Nosce te Ipsum

Welcome to the third installment of my answers to the Proust Questionnaire, as found over at Vanity Fair. You can answer it for yourself, and they will come up with a hilariously inaccurate celebrity match for you. Enjoy that.

There are bits and pieces where this feels awfully self-indulgent, especially the ones where I get to dig up the more unpleasant parts of my self-image. I know the internet is supposed to be that place where you kind of let loose and just vomit out all your deepest and darkest thoughts [1], but it’s something I try to avoid when I can. Perhaps it’s my New England upbringing, that idea that you shouldn’t talk too much about yourself, or maybe it’s just that I can’t imagine anyone wanting to look at my naked brain.

This section doesn’t have quite as much of that in it, though. So we can all be thankful.

11. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I would like to remember how to make friends.

As I mentioned back on Day One, I have come to suspect that I’m not actually a friendly person. I think I’m polite, kind, supportive, even funny. I can be nice, helpful, I can teach without being condescending, and I can listen to what people have to say.

Lost somewhere in all that, though, is the kind of openness and willingness to make a genuine connection with others that would best be described as “friendly.” I hold myself back. I keep a certain measured distance between me and other people, and I’m really not sure why.

Tell me about this "friendship" thing you speak of...

I figure I must have been able to do this at some point – after all, I do have friends. And I’m talking real-people friends, not just names on a Facebook list. Barring catastrophic betrayal or the triumph of apathy, we’ll probably be friends for quite some time. But whatever talent it was that I had back in the day seems to have dimmed.

Maybe it’s the situation that I’m in now. My Japanese abilities are limited, so making friends with Japanese people is a whole lot more work for everyone involved than it might be back in the States. I can’t imagine anyone putting up with it long enough for us to get to the point where we can call ourselves “friends.” And what’s holding me back from my English-speaking compatriots? I don’t know. Maybe it’s not an ability that can be parceled out like that, where I can be friendly with one group but not with another. Maybe it’s because relationships here can be transitory and fleeting – just when you get to know someone, they jet back to their home country again. Maybe I’ve become a suspicious bastard who doesn’t trust people enough to believe that their intentions are good, that this friendship is going to be an investment with a good return.

I get jealous of people who have a lot of friends, really. People who have a Group that they can go out with. My colleagues, especially the younger ones, hang out a lot outside of work hours, and sometimes I wish I was willing to make that kind of commitment to other people. Whatever it is, I’ve found in the last decade or so that I’ve really narrowed my relationships down to a near-singularity that includes The Boyfriend and me, and that’s it. And even he thinks I should go out and make more friends.

12. If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
I wish we hadn’t moved as many times as we did.

On the upside, I'm damn good at packing up a home.

Sometimes I think that my failure to connect well with others has its roots in the involuntary peregrinations of my youth, but again – I do have friends, so I don’t think I can really blame my parents for this one. [2] Having said that, though, I do wish we hadn’t moved as much as we did. I wonder, sometimes, what would have been if we had stayed in one place until I went to college. Would I have had childhood friends of the kind you see in your better class of Stephen King novels? Would I have developed that sense of community that comes with having grown up in a place all your life? What would it be like to have a childhood with continuity, where you could know that the house you lived in would be the only home you know? Where the only time you moved was when you took your place in the world of adults?

I really have no idea, and it’s an entertaining hypothetical at best. There’s no guarantee that having lived in one place all my life would have been any better for me than having moved a lot. After all, I was born in Houston, TX, so it’s entirely possible that I’d be a twang-talkin’ evangelical Christian who was active in his local Megachurch by day and fervently praying to Jesus to take the gay away by night. Hell, I might even have willingly voted for Dubya. Twice.

Yikes.

13. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Setting up a successful (so far) life in Japan.

Plum blossoms always look good.

This was something I never never would have expected. If you had told me, back when I was slogging through Beanie Babies after college, that I would be teaching in a private high school in Japan, I would have laughed right in your face. This was something that I did because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and never really thought that it was something that would last a long time. Maybe stay for a year or two, then come back and do… something. It wasn’t like I was overburdened with career choices before I came here, which may be one of the reasons I’ve stayed for so long.

One year turned into two, which turned into… many. And the thing of it is that I’ve made a pretty good life for myself here. Can it bear some improvement? Absolutely – see number 11 above. But I live in a great place, I have a job that I really enjoy, and The Boyfriend and I have been together for quite a long time now. Things are comfortable, things are good. And before I came here, I never really expected that to happen in my lifetime, in Japan or anywhere else.

14. If you died and came back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?
A raven.

C’mon, ravens are awesome. They’re near chimp-level intelligent, if not better. They can work out puzzles, work in teams, and plan ahead. They are ancient harbingers of war and death, but also agents of thought and memory. They can live anywhere and eat anything, and if you piss them off, they’ll remember you forever.

Plus, I look good in black.

15. What is your most treasured possession?
My Waterman fountain pen.

This has become a surprisingly popular photo on Flickr.

This was a gift from The Boyfriend quite a few birthdays ago. I was looking for a nice fountain pen, and I saw a green Waterman that I really liked. The price was a bit more than he was looking to spend on a present, so I said I’d cover the extra but it would still count as a present from him.

It really is lovely, too. The green enamel is starting to flake a bit, showing gold underneath, but it writes like a charm and never fails to get compliments. It’s really a pity I don’t like writing stories longhand. It would be an excellent tool for that purpose, I think.

—–

[1] Though that would technically be LiveJournal. WordPress tries to be a bit more upbeat from what I understand, and I’m not exactly boosting the curve there.
[2] Don’t worry, Mom and Dad – I’ll find something to blame on you eventually. There’s a shrink somewhere who needs a yacht.

I know I am, but what are you?

