Keeping Focus

I told my wife last night that she's a horrible distraction. I said this after two days of her being out of the apartment 8 hours at a time for a class, while I've been largely at home during this summer.

She insists on talking to me while I'm reading student papers, or writing material for my courses, or reading.  Basically any time she has an interesting though--which in her defense is pretty damn often--she is compelled to share it.  Right then.

But I've been on my own for this whole week, except when I'm in class.  And I hardly got anything done.  I think I graded two papers in 5 hours on Tuesday.  I suppose I'm lucky I put on pants and remembered to eat.  As much of a distraction as she is while she's around, my entire life disintegrates when she's gone for extended periods of time.  It's like those first few weeks of college, when you realized that your parents weren't there to tell you not to do some things--so you essentially do nothing. Because you can get away with it.


My wife holds me to a pretty high standard.  She wants an interesting husband, after all.  The kind of guy who gets shit done, and can talk intelligently about a range of issues.  We're both into communication in a theoretical way, but she's a business-minded person, and I'm an academic.  We have abstract conversations about the nature of perception, of language, and what percentage of a person's image comes down to verbal communication.  I teach people about avoid nominalizations and over-using conjunctive adverbs.  She helps people become better leaders.  

That standard, though, is an interesting one.  It's motivating, but a little disturbing that I seem to be dependent on it to keep on being the fully actualized person I try to be.  I still do the things I normally would when she's not around--I just think I do them better when I think she's watching.  Maybe she'll notice the particularly subtle way I incorporated a lesson on tone of voice into an exercise on paragraph transitions.  Maybe my understanding the way two modifiers acting as a single adjective can be hyphenated revs her engine.  Am I still trying to convince my wife that she should go out with me?  Am I proverbially playing acoustic guitar under a tree in the middle of campus to impress the freshman chicks?

Probably.

Quarter-Life Crisis

Note: this post will *hopefully be appearing in The Good Men Project, at goodmenproject.com.  Check it out!

      “Quarter-life crisis” is a convenient term for glossing over a more subtle problem. I'm 27, about to move to Chicago from a city of some 50,000 people. I've got an MA and good deal of teaching and non-profit experience under my belt—and not a clue what I'll be doing when my wife and I get to Chicago. I'm married too, I should mention—and happily, I can honestly say. My point is, I've got all these markers of adulthood about me—education, a “real” job, the legally binding state of matrimony (I think entering into contracts is a pretty grown-up thing, right?). Despite all of these good things, I would definitely say what I'm experiencing is my quarter-life crisis.

     Crisis is normally used to mean the decisive point in a situation. Usually a negative situation. Like feeling aimless and anxious and worried about how in the hell you're going to land on your feet and why you aren't way more successful than you actually are. For a lot of guys, perhaps what's missing, what causes these crises, is not being sure we're doing anything that men do correctly. This is that more urgent problem I see. We've taken the ritual out of growing up.

     Rituals are fascinating things. They can be the most completely superficial things, and still they carry a weight of significance that impresses something deep and subconscious in us. By superficial, I mean that the motions can be simple, and time-worn, and repetitive—like actually walking across a stage to receive your diploma. We wear funny clothes, and worse hats (which have their own special part to play), we listen to some version of the same speech, and whoa Black Betty! You're one step closer to being an adult. The problem is that we've taken out the important parts of our rituals, or we've stopped viewing the ritual as important in itself. Most schools don't actually give you your diploma at commencement—it' s an empty leather folder or a rolled up piece of paper with a ribbon.

     These things are about coming of age. They're supposed to clue you into what is expected of you, what you're supposed to be doing. More importantly, rituals like these assure us that we're done with one stage of life, and on to the next. I mean simple stuff, too. Tying your shoes by yourself. Learning how to shave. Your first date. Your first part-time job and that first pitiful paycheck that's all yours. Without the substance of rites of passage, and without the assurance of elders who've been there, we end up stuck as children playing at being adults, and we end up simply trying to recreate the feeling of grown-up-ness these sort of events had the first time around. You get to participate simply by virtue of the passage of time, and not because you've proven that you're ready.

     A lot of the writing on this site is about capturing or re-capturing a powerful sense of manhood. As young men we do a lot of the things we think we're supposed to—work, get married, shape wood and metal, procreate, or what have you—without being able to really internalize why. This is why we get into a lot of the problems we do with gender roles. This is why it's often so easy to categorize guys by behavior; frat boy, jock, hippie, upwardly-mobile no-bullshit indie business guy. All of these guys think they've figured out what a man is supposed to do and to be like.

