Airhead Outed

In one of my afternoon classes yesterday, a student who has established a solid reputation for being painfully gullible made a public confession. She told the whole class that, earlier in the day, she'd asked a classmate why a particular part of her head (pointing to her temples) felt softer than the rest. He'd explained that just inside that area, between her temples, the head is actually filled with air. She accepted this and was not tipped off by the fact that people kept asking her to explain her new theory throughout the rest of the morning.

Here's my favorite part: When this student shared this with the class another student, sitting in the front row, mumbled under his breath, "There's No Child Left Behind at its best."

Should I root for the Knicks?

Okay, stop laughing. Seriously. I've actually wondered about this.

Here's the thing: Did you see the Boston Red Sox fans when the Sox won the World Series? Did you see that kind of uninhibited joy? And did you hear what many of them said? They claimed that it was all worth it for that moment; all the suffering and agonizing for, in many cases, a lifetime were suddenly worth it. Assuming these people are not lieing, imagine you could pick a team that looks like they are beginning a long stretch of misery and then root for them until they right the ship. You'd get o have that moment. Doesn't this plan seem to make sense?

The Knicks are a team that looks to be starting such a stretch. Their players are old and highly overpaid, but the city refuses to enter a period of rebuilding so they keep paying out the nose for a team that is perpetually advertised as being better next year. Of course, it isn't. It just gets worse. Also, they went out and got a coach, Larry Brown, with a reputation for two things. He turns teams around, and he leaves dramatically and creates bitterness. NY made a bet that he'd do the former, and got only the latter. Then, to add insult to injury, they promote a guy who is developing a reputation for incompetence that's quickly dwarfing how impressive he was as a player. I was an Isaiah Thomas fan once upon a time. My folks raved about seeing him play for Indiana gainst the Fighting Illini, and I loved watching him play with the Pistons. Since then I've enjoyed him for the exact opposite reasons. As a player he was smart and effective. In management he's been stupid and worse than worthless. The worst guy in your fanatasy league could run a team more effectively. I've enjoyed reading all the one-liners about his bone-head moves, and I've made a handful myself. Now he's the coach. How could this possibly end well?

So here's my prediction: the Knicks won't get better. They may win a few more than last season, but not enough to satisfy New Yorkers. So they'll fire Thomas and keep the expensive, over-rated players. They'll bank on a coach turning the team around. That poor sap will fail, and they'll do it again. Maybe the team will eventually go through an active rebuilding preiod, but it will probably come about slowly, through attrition, and bad trades will make that process even longer. A rookie who could have real potential won't develop in a New York minute and they'll trade him for another old, overpaid guy. You'd think this would go one forever, but it won't. New York will overcome its imatience with it's greatest asset: Money. They'll finally get sick of losing teams a buy themselves a good one. Let's call it the Steinbrenner Solution. And it will work, and long suffering fans will get their championship. They'll say it was worth it all along. Shouldn't I consider taking part in that?

I'm half-tempted. Stephon Marbury helps, not because I think he's a great player, but because I appreciate his latest off-court move. Providing low cost sneakers is actually a big deal. I know the whole shoe-worshiping culture is silly, but kids really do kill each other for shoes. On a less dramatic scale many poor kids face mockery becase they can't drop two-hundred bucks on shoes they'll outgrow in a year. Cheaps kicks with street cred really are socially important, and I appreciate the fact that Marbury gets that.

But it not enough. Maybe I've already made too many cracks about Thomas' player moves to start rooting for him now. Maybe the sexual harassment suit against him has soured me further; a bumbling idiot can be lovable, but a fool who's a lech just isn't. Maybe it's the fact that too many of the over-paid, over-rated old guys still have egos that dwarf the number of wins they can actually pull off.

No, when it comes down to it, I'm just too much of a fair-whether fan to root for a team like New York. I'd root for 'em for a while, and then, the season before they get it together, I'd jump ship.
Instead, I'll stick with the only team that had a worse record than the Knicks last year. That'd be our local boys, the Portland Trailblazers. They offer the same alluring promise of a long spell without a championship, but they're even better. Why? Because, lacking the means to a Steinbrenner Solution, it's entirely possible that they will never win a championship for the rest of my life.

If they do, you can guess what I'll say. "It's all been worth it."

Yeah, right.

Thanks, Mom.