Well, yesterday’s unloading was an interesting experience. While I wish I could say that I feel unburdened or uplifted or something, I haven’t felt much different for having posted all of that, probably because so much of it has been circling around in my head for so long that it just feels like talking to myself some more.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve got for questions 6-10 from the Vanity Fair version of the Proust Questionnaire.

6. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
The unwillingness to empathize.

There is a wonderful quote I’ve seen passed around, and it is of uncertain provenance. Some people attribute it to Plato or to Philo of Alexandria, but the most probable source is a guy named John Watson, who wrote under the pen name of Ian MacLaren.

Yeah, I don’t know who that is either.

Whoever wrote it, it’s a phrase that really resonates with me:

by Simon Walker, via Flickr

Human beings are not telepathic, no matter how much we wish we could be. We all live inside our own heads, acting out dramas that no one else is aware exist, and to each and every one of us, what happens to us is of paramount importance. You may be a cancer sufferer who just got released from twenty years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of murdering your own wife, but that still won’t trump the fact that I missed the train this morning and had to stand while a bunch of elementary school kids punched each other and screamed for the whole forty-minute ride.

It’s not that I don’t think your pain is significant – it most certainly is – but I may not know it’s there. And even if I do, I have absolutely no point of reference to begin to understand how you feel, so comparing your pain to mine is pointless. Mine will win because, well, it’s mine.

Now this is the point where the sociopaths among you are saying, “I know, right?” Well calm down before you get all excited.

The mark of being an emotionally functional human being is that once you have that moment where you say, “I value my pain over the pain of others,” you then go on to the next step, which is to say, “But I’m going to act like that isn’t true, because that would make me a dick.” And that’s what we do. We hear another person’s story and say, “Wow, it would be really inappropriate and belittling to complain to this Iraq war vet with PTSD about how the barista at Starbucks never leaves enough room for milk when I buy coffee.”

And you shut. The hell. Up. Because while you cannot truly know what the other person is going through, you can know that it’s bigger than what you have going on. The real kicker is that, for any given person you meet, there’s no guarantee you will ever know what kind of pain they’re going through or what burdens they bear. No one is obligated to reveal that kind of information, and there’s no guarantee you could understand it if they did.

So I guess my point is this: you’ve gotta try and empathize with people, no matter how much you may dislike them or disagree with them. You don’t know the whole story, or what battles they’re fighting, so you’re not in a great position to pass judgement.

But there are people who actively refuse to do this. I had a colleague once who lived by the saying, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” She met someone, judged them, and then that was that. Changing her mind was like shifting the Empire State Building with a series of precisely timed farts. I found that to be not only immensely uncompassionate, but thoroughly dismissive of the nature of the human condition.

There is a converse as well, which I phrase as follows:

Apologies to Mr. Walker. This one's mine.

I had some students last year who were on the American football team, and it was the center of their lives. There wasn’t a single activity or assignment that they couldn’t somehow manage to slip football into.

Now as you may know, I couldn’t care less about sports, and I mean that exactly as it is written. I don’t hate sports, because to hate a thing you have to care about it. If all athletics vanished from the world tomorrow, I probably wouldn’t notice it until the whole city of Boston up and killed itself.

So when one of these boys comes up to me the other day and says that he’d gotten to start in last weekend’s game and that they’d won, do I say, “I’m sorry, and I should care… why?” No, of course not. I congratulate him and shake his hand, not because I care but because he does. This is his victory – meaningless to me, but the world to him, and if our situations were reversed, I would hope to get the same in return.

Being unwilling to imagine the world from another’s point of view, to admit that your perspective on the world is not absolute, is basically shouting a big “Fuck You” to your fellow human beings. You don’t have to approve of everything someone does, or condone every behavior or belief, but you owe it to people to at least try and understand.

7. What is your greatest extravagance?
Comic books.

Calling it an “extravagance” makes it sound like I’m somehow neglecting other, more important financial responsibilities. And who knows, maybe I am. But if you take the word to mean that I spend more money than I should on something that is not strictly necessary, then yeah – comics.

This has always been true, too. Somewhere in my mother’s house are several long boxes with half a thousand comics in them. When I was much younger, most of my paper route and allowance money went into comics, no doubt to the unending consternation of my parents.

As I got older and poorer, I stopped buying as much, because somehow staving off starvation took priority, but once money started coming in again, it went out every Wednesday in a flurry of capes and spandex.

That… sounds like a lot more fun than it was.

These days, I have several shelves of trade paperbacks that still baffle The Boyfriend, and Thursday morning is the day I download the newest batch of comics from DC, who went digital last year. Good thing, too, as American comics are viciously hard to find here.

Why comics and not something more grown-up like wine or travel or high-class rentboys? Well… why not? I’ve known many of these characters longer than I’ve known some of my best friends. I like reading their adventures and seeing all the ways they save the world. I like watching how writers and artists reinterpret the characters, giving them new life and new meaning that their creators probably never imagined.

Simply put, reading comics gives me pleasure, which is pretty much the whole reason for having an extravagance in the first place.

8. On what occasion do you lie?
When the truth won’t do anyone any good.

I really don’t like lying. Whenever possible, I tell the truth or, in the best tradition of the Aes Sedai, something that is true, but not the truth the listener thinks it is. My general position is that the world is already full of liars, dissemblers, and deceivers, and I really don’t need to add to their number.

Having said that, there are times when the truth might not do any good. It might even be harmful, in fact. And I know this is vague and highly situational and useless as a guideline, but if the truth is only going to hurt people, then you need to carefully consider whether a lie might not be better. I can’t tell you when that is, of course. You’ll have to trust your judgment on that.

9. What do you dislike most about your appearance?
My chewed-up nails.

Pity these don't work for humans.