     I'm saying, I have no friggin' idea what I'm supposed to be like. I'm in the process of shifting my entire career focus. I'm wrestling with the fact that I've committed myself to a career which promises to make me barely a living wage for most of my life. Thankfully, my wife recently had a panic moment and decided she isn't ready for kids, so that's one off my plate. But what does she think of me, of my choices, of my commitment to making our life together better? Men provide, right? They protect and bring security and take care of their families? By what possible stretch of the imagination is a man working adjunct for less than minimum wage at two colleges any woman's ideal relationship? Boys in the Satere-Mawe tribe in Brazil wear gloves stuffed with gigantic neuro-toxic bullet ants and dance around for ten minutes without passing out in order to become a warrior. They do this up to twenty times over a period months before it's official. Where is my torrid glove of agony and manliness to show that I'm ready to take my place as a man in society?

     Somewhere between a semi-traumatic undergraduate graduation and now, about five years later, I can't help but feel like I'm still just playing around. Things haven't been serious. That is, I haven't been serious enough for this really to be adulthood. I also haven't failed. That's a rite of passage, too. As a society we suck at coping with failure and coming out on the other side, and we've done everything we can to make sure our kids never experience failure. My crisis now is, what if I'm doing this all wrong? What if I fail and can't move on? 

Is truth stranger than fiction?

I'm not so sure. I can think of some pretty weird stuff. Most writers of novels and short stories can.  Sadly, I am neither of those.

What I recently did become is an author of literary criticism.  That's pretty weird stuff, at times.  The truth I was after lay somewhere in Rudyard Kipling's (author of The Jungle Books) experience of India and his beliefs about...people.  By people, I mean not-white people.  What seems funny is that I was looking for this truth inside his fiction.

What type of lens does literature--at least fictional writing--provide for viewing the world around us?

The scholarship tells us a lot about people's views of the matter.  Plato wanted to ban fiction altogether.  He also felt that poets should be banned in his ideal Republic.  On the other hand, much of his writing took the form of fictional accounts of Socrates in conversations around Plato's big ideas.  Plato was by nature a writer, as well, and the fictionality of philosophical treatises has been a vexing problem for far wiser minds than mine.

More lately the discussion has been about what fiction does to us.  Movies, TV, books.  Cartoons, video games, comic books.  Are we desensitizing ourselves to violence?  To right action?  To being able to think and function in reality?  We may even be to a point where scads of people have made themselves into the protagonists of their own reality shows.  YouTube is probably the best example of this.  Does that kind of thinking indicate an uncomfortability with, or an inability to live fully in the "real world?"

What about life as we might otherwise find it is so unsatisfying without fiction, without stories?

Community

I recently attended my eye-opening 5-year reunion at St. Olaf College.  I say that it was eye-opening because so much changed over the course of one weekend.  Before the reunion started, people were posting on Facebook and Twitter all kinds of comments about why we didn’t really need a five-year reunion.  Nothing had changed, right?  We were all still basically the same people we were just after graduation.  Sure, some of us had gone on to other schools, or into jobs, or travelled abroad for awhile. Many of us were married, some had kids.  Everybody had grown up, but just a little bit.  
Re-connecting with a lot of people, however, I realized that our similarities were exactly the point.  St. Olaf is a weird place.  The college talks a lot about community, and it really tries to live up to the ideal image it presents.  The campus is incredibly open, we don’t have locks on our mailboxes, and people leave their bags and belongings lying right out in the common lounge when they go up for a meal at the cafeteria.  There’s trust on campus.  That’s the community they’re talking about.  
After graduation, a lot of people experienced a vastly different kind of life from that on the Hill, as we called it.  Terrible jobs, bad breakups, moving to new cities where it wasn’t so easy to make friends.  A lot of people at the reunion had a little bit harder edge to their personalities.  A lot of people had had reason to turn cynical.  The thing was, we all recognized it, and we all knew it was a problem. I know I'm generalizing here, and I apologize to anyone who disagreed, but being back on the Hill brought it rushing back to us.  We’d lost something of the community that we had loved and lived for four years, and we wanted it back.  Badly.  That, I think, became the vision of success—for me and for many of my classmates.  Bringing back and living into the type of community that we would really want to be a part of, and to do so wherever we go.  You can’t go back to the Hill, after all.  Let’s bring the Hill down to us.  
If we had waited until the 10-year mark, I don’t think that St. Olaf would have been able to accomplish its mission of instilling the value of community in us.  And that failure would then have gone on to destroy any hope we all had of succeeding in this powerful and truly transformative way.  Building communities is no small thing, and until now—or at least more recently—I had no idea how to do it.  After this weekend, though, ah! Clarity!  I am able to build communities, I should almost say Community, singular with a capital ‘C’, through the written word.  
I’ve been fortunate to have accomplished one of my life goals.  I’m a teacher of writing.  Game, set, match.  Complacency is a creeping menace, though, and if there’s one other thing St. Olaf is good at teaching its students, it’s that living is more than a livelihood.  I’m happy to have a job.  But what I need, what I really require to be happy and successful in life, is for that job to do something.  Something worthwhile and powerful.  I can build communities in my classrooms.  I can write and encourage others to write about what they want in life, and how they plan to get it.  I can bring that word out of my class as well.  Talking about, writing about, the community I find around me at any point in my life extends and keeps alive the community of the Hill.  What between us alumni started with moving to the same wonderful place, and was brought back this weekend through a wealth of shared experience, is now continued with effort; individual efforts of like-minded people who want this Community to grow.  
The world isn’t a place where we can leave our doors unlocked and not fear for our property or safety, but can’t we get somewhere closer to that?  It’s not about the world we have.  Rather, Oles like me and others will help shape it, and in so doing come a little closer to our unique visions of success.  I want to write success, and teach it, and live it.  How are you going to succeed? What do you want your community to look like?