In my last post I shared an anxiety about my failing memory, and compared the dilemma of try to remember what is forgotten to proving a negative, like showing that one des not have WMD. My mom read the post (yea for moms!) and posted a comment... in my e-mail inbox. Mom is quite adept at e-mail, but apparently not so clear on the workings of blogs. Or maybe she was just protecting me from humiliation. Again, not so clear on the concept of blogs. These were practically designed to allow people to embarrass themselves, as far as I can tell.

In that vein, here was Mom's comment:
"Not being able to remember is not a sign of greatness or meanness or anything as eriudite [sic] as being in the same company as a head of state - it's age, Ben. You are now feeling the effects of fast approaching the age of 30! It's downhill all the way, baby! Welcome to the real world."

Yes, it's true. I am old. The last post centered around the beginning of the school year, and if having my mother call me old weren't enough to drive the point home the arrival of high school students LESS THAN HALF MY AGE certainly did the trick. More and more, pop culture references in my class are preambled with "This was probably before your time..." and produce a strained silence that shows I should have stopped there. I've often said that for my students anyone over the age of 21 is basically dead. For me, anyone over the age of 30 is essentially old. I am fast approaching that category myself, as Mom pointed out. Thanks, Mom.

When I was in college more than one person joked that I wouldn't live to see thirty. This was a consequence of my diet and sleep habits, which have only marginally imporved despite my wife's best efforts to force healthy food into me and tell me I'm an idiot when I come to bed as the sun comes up. Oh, and there's also my complete lack of muscle. I used to get exercise by playing video games, but we got rid of the game console and now even my thumbs are showing signs of atrophy. Back in college I probably weighed about 140 pounds. I thought of myself as "scrawny". When I wanted to flatter myself, I thought of this as "scrappy". Now I weigh 138 pounds. Apparently I was sporting a couple pounds of hair back then.

More than once since losing my hair I've been told I look like a cancer patient. I shave the remaining hair off. I like the cue-ball look, though I do miss my long hair when I hear a song that calls for head-banging. But a note to those who think I look like a cancer patient: Wrong! I look like a cancer patient with remarkably tenacious eyebrows. So there.

My declining memory hasn't been the most telling sign of my age. I have always wished I had a better memory. Or, at least, I think I've thought that before. To the best of my recollection.

My consummate un-hip-ness isn't even the best sign of my aging. I have never been in the least bit cool. When someone makes a clever movie reference I'm the one who waits for everyone to stop laughing and then says, "What's that from?" This is a guaranteed mood killer, as no explanation is ever as funny as the joke. If only I could remember this!

No, the best sign of my age is the growing detachment with which I observe the world around me, especially the world of high school politics. I always found them shallow, even in high school when I also considered them important, but I also detested the adults who seemed the respond to everything with an air of jaded experience that I couldn't compete with. I've made a point to refrain from responding to student concerns with sayings like, "You'll understand when you're older," or "This won't matter so much in ten years." When I started teaching I didn't say these things because I didn't like the people who said them to me. Now I don't say these things because I don't enjoy the fact that I am a person who thinks them.

When I was young I thought that experience was a highly overrated teacher. I still think so, but for different reasons. Back then it just seemed unfair to appeal to the authority of experience when someone else lacked the luxury of doing the same. Telling someone they'll understand later is just wrong. If experience is germane to any conversation, it is the obligation of the experienced party to explain the lesson of said experience. If they cannot convey the message to a younger person, the lesson really hasn't been learned. All those people who told me I'd understand later really should have tried to make me understand at the time. I would have been better off. If experience is a means to avoid inter-generational communication, what good is it?

Now I look at experience differently, though still distastefully. I see what I could do when I was young, what I was capable of and accomplished and what I failed to accomplish, and recognize that most of my vaulted experience is composed of lessons I could not learn now. Someone once said, "Time is a great teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all its pupils." I am now realizing that experience is not only the measure of what I've learned, but also the measure of what I cannot learn again. Unlike book knowledge these learning experiences are, by definition, things of the past. They are nostalgia, not authority. Certainly I have a lot more to learn, and a lot more to learn experientially (read: The Hard Way), but as soon as those lessons are filed away the experiences are gone, too. I cannot learn to tie my shoes again. I cannot learn how wonderful it feels to immerse myself in my first great book. I cannot learn what heartbreak feels like for the first time. My experience only allows me to begrudge my students one thing; I wish they were more grateful for the experiences they are having right now.