I had a few good choices for this one – my thinning hair, the forty pounds or so of flesh that steadfastly refuses to just vanish because I want it to, teeth that really should be taken to a dentist one of these days. The glowing tattoo of the rune of Dagon on my forehead that hums an atonal dirge every eighteen minutes and causes children to cry tears of indelible shadow. But my nails were the first and last things to come to mind, so I’ll go with them.

I have been biting my nails since I had teeth. Regardless of where I am or what I’m doing, there’s a chance I’ll find myself gnawing away on my fingers. Sometimes I bite them ’till I draw blood, which is why I keep Band-Aids in my desk drawer. And that’s really not a thing to be proud of.

The thing is, I don’t consider myself a particularly nervous person, and I doubt anyone who knows me would call me highly-strung or overstressed, so unless there’s some giant ball of Freudian anxiety that I’ve repressed somewhere, I can’t say that I do it out of stress. It’s just habit that I can’t seem to break.

And gods know I’ve tried. I’ve snapped my wrists with rubber bands when I felt the urge to bite, but usually I can’t snap them fast enough – the realization of what I’m doing doesn’t kick in until I’m already doing it. I got that foul-tasting stuff you can paint on your nails, but again – by the time I think, “Ugh, this tastes terrible,” it’s too late. Besides, the human brain is a master at filtering out unpleasantness, so after awhile I would just stop tasting it.

Not entirely inaccurate...

I even tried putting on clear nail polish, with the hopes that the additional layer of enamel would provide some protection.

I stripped it off with my teeth.

Other than encasing my hands in gauntlets for the rest of my days, I’m really out of ideas. I just have to learn to either keep my fingertips out of sight or accept that they look like gnawed-on sausages.

The worst part is that I was able to quit smoking. That’s supposed to be the demon addiction of the modern man, and I beat that. But somehow my inner need to chew on my own flesh cannot be overcome. Dammit.

10. When and where were you happiest?
Any time I come home from traveling.

This is another question that I don’t really like, mainly because it’s nearly impossible to settle on one answer. Happiness is so highly subject to moment and mood and circumstance, and our memories of happiness can be altered with little or no provocation. Trying to thinking a single happiest moment is like trying to capture mist in a fishing net.

I decided, then, to go for a situation that never fails to make me happy, and that’s when I stop traveling.

To give a little perspective, I always thought the saying, “The journey is more important than the destination” was a big old load of stinky, stinky horseshit.

I like destinations. I like being somewhere. I like being able to be in a place and learn about it and discover it.

Only twelve more hours to go...

I hate getting there. I hate having to arrange for the time off, trying to create a schedule that jams as much activity into as small a temporal space as possible. I hate knowing that there’s no way I’m not being robbed blind on transportation costs.

I hate the constant feeling that I’m doing something wrong, like I’m just barely in control of what’s going on. For example, I can never shake that feeling like the Customs officer is going to open my passport and half a kilo of heroin is going to fall out. It feels like there are a thousand things that can go wrong, and I’m only even aware of a few of them.

And then, when I finally get where I’m going, to a place where I want to relax and catch up with people, there is always that knowledge in the back of my head that pretty soon I’m going to have to turn around and do it all again. There’s part of me that’s watching the clock, wondering if I’ll be able to make it to the airport on time, wondering if I can pack everything up efficiently to survive the trip home.

My nightmares are literally about this kind of thing. Being late for transportation, not going the way I want to go, not being in the city I need to be in. For me, travel is just a catastrophic series of clusterfucks that are waiting to happen. They just need one little push – a late taxi, a cranky TSA agent, a weak bladder – to come cascading down and cause me no end of trouble.

The day teleportation becomes a viable travel alternative will be the happiest day of my life…

All right, not quite as personally introspective as last time, but there are still ten more questions to go. See you there.

Just who do you think you are?

I was listening to a podcast of a recent episode of The Colin McEnroe Show (broadcast out of Hartford on WNPR, co-starring my sister, Chion Wolf), and as part of their discussion of how well we should get to know our candidates for public office, the Proust Questionnaire was brought up several times. From what I could gather, this was a kind of “Know Thyself” exercise that was popularized by Marcel Proust, and variations of which are used today as a kind of window into the soul of the person you’re talking to. The idea is that the only way to honestly answer these questions would be to have deep insight into your own mental workings.

He also had a hand in the 500 question Purity Test. The really dirty version...

Of course, the politicians have caught on to this kind of thing, so they prepare for PQ questions by coming up with the answer they think will be most electable. Which kind of defeats the whole purpose.

Anyway, I went to the Vanity Fair website, one of many that has the questionnaire (or a variant thereof) online. The difference is that Vanity Fair’s is interactive and promises to match you with a famous person when you’re all done. I don’t know how they manage to pull that off, though – the questions they give the celebs are quite different from the ones you answer on the site. In any case, I got a 94% match with Karl Rove, of all people, so it can’t be that accurate.

It’s a lot of questions, and a lot of thinking about heavy things, so I’ll break it up into a series of posts. Follow along, and if you feel like sharing your own answers in the comments, feel free!

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
A difficult thing, done well.

Right off the top, the big thing about this questionnaire is that it asks you to think in terms of absolutes. The best, the worst – the perfect. The problem with this is that these answers might change from day to day or moment to moment, so this is really more of a snapshot of your mind as you answer than a comprehensive look at who you are as a whole. So when I answered, I tried to be more general than specific whenever possible.

In this case, the times I’m happiest are usually when I’ve done something difficult and done it well. Whether it’s writing a story that had a particularly thorny problem to it, teaching a new lesson that I wasn’t sure would work, helping a student understand a difficult concept – I think the best moments were when I achieved something that I wasn’t sure I could pull off. How this jives with my answer to question 5 is something I still haven’t figured out.

