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ACKCHYUALLY I Love “Love Actually”

Dusty Leave a comment

Okay. This is my Christmas present to myself. I’ve been struggling with finding the time and energy to write, and so I’m going to make it as easy as possible: I’m going to wade into the debate about the movie Love Actually.

Ever since it came out in 2003, Love Actually has taken a lot of heat — and also a lot of praise. It has gained entry into the ranks of Christmas classics (sometimes with “cult” in the middle there, for extra alliteration credit), and it has gotten a number of takedowns. Here’s one:

Why Love Actually is not the heartwarming romcom you’re remembering

And this one is… really angry about this movie.

I Rewatched Love Actually and Am Here to Ruin It for All of You

On the other hand, this one does — well, what I’m about to do, but I’m going to be more effusive and less hesitant in my praise. Because I actually like this movie (I know, I missed a golden opportunity there — but I’m not going to lie, because I’m writing this on Christmas day, AND ON CHRISTMAS YOU TELL THE TRUTH — and I don’t love this movie, not all of it.), and this one treats it like an insane trainwreck — literally uses that phrase when talking about the worst plotline from the movie — which you can’t look away from. It’s also got some useful information about the filmmaker, if you’re curious.

‘Love Actually’ Turns 20: Revisiting Its Incredible, Awful Greatness

So to be clear, this is not my favorite Christmas movie. It is top five, but it’s definitely behind A Christmas Story and It’s a Wonderful Life, and probably behind The Family Man. If we’re counting Charlie Brown’s Christmas, Chuck Jones’s Grinch and the Rankin/Bass oeuvre, and if both Die Hard and Lethal Weapon are Christmas movies, then it isn’t even top ten.

But it’s a nice movie. It has a good message, and it presents that message in a genuinely interesting and honest way, which you almost never find in rom-coms or Christmas movies, and I respect the hell out of that. It is heartwarming, and sometimes heartbreaking, and it has Bill Nighy as one of the best characters of the last 25 years, something even the proudest Love Actually haters will admit (Not that Jezebel one, but that one’s really shouty). It’s got an incredible cast pretty much all the way through, which makes up for some of the absurdities and offenses that are almost inevitable in a rom-com, and definitely inevitable in a Christmas movie: and this is both.

I think, honestly, that’s the big problem people have with this movie: it is cheesy. It is cringey. It is unrealistic. It is cliche. But of course it is: it is a rom-com AND a Christmas movie. Rom-coms are supposed to make us believe that love is possible, and Christmas movies are supposed to make us believe that miracles are possible, AND that good things happen to good people. Love Actually is going to make those particular sins even more intense because it is a montage movie: it is a collection of nine vignettes about individual characters with individual stories, which means that no one story gets more than about ten to twenty minutes of screen time; that means there is not enough space in the film for actual development of actual characters with actual plotlines. That’s why I like The Family Man more: because it is a Christmas rom-com which tells only one story. So it does the same thing better. But Love Actually does something else, something nearly impossible.

Go ahead. Tell me a romantic story in fifteen minutes without relying on cliches.

Oops, sorry — wrong movie.

While you’re at it, tell me ANY Christmas story that isn’t cringey. There are bad moments in Love Actually, but there’s nothing in it like this heap of crap:

(And this song was turned into a Christmas movie. With Rob Lowe. Get outta here with your Love Actually hate.)

Okay. Let me get into specifics. (Spoilers, of course, but I assume if you’re still reading, you’ve seen the movie, maybe several times.) I’m not going to respond directly to every one of the points raised in any particular argument, I’m going to run through the storylines, acknowledge the issues that exist, and give my opinion on each. Ready? I’m going to use Wikipedia’s article as my organizing principle because why not.

And I’m going to use this guy as my muse.

The movie begins in the airport, which the Jezebel review hates; I admit I’m not in love with the opening, because I too hate airports: but you know what? the best moment of any trip, ANY trip, I’ve ever taken on a plane, is when I get to come home and my wife comes to pick me up, and I get to meet her and see her for the first time in days. So I get where this movie is coming from. And I like the title drop, coming in the sentence, “Love actually is all around.” Remember that: that’s the message.

Then we get into the storylines. Starting with this:

Billy Mack And His Manager Joe

Billy’s the best part of the movie. Bill Nighy plays him perfectly, and the character provides a necessary puncturing of the saccharine Christmas motif that is otherwise pumping through the veins of this movie. The song he is remaking is awful (AND I JUST FOUND OUT IT IS A REAL SONG BY THE BAND WHO MADE “WILD THING” holy shit I always thought it was written as a joke for this movie) and his desire to re-release it for Christmas in order to revive his career and fame and bank account is such a perfect parody of everything that Hollywood and corporate “arts” makers in every field do as often as they possibly can, most often with things just like this movie, works using the themes of love and Christmas; so I love that Billy is upfront about it, and hates himself for doing it, and asks people to join him in his self-loathing abuse of his own career and art. This is exactly what this kind of shit deserves, and Billy goes for it, full speed ahead. And Bill Nighy’s degenerate’s laugh is pure art. The movie that starts with this story is not taking itself too seriously. Neither should we.

The end of this story, when Billy leaves Elton John’s debauchery-fest and goes back to hang out with his manager Joe (And may I just say, all of the attacks that take the movie to task for fat-shaming Natalie [A point against the movie, I agree wholeheartedly] NEVER mention Billy’s constant description of Joe as his “fat manager,” or when he calls Joe the “ugliest man on Earth.”), presents maybe the best iteration of the movie’s message: Billy calls Joe the love of his life. No, he does not mean it romantically. (Another sort-of reasonable knock against this movie is that it is entirely heteronormative; true, but so is EVERY OTHER ROM-COM IN THE HISTORY OF CINEMA THROUGH 2003) He means that love has different forms, and for him, his most stable, most reliable, most considerate friend is the love he needed most. Because that’s what love is: and that’s why it’s all around us.

Going on (though pausing to make Christmas dinner — ziti with roasted vegetables, YUM!!).

Juliet, Peter, and Mark

Love Actually star Keira Knightley says she knows who Juliet really chose - Smooth
In complete honesty the worst part about this whole story line is their clothing.

This story line gets the most undeserved shit from haters of the movie. Okay, sure, it is pretty gross and weird that Mark is in love with his best friend’s fiancée and then wife — except no, it’s freaking not. This happens. It sort of happens all the time. It is perfectly reasonable and honorable that Mark tries his best to hide his feelings, and it is even more reasonable that he is bad at doing so. This story maybe suffers the most from the format of the movie, because without time to show the long buildup of Mark’s affection for Juliet, it just comes off as unrequited and hidden, which is creepy (Except it’s NOT because he is trying not to move in on his friend’s love, and that’s why he never says anything about his feelings, but clearly if he separated himself from Juliet he would never get to see his friend Peter and so he tries to push away his feelings and he can’t — how is that wrong?? Is he wrong for feeling attracted to someone he can’t have? Then I have bad news for EVERYONE WHO LOOKS AT KEIRA KNIGHTLEY IN THIS MOVIE.), and then the movie makes the unfortunate but entirely understandable choice, given the actress and the medium, to focus on how absolutely lovely Juliet is as a way to show that Mark has feelings for her. Every time I watch this I don’t think, “Ermagerd dude umm stop looking at your best friend’s new wife?! Ewwww!” I think, “Jesus, it would be hard to be in this situation, to feel that way about these two people and never show it.” And then when he gets caught? And looks like a creep because he thought he was concealing it, and clearly was concealing it because neither person has a clue??

Now I grant you, the posterboard scene is cringey. And hard to believe, as well. But I’ll tell you what, as someone who has actually written notes to ask people on dates, and not when I was in middle school BUT WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE, there are times when people are completely fucking cringey. And hard to believe. I agree with the critics that Christmas is not actually the time to tell the truth — but I do think truth is better than lies, and especially in important and close relationships, so I see Mark’s gesture as a good-hearted one. I do not see it as a play for Juliet, an attempt to win her away from Peter, and I do not see it as pushing feelings on her which he shouldn’t talk about; he tried not talking about his feelings, and it didn’t work because he got caught (because unlike actual stalkers and real creeps, he’s bad at concealing himself and his feelings), and now the secret is out. It’s already freaking awkward, and pretending that none of this happened is not going to make it less awkward; his only other option is to sever all ties with his friends. And I don’t see that as a better choice. I don’t like that Juliet kisses him: I think it’s a weird way to tell him that everything is okay; but I think of it as her telling him something kind, that in a different world he would be a fine choice. This way he doesn’t feel ashamed of his feelings, even though they are not returned and never will be, and it allows him to keep some of his shredded self-esteem. Because after she kisses him, see, she runs back to Peter: so she is gone from Mark, this will never come back, he will never kiss her again — but he’s not an absurd fool for feeling desire for her, as she could in theory return it. It’s weird, but it works. I love that he just turns and walks away and says intently to himself, “Enough. Enough now.” He has to stop this pining, and he knows it, and now that he has revealed his feelings to Juliet, and she has rejected him — kindly — he may be able to move on.

Sometimes that’s what love is: messy as hell. But it is both Mark’s and Juliet’s love for Peter that allows them to have this awkward, ugly situation between them, and to try to make it work anyway, for Peter’s sake. To me, that’s sweet. It’s not romantic, and despite the (pretty awful) attempts to make the posterboards funny, it’s not comedic, either. But you know what it is? It’s Christmas. It’s another kind of love.

Oh: and for those who complain about this situation being inappropriate because Keira Knightley was 17 when she made this movie? Allow me to explain what acting is. The character was not underage, so the story is not inappropriate. If the actress was underage, and the movie put her in the inappropriate position of being an object of desire for the audience, that was maybe a poor choice for the filmmakers, so feel free to blame them for doing so — but Ms. Knightley chose to take the part, knowing what the character was and why she was being picked for it.

Jamie and Aurélia

Why Colin Firth's Love Actually Storyline Is So Good – Even If It's Not Realistic

This is another one that suffers from the short screen time. Sure, the romance between these two is not based on communication, because they can’t speak to each other intelligibly. But first of all, Aurelia works in Jamie’s home, and he works at home, and so they spend all day together; there are things you learn about a person when you spend time with them, even if you don’t talk. Since the story is short, we don’t get to see the multiple adorable interactions between the writer and the house cleaner over the course of the weeks they spend together, but it is not any more reasonable to assume that there aren’t any such moments than it is to assume than it is reasonable for Aurelia to strip before she jumps into the pond, but for Jamie to go in fully clothed. I agree that scene is a bit exploitative: but also, it isn’t the worst in the movie, and to me, the most absurd part is not her taking off her clothes to jump into the water — it’s her moving the paperweight and letting the pages fly away to land in the water, not realizing, apparently, what would happen when she moved it. I mean, come on: have you never been around paper before??

Also, more to the point for the movie: exploitative or not, that scene (it’s not the only one) makes clear that this woman is lovely. And I hear that Colin Firth is generally seen as easy on the eyes. So sure, their romance might at first be based on being attracted to each other: but that’s not all it is — AND THAT’S NOT AN UNCOMMON THING. Allow me to introduce you to a certain play set in Verona: which also gets the same attacks, about the romance and therefore the marriage being shallow because it is based on mutual attraction: but people have to understand just how incredibly powerful attraction can be. And also, think about how lonely Jamie is, and maybe Aurelia too. So okay, maybe this marriage won’t be forever — but I can see it happening. This is sometimes how love actually works, even if it doesn’t work out. It’s still love.

I won’t accept any of the shit about Jamie not speaking Portuguese very well, at the end. or Aurelia’s family being ridiculous. He tried to learn the language in like a week: he does quite well. And if you think no family would be that absurd, well. You don’t have any in-laws.

NEXT!

John and Judy

Joanna Page breaks her silence on Love Actually sequel rumours - as she admits she only watched the movie for the first time this Christmas | Daily Mail Online

Okay, two things: first I’m going to veer away from the Wikipedia article, and put the sillier storylines in here, and then end with the four big ones; and second, I admit that I don’t like either this storyline or the next one very much. This one bothers me because — well, because I’m kind of a prude. These two being naked around each other and talking about traffic makes me pretty uncomfortable. But of course, that’s the joke. And these two actors do it very well. Is the job they are portraying real? Of course not, there’s absolutely no reason why they wouldn’t have the actual porn actors stand in place and mime sex while they set up the lights and all; but this story wouldn’t be cute if they were actually making porn and talking about traffic, and slowly leading up to a first date.

Though that would make a pretty good romance…

Never mind. The heart of this story is two things: the perfect casual way they work around the awkwardness of their nudity and mimed sex acts, and the utterly sweet, innocent kiss that ends their first date, with Bilbo — sorry, Jack — cheering as he jumps down her steps. That is rom-com gold, and if you can’t see it because their job isn’t realistic, Jesus Christ, take it up with rom-coms.