I finally am grateful. I can't learn to tie my shoes again, but I can watch my son learn, and I think that's pretty wonderful. I can't read my first great book, but I can keep looking for better ones, and maybe even someday write a halfway decent one (mine are terrible). I cannot re-experience the first time I prayed and didn't feel like I was talking to myself, but I can continue to be amazed by new examples of the other-ness of God. I cannot forget that first heartbreak, but I can keep learning that a heart can get more full as I love my wife and son more and more each passing day. I can barely remember the casual amusement I felt the first time I considered the possibility that I was living through the downfall of Western Civilization, but I can continue to be surprised by the growing dread I feel every time I see that opinion reinforced, now that I have a son who will face the consequences.

So I'm getting simultaneously more grateful and more cynical, happier and more crochety, more filled with both hope and despair. I guess that's what getting old is all about.

I still think the "real world" is highly overrated, and is due for an overhaul. I hope I never give up on my belief that "ought" is more important than "is". I hope I die first.

But I hope I don't die before I'm 30. Downhill, here I come.

Remembering What I Forgot

Students aren't the only ones anxious about the start of a new school year. My students will be arriving in my classroom in less than two days, and I can't fall asleep because I'm so anxious. I need to sleep in order to reorient my schedule to the early waking and sleeping required by the school day, but here I am, after midnight, waltzing aimlessly around the internet looking for something interesting to read because I know I can't accomplish the one thing that will help me sleep; I can't remember what I've forgotten to do.

Not that I have any sympathy for Saddam Hussein, but I think I'm starting to understand what it must have felt like for him during the run up to war in early 2003. Imagine the quandary he was in: He had to prove he didn't have weapons of mass destruction within his country while not giving up sovereignty. Weapons inspectors were on the ground but couldn't satisfy the Bush administration, largely because he'd prevented inspectors from having unlimited access in the past. At that point, suddenly giving them unlimited access wouldn't have satisfied anybody. It would have made him seem very weak and frightened, a position that would have lost him more of the country he already wasn't in full control over. Plus, the illusion of WMD was a deterrent to foreign rivals, and he may have even though it would dissuade the U.S. from attacking. Ultimately, he would have had to give up his position in order to maintain his position, and all because he couldn't prove a negative. No wonder he looked so awful when the finally found him. He probably hadn't slept well until he was in that hole in the ground, and when you have to bury yourself to get some peace you're in pretty bad shape.

I am not going to lose my position as despot of a middle-eastern country if I can't remember what I forgotten. I won't even lose my job. In all likelihood whatever I've forgotten will require a few more hours after school than I had planned on spending, and the crisis won't even appear for a few weeks. Unless, of course, I've forgotten something major. Which I may have. I can't be sure.

Maybe I haven't forgotten anything at all. All I have is a feeling, that feeling one has before locking the front door on the way out when leaving for a vacation; what am I forgetting? Maybe nothing, but in my experience it's always something that seems small but is a day-to-day necessity, like deodorant or socks, and I have to buy more when I arrive at my destination. But you can't buy personalized lesson plans at a 7-11 or Fred Meyer's.

I have racked my brains trying to discover what is not there. I've gone to my classroom, thinking maybe the setting would shake something loose. I've gone through my lessons plans, my syllabi, the loose papers piled on my desk. I've stared at the ceiling. I've tried to distract myself. Nothing works. Whatever "it" is, it isn't there.

I guess it all comes down to trust. No one would have trusted Saddam even if he had sworn he didn't have any WMD. I'd like to think I'm a bit more trustworthy. I've never gassed a bunch of people or shaken hands with Donald Rumsfeld, two pretty reliable signs that one is up to no good. So why can't I trust myself?

Are there any out-of-work U.N. weapons inspectors out there who could try to figure out what I have left to do before school starts? I promise I won't ignore your findings.

Lauren's Question for Educators

I know my posts have been too long to read, so I'll try to keep this brief, but I think this is worth discussing; as a comment (and probably not one looking for a lot of serious deliberation), Lauren asked, "Is it wrong that I have totally different standards for myself and my friends than I do for students?" Though I'm sure Lauren's standards for her own behavior and that of her students aren't nearly as disparate as she says, I think the question is a very important one, and I would love to hear how all of you (both friends and random readers) address this question.