2. What is your greatest fear?
That the people I love will move on without me. And that they’ll be right to do so.

This was something I never really wanted to say out loud, and if it weren’t for travel-induced exhaustion and several glasses of wine a few years ago, I probably would never have. But once you admit something to yourself, and then to others, there’s really no use in pretending it’s not there.

I moved away from the US in 2000, leaving behind family and friends I had known for years. I thought I’d only be gone a year, maybe two, and then come back with great stories, pick up where we left off, and everyone would be the better for it. But time went on, as time does, and our worlds started to diverge. Noticeably. People got married and had kids. They changed careers and developed new interests. They had Facebook friends I’d never heard of and did the kinds of things with them that I imagined we would have done.

If I hadn’t left.

And every year I stay, I realize that re-inserting myself into their lives is becoming less and less possible. As I put it, “There’s no Chris-shaped hole in your lives that only I can fill, and I have no right to expect there to be one.”

Yes, wine can make me maudlin and self-deprecating. Better than tequila.

My memory of that night doesn’t recall any soothing answers, either. They didn’t say, “No, no, you’re wrong!” or “Stop being so silly, of course there is!” Which I would have known to be lies, and I am happy my friends respect me enough not to lie to me.

Regardless, I fear that one day I won’t have anything in common anymore with the people who meant so much to me. Our last real, non-virtual point of reference as friends will be decades in the past, and I don’t have a whole lot of faith in my ability to catch up.

I have plenty of other fears, of course. Insignificance. Failing someone. Not living up to the expectations that I’ve set for myself. And while I don’t have a crippling fear of death, my only true prayer to the Universe is, “Please do not let my death be passed around on YouTube.”

3. Which historical figure do you most identify with?
Thomas Jefferson

The resemblance is... uncanny.

I had trouble with this question, because any answer I give will sound incredibly arrogant. I’m pretty sure my name won’t be remembered for all that long after I’m dead, so comparing myself to Jefferson – or any person of historical caliber – seems like a real stretch.

But there is a point where I think we intersect: we’re both interested in everything. Jefferson was a true polymath, someone who found everything fascinating. He was a writer, a scholar, a politician, a President, a scientist, an architect, a botanist, a farmer – there was no area of human knowledge or endeavor that Jefferson couldn’t get interested in, and I like to think that I’m similar in that way.

Of course, there’s plenty of stuff that I couldn’t care less about. Sports, for example, or pop culture, but I can see where other people are fascinated by it. I’ve been known to lose myself in trivia, I know about things that I really don’t need to know, and I find the whole world just a fascinating place. If I had the kind of freedom of a late 18th century landed gentleman to pursue whatever caught my brain, I think I might have ended up a lot like good old TJ.

Without the slaves, of course.

4. Which living person do you most admire?
My sister.

As you may be able to guess just by the fact I’m writing all this, I esteem self-awareness very highly. I think that the best thing a person can do for themselves is to know who they are, and my sister knows who she is. She knows what makes her happy and what she needs to avoid. She knows what her talents are and how she wants to use them. She is compassionate and empathetic, funny, strange, and brave, and far more at peace with the idea of finitude than I will ever be.

She has dreadlocks and tattoos because they make her happy, knows her whisky, speaks Spanish without hesitation, learned Sign Language because it looked like an interesting thing to do, and has gracefully accepted the mantle of Local Celebrity. She can make childish puns right alongside a discussion of the nature of religion, and takes no joy in making others feel bad.

My sister is great.

This doesn’t mean, by the way, that my other family isn’t just as admirable – they most certainly are. But her face popped into my head first, so she gets the door prize, such as it is.

5. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
I am ruled by my pride.

In the movie Serenity, the Operative asks Mal a very important question: “Do you know what your sin is?” Mal, of course, has a witty response – “I’m a fan of all seven” – but the question stuck with me for some reason. Probably because I can answer it very easily. My sin is pride.

Not this kind of pride, of course. Though if I looked like that, I might consider it.

I can’t bear to be made a fool of, so I avoid doing things that might make me look foolish. I hate the idea of failing, so I stay away from things that I might fail at. I don’t want to be rejected, so I don’t do things that would lead people to reject me. It’s really the exact opposite of what one should do in order to be a fully-realized, happy human being. And I know it. But I do it anyway.

As mentioned above, I feel best when I do something I wasn’t sure I could do. If my mind were a rational place, that would mean that I would seek out such experiences, not caring about my pride and thus maximizing my chances for happiness and self-satisfaction. But the human mind is a tangled ball of inexplicable contradictions, so there we go. There are so many things I’d like to do – especially crafty things, things where I can make stuff. But those things are hard, and rather than see myself as a beginner on a long journey of discovery, I see myself as someone who really sucks at whatever it is he’s trying.

So rather than try and fail and look like a fool, I give up, and then a few months/years later I look back at it and think, “Wow, imagine how awesome I would be at that if I had kept at it.” That starts the “You’re just a big ol’ loser” cycle of self-flagellation and despair, since by giving up means a guaranteed failure rather than having simply risked it, and I’m then very glad that I’m an infrequent drinker.

What I wish I could figure out is where my threshold is. I had absolutely no problems with starting my story blog, or my podcast, or jumping into a new teaching job. I took those risks and made them work fabulously. Hell, I’m psychologically dissecting myself on the internet, for crying out loud. But there are other things that I just won’t do. Speaking Japanese, for one, is guaranteed to trigger my pride. When I speak Japanese, I feel stupid. Not “Ha, ha, don’t I look foolish” stupid, but actually mentally undeveloped. Like the kind of person who is unable to articulate thoughts in a manner that is understandable to other people, and that hits my pride button hard.

At least I'm better than Mitt at pretending to be human, I know that much.