The Ranting of My College Teacher

I am now a college teacher, and this is exciting. Professor B. would be proud. I pray that I don't end up like him.

Here was a man who could pen a line of poetry or two--I wouldn't mind that little skill. He was a very old dog, though, who never was quite able to keep up with the times. More than once, women would walk out of his classroom, enraged at something he had said. Worse yet, were his stories about serving in Korea. I remember something about him stumbling upon a decomposing North Korean soldier on the banks of the river he had just filled his canteen from. That wasn't the bad part, however. No, that bad part read more like something from Lord of the Flies, complete with skull mounted firmly on a stick.

He showed us a picture of himself holding the stick.

I can't wait to be an old, doddering teacher who my students can laugh about. I hope that means, though, that I've had a long and successful career of teaching those students something of value. Perhaps how to write compelling narratives.

London Fogs

After some very noble blogging attempts, solo and collaborative, I sit in a place from which to say that writing is hard. There's a level of professionalism among the big names of the blogosphere that is just hard to match, and no mistake.

Even keeping somewhat regular updates to a personal travelogue is difficult, with all the other concerns of life whirling around as well. My thinking is, if I'm going to be writing something, shouldn't it be my dissertation? Why spend the energy elsewhere? I think I've found an acceptable answer. Because it's enriching, and a much needed mental health break from the academic coma into which I so easily fall. I've spent the last several months with my nose buried in more books than I thought I'd be able to get through in such a comparatively short time.

It's really interesting work, but that's not the point. Even people who love their jobs need vacations. Sadly, I have neither the time nor the money for a proper vacation right now. Italy and Sweden were about all the Committee of Ways and Means could handle at this point. Making the most of my experience in London is on top of my priority list right now. What that means is slightly more ambiguous. When I'm steeped in research for a week straight, I feel accomplished, but I have absolutely nothing to talk about with my friends or even my wife. Not that they couldn't carry a conversation in physiognomy and masculine anxiety concerning the British empire in the late nineteenth century, it's just that I don't want to talk about it anymore!

There's so many other things going on here that it's actually difficult to process and analyze. Considering when my last update here was, it seems like I have a pattern of going AWOL on personal writing until I build up a critical mass of tension and over-focus and need the outlet. It may make for interesting writing sometimes, but it is neither regular nor comprehensive enough to be really reflective of an amazing experience like I have before me right now. A year abroad in a place like London could bear writing everyday, probably more than once. That would take time and patience beyond what I have available right now. Instead, I will commit myself to slightly less frequent, but no less important and (hopefully) interesting writing.

By way of foreshadowing, our good friend is visiting us for a week or so. We're heading to Stonehenge, Bath, and looking forward to a lot of interesting times just around London. Should make good material for my next post!

London Bound!

London bound. A few days in a new country, with no permanent home, contacts, or concrete schedule does wonders to mess your head up. I have been thinking now that most people truly need some distraction, some task or deadline to keep them sane and reasonable. The pace of life. Right now, mine is about zero. I have nothing but time until my course begins, and no clear idea how to spend it. I'm reading, walking miles a day, and enjoying some of the local flavor at night. Really though, there is nothing determining me from moment to moment, and I have very little to worry about in terms of personal security or finances. It's unsettling to feel so free and cared-for (in an abstract, general sense) and still to be so far away from the familiar comforts of home.

Today I move in to my permanent home for the next 5 months. Having a sense of place, at least--a neighborhood to call my own, frequented bars and restaurants, just an address--will perhaps start to bring together the various threads of school, personal life, and daily tasks into a more recognizable form of home life. I haven't had to set my own schedule for such a long time. Always there was some outlying task to prepare for; hours in the car, presentations one after the other, paperwork to follow up on. General responsibilities foster general peace of mind. American workers not lucky enough to love their work tend to grumble about the tasks small and large that fill up what is usually referred to as "all my free time." Strangely, without those necessitating tasks, our free time becomes and incomprehensible greatness, equally as mind-numbing and dull as the hated functions of a profession.

Wishing so strongly for responsibility is a new feeling to me. I intend (before I've started, mind you)to work hard and long to make this a successful year. We'll see how that turns out once I'm faced with the reality of long nights and little time to write long papers.