Colin, Tony, and the American girls

Love Actually/Hate Actually #4: Colin/America – The Avocado

This one is also a bad story line. Colin is annoying and stupid, and it’s bothersome that these women find him so very appealing, and absurd that they all dive into this orgy housemate scenario, and it’s certainly offensive that Colin brings back another hot girl as a gift for his other British friend at the end of the movie. I think this is the dumbest part of the movie, so I’m not going to try to defend it.

But I will say a couple of things. First of all, all great movies have bad parts, so the existence of this bad story is not enough to make Love Actually a bad movie; this is just the time when you go get another snack or head to the bathroom. Secondly, this whole thing is played tongue-in-cheek, totally absurd; take it that way, and the scene in the image above, where the three girls are cooing over how Colin says “bottle” and “straw” but are disappointed that he says “table” the same way they do, is hilarious. I think this can be seen as a pretty good parody of both the way some people melt over accents AND NOTHING ELSE, and also the way movies frequently throw attractive women at unattractive dudes and have the women act as though the idiot is God’s gift to their love lives or sex lives or both.

And I won’t point out that both of those things are sometimes true in real life.

This is a bad story line. In a good movie.

Sarah, Karl, and Michael

Love? Actually? - Ranking the Couples From Love Actually. — OMID

This is another story line I have a hard time watching, but not because I’m a prude (Though I am uncomfortable seeing that guy nearly naked, because DAMN does he make me feel like a raw potato): just because it’s so painful watching Sarah make this choice. But this is one of the best moments to examine and recognize what this movie is really trying to say about love.

First, love is all around us, and not always where we expect it. Sarah has been in love with Karl since she started working for this company (And that exchange, where Alan Rickman’s character Harry asks Sarah how long she has worked there, and how long she has been in love with Karl, and her answers reveal that she fell him fifteen minutes after she started working there, is absolutely brilliant, and a wonderful piece of acting by both Rickman and Laura Linney), and has never acted on it; she finds out that Karl has known all along, or at least for a while, and so do the rest of their coworkers; this means, in usual movie/TV dating scenarios, that she has failed to conceal her true feelings, has not played hard-to-get, and is therefore doomed, and will have no chance with that guy, ever. But no: Karl approaches her, he asks her to dance, he is enchanted by her, he goes back with her to her place, and none of it comes off as sleazy or exploitative (I mean, other than the gratuitous near-nudity of this Brazilian hunk, but we’re not concerned about the exploitation of male actors. [Really. We’re not.]), it’s just — romantic.

But then Sarah turns away from the hottie in her bed because she feels that she has to answer the phone call from her mentally ill brother. And Karl leaves.

It’s funny to me because the critics castigate Karl for that, for stepping out after Sarah rejects him twice, choosing to take the call instead of the sex; because I see that as Sarah’s mistake and bad behavior, not Karl’s. I think when she tells her brother during the second call that she is not busy, that she is ready to talk to him, while sexy Karl is sitting all naked-adjacent right next to her in the bed, that it is a clear message of how she feels for Karl right then, and I think it is respectful of him to accept her choice and leave, and also the right response when a mood has been killed that hard. No, I don’t think it should be on Karl to find a way to make the relationship work around Sarah’s commitment to her brother: she made a clear choice, he respects it. In the rom-com world, she would have to go to him, hat in hand, and apologize and make some grand gesture to win him back; in the real world, he’ll just go pick up somebody hot in a bar somewhere. Somebody who will turn off their goddamn phone in order to have sex with someone they have purportedly been in love with for years.

But though this story line hurts a bit to watch, I think it is essential for the movie: because this is actually love. She chooses self-sacrificial family love over personally satisfying romantic love, and Lord knows lots of people do that; and while it is to be pitied and denigrated in a romantic movie, there is nothing more Christmas than spending time with your family instead of the hot Brazilian man. Romantic love is not the only love. And sometimes the choices we make for love are not healthy for us — but that is not the fault of the love. Sarah’s commitment and dedication to her brother is laudable, even though it is also toxic for her; in a perfect world she would find a way to have both things, and many people do that. But many people don’t: and it’s still actually love. That’s what the movie is trying to say. Love is multi-faceted, wildly variant, and not always healthy or good. But it is love. It is strong. Stronger than sex.

And that’s pretty damn strong.

Harry, Karen, and Mia

But while love for Sarah is stronger than sex, sex, for Harry, is stronger than love. And this story line shows that. And it shows it pretty perfectly.

It is not clear to me why Mia wants to sleep with Harry. Maybe she finds him attractive — Alan Rickman was certainly not an ugly man, and not everyone finds age gaps unappealing (though in our modern world, with our fascination with and also our deep-seated aversion to pedophilia and sexual exploitation, we keep acting as though two adults who have disparate ages is as terrible, or even as icky, as an adult assaulting someone underage — and it is NOT) — and maybe she finds his position, his wealth, his power appealing; maybe she just wants to mess with him, and maybe she wants to be a homewrecker; any of them are possible, all of them are things that people do, even things that attractive young women do with older married men. But in the situation where the woman he works with wants to sleep with him, and is aggressive in trying to show it, Harry does what probably the majority of men would do: he considers it. He flirts with the idea, though he is also very clearly uncomfortable with it — when he calls her to say he’ll get her a Christmas present, and she tells him that she will give him all of herself, but if he’s going to buy her a present then she wants something pretty, he is neither smooth nor particularly sexy in his replies; he is fumbling and silly, like most married men would be when trying to flirt with someone they shouldn’t be flirting with.

But he does the wrong thing. And he breaks his wife’s heart, and ruins his own family, and Emma Thompson shows that so perfectly that even people who hate this movie love this segment, though they won’t admit they love it, because they hate Harry for what he does to Karen. But that kind of response shows that the movie is successful: the story works, the acting is wonderful, the audience’s response is exactly what it is supposed to be. I like this story for that reason, though of course I also get pissed at Harry and feel so sorry for Karen — her final shot at him, when she says he made a fool out of her, too, is just brilliant.

Let me also say that you cannot dislike both this story line and the Colin story line: they are polar opposites. That one is stupid; this one is smart. That one is a parody; this one is completely realistic. The Colin story is pure happiness, because Colin’s dreams come true; this one is pure sadness, because Karen and Harry’s lives are ruined, at least their romantic and family lives. You can’t criticize both in the same breath.

Okay. Next.

David and Natalie

Love Actually writer shuts down big fan theory about Prime Minister and Natalie
I could have picked a lot of pictures for this story — but how could I resist that octopus? The Nativity Octopus, no less??

This one is the rom-commiest story in the movie, and it’s everything that rom-com romances are: shallow, because the movie is never long enough to show a real buildup of a romance; unrealistic, because no prime minister looks like Hugh Grant and no housemaid looks like Martine McCutcheon; more than a bit offensive, usually because part of the idea of overwhelming romance is that it has to break through barriers, and barriers are often taboos, so rom-coms frequently break taboos — in this case, the posh, upper-class Prime Minister having an upstairs/downstairs relationship with the housemaid who’s from around the way; and if we feel like being humorless sourpusses, we can describe this as exploitative or derogatory to the person in the inferior position, in this case the woman.

Yeah yeah yeah.

The genuine criticisms of this are the fat-shaming of Natalie, who doesn’t deserve it, though of course no person ever does; and the rather horrifying scene where the American president, played all too well by Billy Bob Thornton, sexually harasses Natalie and David does nothing about it in the moment, but even worse doesn’t tell her not to when she later apologizes for the situation. And I agree: they make too much of her being fat, and she’s not, but the whole point of that is to show another “obstacle” that their love overcomes, namely that she is not as classically beautiful as someone might want her to be, but he loves her anyway. And sure, the actress doesn’t fit that, because she is in fact classically beautiful; but first, I guarantee you that despite all the scoffing from the critics, that actress has indeed been constantly fat-shamed throughout her acting career precisely because she is not built like, oh, say, Keira Knightley; and second, every goddamn movie with a story like this fails because of the actors being inhumanly attractive. You ever see My Fair Lady? Where the flower girl, Eliza, is at first “deeply unattractive,” until she gets to take a bath and put on pretty clothing — when it is revealed that said flower girl is actually Audrey Freaking Hepburn, one of the most beautiful human beings in all of history? Sure, a smudge of dirt on her cheek makes Audrey Hepburn unappealing. Of course it does. Just like when the nerdy girl takes off her glasses and turns out to be a stunning beauty.

Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, 1964
Come on, bro, her hair’s messy, she’s a three at best.
389 Audrey Hepburn My Fair Lady Photos & High Res Pictures - Getty Images
THAT’S THE SAME WOMAN??? Whoa — she sure, uhhh, cleans up nice.

I do think the sexual harassment scene is gross, and David does handle it badly. But again, rom-coms do this: the hero fails the maiden in her moment of need, and must then put on a Show of Love and Act of Contrition in order to prove to her that he actually loves her; and David goes through her neighborhood looking for her, door to door, singing “Good King Wenceslas” to three girls who ask him to carol, and then when he finds her, he goes with her to her little brothers’ Christmas pageant — featuring the above-pictured Nativity Octopus. That’s full on rom-com, in every way. And it’s cute, damn it. It’s rom-com cute. I saw a tweet that criticized David as Prime Minister for endangering England’s most important alliance for the sake of a harmless little sexual harassment, and — I mean, please just fuck off, at that point.

YARN | It's a movie. | The Sopranos (1999) - S06E08 Drama | Video clips by quotes | cf6bfd9b | 紗

Daniel, Sam, Joanna, and Carol

Joanna Page (actress in Love Actually) – Matt Lynn Digital

I saved this one for last, because I think this is the heart of the Christmas movie, as the David/Natalie story is the heart of the rom-com. This story is my favorite. Though even here, there is a flaw, and it’s Claudia Schiffer showing up at the end to melt the heart of Liam Neeson; that’s a weird thing to do to a character that starts the movie speaking at his wife’s funeral — though not as weird as making that dead woman into the villain at her own funeral by having her insist on the Bay City Rollers as her farewell music, which would be pretty funny IF HER TEN-YEAR-OLD SON WEREN’T THERE. He is there, and that scene and that joke is fucked up, I agree. But this also is pretty classic rom-com concept, because it is Daniel’s love for his wife overriding his sense of propriety, but he does it and introduces the appalling music choice because that’s what the woman he loved wanted. Very British rom-com, really.

But other than Claudia Schiffer (which I also don’t like because it’s too meta that Daniel uses her as the jokey-joke representation of what it would take for him to move on after Sam’s mother, and then Claudia Schiffer BUT IT’S NOT CLAUDIA SCHIFFER IT IS CAROL PLAYED BY CLAUDIA SCHIFFER shows up to make googly eyes at him and even apparently go with him to the airport at the very end which is even weirder), I think this story is lovely. Sam is in love, and of course he’s not, he’s bloody ten years old; but ten-year-olds won’t accept that fact as Sam doesn’t: and the right thing to do is exactly what Daniel does, which is take him at his word, take him seriously, and try to help without actually making him feel stupid or uncomfortable. The reality is that this brief crush will pass away, as every ten-year-old’s crush does; and if in the moment Sam learns to play drums, there’s nothing on Earth wrong with that. It gives the boy something to focus on other than his dead mother, and that seems like a good thing to do. It treats love as a real thing, and Sam’s feelings as real things, and that is DEFINITELY a good thing to do. The critics say that Daniel should encourage Sam to talk to Joanna, like a grownup with a romantic attraction; that strikes me as pretty damn disingenuous as a criticism, and also very much a weird thing to tell a ten-year-old to do. That is absolutely what you should tell a teenager, or a grown person to do; but what is going to happen if this kid tells this other kid that he loves her? She’s going to laugh at him, roll her eyes, and then make fun of him with her friends. So Daniel doesn’t tell him to do that. He plays along, and encourages Sam, while also trying to keep him grounded.

It ends up with a chase through an airport and a kiss because it’s a Christmas movie. And in Christmas movies, miracles happen.

But what this story is really about is these two people, Sam and Daniel (Who is Sam’s stepfather, by the way) learning to be a family together. At the end, Sam calls him Dad, instead of Daniel, and when Sam gets his kiss from Joanna, he leaps into Daniel’s arms and gets a genuine hug: and it’s beautiful. That story line is done very well, and is incredibly sweet, and I love it. It also gives me a reason to enjoy “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which I associate with my favorite part of this movie I enjoy; it makes Mariah Carey season a whole lot easier to take.

So that’s it. It is not a perfect movie: I don’t really like that it is both a rom-com and a Christmas movie, because that does some weird things to the story lines — the romance between Sam and Joanna is WAY too romantic because it’s in a rom-com, where in a Christmas movie it would just be innocent and sweet, as it should be — but I think it is a decent version of both things individually, with all the inherent flaws of those two genres; and I think all on its own, it is an entirely unique movie. One that is worth watching. Every year, if you really like it.