And in talking with The Boyfriend this evening, I mentioned to him something unpleasant that I had figured out about myself: I can be nice. I can be polite and kind and considerate. I can even be funny. But I seem to have lost the ability to be friendly, if I ever had it. That talent for allowing myself to be approachable and to let my guard down is something I don’t know if I can ever manage. Why? Because of my pride. Inviting another person into your world is inviting a whole lot of chances to be brought down a few pegs, and I don’t seem to be able to handle that.

If you can figure out how to resolve that with number 2, by the way, you’re a better person than I am. The answer to that is reflective of my fear that the effort to rebuild friendships will be so monstrously huge that I’ll end up giving up entirely. And the thought that I might be the kind of person who would actually do that is wholly repellent to me. But there it is.

Keep an eye out for part 2, coming soon…ish.

Arrow. Knee. You know the rest…

As a rule, I don’t like it when bloggers start out by apologizing for not having written anything in a while. So I won’t. [1] So here’s a post about what I’ve been up to in the past… while.

No, kitty, that's my sweet roll. BAD KITTY!!

When Skyrim came out, I took one look at it and said, “Nope. This would be an unimaginably bad idea.” I know myself well enough to know that if I got into a game that immersive, that complex and that malleable in terms of how its played and how involved the player can be, it would come to dominate every bit of free time that I had. Any creative or otherwise productive thing I had going would no doubt wither away like an old fruit, left on the tree for far too long until it was nothing but a shriveled husk, good to no one.

I also knew that it was inevitable that I would play it eventually.

And I was right.

It’s a game that gets into your head and just sits there, taking up as much space as it can. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a lot of fun. There are so many different ways to play it, the world is mapped out and written to an amazing level of detail, and I will never – never – get tired of lurking in the shadows and clearing out caves of bandits with flaming arrows. That’s just more fun than I should be able to have.

But of the game itself I did eventually grow weary. At a certain point, your primary skills are too good for most enemies to challenge you, but those enemies will break you in half if you try to confront them using your less-fleshed out skills. So, as a sneaky archer I could wipe out a coven of necromancers in no time flat, but if I tried to work on, say, my destruction magic instead, they would have me for breakfast. Literally.

I seem to like the non-hominids. The implications are terrifying.

What this means is that I did eventually stop playing. I’ll go back to it, I’m sure. I have a skinny little Argonian lined up for future adventures. But it probably won’t be for a good long while.

The other thing taking up time, of course, is work. The new school year started last week, and that’s always exciting. Here’s a little fact for students: your teachers are just as nervous about the new year as you are. We don’t know who will be in the classes, what the dynamics will be, what the skill levels will be – all we can really do is plan our fingers to the bone and hope for the best. To borrow an old military aphorism, “No lesson plan survives contact with the students.” Once you’ve met everyone, then you can start figuring out what will actually work for that given class, and hope that you can find the best way to teach them. It’ll involve some trial and error, but that’s part of the adventure.

This makes perfect sense to me.

Things are off to a good start, though. I mainly teach first year students, fresh out of junior high school, and that’s a really interesting opportunity. It’s a chance to help them set their study habits and their learning methods early on, so that you don’t have to break them down again in the years to follow. Some of them are still eager to learn and be part of the class, although it is about the time where that teenage ennui sets in and the last thing they want is to be seen actually enjoying something that isn’t sports or pop culture. Starting from the first class, I try to get them to understand what I want to achieve in the class, and what I expect from them, in as clear and simple a way as possible. We’ll see if it works.

Pictured: Not a valid assessment technique.

As an aside: one of my teaching bugaboos is when students don’t understand things, but don’t tell me that they don’t understand. As if I can mind-meld with them and find out what they’re having trouble with. Often, they’ll turn to their classmates, but there’s no guarantee they can help either. So I spend time during the first couple of classes going over the basic comprehension phrases with them:

Could you speak more slowly?
Can you say that again?
What does ~ mean?
I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

And so on. Every year I try to get them to understand how very important this is to their learning, and this year my phrase is this: “If you do not understand me, then I have failed.”

Not entirely true, of course. It could be that they weren’t paying attention, sleeping, chatting with friends, thinking about football practice, whatever. But I’m giving this strategy a shot in the hopes that its novelty will catch their attention. Teachers are supposed to be the ones who know everything, the ones who are In Charge. The idea that a teacher could fail might just reduce the intimidation factor just enough to allow them to ask for help when they need it.

Or not. We’ll find out.

Other than that, though, life is life. My mother sometimes expresses frustration because we don’t email often enough [2], but she knows that it most likely means that everything is copacetic. Not every day is worth a blog post or a phone call or a long, drawn-out email. That’s what Twitter is for, and I’m pretty quiet even over there.

If, on the other hand, North Korea actually gets a missile that works, you’ll be hearing from me in no time flat, don’t worry about it. And I have a few ideas for some more blog posts that don’t amount to, “Hey, so I haven’t written a post in months…” [3]

—–

[1] Except that I just totally did.
[2] And I’m sure she’s not the only one.
[3] See what I did there?

You Get Nothing! You Lose! Good Day, Sir!

Pictured: Teacher of the Year

I had an interesting interaction with a student the other day that got me to thinking, which is always good, though it did send me down a mental rabbit hole for a little while. Which is not so good. Unless you consider that it inspired me to write a blog post. In which case it is good.

See? This kind of thing happens to me all the time…

We had a recitation contest this past week, wherein first year students would have to memorize a text in English and deliver it with some amount of oratorical skill. This year we had a section from the memoirs of Helen Keller, an old folk tale, a couple of speeches from Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” and John Lennon’s “Imagine,” among others. Lots of kids prepare for it, and from among them, eight students are chosen to compete in the final.

So, I was talking to one of my first year students about this, and while he had tried out, he hadn’t made the cut. He said that, in response to not becoming a finalist, he had been called a loser.