Allow me to take the first whack at it: I think it's an issue tha has to be measured by two factors: what is role-modeling, and what is developmentally appropriate. First, the biggies: sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. When it comes to sex, I think my student should wait. This isn't a religious conviction, because I don't expect students who do not share my faith to feel compelled to base decisions on my religious views anyway. I just think fifteen and sixteen year olds would be better off waiting. And it's not just an issue of pregnancy or disease (though those are huge concerns because kids are far more likely to be unsafe about their sexual practices). I don't think they are emtionally ready to inject the power of sex (pardon the pun) into their fragile relationships. Also, I know that, for my students, relationships last weeks or months at most, and serial monogomy and sex don't mix well on any level. I don't think educators should have to hold themselves to this standard. We're all married or in serious, responsible adult relationships, so staying celibate in the name of role-modeling would be silly and unfair to our spouses/significant others. I think our obligation is to model decorum; we shouldn't talk about our sex lives with our students.

As to drugs, I think it's similarly important that we not talk about any illegal drug experimentation in our youth. While I don't think educators should be using illegal drugs while in the proffession, we also shouldn't get sucked into conversations about our childhood use because if we say we didn't use we put fellow educators on the spot, and if we say we did we provide kids with an excuse. Refusing to answer the question may make some kid assume you were a junkie, but it's better than giving a kid a reason to challenge another educator and make them a liar.

Regarding rock'n'roll, and all art, I'm very open about my tastes. I think this humanizes me and, if I've shown myself to be a role model in other ways, opens kids' eyes to the fact that responsible people can appreciate all kinds of art, music, films, entertainment that they may think of as taboo. Do I admit to reading Harry Potter? Absolutely. (When a student confides a frustration with those who think those books ar evil, I share my opinion that a person whose faith is threatened by a children's book doesn't have a literary problem but a weak faith, but I am very careful who I share that with). Do I admit that I love The Daily Show and The Colbert Report? Definately. If students want to make judgements about my politics as a consequence they can, but I haven't tried to inculcate any political beliefs by sharing a personal taste.

One last more frivolous example; I don't allow my students to eat or drink in my classroom. It's against the school rules. I do eat in class, though. I am unapologetic about this seeming hypocrisy, and I freely explain it to my students. I tell them from the first day that I have graduated from high school and continued with my education, and that earns me privalidges in the real world. I encourage them to come back to visit me when they are enrolled in some form of higher education and eat and drink in front of some future group of high school freshmen, to show them that privilidges are earned. Some of my students have promised to do so, and seem very excited about the prospect. Whether or not they remember in four years is irrelevant. Is this self-serving? Yep. But it's also a valuable lesson. I benefit from other valable lessons I teach with a monthly paycheck, and I don't hear anyone complaining that this makes my advocacy of learning for its own sake hypocritical.

Ultimately, I think it's good to hold adults, especially educators, to a different standard than kids. We are different, and expecting us to behave like kids is just as unfair as expecting them to behave like adults. But we, like Lauren, should have a standard, and it should be carefully considered and intentional. What do you folks think?

Ha, Portland Will Miss You

The Portland Trailblazers recently traded three players to the Milwaukee Bucks for Jamaal Magliore, a true center we desperately need (but who may cause some problems because our other center, Joel Pryzbilla, is our true breakout player). We lost Brian Skinner (who’d only been here for half a season), Steve Blake (who will probably become an all-star because he’s left), and Ha Seung-Jin. I will miss Skinner’s hairstyle (bald, like me, with an awesome goatee I will always envy), and Blake’s steady play, passing, and heads-up ball. But most of all, I’ll miss Ha.

Ha was not a great basketball player. He averaged less than two points a game, which means most games he didn’t make a single field goal. He also averaged less than two rebounds per game, which might be the fewest for any guy in the league standing at 7’3”. Oh, and according to his carreer stat line he never made a single assist. Ouch. Now, this doesn’t mean Ha might not become a great player. Jermaine O’Neal averaged less than five points per game while with Portland, and is now a star who puts up almost 25 with Indiana when healthy. His rebounding average went from about 3 to around 10. If Ha makes the same kind of improvement then he will… okay, he’ll still be mediocre. A five fold increase in points would have him scoring about eight points a game, and tripling his rebounds would give him six. Oh, and even if his assist average gets 100% better, he still won’t make any. So O’Neil isn’t quaking in his boots, but the evidence still shows that players improve when we get rid of them. Ask Rasheed Wallace.

But there’s more to basketball than basketball, I guess, because Ha made the game experience more fun. You don’t go to a Trailblazers game expecting to see a win. Not last season, anyway. After all, we were worse than the Knicks, and we don’t have Isaiah Thomas intentionally running the club into the ground as an excuse. We didn’t have a lot of opportunities to put Ha in as a victory cigar, like Darko Milicic in Detroit, because we didn’t win very often. We put him in when it was a lost cause, and that seemed to be most of the time. My friends and I loved Ha. He was Detroit’s Darko, but funnier.