If for nothing else, then it is worth watching for Rowan Atkinson. The funniest part of the entire movie, hands down.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch The Family Man. Merry Christmas, everyone. And good night.

The Truth

Dusty Leave a comment
Me (far right) as a janitor
Me as a high school English teacher. Which one looks happier?

I have been a high school teacher for a very long time. Too long, in some ways, because I have watched education change enough in that time to make me very nearly obsolete, and if you stay in a job until your job doesn’t exist any more, that’s too long. I fear that the day is coming when English teachers will not exist: and possibly the day when teachers will not exist.

I’m here today to try to forestall that day. Not for myself – if I reach a point where I cannot teach, I will move into janitorial work, and be quite happy; probably happier than I have been as a teacher. After 25 years of cleaning up student writing, I would rather clean up public restrooms. It’s less work.

But it’s also less important work. Not unimportant work, it’s incredibly important because janitors keep our world working, and keep it livable – but for me, as someone who works in education, that work is more important. I’m just saying custodial work is a good backup for me. I worked in maintenance for five years before I became a teacher, and I liked it. In some ways more than teaching.

So if I liked being a janitor more, you may be thinking, why am I a teacher? And why do I still like and sometimes love being a teacher, despite the issues in education that I deal with every day?

It’s because I love humanity. I think we are incredible. I believe we have infinite potential for goodness, and infinite capacity for wonder. What we have achieved as a race is miraculous – and also sometimes terrible – and despite our almost limitless ability to dream and imagine, we can’t imagine how many more miracles we can achieve. And, hopefully, how many terrors we can avoid, or even eliminate, in the future.

And the key to that, the key to unlocking our potential and achieving progress and positive growth, and to actually making miracles real, is education.

That’s why I’m a teacher. Because my faith, my zeal, my heartfelt belief, is this: the best thing about all of us is that we are human, and the most important thing one can do is help us all become better humans. That’s what I try to do as a teacher. And that’s why I’m here today, speaking to all of you about school. Because I want to help you all to learn something about which you have been deceived – or at least misled. I don’t think any of you really understand what school is or should be – and what you think it is, what you have been told the purpose of school is? That’s a lie.

The lie is that school is about money. All of you students have been told that the purpose of school, the reason you are here and the reason you should try hard and do all of your work, is because that way you can get into a good college, get a good job, and make good money. You’ve been told that all along – though in elementary school it may not have been stated explicitly; but back then you were certainly told, with absolute sincerity, that the purpose of your schooling was to prepare you for the next step, which would be harder, and would matter more: 2nd grade is meant to get you ready for the rigors of 3rd grade, 3rd grade gets you ready for 4th; all of elementary school is preparation for middle school, which is preparation for high school. And all the way along, more often the farther you get in your thirteen years of compulsory schooling, you have been told that the goal of high school is to get you ready to go to college. So that you can get a degree, so you can get a good job, so you can make good money. And since schools also tell you that the next stage is always more important than the current one – “When you get to high school, things get serious, that’s when grades really matter” – the clear implication is that the final goal is the one that really, really matters: college, degree, money. Did you absorb the message in 2nd grade that everything then was intended to prepare you for college and a job and good money? Maybe not, but the cumulative effect of all of this is the same: the goal of school is – money.

Teachers, and especially administrators, you have said this. You have said it to all of your students, probably with certainty, certainly with absolute sincerity. All of you have lied. All of you have misled all of your students. Don’t feel bad: it’s what you were taught, what you were told, what the whole apparatus and engine of the educational system forced on you. So you didn’t know, you couldn’t even think, that it might be a lie. This is some of the power of education: it can influence our beliefs, and therefore our behavior, in pernicious ways as well as positive ones. As always, the pernicious influence is easier. The idea that school is intended to help students make more money is a pernicious lie, and I need to convince you to stop saying it, to stop thinking it.

Don’t take this as a personal attack, either, teachers: I’ve said this too. With certainty. With absolute sincerity. Because it’s what I thought, and it’s what I was taught. But luckily for me, I had an extra advantage that most teachers don’t have, something that helped me realize the truth: I’m an artist. And I’m married to an artist.

My wife and I both went to college to study art. And though I ended up studying education – one of the more useless endeavors of my life – I earned my degree in art, specifically in literature. My wife, who is stronger and braver and smarter and better than I am, stayed with art all the way through. And she had one of the most difficult undergraduate programs I’ve ever heard of; harder than any pre-law or pre-med program, I would be willing to wager, and with far less prestige.

And here’s the thing, the magic secret: she didn’t do it for the money. Neither did I – though I did sell out and become a teacher. Actually, it’s not the becoming a teacher that was selling out; I still reflect and promote the ideas of my art in my teaching, and I am proud of the career I have had, because it is a noble vocation, when it is done right. But I should have kept studying art while I was in school. I hate to think of the potential I lost, the opportunities I walked away from by switching from literature to education. And it’s funny: just as my time in public school didn’t prepare me successfully for college, my college education didn’t prepare me successfully for my career in public school education. The time I spent studying art was far more useful to my teaching than my training in how to be a teacher.

It was in teacher training that I was first trained in the Big Lie, though of course I heard it in some form or other all the way through my own K-12 schooling: the idea that the purpose of school is to get students higher incomes than they would get without it. I was shown the statistics, the data, the graphs, that argue that college graduates make more money, on the average, than non-college graduates. I was shown this, and told to use it on my students, because it’s one of the most effective ways to get students to take school seriously, to work hard and therefore (incidentally) to learn. I assume that’s why all trained educators in this country have been shown the same data: because scaring children with threats about their future is effective. It’s cruel, essentially abusive, and it has some quite severe secondary and unintended consequences, as we are now discovering; but it’s effective. It makes those lazy little punks – that’s you, students – work harder and try more. At least some of them. At least some of the time.

Look: you can’t blame us. Teaching is hard. Everything about it is hard. Organizing curriculum is hard, planning lessons is hard, finding and adapting materials is hard. It’s hard to stand in front of a room and command attention, let alone respect. It’s hard to manage a room full of individual people and get them all to focus, together, on one thing. It’s hard to communicate clearly, and hard to understand children who haven’t yet learned to communicate clearly.

(Let me just say one thing to all the students here: speak up. I’m old; I’ve lost some of my hearing. I cannot understand you when you whisper, when you mumble. Whatever you have to say to me: speak up, please.

(And I’ll try to talk slower.)

And then, after completing all of those difficult tasks, teachers run into the biggest difficulty of all, the one that feels insurmountable: getting the students to do the work. We create this curriculum, design these lessons to deliver it, gather the materials, summon all of our strength, invent positive energy from somewhere, and teach our hearts out: and then all of you students, just – don’t do it. There are many individual reasons why you don’t do it, but in a large number of instances, maybe more common than any other, the reason you don’t do the work is just because you don’t want to. You don’t feel like it. You don’t see the point. You don’t think it matters. You don’t care.

Confronted with that, over and over in student after student, day after week after month after year, teachers have reacted understandably: we try to MAKE you care, dammit! Sometimes we do it angrily, resentfully, with hurt feelings; because we care. And when you care, it hurts to try so hard and have somebody just say, “Nah.” That’s why teachers then try to scare students, that’s why we threaten.

“Your boss won’t accept this kind of work when you have a job.”

“Your college professor won’t care about you, so they won’t make exceptions for you: they won’t even know your name.”

“You think you can act like that out in the real world? Think again!”

Hurt people lash out. We may tell ourselves we’re doing it to be helpful, but we’re doing it because we’re hurt. It makes it easier for us to tell the lie, because the lie is hurtful, where the truth is just difficult – and we’re lashing out at those who hurt us. We shouldn’t do that, but also, maybe all you students should stop hurting your teachers. When a student comes to my class and says something like “This is boring. Can we do something fun instead?” to my face, every day, I definitely want to snap at them about how their attitude won’t be acceptable in the future. Because it’s just not right to insult someone’s passion the way students insult mine.

So it makes sense that teachers have done this, that we’ve told this lie. It makes sense that we’ve structured school, and thought about how we can teach our subjects, and explained this whole endeavor to students, on the basis of this fundamental assumption, this base falsehood, that the purpose of school is to prepare students for the real world, specifically for college, so they can get good jobs and make good money. It makes sense – though, teachers, I won’t take us off the hook entirely, because we really should have recognized the falsehood in this, and seen the hypocrites we make of ourselves, when we tell our students they should study hard specifically so they can make more money: because we are all so very well-educated, and worked so hard to become so, and we are so poorly paid for that effort and education. Did you all go to school, do all that work, and then take this very hard job, for the money?

Neither did I. (Though also, I expect and deserve and demand that I get paid what I am worth. So should we all.)

I do need to point out that we make this claim about the purpose of school in more ways than just talking about money. We do also talk about getting a “good” job, by which we mean a job you like and find fulfilling, a job that you feel has value, to yourself or to society or both. Teaching is all of those things for me, as it is for many of my colleagues; and the money has been generally sufficient, if not actually good, or representative of what I’m worth. We do also talk about getting our students prepared, with skills and knowledge, for the real world, beyond and apart from college. I think we do that, a little. Not enough, though also, here we run into a question of how much someone can be prepared, in school, for the world outside of school, and also how much someone should be prepared in advance of actually living. But regardless: our efforts to prepare students for the real world, as we call it, are founded on the same principle: we try to get them ready for their jobs. We want them to have work skills, and know how to find a job, apply for and interview for a job, succeed in a job. When we talk about our students’ future – other than some basic insincere lip service to the worn cliches “You can be anything you want to be!” and “You can do anything you want to do,” – it’s always the same basic idea. It’s all about the money.

Okay. So those are the lies. Now: are you ready for the truth?

Deep breath.

The truth is, you can not be anything you want to be. You can only be yourself.

The truth is, you cannot do anything you want to do: there are limitations on all of us, some internal, most external.

The truth is school does not prepare you for college or for work. Only you can do that, and no matter how well you do manage to prepare yourself, you will still be surprised, and sometimes unprepared and overwhelmed; and to some greater or lesser extent, you will fail.

The truth is, school is not preparing you for the real world: you are already in the real world, and you always have been. And no, it doesn’t get better. It doesn’t get easier.

The truth – the big truth, the last truth – is that the purpose of education is not, cannot be, and should not be stated as, helping students to get a good job or to make more money.

The purpose of education is to create more life.

***

Okay, that was a lot of truth. Take another deep breath, and then I’ll soften it up some, make it easier to swallow and to digest.

By the way: we absolutely should teach our students how to breathe. There’s nothing more important. Literally.

Okay: now for the softer side of the truth.

While it is true that you can only be yourself, that is also the very best thing you could ever be. Because every single one of you, of us, is as good and valuable and worthy as every one else; and there is also no other person you could be as successfully as you can be yourself. It’s also true that figuring out who exactly you are is incredibly difficult and complex, and the work we do on that project in schools is good work. You get to explore your self and your society and your skills and interests, even while we are barking at you that you need to master proper MLA format for your resume.

While it is true that there are limitations on all of us, which keep us from doing anything we want to do, limitations can be overcome. Muggsy Bogues played a full career in the NBA despite being only 5’3” tall. Also – and this may be even more important – a lot of things we think we want to do are actually really bad ideas. When I was 6, I wanted to be a stage actor, a fireman, and an astronaut. All bad careers for me, for the person I became – especially all at the same time.

The truth is that school does not prepare you completely for college or work: but the truth also is, it helps. We will, as I said, always fail, in college and career and life; but no failure needs to be total, or permanent. Failure always precedes growth. And – heh – school can prepare you for failure.

Unfortunately, the truth – and I cannot soften it – is still that school does not prepare you for the real world. But that’s because you’re in the real world, right now, while you are in school, and there’s no preparing for it, for any of us. There is only living it. Experiencing it. Learning from it. That’s all we ever do, whether in school or not. I do think it’s important that we teachers stop telling students there is some distinction between school and the real world, especially with the implication that the real world is somehow worse, harsher or harder, colder or crueller. People who really think that do not remember what it was like to be in middle school or high school. Or they do not understand the situations that many students, many children, live through. As I said: it doesn’t get better and it doesn’t get easier; but you will get better. And then, if you can, you will make your life better. And that process will continue for as long as you keep trying to learn and improve: always in the real world.

Last one – and, because I know my persuasive rhetoric, this is the important one. This is the point. This is what education is for.

Our world has, I believe, an objective reality. It’s not just in my mind, or in the Matrix. The world would – will – still be here when I am not here to perceive it; it will still be the same world when all of us are gone from it. Although it will be quieter, and less messy. No matter how I imagine the world to be, whether I think the Earth is round or flat, 6,000 years old or 4.5 billion, floating in space or resting on four elephants who are standing on a turtle – there is a truth, a real situation that I don’t change through my perception of it.