Now, before we get all knicker-twisty, let’s put in a couple of caveats: this kid does tend to humorous hyperbole when he can. Moreover, I don’t know what Japanese word the other person actually used, to say nothing of the nuance of that particular word in Japanese in that context. On top of that, what I heard was a translation of that word by someone with an imperfect grasp of the subtleties of English. So let’s not get into what an awful human being this other person may or may not have been, mainly because that’s not what I want to talk about.

"As always, Bob, your feedback is invaluable."

What I suspect, given all of the above, is that the student in question – who has in the past displayed quite the competitive streak – probably knows what “loser” means, and regardless of what the speaker may have meant, I suspect that this student believes he might be one, and the thought chafes at him. I reminded him that there were only eight spots available, that not everyone could make it, and if he’d tried his best, then… Oh well. So it goes. Not everybody gets to be a winner.

That thought dovetailed nicely into the work I was doing with my advanced reading class (which he’s not in, which is a pity). We did Harrison Bergeron, a dystopic story by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. about an America where everyone is forced to be equal in every way so as to eliminate competition and the hurt feelings that come about from seeing someone who is better than you. It’s a great little story that we had a lot of fun unpacking [1] and is often brought up in situations where people are rewarded for effort over performance.

It’s the little league games where the losing team is given extra at-bats to make up for a low score, or a spelling bee where everyone gets a prize of some kind, or a school where there is no such thing as a failing grade. There is incredible tension between the need to treat kids fairly and the desire to keep from breaking their spirit. We want to make sure that skill and accomplishment are rewarded, and at the same time make sure that each precious snowflake gets their due.

(from Despair.com)

I thought about that as I was telling this kid that I was sure he tried hard and that was the most important thing. That he shouldn’t consider himself a loser, but just accept that there were at least eight people who were better than he was. This thought unfolded like an origami flower in my head, probably because I can’t just leave any damn thing alone.

At what point do we stop praising effort and start expressing disappointment in poor performance? How can we help students understand the difference between constructive failure and failure brought about by laziness? Should the teacher be the unforgiving rock against which a student dashes himself, or the compassionate guide that encourages her to find her way?

Or are all of those just false dichotomies, over-broad generalizations that cannot apply to every student and every situation that might come up?

I have no idea, really, other than to use the cop-out answer of “all of the above.” Some kids will flourish when they’re praised for trying hard. For them, success will just be a by-product of effort, and the real reward will be the recognition of that effort. Other kids won’t be happy until they’ve “won,” whatever that means to them. To these kids, praise for effort will be empty and cloying, and will be of no help whatsoever. Different students need different things, and it’ll take a lot more years under my belt than I have so far before I’m able to pinpoint the best strategy for any given student.

Tell me you didn't live for these when you were a kid...

I seem to be of the effort-praising school of thought, and that’s usually how I deal with my students. I don’t like to point out their failures as failures, but rather as lessons for improvement. If a kid makes a mistake in class, I thank them for the opportunity to teach something that not only they need to learn, but probably several others do as well. I prefer means to ends, and process to product, and I think I reflect that in my interactions with students. Not every student is going to benefit from this, but it’s the most authentic way I know how to be.

What I was able to get out of all this, however, was a working definition of the word “loser.” It is a person who has failed due to a conscious and obvious lack of effort. Someone who has, in effect, lost a competition to themselves. If this student had indeed done his best, and despite that did not reach the finals, then he is not a loser. He just hasn’t won yet.

——–

[1] Well, I had a lot of fun. I can only hope the students did as well.

DARKNESS! IMPRISONING ME! ALL THAT I SEE! ABSOLUTE HORROR!

There’s something just so… satisfying about using Metallica lyrics to title this post.

As you may have heard, there is an Internet Blackout going on right now. Wikipedia’s English site has gone black for the day, HuffPo has covered its usual front page with a giant black square, Reddit has plans to shut its doors for a while, and there are plenty of other sites around the web that are going dark as a protest against the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

In a nutshell… Well, I’m going to let this explain it, because I’d probably muck it up:

Got all that?

On my scale of trust levels, internet movements don’t rank all that high. Any time some brush fire gets started online, I’m usually sure that either it’s inflating things out of proportion or outright lying. But this rings much truer than most, and even if it’s not as bad as it’s being made out to be, it’s still very important that we make it crystal clear to Congress and Commerce – both of which I trust about as much as I do the guy who sells discount Viagra out of the trunk of his car [1] – that we do not want our internet fucked with.

Any more than it already has been, of course.

To that end, I’ll be joining the Blackout, thanks to the special settings that WordPress.com has introduced to its blogs. This site – as well as the Labyrinth Library and Year of Stories – will go dark on January 18th at 1 AM, UTC (about four hours from this writing) and return at 1 PM, UTC. It will sport a “Stop Censorship” banner until the vote date, which is January 24th.

In the meantime, if you are a US citizen, you can contact your Senators and Representative and voice your disapproval. If you’re not in the US, you can use the same link (and scroll down a bit) to contact the State Department and protest. After all, what the US does with the internet affects the world, and don’t think for a second that your government wouldn’t give some thought to adopting identical laws if they were successful in the States.

I’ll leave you with a quote that I grabbed from Wil Wheaton:

“Why is it that when Republicans and Democrats need to solve the budget and the deficit, there’s deadlock, but when Hollywood lobbyists pay them $94 million dollars to write legislation, people from both sides of the aisle line up to co-sponsor it?”
–Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian on CNBC.

I have a feeling that it’s a rhetorical question.

Anyway, see you on the other side.

————-

[1] You bastard!