I liked Ha from the get-go, because he reminded me of my friend Nick. Nick was a six-and-a-half foot tall Korean guy I knew in college. He let us call him Korean Abdul-Jabaar. He’s one of the nicest guys you could ever meet in your life. He was funny. He knew the most outrageous pick-up lines. And, if he really had used them, as he claimed, then he was also very brave. Because I had such a positive impression of Nick, I instantly liked Ha. After all, how many Korean guys are over six feet, let alone over seven? They must all be nice, right? Nick sold me a car that was a hunk of junk, but it ran for almost a decade after I bought it, and may still be running today. Sure, it smelled like he might have puked in it after a night of heavy drinking, but the smell faded and was replaced by smells I was responsible for. I’ve rediscovered Nick thanks to MySpace, and sure enough, he’s still a nice guy and doing even better than when I knew him. So there’s hope for Ha, too.

Not only was Ha unprepared for the NBA game, but he often looked like basketball itself was just too much for him. It’s one thing to look perpetually confused when you can dominate the court like Shaquille O’Neal, but when you’re missing passes, failing to box out, and generally watching nine guys do things you can’t understand, you really can’t afford to let your confusion show like that. I would love to play poker with Ha. That’s assuming he can turn that expression off when he actually knows what he’s doing. Otherwise he would shark everybody.

The greatest thing about Ha was his name. When Ha made a good play (or even a competent play) we would scream his name like madmen. When he made a bonehead play we would scream it, too. That’s the magic of Ha; his name is the sound of laughter. Support and derision are intimately fused. To cheer is to ridicule.

Sure, we also liked Ha because, unlike some other players, he never sexually assaulted anyone, tried to sneak pot wrapped in tin foil through an airport metal detector (tin foil is a metal, Damon), or tried to use his basketball trading card as identification when pulled over for speeding. Instead, Ha went to visit kids in the hospital at Christmas. While there, he looked confused. And he probably frightened the kids. But he was tying to be a good citizen, and we liked him for that, too.

Maybe Portland will be a much better team next year. We had a great draft day, and I’m looking forward to Magloire’s near double-double points and rebounds. We need the help. But I’ll miss Ha. I wish him well in Milwaukee.

So long, Ha. Oh, Ha. Oh, Ha. Oh, Ha Ha Ha.

Smells like Desperation

…and, frankly, it stinks. David S. Broder’s piece “Voter Anger That Cuts Both Ways” in the Washington Post describes the current movement away from centrism without weighing in on the danger this poses to democracy. He even goes so far as to say that the current mood poses a threat to the gridlock in Washington. David Brooks, on the other hand, reflects on the same voter disaffection in his piece “Party No. 3” (TimesSelect membership required) and plugs the “McCain-Lieberman Party”. He describes that party as follows:

“The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through aggression and stridency.”

Does anybody else smell that?

David Brooks is often described as the liberal’s favorite conservative. I would argue that he's the worst kind, because he's smart. Instead of choosing to use his intelligence to divine the most moral or even pragmatic take on policy, he uses his wits to shill for the party line far more persuasively than the Bill O’Reillys and Sean Hannitys of the punditry world. But when it comes down to it, he consistently defends conservatism. Now, when the political landscape is looking particularly dangerous for incumbents, the majority of whom are conservatives, he’s advocating centrism?

There are a number of assumptions here that should be exploded in order to smell out the real motive for Brooks’ newfound love of triangulation. First of all, there’s the assumption that compromise is inherently good. I’ve previously written extreme examples to show that this doesn’t necessarily provide a moral solution (two Nazis try to find a compromise between exterminating the Jews or expelling them forcibly from German lands, for example) but the Senate recently provided a model for exactly why compromise sometimes finds a crappy outcome for everybody. When Dems pushed for a hike in the minimum wage, and Repubs knew they couldn’t go back to their constituents and brag that they killed it again, they poisoned the bill with a near-elimination of the estate tax. If such a bill had passed, who would have been winners? The growth in income disparity between the ultra-rich and the working everybody-else would have grown t such a rapid pace that the minimum wage hike would have been too little from the outset. The government, already buried in debt, would have lost billions in revenue. The Dems would have lost credibility for providing a minimum wage increase that made the working poor even poorer in relation to the ultra-rich. The Repubs would have lost even more ground on the myth that they value fiscal responsibility. Oh, and the government would be more broke. Compromise, in this case, provided a bill that was a loser for not only the government and the citizens it supposedly serves, but also for the parties ostensibly serving those citizens. Way to go, Party No. 3. Luckily the Sunni-Shiite tribal politicos prevented this monumental blunder, though some smart Senators may have to pay for their good sense in the short run.