However: my perception of the world shapes my world, changes how I experience it, more fundamentally than I think we realize – certainly more than we think about very often. How we see determines what we see. We cannot perceive things that we cannot imagine existing; sometimes we cannot perceive them intentionally, consciously. Take the flat Earth example. If I believe, absolutely, that the world is flat, then there are things I will not do, places I will not go, because of my belief, because of my perception. I will not get on a plane that I think would fly off the edge of the world. I will not go to the world’s edge, let alone beyond it – so I will never see that there is no edge. So even though the world is in fact round, I will never perceive the world as round, because I will avoid – or more simply, deny – anything that would prove to me that the world is round. So for me, functionally, the world would be flat. And I will miss out on any experience associated with the round Earth. My world, shaped by my perception, would be less full: only two-dimensional.

Let’s take a more realistic and more common example. If I were a racist, and hated, let’s say, plaid people, then I would avoid, or dismiss as unworthy of my time, any and all plaid people. They would essentially not exist in my world except as an amorphous abstraction for me to hate and fear and blame. I would never get to know, never get to appreciate, never get to love, anyone who is plaid. And therefore my world, my life, would be smaller.

Because plaid people are some of the finest people there are.

And if you don’t know any plaid people – or, even more shocking, you somehow think that they don’t exist – I think you need to open your eyes and pay more attention. America’s no place for plaid-deniers.

But in all seriousness, this fact, that perception shapes reality, is true in all ways: things that we can’t understand, we avoid; things that we can’t conceive of, we don’t even perceive. And in contrast, when we have heightened understanding, we have heightened perception: my wife’s experience of an art museum is much richer, much fuller, than mine, because her knowledge of art, and her experience with creating art and the deep understanding of the artist’s craft she has thereby, lets her see the works on display in more ways than I can, who makes art only with words. My experience of literature is similarly fuller than most people’s. My dog’s experience of the world of smells is many thousands of times more complex and interesting than my experience of smells: which is why he chooses to sniff cat poop, which I simply avoid. Because he finds it interesting, and I just think it smells gross. But I have to assume that if I could smell what he can smell, I would interact with cat poop the same way he does: my nose would be riveted to every turd. Think how much more enjoyable it would be to live with cats, then. Having the litter box in the house would be a benefit. Maybe we’d put the box on the coffee table. Make it a conversation piece.

I know that sounds bizarre and insane. It sounds that way to me, too. But understand: it only sounds that way because of how we perceive cat poop. Or rather, how we don’t perceive it. How our experience of the world is limited by our range of perception.

Education can change that (Maybe not with cat poop.), because education can introduce us to things, and show us how to perceive them. I wasn’t born reading literature the way I do; I learned that. Because I learned it, my experience of reading is better than most people’s. My world of books is larger, more vibrant, more diverse, more entertaining, more inspiring, more challenging, than most people’s book world. Not because I’m better than other people, not because I’m just built different: because I have been educated. Because I learned. Because I learned how to read and understand what I read to an unusually high degree, I have a larger world to live in. It means I can find greater pleasure and fulfillment in the world of books. I will never get tired of reading books. I will never be bored, not as long as I can get my hands and my eyes on books. I can still perceive all the non-book things as well as all the rest of you can – though some people perceive individual pieces of non-book-reality better than I can, because I don’t know much about cars or sports or calculus, or about being a parent, or about traveling to other places or into other cultures – but in the areas where I learned well, my world is larger than the world of people who didn’t learn as well. In all the areas where I am not ignorant, my life is larger than the world of ignorant people. I live a larger life, in a larger world, than someone with less education with me.

That’s why I’m a teacher. Because I love humanity. Because I want to help people to live larger, fuller, richer lives. To have more chances to be human, to be more human. To make miracles. What else could I possibly do that would be as valuable, as important?

But, you see, my work has, of late, become less valuable. Less effective, and therefore less important.
Because my students are less willing to work with me, to listen to me. They are less willing to learn.

But that’s our fault, teachers, parents, adults in general: because we’ve been lying to them. And they have caught on. These are the unintended consequences of our choice to use the threat of future poverty and failure to scare our students into obedience. Rather than explain the real value of education, even though the idea is complicated, even though it is hard to accept, we have chosen to use the simple lie that the entire point of education is to prepare students for future work. We still tell them, as we have for years, that going to college is the best way, even the only way, to get a good job and make good money, and the point of compulsory public education is to prepare them for college and for jobs – and that’s it. It’s not all we think education is for, but when we are frustrated with difficult and disobedient students, we don’t usually talk about the wonderful benefits of education: we just threaten them. “If you drop out, or get expelled, how will you get a good job? You’ll be flipping burgers for your whole life!”

But, see, we have now gone through a pandemic, and more than one recession; today’s students are in the world of social media, which gives them access to people’s lives and internal thoughts. So they’ve seen behind the curtain, they’ve torn down the veil. They know that there are countless people who have good jobs without ever having finished college, and countless people with lots of education who have miserable jobs. And now college is so absurdly expensive that even those who would want a college-level job – for whom a job that required a college degree would be a “good” job – are not willing to accrue the debt to get that job, and so they’re looking for different jobs, ones that are easier to get, that have fewer requirements. Or, more often than I think we educators realize, they have come to the conclusion that life is not, and should not be, defined by a job: and so what job they end up with simply doesn’t matter to them, as long as they make enough to survive and do what they want to do. What they want to think about and plan for is all the non-job parts of life.

So here you are, students. You’ve been hearing for years, again and again, that school is necessary for getting into college and getting a good job. And you don’t want that. And you know that we are lying to you, that you don’t need college for many good jobs. You also know that life shouldn’t be only about a job.

What, then, is the value of this education we offer and demand, for a student who doesn’t want what we have claimed is the main and even the only goal of that education?

There isn’t any. So you don’t want it. Of course not.

And the more we try to threaten, and cajole, and cozen you into doing the difficult work of education anyway, the more you resist. Of course: you don’t like being lied to, and you don’t like having your time wasted. Wasting time is wasting life, and we all want all the life we can get.

So you ignore and evade and escape education that is nothing for you but life-draining, time-wasting oppression.

And therefore you remain more ignorant than you could be. Not totally ignorant, of course, because you learn on your own. But school could teach you so much more than you can easily learn on your own; and without putting effort into school, you will absolutely know less than you would if you could really do this the way it should be done.

And since you will know less, therefore you will have less life.

***

It has to stop. We need to stop telling students that school equals college equals job equals money. We need to stop focusing on money. I don’t teach literature because it makes money, either for me or for the students – or even for the authors, who I do think deserve money for their work; but that’s not why I want the book, and it’s not why I want to teach the book. I do it because literature expands and improves my experience of being human: and I want that larger life. And I want other people to have what I have. Especially now: because the world kinda sucks. And especially the kids I teach: because being in middle school and high school kinda sucks.

Teachers: we need to tell our students the truth: school sucks, but education will make your life suck less. It will give you more life, and a better life, because it will let you understand more, and therefore do more, and perceive more. And we need to believe this when we say it, and we need to want that for our students.

Otherwise we should all just give up and become janitors.

At least then the world would be cleaner.

Bold Journey

Dusty Leave a comment

So my wife was interviewed by this website, because she is a wonderful artist and an interesting person; and then she recommended they interview me. Personally I think that was a mistake, but they did it anyway — and here it is. Please give it a read.

Meet Theoden Humphrey

Looking Up

Dusty 2 Comments
Still one of the best movie songs ever.

You know what?

Things are actually looking up.

No, really: I mean it. 

Tomorrow is the beginning of classes, which means I now have to deal with students — but as always, though teenagers are frustrating, they are the reason why my job exists, and the aspect of it I actually enjoy. Teaching is hard — but it’s better than inservice. And since classes start tomorrow, that means inservice is over. (My district tried to extend it, pushing a two-day training on how to teach ACT prep — actually there are somehow three two-day trainings for English, one in reading, one in writing, and one in…English… but when I said I didn’t want to go, my direct supervisor said I didn’t have to go, in contrast to his supervisor who said he “strongly recommended” that ACT prep teachers be SENT to this training. But my boss said I didn’t have to go. Which means that inservice is over. And also that my boss is on my side, which is — well, it’s lovely.) My students make me laugh as often as they make me grit my teeth in rage; and they sometimes tell me that I helped them, that I taught them, even that I inspired them. And I like that.

I am typing this on my brand-new MacBook Air, which I got for my birthday as a present from my brother. Which means not only that I have this sweet new machine (Which, admittedly, I am having trouble adjusting to, but that’s only because it doesn’t have a ten-key pad on the right side of the keyboard, and because the Command key I have to use to copy and paste and so on is in a different place than it has been on the last two laptops I’ve had, both Windows machines — and because I didn’t know that you ran two fingers together over the touchpad to make the screen scroll BUT IT TURNS OUT YOU DO THAT ON THE GODDAMN WINDOWS MACHINES TOO I JUST DIDN’T KNOW IT BECAUSE I MOSTLY USE A PLUG-IN MOUSE AND TRYING TO DEAL WITH THE WINDOW ON THIS LOVELY NEW MACHINE WITHOUT BEING ABLE TO SCROLL WAS A TRIAL, BELIEVE ME but then I figured this out, and now it’s easy. And now I know this new thing, so that means I’ll never have this struggle again.

That’s amazing, isn’t it? That there can be single pieces of knowledge that you don’t have, and without them things are hard or confusing or even frightening; but then you find out that one thing — and the problem is gone. Gone entirely. Never going to be a problem again. Things can actually get solved. Not everything, certainly, but there are situations that are like that: you find the answer, and then you have it. The answer. The solution.

But also, anyway, the other thing about getting this beautiful new (EXPENSIVE) computer as a gift from my brother is this: my brother gave it to me. He and I haven’t always gotten along, sometimes even emphatically not; but that, too, has gotten better. I don’t think the relationship has been solved by a single answer that suddenly came clear, because relationships aren’t really like that; but definitely things have gotten better, and they will stay that way as long as we keep working on them — and he got me this absolutely lovely and generous gift, which I think was a very nice thing for him to do.

Thank you, Marv. I love the laptop. Though I feel dumb about the touchpad scrolling thing. Also it just autocorrected your name to Marc, so. Something to think about. And I’ll make you a deal: if you go by Marc (Or Marcin, in full), I’ll go by Dussy. Which was recently given me as an interpretation of my name at my optometrist’s office. It’s a new one.

Though to be honest, I’m not sure how it would benefit you for me to go by Dussy. Or how it would help me if you went by Marc. Nah, forget the whole thing. I’m still grateful for the gift, and glad that we’re doing well with each other.

And speaking of family, I finally mailed away my spit, in the tube my wife bought for me, to ancestry.com (That was a Christmas present, if you weren’t aware of how bad I am at following through on some things in a timely manner), and so I found out a little bit more about my family: mostly German and Scottish and English and French, all of which I knew — but also, about 3% African. Which I did not know. 1% each from Ivory Coast and Ghana, Benin and Togo, and Cameroon, Congo, and Western Bantu peoples. Obviously it is not a significant amount of my heritage — but it is significant that it is there, that I am that much of a mutt, that I have a little bit of African DNA in me. I think that’s wonderful and fascinating. I can relate even more closely to my dogs now, as they are both mutts.Which are obviously the best kind of dog.

So thank you, Toni. It was a very cool gift, and I’m sorry it took me so long to use it. 

Oh — and speaking of white people with just a tiny bit of Africa in them, and also speaking of  things I would spit on: Elon Musk is now not only a goddamn idiot, but he’s a goddamn idiot that has shown himself to be a goddamn idiot, and therefore proof positive that there is no meritocracy in capitalism, that even complete dipshits like Musk — who, I’m sure, would prefer to be called Xxxx Xxxx, so that’s what I’m going to be calling him from now on. Or maybe just Muxx? (Or Marc?) — have too much money and absolutely do not deserve it, and do not deserve our respect for their ridiculous hoarding of wealth. Because their wealth does not show their brilliance.

So the guy buys Twitter, right, and it isn’t really clear why. It seems mostly like he wanted to prove to everyone that he could do it, because Xxxx obviously believes his own hype to a truly epic degree, like Trumpian level delusion here: and literally every choice he’s made in running this company has been a bad one: first he let all the extremists and slanderers and liars and shitbags back onto the platform, which made the platform not only actively worse for everyone but also genuinely dangerous for some; and then he destroyed the verification system, which reduced the value of being a name on Twitter and of following names on Twitter, which reduced the value of the site and of the company; then he introduced a bad subscription model, which is still a cheap gag for everyone on the site who doesn’t have a blue check; and then he expanded the length of the Tweets; and then he limited the number of Tweets that someone could see in a day; and somewhere in there he also threatened to remove (and did remove) a number of people and a number of tweets that he disliked or disagreed with, thus proving to everyone but his legion of sycophants (Also suffering from Trumpian levels of delusion) that he as not actually interested in protecting free speech like he pretended do be doing when he bought the site; and now the crowning glory, his most recent conversion of Twitter to — X. Twitter is a household name, with Tweet a known slang verb used across the internet; and he threw all of that away. Because he thinks X is cool. And X, in actuality, is a shit name for a company, and a shit name for an app, and he picked a shit logo, and the rollout has been absolutely terrible — mine just switched over today, and it still says Tweet and Twitter all over the site. I mean, even I could do a rebranding better than this, and not because of my business acumen or my marketing skills — but just because I’m not a goddamn idiot. I can tell you that I am already filled with a visceral loathing for the X app, and am really just hopeful that it will go ahead and finally die so I can stop looking at it. 

