least not on a weekly basis, which I suppose explains why I make my living as an English teacher and not a boxer or a brain surgeon. Still, I always wonder if I am doing a disservice to my learning when I choose light sparring over the harder sort.

And yet, when I find myself in a situation such as this boxing class, where I am unexpectedly faced with harder sparring than I had expected, or a spazzy, dangerous partner, or a distractingly critical teacher, I actually do fine. I landed about as many hard punches on my partner as she landed on me, possible even more. And once I realized how forceful her punches were going to be, I evaded almost all of them. I did all of this using the same techniques I had been practicing in my light sparring class, against an opponent who was much more accustomed to this higher level of impact than I was.

So perhaps I don’t need to feel guilty about my English-teacher sparring. Maybe it’s preparing me for brain-surgeon boxing after all.

Names

2009-07-31T17:29:00.001-07:00

It’s my third birthday, and we’re having a party in the courtyard of our apartment building. There is a cake. My parents tell me that it says “Happy Birthday, Karin.”

Karin, I think. That’s my name.

I once told my mother that I remember learning my name on my third birthday. “No,” she said, “That can’t be right. You knew it much earlier than that.”

Of course I did, I thought. That’s why I felt that strong wave of recognition when I heard it, a rush of new understanding. This group of sounds that I’ve been hearing for so long—it refers to me. It isn’t just any word. It is my word, my designated set of sounds and letters.

I suppose my memory wasn’t of learning my name, but of learning what it was to have a name. Out of all the types of words, names most pointedly symbolize the arbitrary nature of language, particularly first names. One of the basic rules of language is that words are meaningful because a community agrees upon a meaning. The choice of the word is arbitrary but customary. Even though the word chair has no inherent connection to the concept or material reality of a chair, and so is arbitrary in that sense, I still can’t just decide to call a chair a rocket ship or an air-chay if I want to be understood.

Names are different. Every person has a name that was given to them at some point, usually at birth, and that everyone else has to use to refer to that person. We can’t even refer to the person until we discover his or her name, so we have to learn new vocabulary every time we meet somebody. Naming children is one of the only opportunities we have for creating our own reference and imposing it upon the rest of the world, rather than accepting the set of words given to us by our language and culture.

Names are also different from other words because they are meant to have a unique referent; names refer to individual people, not types of people (such as doctor or diabetic). Most types of words refer to classes of things. Linguists like to use chair as an example, presumably because there is no inherent quality that makes something a chair other than that people think it is a chair (unlike a cat, which can be identified as a cat based on its DNA). Something is a chair because it shares similar features with other chairs: it has a seat, and usually legs, and perhaps arms, and you can sit on it, and someone built it expressly to be sat upon, and it might be near some other chairs or a table.

Names work the opposite way. I am called Karin, but this does not imply any similarity with other Karins, although we sometimes pretend it does, saying things like, She seems like a Karin.
Even though I may seem like a Karin, that’s not how I got my name. Our parents just choose them, and they are free to pick anything they want. It’s sheer meaningless luck that christens us Karin, or Isabella, or Amber, or Moon Unit. Yet this arbitrary collection of syllables will be unproblematically correlated with our identity, in most cases for the rest of our lives.

Sometimes names are chosen based on a system. In many African countries, names are based on days of the week; my friend Kofi’s name indicates that he was born on a Friday. Even so, when people say Kofi, they are not referring to the category of men born on Fridays. No one says, My friend is a Kofi, or Kofis are such nice people. The name still has a unique reference to whichever Kofi the speaker meant to describe or address.

We use names as though they are unique, although they usually are not. When I say Kofi, I am only referring to one particular person named Kofi, although I am well aware that the name presumably has other referents, at least three that I know of and presumably tens or hundreds of thousands that I don’t.

If you are the frequent illustrator of this blog, Adam Caldwell, then you recognize that there is another artist and art teacher named Adam Caldwell living across the bay from you in San Jose. If you are my coworker, Michelle Gonzales, your files occasionally get scrambled up with those belonging to a student at our school by the same name. And if you are my high school friend Sarah Johnson, then there is someone with the same name as you right within your circle of friends, so that whenever someone says Sarah Johnson, someone else inquires, Which one?

There are many other Karins, but I am the only Karin Spirn in the entire world; at least, all evidence indicates this to be the case. My last name is so unusual that, until recently, I was under the impression that only documented members of my family shared it. This impression stems from a childhood memory. Long before internet research was an option, my grandmother ordered a book that promised to list everyone with our last name in the entire country. I was at her house when the book arrived. She opened it with excitement, only to find that she knew every single person listed in the book. “Oh, there’s Uncle David,” she would say, thumbing through the pages, “and there’s my cousin Florence,” as my aunt and uncle looked over her shoulder and nodded in recognition.