Then there’s the assumption that bi-partisanship naturally makes the government more productive. Sure, it may get further on a flag burning amendment, but on the issues that really matter, does this work? Well, we’re poised to watch sea levels rise some twenty to forty feet in my lifetime. Millions of people will be killed or displaced. What has bipartisanship done here? Support for moderate candidates like Maine’s Olympia Snowe keeps the Republican Party in power in Washington. In turn, the party chooses buffoons like Senator James Inhoff to chair the Senate Environment Committee. He has said that global warming is, “"one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people." Thanks, bi-partisanship. With any luck we can cut down on global warming by not burning flags.

Lastly, there’s the assumption that the McCain-Lieberman party will do better than the “tribalism” Brooks warns against. McCain made real headway against the administrations use of torture not by playing nice, but by being aggressive and strident, the two qualities Brooks denounces. But when the President attached a signing statement saying he didn’t have to actually do what the law said when it came to torture McCain found his hands tied by a Congress unwilling to go head-to-head with the White House. And why is the Congress cowardly? Maybe it’s because people like Joe Lieberman have been painting those who dissent as unpatriotic, advocating a show of solidarity with the president hat should only be limited to the length of the eternal War On Terror.

So if compromise sometimes stinks, often reinforces the status quo, and sometimes trips itself up, who would really benefit from a Party No. 3 with nor particular platform and an obvious predisposition to prevent real change? Why, the administration, of course. You starting to smell that now?

Bush, and his shills, used to present their policies as the right way to go. Now that all the evidence suggests that these policies are disasters in practice, they’ve resorted to characterizing those who want to take on a new direction as dangerous extremists (especially on the left. Presumably the far right is an enemy of Party No. 3, but you don’t hear Brooks bashing them much). So here’s the new talking points, decoded for those of you that feel nostalgia for the wonderful world of Orwell’s 1984: Our way is clearly the wrong way to go, but those who suggest going a different way are just crazy.

Joe Lieberman has stayed the course. Let’s just ask half of Party No. 3 how well that works.

The Least Fun Game

Some people don’t enjoy the dating game. I’m done with that one, luckily. Phone-tag can be a drag, unless you have friends like my pal Craig, who makes up droning, off-key songs on my voice-mail. There are other games I do not enjoy, like games of chance or games where my nephew shows off his creativity by making up rules as we go along (he’s growing out of this habit, luckily, because he’s too old for it to be funny anymore). There is one game I will never enjoy: The Waiting Game. And that’s what I’m playing now.

I sent off a manuscript of a book I’ve written to a publishing company, and I’m waiting to hear back from the publisher. The company has been great. I’ve already worked with one of their editors to hammer out some bumpy parts of the book. He was very helpful despite the fact that I secretly second-guessed much of his advice. He read and re-read passages for me, and when I thought it was ready to submit to his boss, he made me feel comfortable doing so.

Then I began to wait.

I am not a patient man. I skipped a year of high school because I wanted to be in college. In college I didn’t bother to wait to decide what kind of job I wanted when choosing classes to take. When I met the woman of my dreams I didn’t wait long to propose, and though I agreed to be engaged for two years I was still married pretty young. I did wait a while to have a child, but not until I was as financially stable as I would have liked. Despite my impatience, I’m lucky to be married to the right person, have the right child, and have a job I love. From my perspective, seeing how everything has worked out so well, patience seems highly overrated. I know it’s a virtue. Yada yada yada. No time for that! I want to have my cake and eat that m-f-er NOW!

Like so many other areas of life, there are things that are simply not within one’s locus of control. I cannot make the publisher make a decision, and if I could, it would likely be to encourage him to reject me that much more quickly. I mean, let’s face it; most manuscripts are rejected. I know my novels and short stories were never picked up in the past. Why do I think this one will be different? Aren’t I just hastening my own disappointment?

There’s the rub. Is it better to know, even if knowing hurts? These things would be easy to measure, if only we knew in advance how much we would hurt later. When the publisher rejects the book (which, deep down, I know I should expect) will I wish I could have had more days of waiting? Will I be relieved to move on to another publisher? Will I sink into a funk, decide the project was a monumental waste of time, file it in a drawer, and forget about it? I can’t know. Analyzing the prospective outcome of my waiting only adds another layer of uncertainty.