Just look at that garbage.

It’s possible that that’s what Musk wants, too. There is profit to be made in breaking a company up and selling off the pieces; but it doesn’t really seem like Musk is doing that, because everything he’s done, other than fire all the workers and refuse to pay bills (In the short term, dumping salary and holding onto cash would be profitable if you meant to destroy the company and sell the pieces — but he hasn’t done that yet.), everything has reduced the value of the company: which would seem to really reduce the potential profit he could be making as a vulture capitalist. On the other hand, if he planned on keeping the company and building something bigger out of it, which is what he has claimed to want to do, then firing half the staff and refusing to pay bills is a shit-stupid way to handle a company that does an incredibly difficult and complicated thing like maintain a free marketplace of ideas on the internet — let alone grow it into an all-inclusive financial network where people can handle literally all of their business interactions. I saw an article that said this:

Expanding the platform’s reach to include things like shopping and paid subscription content could actually help it flourish in the long term by creating several revenue streams and making it less reliant on large companies’ willingness to spend money, analysts said. 

In the short term, building out those capabilities would require a massive investment in staff and infrastructure. It’s far from clear if a company that slashed about three-quarters of its staff and is now embroiled in multiple lawsuits over unpaid bills can deliver that.  

“The investment is a lot in terms of cloud infrastructure — we’re talking about $40 billion, $50 billion in upfront investments,” Singh said. “Twitter as a standalone app doesn’t have the infrastructure to become an everything app.”

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-rebrand-x-name-change-elon-musk-what-it-means/

And also this:

But the name change suggests Musk is likely to keep control of the company for the near future, said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh. After Musk’s takeover in April of 2022, some observers believed the billionaire could make some changes to Twitter and quickly flip it to a different owner, Singh said.

“That option is off the table now given the name change — I don’t think there’s any other prospective buyer who will take it now,” he said.

So maybe Xxxx is shit-stupid.

I will note that his new sign got turned off because it was too bright.

There is also a profit to be made in being a corrupt oligarch who opposes and helps to suppress free speech and the free exchange of ideas; and one of the ways you could achieve that, as a corrupt oligarch, would be to buy the marketplace of ideas and just set the whole thing on fire. And it very well could be that this is really want Xxxx wants, and if so, on this front, he’s doing a bang-up job.

I will definitely say that that is a sad thing. Communication is one of the highest forms of human endeavor and accomplishment: our ability to share ideas and spark new ideas in each other is unmatched in the natural world, so far as we know. And the internet and social media have made that possible on a scale unheard of before now; Twitter was part of that. But now it’s not. Because now it’s X.

Speaking of corrupt oligarchs fucking up things that were once worthwhile: Trump is another example of something that actually seems to be going right. I don’t want to count my chickens before they’re hatched, because I, like most of us rational, thinking people, was deeply overconfident in 2016, and I just could not believe it when TFG won the election. But it does really seem like he is facing a whooooooole lot of serious legal trouble, and at least in the Mar a Lago documents case, he’s clearly as guilty as sin: and when you put that shithead in front of a jury (Not that he’ll show up for his own trial, if he can possibly avoid it), he’s not going to get a pass like he did in both impeachments under a corrupt senate. 

Oh right — and let me take a moment to wish Mitch McConnell ill. Forgive my schadenfreude, but that fucking no-neck piece of shit has ruined untold numbers of lives with his power mongering, so fuck him. I hope he did have a stroke, and I hope he suffers in his declining years.

Anyway, the court system is not as easily bought as Congress: so Trump will likely go to jail. And while that doesn’t mean he can’t run for president, it surely does mean that most Republicans will not vote for him, and his base still will, or they won’t vote at all; and that likely means a runaway victory for the Democratic Party — which, if Biden is the nominee (And I personally hope he will withdraw from the race and let someone younger take it over), and wins a second term, I will say that he has actually been doing a goddamn good job so far at restoring the American government to what it should be, and we could do a whole lot worse than the guy who has re-established NATO even while supporting Ukraine in the war, and who is establishing new alliances across Asia, and who has passed the Inflation Reduction Act and the Build Back Better Infrastructure Act, and who has therefore done more for American manufacturing and industry and for fighting climate change than literally any other American president. We could do a whole lot worse.

So let me just say that, too: this time we all have to try to do our part to make sure we don’t do a whole lot worse. Joe Biden is old, yes. I do not want an octogenarian President. But he’s actually doing a good job. And if Trump goes to jail, the democrats might just win both houses of Congress — and then maybe we can name a couple of new Supreme Court justices, too. But if we’re too overconfident going in, we might get another TFG presidency, and that might just turn all of this back around, and send us all spiraling down until we crash. Let’s try to make sure it doesn’t go that way. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize, and keep things looking up, okay?

So okay, this wasn’t exactly the most cheerful blog, because things have been pretty bad for a while. But hey. School starts tomorrow.

Let’s make this a good year.

Actually just found this. The band is donating proceeds to the ACLU. Plus a player piano!

Changes

Dusty 4 Comments

Yesterday was sad.

Not because it was the first day of school inservice season, starting earlier this year than ever before. Actually, that was part of it, because this is WAY too early. I hate being back in the work mindset already: I was having a fantastic summer (though with ups and downs as always), and I very much want to it continue; but now I have to spend my time and energy teaching instead of all the other things I want to do, which I do over the summer. It’s never enough time, because there are a lot of things I want to do; but this year was especially not enough time, which sucks because I was doing really well on my other projects and purposes.

But that wasn’t the real reason why yesterday was sad. (Although the fact that I had to go to school yesterday was the reason why this post is now late. Sorry.)

And it wasn’t because I had to do what I always have to do in the early days of inservice season, which is move a bunch of furniture and run around a lot looking for things. I did that, and it really was crappy because it was about 110° yesterday here in Tucson (Climate change? What climate change?), so I spent much of the day sweating, which is less than enjoyable. It’s also one of those things that makes me feel like I’m wasting my time, you know? Maybe it’s just my job (though I REAAAAALLLLLLYYYY doubt it) but there are activities and tasks I have to complete that don’t feel like the important activities and tasks, and so whenever I spend time doing those, it feels like I’m not doing the things I really should be doing, and so I regret the time spent. Every summer, the school gets a deep cleaning, which is good and necessary: but it then requires me to rearrange my classroom, every year, because the lovely and hardworking cleaning people take everything out of my room, clean it, wax the floors, and then put everything back — but they just sort of put everything inside, not paying much attention to where it belongs. Which is entirely fine (Though the custodian in me remembers VERY carefully keeping track of where things were so I could move them, clean, and then put them back precisely where they were — but also, teachers always change their room configurations, so there’s not much point in being that precise with classrooms), but it means that every year, I have to put my desks back where they belong, and get all my stuff out of the places where I stored it for the summer. And then there are teachers who move rooms, and new teachers, and that means desks have to move, and bookcases have to move; and my wife is an art teacher at my school, and that means I have to help her move her furniture and equipment — and art has a fair amount of equipment involved.

So yesterday was sweaty, is my point. And difficult. And yet I didn’t do the dozen other tasks I have to get to before classes actually start, which makes me feel like I didn’t do much, even though I did.

It wasn’t even sad because on the way home, Toni and I got caught in a raging monsoon: more rain coming down at one time than I have ever seen from inside a car. We literally could not see the road or anything ahead of us, because the windshield was simply a gray screen of water: and at the same time, hail was pelting the car, and the wind was shaking it. It was nuts. But actually, though it was scary, it was also really cool.

And our home didn’t suffer any damage, and our pets were fine. So that’s not why yesterday was sad.

Yesterday was sad because of this.

This is the classroom next to mine. It is the room where my excellent friend and colleague and collaborator and ELA sister, Lisa Watson, has worked with me for the last nine years.

And now she is gone. Because Lisa quit.

It isn’t only sad: Lisa moved from being a teacher and ELA department head to being a principal at another charter school.

It’s a definite step up, and a wonderful role for her: she is an amazing person, kind and caring, determined and perceptive, empathetic and wise; and thus an outstanding leader. She’s going to have a tremendous, and tremendously positive, impact on that school, and on the teachers and students who work there. The school that got her is lucky to have her — and my school is stupid as hell for letting her go, and for not putting her into a similar role for us. The fact that my school has been stupid as hell in not recognizing how excellent Lisa is, is the main reason why she’s leaving, and she’s right to, and I’m glad she is going. So the move is good for Lisa, and great for the school she is going to lead.

But for me? It’s sad.

Lisa hired me. Nine years ago, she and two administrators (one of whom was competent) interviewed me over Skype (That is the MySpace of Zoom, for all you Gen Z’ers out there. Who are definitely not reading this blog. And don’t know what the hell MySpace was. Look it up, punks.) from Oregon, and hired me based on that interview, which is what brought me to Tucson. I don’t doubt that Lisa’s voice was the main one in choosing me, because while I was clearly competent as an English teacher, and she knew right away that she and I would get along well and I would fit into the department, I was also, while I was being interviewed, suspended from teaching because of my blog-blowback. I don’t think I would be any administrator’s first choice — but I was Lisa’s. And while there are certainly things about Tucson which I don’t love, this city has become home, and has been very good for my wife and I: and Lisa made that possible. When people ask me what I think of Tucson, my usual answer is that there is poetry on the rocks here: and Lisa is a poet, as well as a teacher, so she is part of that Tucson poetry, for me. But she didn’t just hire me: she also made sure that I got the Advanced Placement classes, which usually go to the current staff when a teacher leaves, because those are usually the most coveted classes and we distribute classes through seniority; it’s very unusual for a new hire to get AP classes. (I will admit that I was an unusual new hire, because 14-year veteran teachers don’t usually look for new jobs.) I got them. I love them. And Lisa gave them to me.

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Lisa and another wonderful teacher she hired, our friend and colleague Aleksandra — who fortunately is still at the school.

Once I got here, Lisa was immediately and enthusiastically supportive. She gave me ideas and materials, but she let me create my own curriculum for all of my classes. She observed me, complimented me, and put her trust in me. She listened to my thoughts, gave me feedback, and encouraged me to keep doing what I was doing, no matter how often I worried about how my teaching was ineffective or misguided; my anxiety and self-doubt and imposter syndrome were no match for Lisa’s loving and generous guidance. Over the last nine years she has defended me from administrative interference, helped me focus on the real goal — helping students improve their language skills — and taught me an enormous amount about teaching. I am ten times the teacher I was before I met her, and it’s because of her, more than anything else. All of my students who appreciate me and my class have Lisa to thank, because I wouldn’t be here in Tucson and I wouldn’t be the teacher I am if it weren’t for her.

Do I need to say that she’s incredible?

As if that weren’t enough, Lisa is also an author: a poet, first and foremost, she also writes essays and short stories and novels. I’ve known a fair number of people over the years with aspirations of writing, but Lisa is one of the only ones to accomplish writing, real writing, good writing, I’ve ever known. Her poetry, especially, is incredible to me: of the several volumes of poetry she has published — and I think I have every one — my favorite is the first one I read, Hear Me Now, which starts with these two poems:

Ashes

The embers of the fire

Glowed in the night sky

Smoke filled cloud

Reigned overhead

Sweltering head from

A

Careless human

Drops a match

Flames dance

Before our eyes. Demolish the wrong

As the mirror sees nothing

You see the dark places

Of humanity

Burn

And burn

Until we all fall down

Dancing with Raindrops

The gray clouds overhead

Have everything to dread

That little spot of sunshine

Is dancing

And she won’t stop

Dancing with the raindrops

She smiles up at the skies

As drops fall carefully

On her eyes

The drops against her skin

Makes her start dancing again.

What beauty does she exude?

What moves does she make?

Her dancing breaks the clouds apart

And her smile heals my broken heart.

I love those. I love the contrast between sky and Earth, between fire and water, sunshine and clouds. That one pun in “Ashes,” “Smoke filled cloud/ Reigned overhead” just gives me chills. I admire the way Lisa can go from despairingly despising humanity for setting fire to everything, to filled with joy because of a child’s dance (which is also the dance of a spot of sunlight under clouds). I love the way one image, one thought, blends into the next, giving more meaning to both — in “Ashes,” is it the dark places of humanity that are themselves burning? Or is it that you see the dark places in humanity commit the acts of arson which burn everything down? And either way, the mirror sees nothing.