In which I am almost, but not entirely, like Ultra Boy

It’s very important that I write something. Over the winter break, I picked up a bunch of games off Steam – Batman: Arkham Asylum, L.A. Noire, Grand Theft Auto IV, Bastion, The Binding of Isaac – they call to me. They want to help me eat up vast amounts of time without really realizing it. They want to sap away my precious intellectual juices in a haze of car crashes and Batarangs.

On the other hand, I stole a SWAT truck!

As much fun as that sounds, I do have work to do. Not school work, though that wouldn’t be a bad idea. I have my own work to do – writing.

Last year, I got really lazy with writing book reviews, which isn’t really a sound strategy when you’re the sole writer for an internationally-known book review podcast. [1] With every week that I do the show, my backlist of reviews diminishes by one, and sooner or later I’ll be at a point where I have to actually write one review a week just to catch up. That’ll be the point where I’ll have to either end the podcast or put it on a hiatus, because there’s no way I can pull that off for very long.

So, one of my resolutions for this year is to get back in the saddle of review-writing, and make sure I always have plenty of reviews to choose from each week. As of this writing, I have a backlist of 48 reviews. That’s great. Unfortunately, half of them are either Wheel of Time reviews or Discworld. So I need to get moving on this and try to put some variety back in the stacks. I have a lot of old, pre-podcast reviews that I can beef up, but a lot of those are for books I no longer own. That means doing a bit of research to remember what they were about, to say nothing of cursing out Past Chris for not writing more thoroughly.

The other work I have to do, of course, is writing fiction. I’m still plugging along on my fic-a-day work, and have decided that in January I will use only all-new characters. That’s not as hard as it sounds, but after seven months it does seem to take a little more energy every day just to get started on writing. I know I have to do it, but I find other things to do, and that’s never a good sign. It also brings me to the title of this post.

His Ultra-Smooth is always on, though. Another difference between him and me.

In case you’re not familiar with him, Ultra Boy is a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes, a group that battles interstellar menaces in the far future of the DC Universe. Ultra Boy is a character with pretty run-of-the-mill powers – super-speed, invulnerability, great strength, and so on – but with one rather strange caveat: he can only use one of his powers at a time.

The idea is that his body is full of some kind of “ultra-energy” that can allow him to do amazing things, but he has to consciously will it to do what he wants. And there’s not really enough of it to go around. So, he can be really fast, but not inhumanly strong, or he can be super-strong and yet vulnerable to an enemy’s weapons. It’s an interesting twist, and part of what makes him more than just Superboy with some stubble.

Now while I cannot, as of this writing, fly or shoot lasers out of my eyes, I do feel a kind of kinship with Ultra Boy. I have creative energy that I can do pretty good things with. I’m not superheroic or anything, but I’m certainly not bad. The trouble is that I can only use it for one creative outlet at a time. So if I’m writing, it means that I’m not drawing or doing photography. If I start getting more caught up in photography, then the writing will stop. If I feel the drawing itch kick in, then that’ll be it for the photography, and so on.

I hear Fitzgerald did this all the time.

The thing is, I don’t really have a lot of control over when my creative outlet is going to switch from one thing to another, or if it’ll just stop altogether – which has happened before. So when I get to a point like where I am today, where I just want to switch off my brain and hijack cars all night, I start to worry that this is the first sign of The Switch. I really want to continue with writing, and I have no plans to stop doing the podcast. But perhaps my subconscious has other things in mind for me.

The obvious solution, of course, is to soldier on. To write something, even if it’s half-assed and half-hearted, just so I can say, “Well, I did it.” But at the same time, I don’t want it to become a chore. I don’t want it to become just one more damn thing I have to do every day. I’m not making money off the podcast or the fiction, so the main reason I do it, really, is for my own enjoyment. And if I don’t enjoy it, then what’s the point?

Anyway, all that is neither here nor there. I’ll keep on keeping on, and monitoring myself to see what’s keeping me on track and what’s trying to nudge me off it. Self-knowledge is a good thing, if a little tricky at times.

—–

[1] There are people in other countries who listen to it. So I’m just being accurate.

Iowa, O Iowa

We should all just re-use this picture. It's gonna happen eventually...

Just a short note, covering a couple of things.

1) I’m going for a blogging schedule of at least once a week this year. No guarantees on content, and it’ll probably get politics-heavy as 2012 drags on. And there’ll be some maniacal cackling and / or pleas for a swift death after December 21st, but disregard that.

2) Explain to me why we care about the Iowa Caucuses again? I mean, aside from the fact that the only people who are going to participate are the hard-core wonks from either side, a quick look at their record seems to suggest that someone ought to just build a giant coin-flipper in the middle of downtown Des Moines. Seriously, when there’s not an incumbent running for re-election, it’s a 50% accuracy rate at best.

Actually, now that I jot down the results, in races where there was no Democratic incumbent, Iowa picked the eventual nominee 4 out of 6 times. In races with no Republican incumbent, Iowa Republicans picked the eventual nominee 2 out of 5.

So what does this mean? It means stop encouraging these people. And by “these people,” I mean the candidates, the media, and the self-absorbed partisans who participate in this charade in the belief that what they’re doing actually has any influence.

Oh, and just for fun: the New Hampshire Primaries are only slightly more predictive, but only for the GOP. In the same races as above, the Democratic NH winner went on to be the nominee in 3 out of 6 years, and the Republican did so in 3 out of 5.

Man, if I’m this cynical now, just wait until things really get rolling…

The Music in my Head part 1

I find that I don’t talk about music much, which is weird. I’ll talk about comics till I’m blue in the face, and y’all know how much I like to talk about books. But there’s something with talking about music that just makes me really… hesitant.