Is there a pleasant side to waiting? Definitely, though it isn’t as enjoyable as Craig’s spontaneous songwriting. Anticipating gives me a window to imagine what I will do if I get good news. It’s a ticket to daydream. Sure, the dreams are much smaller than the ones I enjoy when I buy a lottery ticket. Actually, I’ve only done that once, but my wife and I spent the whole evening discussing what we would do if we won the 300 million bucks, and even after taxes it was a kick. We even wrote down the charities we’d want to support, the influence on them we’d like to have, and some we’d like to start. Since then I’ve come across other ideas and logged them in my memory for when I hit it big. But I haven’t played again. When it came time to announce the winner, I found I was no longer enjoying myself. Sorry Wikipedia and The One Campaign. You won’t be getting a couple mil from me anytime soon.

Publishing the book isn’t about money. I don’t expect to be paid even minimum wage for the time I spent hammering at this keyboard, let alone the time I’ve spent wondering if it was all worth it. I’d write anyway. I’m an addict. No, publishing really is about the ideas getting out there. I’d self-publish or post the whole thing on the web, but I know that, sadly, people are far more likely to read something they have to pay for. I’ve been given people’s manuscripts before, three-hole-punched with Xeroxed black-and-white covers, and I know what happened to some of those. Or I don’t, which is the point. No, publishers are valuable gatekeepers. They let people know what they decided to invest in, so readers, in turn, can have a better sense of what is a worthwhile investment of their time. Publishers make that investment, so they get to make the decisions. Writers, we get to wait.

My particular prospective publisher hasn’t made waiting easy. He doesn’t have to. That’s not his job. Still, after waiting for about a month, I finally sent off a letter to my editor friend asking if it would be appropriate to ask the publisher when I should be expecting a response. He told me that was fine, and that it was a good thing I’d asked. The publisher then told me he’d get back to me by the end of the month.

Last month.

When that came around I went through the editor again. He talked to the publisher, who sent me a kind apology for running late and told me he’d be done by “the first of next week”. I took that to be Monday.

Today.

Now, he may have sent out a letter by snail mail today, or maybe he’s swamped and I’ll hear from him tomorrow, or maybe the “first if the week” quote means the beginning of the week, as in the first few days. In which case I don’t want to nag too soon.

So here I am. Waiting. And if this post feels a bit inconclusive, well…

See? Not fun.

New Dictionary for New Neighbors?

I'm a big fan of great quotations. I put up a new one on the overhead in my class every day. My students copy it down while I take attendence, we discuss it, they turn in their completed list at the end of the semester, I return them, and they promptly throw them away. Still, I think it's worthwhile. After today, I am reconsidering my decision to limit the quotations to those meaningful, inspirational kind penned by famous authors, thinkers, and politicians. Tonight I overheard one of the best quotes from the neighbor across the street, and I know that, if it were appropriate to share, my students would hold onto that quote noetbook like it was made of gold.

My wife and son and I recently moved to a new town, the town where I teach. It's a small town (population 7000) and I am doing my big-city-boy best not to get claustrophobic and judgemental. Over-all the people here have been wonderful. Our new landlords, for example, are a huge improvement over the hoochy slumlord landlady we suffered for the last couple of years. We were so amazed when they not only showed up to fix a couple things we noticed, but showed up the next day and then, to our great amazement, promtply fixed both problems in one visit. I don't think this is an inherently small town thing; they are both immigrants from China, and I don't think that country has any towns with only seven thousand residents. They are just good people, and I need to remind myself that a town of good people is a good place to live, regardless of its size.

The lady across the street serves as an example of the sad fact that no town is filled with good people. As far as we can tell her full time job is sitting out in front of her house verbally abusing her children. Personally, I can't see why one would make such a career choice. The pay is non-existent, and the more she harangs then the worse her retirment benefit gets. Regardless, shes proven to be a tireless employee, and very capable, so I'm glad she hasn't chosen to work in customer service. She is quite a piece of work, let me tell you. I think her family chose to live in this inland town because her vocabulary would make sailors flee in shame. The mouths on her kids are filthy, even when they are defending themselves from her, but I can't really blame them for that. Tonight, during a dispute over who would mow their lawn, we tink we heard her hitting the kids. I hope not, because as a mandatory reporter I'll have to call child proective services, and that's no way to ingratiate yourself to new neighbors. Anyway, as the kids tried to defend themselves from the charge that they'd previously destroyed a garden hose with the mower the mother shouted at one of the boys, "Well, if it wasn't you it was that nimble-minded f*&% you hang out with!" I could tell from her tone that she was not complimenting her child's friend on his mental agility.