It’s amazing work. She is an incredible poet. And what I love most about her poetry is that it is almost entirely instinctive and unconscious: she will not write a word for months, and then suddenly have an outpouring of dozens of poems in one night, when inspiration strikes, and those tiny bits and pieces, the stems and seeds of poems, that have all been germinating inside her, all blossom at once. But then, she is so capable and knowledgeable about language and poetry and the craft of writing, that even her instinctive, unconscious poetry carries incredible meaning, incredible perceptiveness.

And this wonderful writer has taken me as her writing partner. She encourages me, she pushes me to write and keep writing. She has helped me to realize my own dream, of publishing and selling the books I have written, which were just languishing in my files until Lisa (And my wife, who has always encouraged me as well) got me to make a booth at the Tucson Festival of Books, where I have learned that my fears were not true: I am not a bad writer, or even worse, not a writer at all; and I learned that my hopes were true: people like reading my books. Once I started getting my books into people’s hands, the positive feedback has only grown, and that has been a magical gift for me. I might have reached that one without her, because my wife has given me the same gifts of encouragement and confidence; but I needed Lisa to help create that booth, to create that success, and to push me to keep writing. (I will say that I have given her the same gift of support and encouragement with her writing, and she has written more and published more and sold more because of me. I’m proud that I have been able to give that back to her even as she has given it to me.)

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Lisa and I at our booth at the TFOB — along with our other friend, Amanda, another one of the actually talented writers I have known. (WHO ALSO LEFT MY SCHOOL, but who’s keeping track?)

That’s what I have had in the room next to me for the last nine years. An amazing writer, a gifted teacher, a caring and supportive colleague and supervisor (She even lets me yell at my class, which I do when I get too excited about the literature or the argument I’m going through with my class, and rather than coming to my room to complain about the noise, she just tells her students that I’m preaching.). And, of course, my friend. One of my best friends. She has carpooled with me every day for the last three years; we have walked our dogs together; we’ve had dinner, had lunch, gone drinking; she gave me her old couch, and my wife’s favorite chair; she called me when she had a bird get trapped in her house and was freaking out. (She literally ran away screaming when the bird took off while I was trying to herd it out the door. It was hilarious.) She calls me her brother, and because I know how important her family is to her, I am mindful of the compliment in that, even though I don’t really think I deserve it. But it is true that we’ve talked about everything, and helped each other through everything, and worked together on everything, and together we have been successful far more than we have failed. But even when we have failed, we’ve done it together.

And now she’s gone. And so I am sad.

But of course, Lisa is not gone. She is working in a different place: but she is still doing the same things. She has given me so much that I have needed for the last nine years, I certainly can’t begrudge her decision to give those same gifts to other people instead of me; I probably don’t need them any more — though I certainly still want her gifts, as they are wonderful, like her. And, of course, even if she isn’t teaching with me, she is still available to help teach me and support me in my teaching; and she is still my friend, and my writing partner, and my sister. I’m going to make her go out for a drink with me and with our other friends at least once a week over this coming school year; because I know that Lisa will need our support as much as we need hers. And now that she has stepped up to take charge of an entire school, I will do my part: and I will try to step into her role at my school, to be the department head and to encourage and support my colleagues and help them to grow as much as Lisa helped me. I won’t succeed as well as she did, but I’ll do my best; and I know I’ll have her support.

Another poem of hers, from the volume Beautiful but Ugly, is called Privacy:

In the bedroom

I found a rock

Another rock

There are too many rocks

I have fallen to pieces

That’s Lisa: so many pieces, and she leaves them everywhere, without even realizing it until she turns around and sees them everywhere. Poems, students, friends, family; people she has touched, people she has inspired, people she has taught and made better, in every case by giving them — us — a piece of herself. She thinks she just does it all without thought, just reacting, just feeling, and sometimes she thinks she’s making a mess, and she apologizes; but exactly as she writes her poetry, her teaching and her friendship are so very intelligent and wise that even her seemingly unconscious and instinctive gestures are wonderful, thoughtful gifts, which I will always treasure. My greatest gift to her has been to show her that she is not falling to pieces, and she does not need to apologize: she is giving her gifts to everyone around her, and we have to thank her for it all. The one area where Lisa notably lacks is that she is not nearly kind enough to herself, for all her generosity with others — and that, too, is a lesson I need to learn.

I’m going to miss her being in the room next to me. It has been so very lovely to have this wonderful friend so close for these last nine years, to have the jokes and the laughter and the passion and the wisdom she brings to every place she is. My school has been lessened by her departure. But my friendship has not been lessened, and though she has given me and everyone else around her so much of herself, Lisa has not been lessened by her generosity — and that’s the most important thing I have learned from her. The more you give, the more you are.

But still, you do have to make sure you give to yourself. So Lisa, I hope you do keep giving to yourself at least a little of the wonderful bounty you have given to all the rest of us.

You deserve it, my friend.

Photo Dump

Dusty 1 Comment

This is the last week of school, and my brain is broken, so I will not be writing. But here are pictures.

Every year we get teacher appreciation certificates. And every year, my administration tries to personalize them for every teacher — and every year, they think “Well he likes pirates…”

This appreciation gift, from one of my graduating seniors, was MUCH better. Those darts can really fly.

Last night the graduated seniors did the traditional Senior Prank. We have very nice students, so they try not to damage anything. This is what they did to the Dean of Students’ office:

They also came in this morning to clean up the mess.

And this is what they did to my room. This year’s theme was apparently — cabbage? I’m assuming it was an Avatar, The Last Airbender reference, but — I dunno, man. Cabbage. They left radishes, too.

The ridiculous mess of books and papers, by the way, is all me: I am not a neat man. And it is the end of the year.
See the two radishes? One in front of my keyboard, the other is under the phone.
This was the best cabbage placement. I left this one up for the day. (By the way: on top of the clock is a 3-D printed figurine of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. He lives there.)
The cardboard head cutout was from Graduation; it’s a good likeness of one of our newest alumni. When he and I took a photo after the ceremony, I asked if I could have the head; so he left it for me last night. The Snickers bar, unfortunately, appears to be a new tradition: last year’s senior prank also included poop-chocolate on my chair. Sigh.
This is where the head cutout lives now: on top of the large Darth Vader cutout I already had on the inside of my door. This is now #DarthDrew.

And then one last thing, which has made me much happier than I was last week: at Graduation this year, and last year, we had a Flower Ceremony. We gave the graduates roses and asked them to deliver a flower to the person or people who helped them reach this achievement. Last year my favorite student tried to give me his rose (We only gave them one flower apiece last year; we realized the problem there and gave them two this year) and I told him to go give it to his mom. Then this year — I got four. Left me pretty close to speechless. Here they are (The fifth rose is actually an extra one I gave to Toni because she should always get flowers, but I’m letting it stand in for the flower I turned down last year. [Also I got her a new bouquet of flowers today because she should always get flowers.])

Thank you Than, Alex, Julia, Sofia, and Meghan. This meant the world to me.

Just Imagine

Dusty Leave a comment

I want you to do something for me.

Imagine you were born with only one arm.

Doesn’t matter which one, left or right; for simplicity’s sake, imagine you have your dominant arm, whichever hand you write with. That one is still there, exactly as it is right now, and has always been there. But the other one — in my case, my left arm — was never there. You didn’t lose it in an accident, or to cancer or anything like that; you were just born without it. No stump, just a perfectly smooth shoulder.

Imagine that for a second.

Now, if you were born that way, with only one arm, it wouldn’t be that big a deal. Really: there are some things that would be difficult to do, because they require two hands working simultaneously; it would be a bit harder to drive, for instance (though you certainly could do it), and there are a lot of musical instruments you just couldn’t play, like guitar and piano (But if Rick Allen of Def Leppard is any example, you can play drums with one arm all the way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame); and sports would be challenging, especially baseball and basketball and hockey. You could play football, if that were your preference, though not all the positions; and soccer, of course, it wouldn’t even be a disadvantage, really. Other than that? You couldn’t play pattycake, and jumprope would be tough (unless you jumped double-dutch), but you could play tag, or hide-and-seek; and you could play with dolls and Legos. Some video games would be impossible or close to it: but you could play Wii, and handle most driving games; and of course with any strategy or puzzle based games, your one-armedness would mean nothing at all. Most parts of life, in fact, having one arm would mean nothing at all: you could still read and write and do math and science, you could use a computer or a smartphone, you could ride a bike, you could dance in the rain. You could date and fall in love (There might be some people who would reject you for only having one arm, but come on, how ridiculous and messed up is that?), you could marry and have children. You could be a lawyer, a doctor, a car salesperson, a carpenter, a sculptor, a farmer, an engineer, a rocket scientist, a dogwalker. You could live a full and healthy and rich life.

It would be difficult to find clothes that fit you well. People would probably stare. Little kids would make jokes, and tease you. For a lot of people, it would be the first thing they would ask you: it would be a thing that defined your identity, even though to you, it would mean next to nothing. You never had the arm. You don’t miss it. You may sometimes wish you had two arms so you could throw a flowerpot on a pottery wheel, or shoot a longbow; but it would be more comfortable for you to sleep on that side, because you’d never have to figure out where the hell to put your arm so your hand didn’t fall asleep. Mostly, it just wouldn’t matter.

Can you picture that? Try going through your day, in your mind, with only one arm. Some things might be a little tougher — mostly it would just take more time — but really, not that big a deal.

Okay: now imagine, having lived your life with only one arm, you came home today, took a lil nap because it’s Monday and we all deserve a lil nap on Monday; and when you woke up — you had two arms.

Picture that. Not how wonderful it would be to suddenly be able to juggle three chainsaws: but how incredibly brain-meltingly shocking and horrifying it would be to suddenly have a whole other limb where one hadn’t been before. Step out of this whole thought experiment for a second and imagine how it would feel to wake up from your lil nap to find you have three arms, one new one growing out of the middle of your chest. Would you think “Hell yeah, now I can juggle FOUR chainsaws!” or would you think “AAAAAAAAHHHH WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THING GROWING OUT OF MY CHEST JESUS CHRIST GET IT OFF GET IT OFF!!!!”

I know what I would think. And so I know, for the person who had one arm their whole life, suddenly getting that second arm would be absolutely appalling. Your body would suddenly be different. Your balance would be off. All of your clothes, bought and maybe adjusted or even tailored to fit your one-armed self, would suddenly be different. Everyone who ever knew you would talk about nothing else, pretty much forever, especially if you didn’t have an easy explanation for what happened. If you have any fundamentalist Christian friends, they might decide it was a miracle, a gift of God, and they might try to make an example out of you; conversely, they might think it was the work of the Devil, and shun you, or try to exorcise the demon in your new arm.

Your whole idea of yourself would change. You wouldn’t recognize your body in the mirror. Imagine how weird it would be to keep seeing a hand, fingers moving and gesturing, in the wrong place, attached to the wrong side of your body. Everything you had ever thought, ever said, ever come to a difficult recognition of, about what it is like to be a one-armed person in a generally two-armed world — all of that would go out the window. You’d have to be — normal. But at the same time, not at all yourself. Everybody would think you were normal now, and they would probably congratulate you, and be super happy for you: but the whole time, you would, most likely, feel wrong. Just wrong. Not yourself. Not at home and not comfortable in your own body. You wouldn’t know how to sleep, because you’d have spent your whole life sleeping on the side where there was no arm, and being perfectly, totally comfortable that way: now there’s a fucking arm there, and the whole thing is different. Is wrong.

So here’s the question. If you felt that way, if you felt uncomfortable and strange and weird, all the time, would you grow to hate your new arm? You might. I might. I might not: I might adapt, might adjust; but I might not adapt, either. I might resent my new arm. I might miss being one-armed. And if there were people around me, if I had joined a group of one-armed people, say, and I had to see them sleeping comfortably with their single arms, I might really hate what had happened to me: and I might even grow to hate myself.

If that happened — and I know we’re getting pretty out there, but hold on, we’re close to the end — what if I came to a decision, and went to a doctor, and told that doctor to remove my left arm? To give me back my self-image the way I thought it should be, to make me into the person I knew I really was, no matter how I might look to others who thought I should be happy to have two arms like they do?

Would that be wrong of me to do? Would it be insane, to remove a healthy limb? Would it be butchery, for the doctor to agree?

What if I had really descended into depression and self-loathing? What if I were suicidal, because I had too many limbs, and I couldn’t stand it any more? Then would it be wrong of me to ask, and would it be wrong of the doctor to remove my unwanted body part?

I think it would not. I think it would be my choice, and I think there is nothing at all wrong with being one-armed. I think if someone chooses to be one-armed, then they have every right to make that decision, and to be that person if that’s what they want — particularly if being that person would help them to live a happy life, to have a good self-image and self-esteem, and to keep from harming themselves.

And that’s why I support trans rights.