Perhaps it’s because I know a lot of people who are really into music, and who have very strong musical tastes. Perhaps I don’t want to lower myself in their eyes by revealing the ridiculous things that I snap my fingers to sometimes. Or perhaps it’s because the songs you like really say a lot about you as an emotional being. Unlike books, music is best when it’s not appreciated as an intellectual exercise – you should just let it wash over you and through you and see what kind of buttons it pushes and switches it flips. Maybe I fear that revealing the songs I like will tell you more about me than I really wanted you to know. [1]

I thought a lot about how to approach this post, actually. Should it be the songs I will always listen to, the ones that make me angry or sad, or the ones that remind me of those dear dead days beyond recall? Should it be the ones that I can’t listen to anymore, or the ones I like that I know I really shouldn’t?

In the end, I realized that I have an iTunes playlist of four-or-five star songs – which should be the best of my collection – that I invariably skip through like an ADD kid at a Five Second Film festival. So I’ve fired up the ol’ iTunes Playlist of Favorites and set it to shuffle, and I’ll write about the first ten songs that come up. Here we go…

1. “Snail Shell Remix”, They Might be Giants, Back to Skull, 1994

Ah, college… I’ve been a fan of They Might Be Giants ever since high school, thanks to Jonah Knight (singer/songfighter), who played “Triangle Man” for me once and got me hooked. After that, I was always sure to pick up the new TMBG CD when it came out. The original version of this song was off their John Henry CD, and it really spoke to me as a twenty year-old with issues of ego and my place in the eyes of others. A significant sample of the lyrics is as follows:

Was it something you would do for anybody?
Was it what you’d only do for me?
I need to know because you see
I want to thank you for putting me back in my snail shell

Friend
Look what you gave
And how can you ever be repaid?
How may I give you a hand
From the position at your feet where I stand?

There’s a certain bitterness there, isn’t there? The singer is angry and sarcastic and just a wee bit passive-aggressive in trying to complain to his “friend” about how he’s been treated. The narrator of the song struck me as someone who perhaps tried to move out of his comfort zone, to do something different that his friends wouldn’t expect of him. Perhaps even to challenge his friend’s sense of dominance over the narrator. For which the friend swiftly and sternly smacked him down and put him back in his place.

It really was a good song for someone who held his friends’ opinions of him in high regard and was at the some time convinced that they didn’t return the opinion. I don’t play it as much anymore because it’s a phase that you should grow out of as you grow up. The friends who didn’t think much of me have fallen by the wayside, thanks to time and distance. The ones who thought I was worth keeping did so, regardless of how far away I went and how long I stayed here.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m not still in a snail shell – I have a nice cozy one all set up. The difference is that I’m not blaming other people for putting me there.

NaNo was a Triumph!

Let me make a note here, hold on: huge success.

Seriously, folks – not only did I make the 50,000 word mark, but I blew right through it – the official final total was 73,176 words. Which makes me, as they say, a winner!

Before we get into a review of the whole experience, let’s just take a look at the last section, which was broadly based on the aether – a fifth element that, for reasons unknown to me, does not usually appear as a quirky redhead. It was, instead, the substance through which light waves were thought to propagate. A rather clever and simple experiment managed to prove that the aether didn’t exist, however, which makes it perfect for telling stories about other things that don’t exist – ghosts, ESP, spirits of every shape and size.

• Houseguests is a tale of a haunted house, where fourteen boys were tortured and killed. The house is bought by a pair of dedicated skeptics. Because after all – there’s no such thing as ghosts, right? Except for the ones that really do live there…
• The Bad News tells more of Carly Siminsky’s story. Carly is a telekinetic girl, held by the Department of National Security for – allegedly – her own safety. She’s doing well in her training, until she hears something that she cannot endure.
• Spirit Guide, in which a young man is having problems with his date. Mainly because his spirit guide, a floating blue panda bear, is trying to help him get lucky.
• Finders Keepers, a story that may or may not reflect some writers’ bias, is about a woman, a telepath who uses her powers to steal the seeds of ideas from famous authors to build a writing career of her own. The latest author, however, might be harder to get into than she thought.
• Hotline is about a psychic, but not a real one. A young woman acting as a telephone psychic to make money for college. Her last call of the night, however, turns out to be one she couldn’t have forseen.
• Dream Intervention is the monthly revisitation of a story I wrote last month. A man with the power to enter the dreams of others is trying to help a young man with a problem that even he doesn’t understand.

It was a good section, with some fun ideas that popped into my head, and others that actively resisted being drawn out into reality. But I suppose the aether is like that – indefinable, and unreliable. At 12,453 words, it was the second shortest section – probably due to the fact that there wasn’t a whole lot of pressure anymore.

Most important, though, was that I finished NaNoWriMo with plenty of time to spare, and managed to get a very respectable number of words in before the month ended. How did I do it, you might ask? Very simple:

• I planned. I made sure that I knew what I was going to do for the month, and had keywords set up to give me something to think about while I put the stories together. Aside from providing a seed for the story to grow from (which is pretty much where Finders Keepers is all about), it allowed me to think about the stories during time when I normally wouldn’t write.
• I was regular in my writing. My regular writing time is at night – usually after eight or so, given my schedule, and I need to finish by eleven. That’s not a whole lot of time, but I made damn sure I used it. If I couldn’t – for example, on Wednesdays, when the podcast is due – I would do as much as I could during the day.
• I used all the time I had on my hands. The effect of this, of course, what that I didn’t have a lot of time to do anything else. I didn’t read a book all month, or write a review or anything, which seems really out of character and weird for me.

What this means for the future, of course, is that now I have an excellent month to point to and say, “I did that.” Over 70,000 words, and if I print out the whole month, single-spaced, it’s just over 160 pages.

A triumph indeed.

For December, though, I’m going to ramp things down a little. Do some world-building and exploring, look at some of the people and places I’ve created over the last six months and 279,000 words. It should be an interesting little vacation.