As I ran inside to share this new epithet with my wife, I idly considered grabbing one of our dictionaries and going over to introduce myself. We have more dictionaries than we need, and even our lower quality ones would certainly serve to help this poor woman avoid such faux pas in the future. But, I decided, she would probably use it to come up with a more fitting slur for me.

Intead I will wait until she hits her kids and I see it. Then I will go tell her that I have to make a call, that the authorities rarely do anything about it the first time someone calls them, and that she would be better off sitting on her back porch, where I won't be able to see what she is doing to her kids, and where my son is slightly less likely to learn new words from her.

I very much hope that when this happens she will tell all the other neighbors about the pesky, intrusive, know-it-all, nimble-minded f*&$ who just moved in across the street.

Inconclusive Ramblings about Geography

A fellow faculty member at the high school where I teach informed me today that he'd come across my site on MySpace. One of his posts explained his reason for creating a MySpace site: He is studying the behavior of his students on MySpace as a kind of anthropological research experiment. He describes MySpace as a gathering place within their "sociological jungle". Combine this with the fact that Paige, Noah, and I are moving, so I am sitting in a room filled with labeled boxes, and a conversation I had with Joel yesterday about how the new NYTimes website is more navigable, and it's all got me thinking about geography. I'm acting out the R.E.M. song "Stand". "Think about direction/ wonder why you have it now."

MySpace isn't Space, strictly speaking. Given time and processing speed it could all be shoved through a single fiber-optic cable, right? I mean, in theory, given a powerful enough blender, enough pressure, and enough added liquid my apartment and all its contents could all be shoved through a piece of normal PVC pipe, but that doesn't sound very pleasant. But there is something quantitatively different about navigating a website as opposed to navigating this room filled with boxes full of books. I'm not just referring to the two dimensions of my computer screen as opposed o the three of the room, either. Data doesn't have to be spread out and navigated like space. What does it say about our ability to comprehend information that we like to have it defined in terms of space, even when it isn't, so that we can... well, navigate it?

This question is more vexing for someone like me who prefers to write in prose rather than poetry. Poets manipulate space when writing all the time.
I
rarely
play
with
words'
location
on the page. Instead, I follow the rules of paragraphing and alignment. And yet, seen in the context of the "gathering place" in the "jungle" post, the new NYTimes site, and this room filled with boxes, I'm forced to consider the fact that any one of the books I've written could be read as a continuous line in a text file, with some editing marks to denote paragraph breaks and the ends of chapters, and no information would be lost. But I recoil in horror at the thought. Why? Is it merely because no one would go to the trouble of reading a mile of text stretched out rather than printed in block form on individual pages? I think there's more to it. I think that formatting itself might be a facet of this Witgensteinian language game all writers play without careful consideration. Sure, writing in Arabic of Japanese seems odd to me, because the text is navigated in the opposite direction, and I've heard that Chinese can be navigated in multiple directions (though my mind boggles at the thought) but I've never questioned why text must be presented spatially in the first place. Is this an outgrowth of our need to anthropomorphize ideas so that they relate to our physical world? Is it just convenience (at best pragmatism in the sense of Richard Rorty's?) Is it something else, some Kantian mechanism within the mind that Kant himself didn't explore? Is it a manifestation of a Platonic reality; true ideas being manifest as a navigable world like ours but better? I seriously doubt the latter, since we can all recognize that the arrangement of ideas is

somewhat

arbitrary.

So what does it mean? I don't know. But think about it: You, dear reader, didn't read this backwards. Even if ideas have a logical, sequential order, we could express them in a linear fashion in whatever direction we might choose. If our technology were capable, would we make use of a third dimension to express ideas? Would we pull important ideas towards us, to get our attention, or push them away to relate the fact that they are "deep"? I wonder.

As I advertised in the title, I have drawn no conclusions. What are your thoughts? When you stand in the place where you live (now face north) and you think about direction and wonder why we have it, what do you think?

P.S. Don't write your reply backwards or vertically. I am clever enough to appreciate the idea, but not clever enough to actually sail through un-navigable waters, so don't waste your time.