Now: this may seem offensive. And if this were the actual analogy I were making, it would be; because there actually is a disadvantage in only having one arm, and there is literally no disadvantage, at all, in being transgender, other than how people treat transgender people. There is nothing “wrong” or “missing” in a transgender person, at all. But this is not the analogy I’m making: this is just the warm-up, just the practice round. (Okay, I’m kind of making this analogy: because there are a number of parallels. But it is an imperfect analogy. And it is not the main one I want to make.) Now it’s time to move to the actual topic of conversation here.

You see, there’s a trend I’ve seen in arguing with conservatives (And with assholes, let me point out, because I do my arguing these days on Twitter, which is now like the black hole of assholes [WON’T… MAKE… THAT… JOKE… WORSE… THAN… IT… ALREADY… IS!], pulling them all in until they have more mass than anything else in the solar system), and it has to do with the issue of transgender people getting gender-affirming health care, in two specific areas: one, young trans people getting puberty blockers and then hormone therapy during their adolescence, before they complete puberty; and two, trans people of any age getting surgery.

The trend is this: these folks, both the “compassionate” conservatives (And some of them probably are genuinely compassionate, but not a one of them tries to understand or empathize with what trans people experience, so their compassion is more performative than genuine) and the transphobic assholes, say that they don’t mind people being trans or living how they want: but they don’t agree with people changing their bodies to match their gender identity. They do what conservatives, and compassionate people, and assholes the world over have always done, which is claim to have the right to decide what other people should do, in this case because they are arguing only for young trans people: for children, they will tell you, children who are not mature enough to make decisions about themselves or their lives or their identities.

“What about a young person making decisions in collaboration with their parents, and with loving and competent medical care providers?” I ask these people, over and over again. I get either a simple refusal to accept anyone making a decision these people disagree with — or silence. It speaks volumes, either way. It shows that they are lying when they claim only to be watching out for children, only protecting those too young to protect themselves.

And at some point, I realized why.

They object to surgery, most specifically and frequently, because, they say, nobody should “cut off healthy body parts.” That’s crazy, they say. And for them, maybe it would be — though I would disagree with calling it “crazy,” because our bodies do not define us, we define our bodies: starting with tattoos and piercings and circumcision (Not that I’m getting into THAT conversation, because while I will fight all day with transphobes, intactivists scare the bejeebers out of me) and all kinds of voluntary surgery like cosmetic surgery and permanent birth control like vasectomies and tubal ligations; so honestly, if somebody decided their life would be better with only one foot, then I say mazel tov: go for it. Save all that money on shoes; now every sale is BOGO (though you’d need a friend who only had the other foot, in the same size. [Business idea: ShoeMates, for people who only need one shoe, to share with another person who only needs the other shoe. Call the Tinder people. Whole new meaning for swiping “left” or “right.”]). Make all kinds of jokes about “The shoe’s on the other foot now!” or waiting forever for the other shoe to drop. Joke — or lament — about how you will never again have to do the Hokey Pokey. But okay, let’s say that to someone who likes having two feet, removing a healthy foot would be crazy. Or to stop stigmatizing mental health, let’s just say it would be something they would never, ever do. To them, it would make no sense, and they’d never, ever do it. Just like most of us would never voluntarily choose to remove an arm, particularly not one that we’ve had our whole lives, particularly not a healthy one.

But what they are not considering is how one’s body feels if one is trans.

DISCLAIMER: I am not trans. I have never been trans, and I do not for one second think that I can speak for trans people or try to explain how they feel or how they experience the world or their bodies. I, unlike the conservatives and assholes I’ve been arguing with, would much rather leave ALL people, trans, cis, and everyone else, to make up their own damn minds about who they are and how they feel, and what their bodies should look like, with absolutely no unsolicited input from me at all, ever. But what I want to do, what I think I can do, is try to get some of the people who actually can be compassionate to understand what is wrong with this argument that I’ve been facing. This argument that it is wrong for someone to remove a “healthy” body part just because of how it makes them feel, particularly when they are young (though again, conservatives are not actually protecting young people, as can clearly be shown BECAUSE TRANS PEOPLE ARE AT PARTICULAR RISK OF SUICIDE AND SELF-HARM AND GENDER-AFFIRMING CARE IS PROVEN TO HELP WITH BOTH ISSUES AND IS THEREFORE THE BEST WAY TO PROTECT CHILDREN BUT I GUESS I FUCKING DIGRESS), and therefore, gender-affirming health care should be banned for those under 18 (or under 21, when the mask starts to slip and they reveal that it isn’t about children, it’s about control), particularly hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and surgery.

“Butchery.” They keep fucking calling it “butchery.” They insist on it. As if we weren’t talking about medical procedures carried out by fully trained and licensed physicians in a modern hospital with all the proper precautions and care and science around it.

It’s because they’re not trying to understand how the trans person feels, what made them decide to pursue hormone therapy or puberty blockers or surgery.

The people arguing against GAHC (Gender Affirming Health Care, and yes I hate the acronym, but it’s a pain to type out over and over and I don’t want to change the name from what it actually is because words matter and my opponents intentionally use the wrong terms) are thinking about what it would be like if they went to the doctor and removed their body parts. Their healthy body parts. Their wanted body parts.

That’s not it.

Here’s the real thought experiment. Ready?

So instead of picturing yourself with one arm, and then suddenly waking up with two, picture yourself as you are now: and then you take your lil Monday nap — and you wake up with the wrong genitalia.

If you are a woman, imagine waking up with no breasts. Not that they have been removed, which would be traumatic enough: they’re just not there. Flat chest, completely. And imagine in between your legs, you suddenly have a penis and testicles. If you are a man, imagine waking up without your penis and testicles. And you have breasts. And — forgive me for this, but it helps make the point — they’re big. That penis and testicles, those breasts, they’re HUGE. Just slapping around, there. Every time you move — and when you move, it’s awkward, because you never had them before so you do it wrong, and it hurts more than a little — they shift, they flop, they smack into something else, into your legs or arms, into your belly, into everything. They are there, and they are unavoidable.

And they are WRONG.

Joking aside: can you picture that? Can you imagine how awful it would be to wake up with the wrong body parts in the wrong places?

Now imagine you go running out and go to your loved ones, and say “WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING TO ME!?!?”

And imagine if they acted like it was normal. And like you were strange for thinking those body parts were wrong. Maybe they would even be offended.

If I woke up with different body parts, with large lumps where before there had been no large lumps, I would immediately think it was cancer. Or like some kind of horrible infestation or infection, like the aliens had laid eggs in me. It would terrify me. It would be awful.

But to everybody else who wasn’t me, those lumps would be — healthy. Normal. Not only normal, but positive, important, defining.

Think back to when you went through puberty. When your body started changing. Did you have someone — a loved one, or maybe, like me, one of those terrible cheesy sex ed movies from the 70s — tell you that you were perfectly normal? That your body was supposed to change, that it was supposed to look like that? That you were becoming a man, or a woman?

What if you were becoming the wrong one?

Can you imagine how that would feel?

If I had woken up as a young woman, with breasts, with feminine hips (And imagine if I burst into tears, and immediately thought that I was crying like a little girl), my mother would have been ecstatic. I said before, she always wanted a daughter: it would be affirming for her if I had been her little girl. She could have taught me everything she knows about being a woman, as she understands it — and my mom knows a lot. She cooks. She knits. She sews. She is a nurse. She worked for decades with post-partum mothers and children with complications, so she can handle ANYTHING to do with babies. And my mom is a very feminine woman, in the classic stereotypical sense: she sings, she dances, she wears bright colors and pretty dresses. She would have LOVED to take me under her wing and show me how to dress and how to act with my feminine body. How to sing with my high feminine voice. How to live with my menstruation, and what it all meant for my future as a mother.

But if I was me — and in my mind I have always been male — all of that would be horrifying. Particularly because I would know that refusing to be the girl my mom wanted me to be would break her heart. But I’ll tell you right now: even apart from the horror of finding my body was not the body I wanted or expected it to be, the very thought of pregnancy and childbirth is the most horrifying thing I can imagine. It has always given me the heebie-jeebies in a way and to an extent that I can’t explain. I’m terrified of all of it.

And if I were, in my mother’s eyes, a girl, and she started talking about how lucky I was that I would get to look pretty in dresses, and eventually get married to a man (Ew) and have babies?

Aw, HELL no.

This is not how it feels to be trans. Puberty does not happen overnight, and doesn’t change a familiar, known, comfortable body into an entirely different body. But puberty does feel sudden, because you don’t notice the changes until you do: and then suddenly it feels like everything has changed. And for someone who is trans, that change might feel — wrong. And every day it continues unchecked, it gets worse: it gets wronger. But if you go to someone for comfort, for understanding, they will most likely not sympathize with your feeling: they will most likely tell you that your feelings are wrong, that your understanding of yourself is wrong, that your body is right, and you should just try to accept it. They might even get offended: and insist that the body, and the identity that they associate with it, is a good thing, a thing you should be happy about and proud of.

Picture that: you, as a man, wake up with breasts, and your loved ones say “But you’re such a pretty girl!” You, as a woman, wake up with a penis and testicles, and your loved ones say, “Come on, stop crying, BE A MAN! Show some BALLS!” But you are not a man. You do not want balls.

That’s the point. Don’t imagine GAHC as removing your body parts, healthy, wanted body parts: imagine if you had body parts you DID NOT want. Body parts that DID NOT belong on your body. They might look healthy to everyone else, but to you, they are more like tumors. More like infections, or infestations. They are wrong. They do not belong there. And worst of all, those body parts redefine you, in everyone else’s eyes, as something you are not. As something you do not want to be.

Wouldn’t you want them removed?

Wouldn’t you want to have the right body, the body you know, the body that you belong in?

What wouldn’t you do to get that body back?

That’s how we should think of GAHC. It’s not changing someone from what they should be into what they should not be: it is AFFIRMING a person’s body, making it look like what that person knows it should look like, what it should feel like. Making it into the right body. And, not least important, changing the way everyone else responds to that person and their body, so that they can live the way they know they should live.

I know that I have done this badly. I apologize for that. I know I’ve said this in a terrible cringey way, and I’ve probably been insulting. I do not mean to be. I just want people who think that GAHC, particularly gender affirming surgery, is removing “healthy” body parts, to understand that it is not what conservatives and assholes say it is. It isn’t about taking your body, that you belong in, and making it different; it is about taking a body that is already wrong — and making it right.

That’s the point. I hope, if I have said everything here crudely and stupidly, that I have at least helped make it more clear that most cis people think of GAHC in entirely the wrong way: we think about it like ourselves. But we never think about it as it is for trans people.

We should stop that.

Hey, you know what we should do?

Listen to the people in question tell us, themselves, what they need, what they want, what is right for them. And then we should support them so they can have that, the same way of life that most of us enjoy without ever recognizing how easy it is for us to live as ourselves.

Imagine that.

I’m Doing My Best

Dusty 1 Comment

Yesterday was a bad day.

That’s why I didn’t get a post up; I had one, about half done, which I started last Thursday; but yesterday I couldn’t handle finishing it and posting it.

Because yesterday, I lost faith in myself.

It’s pretty easy to do, really; I’m human, I make mistakes. All the time. Sometimes those mistakes are easy to brush off — I’m terrible at estimating time and distance; I know this about myself, so usually I don’t trust my first instinct when I think, “Oh, that’ll only take ten minutes to drive there. What is it, five miles away?” Because I know both of those numbers are wildly inaccurate. So if I need to know the distance, I will look it up; if the time to get there is important, I will double my original estimate. Or triple it, maybe. So that means I generally leave early and arrive early: but that’s no problem, because I get up every day at the crack of dawn anyway, and if I arrive early, it just means I don’t have to search for parking or an empty seat, which I hate doing anyway.

What I don’t do, however, is get mad at myself for mistaking the time or distance, and decide that I’m an idiot who can’t do anything right, and I’m therefore doomed to a life of mediocrity and failure, and it’s my fault for not working hard enough, or learning enough, or making the right decisions in the past. No, I save that kind of existential crisis for when I’ve done the worst thing I do: screw things up for somebody else.

It doesn’t have to be a big thing. If I give bad advice, or advice that doesn’t help; if I teach badly, or fail to control my class, and get called out on it; if I try to do a thing and fail at it: any of those are enough to send me into a certain kind of shame-spiral, when I start thinking, Well, if I can’t do that right, then I probably can’t do those other things right; and that means everything I do is wrong, and I’m useless and stupid and I’ve wasted my life and harmed people by inflicting my stupidity on them when what they really need is someone who can help them. Basically, I think of myself as an intelligent person, and if I experience something that makes me feel unintelligent, then I doubt everything connected to my intelligence, and everything that I’ve ever done comes crashing down like a house of cards.

Of course, this is not a new phenomenon. And it is not unique to me. There’s a whole thing.