In a prescient effort to make sure that I would be maximally Googlable, my parents added to this rare last name the unconventional spelling of my first name, and, incidentally, an unusually spelled middle name as well.

Growing up, many of my closest friends had unusual last names, so it never seemed odd to me. One of my best friends and I still reminisce about the substitute P.E. teacher who read our names off the role sheet with disdain: “Spirn and Tashker,” he said. “What ever happened to the good old days when everybody was named Smith and Johnson?”

Now when I want to know what my friends with unique names are up to, I can type their names into search engines and generate a list of information pertaining specifically to them. If I want to know what Sarah Johnson—either one of them—is doing, I’m pretty much out of luck.

For those of us with unique (as far as we know) names, the illusion of our name being inherently connected to our identity is complete. I know that the word chair is not inherently connected to the concept or object of a chair, because if I go to France, it will be called a chaise, and if I go to Mexico it will be a silla. But when someone says Karin Spirn, I imagine that this name encompasses my identity and is synonymous with me. I would be highly disconcerted to discover another Karin Spirn, or even a Karen Spirn, out there in the world; she would have stolen my identity.

What would it be like, I wonder, to have the anonymity, or perhaps I should say the omninymity, of Sarah Johnson? I like to imagine that I would be less narcissistic, less convinced of my own uniqueness or specialness. That I would have a greater sense of my fundamental similarity with other people, people who shared not only emotions and experiences with me but even shared, in some linguistic sense, my identity.

It’s hard to say, though—I can’t really envision what it’s like to be anyone other than Karin Spirn.

Thanks to the inimitable Adam Hunter Caldwell for the illustration.

We Live As We Dream, Alone: Part 3

2009-07-28T09:42:00.000-07:00

Dating

My friend John only dates a woman for a year at a time. After a year passes, he starts to feel restless and depressed and needs to end the relationship. He is in his late thirties, and he has been following this pattern his entire adult life. I was curious whether this was a lifestyle that he maintains intentionally or whether he is just taking his time shopping for a more permanent arrangement.

“What is your plan?” I asked him. “To have a series of one-year relationships?”

“No, I don’t want to have a series of one-year relationships,” he said, repeating my words back to me in a wounded voice, like this was an insulting idea.

“So, what do you want?” I asked.

He shook his head and shrugged.

John is like many other people I know, taking the romantic middle path. He eschews the stagnancy and dependence of permanent relationships, but he doesn’t want to give up on companionship, affection, and sex. And so he is rather permanently situated in the state of romantic affairs known as dating.

At this point, for the sake of full disclosure, I must confess: I don’t understand dating at all. On my list of the most baffling cosmic enigmas, it is up there with mortality, the nature of consciousness, the purpose of life. If you were to look at all my journal entries on the topic, you would find a prevalence of entries ending with the words, I don’t understand.

Do you ever try to think about the universe and whether it is infinitely large, and if so, how could something be infinitely large, and if not, what would its boundaries look like and what could possibly lie beyond them?

That’s how my brain feels when I think about dating.

Dating makes logical sense as a way to shop for a permanent relationship. The goal is to stay together until you decided to get married or break up and go looking for someone else to marry. But what about people who don’t—necessarily—want that sort of relationship? People like John. When he begins dating somebody, he isn’t thinking, I will date this woman for a year and then we’ll break up, I’ll be alone for a while, and then I’ll go date some other woman.

Nor is he thinking, If things work out well, I will stay with this woman forever.

“What is he thinking?” I asked my friend Marie, who is very insightful about relationships, shortly after this conversation. “What does he want?”

“He doesn’t know what he wants,” she said. “When it comes time to decide what he wants, he gets scared and ends the relationship.”

Marie is married now, but when she was single, she didn’t understand the logic of dating, either. After a series of emotionally exhausting relationships and break-ups, Marie decided that she would date casually but never be anybody’s girlfriend. Temporary relationships seemed artificial and painful to her.

“Breaking up is horrible,” she said. “This person is like your family one day, and the next day you’re supposed to just cut off all those feelings and go back to being friends, or not speaking? It’s unreasonable.”

It does seem unreasonable, and yet, there do not seem to be better alternatives. No matter which direction we turn, the traps are set: denial of our independence and self-determination, denial of our physical and emotional needs, or some combination of the two. It’s a paradox that we can’t escape from. Ethical behavior calls for us to be independent yet socially connected, to be loving but not self-sacrificing, to honor some of our animal instincts and defy others. It’s complicated and confusing, but we don’t have a choice.