This came from this site, which looks quite delightful and helpful, so please go look if this speaks to you:

The bubbles around the edges are the ways to fight the downward spiral. I didn’t do those yesterday; I went straight to avoidance, and spent most of the day playing Minecraft. (I’m going to have to do a post on Minecraft, by the way, which I have only discovered this last year — that is, I knew about it, but I didn’t know that I would love it as much as I have grown to in the last year.) And so last night, I couldn’t sleep: because I was ashamed of having done nothing useful yesterday, including this blog, which I really do want to keep up with; and I failed. I blew it. I must be a terrible person…

Fortunately, my shame spiral this morning was interrupted by two things: first, I started writing this blog while I was eating my breakfast bagel, with the intent of finishing it tonight, because I can certainly accept posting one day late (Have I mentioned that I’m not real big on deadlines?), and so that reminded me that I can give myself one day of grace on my tasks without assuming that I am worthless; and second, I had to stop writing this blog so I could go to school. And while I was completely exhausted at school today — I was falling asleep while I was grading AP essays this morning (That is not a comment on how boring those essays were [Yes it is.] and also I surely did not lose focus on the essays while I was determining their final score […]) — and that made me cranky as hell, I also taught today. And I taught well. We went over the climactic end of the first act of The Crucible, and while my other class is not grasping the play, this class is. My AP Lit class is really getting into the details of Donald Barthelme’s amazing story GAME (Though they still haven’t figured out why Shotwell has the jacks). The Fantasy/Sci-fi class finished another chapter of The Hobbit, and I got to do a Mirkwood-spider voice, which was fun.

And now here I am, back trying once more to finish this blog.

So I am not stupid. I am not lazy. I am not incompetent, or incapable.

It is true that I’m not sure I have the level of expertise that makes this blog worth reading. Depending on the subject: when it is literature or teaching or writing, I’m fine; I understand those things better than most people, and anyone who understands them more than I do is always welcome to take issue with what I say. (Anyone is, really. Please feel free to comment on the post, or use the Feedback link on the bottom left of the screen, or go to the Contact link at the top. I’d love to hear from you, for whatever reason.) But the post I started last week is not about any of those things, so I’m more uncomfortable about it; hence, yesterday, when I was doubting myself and my abilities and my worth, I couldn’t gather the confidence to say what I want to say on the topic.

But, see, I don’t really write this blog as an expert. As I said, in literature and teaching and writing, I think I can at least hold my own, at my level — you will not find any doctoral theses on this page — but otherwise, when I write about politics or society or life, I’m not writing as an expert. I’m writing as a person. I have my perspective. I think the value I offer in this blog is not necessarily the brilliance of my insights: it is the clarity and the precision, and to some extent the humor, that I add in the writing of my insights. Basically, I’m just a guy with some ability to observe the world around me, and crystallize what I observe into a thought: and a genuine ability to put all that into words. And if that’s enough to make you read what I write, great: I hope my words on my perspective help you to have some thoughts of your own. I don’t think of it as advice.

If it hasn’t become clear, the specific problem yesterday was that I gave a student advice, and it wasn’t good advice. I mean, so it goes, right? I gave it my best shot, I didn’t make the best call. Nobody died, nothing was permanently broken. But I got into this thought pattern like: If I don’t give good advice, what am I doing teaching? If I don’t understand teenagers well enough to know what they should do in a certain situation, why do I work with them? Why should they listen to me? And if I’ve wasted 23 years of my life teaching when I shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, am I doing that only because I need to avoid being a writer for real? And I’m just fooling myself into thinking I’m a good teacher when actually I’m just kinda charming and easygoing, and so the students like me because I don’t make them work too hard, and that’s why I’ve kept my job even though I’m basically incompetent and, let’s face it, just pretty fucking stupid, right???

And what the hell am I doing offering my wisdom on this blog if I can’t even give good advice? Why would anyone listen to me?

I dunno. Why would anyone listen to anyone? Because sometimes, we get things right. Even if sometimes we don’t.

So here’s what I want to do. I don’t want to give advice: because I don’t know more than other people do, except in my small areas of expertise. But I do want to share some of the things I have figured out. I want to share my understanding, my perspective. And if it is helpful, or if it is interesting, then great: and if not, come back next week and see if I have anything better to say.

Okay?

Here we go.

#1: Love really does make the world go round.

Also The Beatles are even more wonderful than you think they are.

My greatest joy is my wife. Living with her, seeing her, talking to her; supporting her, cheering her on, protecting her, watching her be amazing. She is my everything: because I love her. That keeps me wanting to do more with her and for her, and keeps me from being tired of her or resenting her or any of that other shit that comes between people. I am incredibly lucky that I can still feel this strongly for her after almost 30 years: but if I didn’t, if she didn’t still love me, then I would hope we could amicably separate, and go find other people to love. Because love is the most important thing in our relationship, as it is the most important thing in any of our lives. That love is more important than the relationship: the relationship remains because the love remains (And if we fell out of love, we might have a companionable love that would remain, and we could stay in that kind of relationship, and that would be fine: as long as there is love. It doesn’t always have to be the same kind of love. [Though I hope it does stay. It’s awfully nice.]), and the love is what matters, more than the relationship.

I write because I love it. I read because I love it. I teach because, basically, I love humanity. I am a pacifist for the same reason (Even though sometimes I want to hit my — well, maybe not my students. But I want to hit things around them, you know?). Every important thing about me is based on what I love, or what I don’t.

Love is everything.

#2: Life is long — but never long enough to do everything you want.

I hear people talk about how fast time goes: and I don’t understand it. I mean, sure, my childhood is loooooong gone, and I don’t remember everything that happened between then and now; so that might seem like it was a shorter time than it should have seemed like; and I have definitely felt some dilation of time in the last few years: I cannot fathom that the pandemic and the quarantine were three years ago. So I definitely do that thing where I go “What?!? Three years??? Seriously? Where did the time go?”

But then I actually think about it: and the last three years have been — three years long. I’ve done a whooooole lot of stuff in that time. A lot of it is the same stuff over and over again, but it’s been different every time. And it’s always like that. Life is very long. I hear the cliches about how we only have a very short time on this Earth and in this life, and that’s true: but only from the perspective of mountains. From a human perspective, we have a very long time to live. My students are so goddamn young; and I am 30 years older than they are. And 30 years? That’s a long fucking time. If I have 30 years left to live, that’s a long fucking time left. A very long time.

At the same time: in those 30 or 40 or 20 or however many years I have remaining, there are more things that I will not do, than there are things I will do. Partly because I will have to spend a huge amount of those remaining years doing shit like — grading AP essays while I try not to fall asleep. And that time lost will be sad, because it won’t be spent doing things I love. And it should be. Because see #1.

So we have to pick and choose what we spend our time doing. It’s important to choose, and to do it intentionally, and thoughtfully, as much as we can. Don’t let time slip by without paying attention to it at all; because we have a lot of time — but we can still waste it, and we shouldn’t. We should love our lives, as much as we can. Because #1.

#3: There are three things you can have with any job, any task, anything you buy or hire for: you can have good, you can have fast, and you can have cheap. You can only have two of them at a time. So if it’s good and fast, it ain’t cheap; if it’s good and cheap, it ain’t fast; and if it’s fast and cheap, it ain’t good.

This is the best single piece of wisdom I ever got from my dad (Though there are a lot of other things he’s taught me, more than I could count. It’s just that this is the best.). I think about this all the time. I’ve written about it a lot of times, too. Hiring a plumber: not cheap. But usually they do good work, if they’re professionals; and it’s always MUCH faster than doing the repair yourself. Or you can think about it in terms of buying a car: you can get a POS rusted-out Mustang, that still might be fast, and it will be comparatively cheap: but that won’t be a good car. Or you can get a good, cheap car like a used Toyota — and it will not be fast. Or you can buy a good fast car: but it’ll cost you. Or getting music on the Internet: you can get free music without ads (That’s what I’m calling “fast” in this case: no download delays and minimal interruptions), if you don’t mind listening to shit on Soundcloud; or you can get good music fast (without ads) if you don’t mind paying for premium services; or you can get free good music on YouTube (I’m currently listening to this, which I find both beautiful and amazing, but I also genuinely feel bad for this guy’s forearms. It’s like you can smell the tendonitis in the air, like smoke.) if you don’t mind sitting through ads.

Also: you don’t always get two. You can get only one. Or you can get none: because you can buy expensive shit that takes a long time to get finished, and when it’s done, it still sucks.

#4: The most important thing in any relationship, from friendship to love to family to business to neighborhood association to — anything — is communication.

I’m teaching argument right now, and if my students are understanding it, they should be figuring out that the first key to any argument, to understanding what someone else is saying, is always to define your terms. And clarify your meaning. And show where you get your information from, and why it leads you to the conclusions it does. And the same is true in any interaction: I am a good teacher because I want to understand my students, and I’m good at making them understand me. My wife and I still have a strong relationship, apart from our love, which is irrational and magical and incomprehensible and the most powerful force in the universe, because we communicate: because we tell each other what we think and feel, and we listen when the other is talking. I get along with my coworkers because I talk to them and listen to them. My students don’t complain about my grades because I am clear about why I give students what I give them — and if they have opinions about those grades, I listen to them, fairly. And if their communication makes sense to me, I am willing to change the grade. Their parents don’t complain about me because whenever they have a question for me, I answer it, fully, completely, and honestly.

Corollary to #4: communication requires honesty, which is why honesty — not patience, not courage, not intelligence nor openmindedness nor anything else — is the most important virtue.

No, you don’t have to be honest all the time. Yes, you can lie and say someone looks good in that outfit, or the food was tasty when it was not. But understand the consequences of those lies. And be as honest as you can.

#5: Everybody should have pets.

I have no opinion for or against children: if you want them, I wish you the very best; if you don’t, I wish you the same. But everyone should get pets. They are pure love and they teach pure love.

I always use the dogs for this, so here’s a video of Dunkie the cockatiel whistling. He’s adorable, too.

#6: Everybody should exercise, even if it’s only walking. Or dancing.

When I was a kid, I rode my bike everywhere. So much better than driving. Now I walk my dogs every chance I get, and also go to the gym. Movement helps with everything physical, mental, and emotional. We were made to move: so do it. Make sure it is something you enjoy, or you won’t do it — but when you enjoy it, do it as much as you can. It’s always good for you.

#7: Doing it yourself is better than buying it: but see #2. And #3, because doing something yourself instead of buying it is cheap, which means you can’t have it be both good and fast.

I was thinking of this in context of making food. Cooking yourself is healthier, in this country; generally cheaper than food from a restaurant (If it’s not cheaper, it’s DEFINITELY healthier), and if you can do it right, it tastes better, too. My advice for cooking is to learn a couple of specific dishes, and really master those: I can’t make eggs, but I can make three different kinds of mac and cheese, and they are all AMAZING. Also I am good with sandwiches. And my wife says I make good salads, too.

But it goes beyond that: my wife and I (with my dad’s help when he came for a visit) painted our first house, the entire exterior, two coats; and we did a hell of a job, and it was an accomplishment I was proud of. It was worth doing. But it did take a damn long time, I will say. It was a lot of work. Because of that, it is certainly worth it to hire an expert to do things for you sometimes, rather than take the time to do it yourself, always, because #2 means you have to pick and choose where and how you spend your time.

But if it’s important to you, and if you love it, do it yourself, as much as possible. Learn how and then do it.

#8: Everybody should read.

More than we do, unless you already read as much as you possibly can. I’m not against watching TV and movies and playing video games, and all outside/physical activities are good too, as is just relaxing and doing nothing. But we all need to read. It does more for the mind than any other intellectual activity. It brings us closer to the world every time we do it, because good writing is about the world. And writing is communication, which allows us to build and strengthen relationships, every time we read. It’s just the best thing. We should do it more.

Also, it will prevent the arrival of the world of Fahrenheit 451, which is closer now than ever before, and getting closer all the time — and that is not a good thing.

Ray Bradbury Death: Does paper really burn at 451 degrees Fahrenheit?
“This is not your classic censorship, where they put a soldier in the door of the newspaper and assault the journalists,” Calzadilla told us. “Instead, they buy the newspaper, they sue the reporters and drag them into court, they eavesdrop on your communications and then broadcast them on state television. This is censorship for the 21st century.”

Also: everything is better with music. So listen to lots of music.

Now I’m listening to this. And to be honest, I have something of a pseudo-crush on the singer/songwriter/rhythm guitarist for this band. Which I’m only saying because honesty is important. And nobody is 100% straight. And damn, he’s got a good voice.

Also, this is maybe my favorite love song. Though I don’t have a crush on this singer. But he does have an amazing voice. Damn fine piano player, too. And I have no idea how he made this gruesome concept into a romantic song — but he did.

And this is one of my favorite songs about life. Which I should listen to more. It makes me feel better about myself.

#9: Put your own mask on first.

When the oxygen masks fall from the ceiling in an airplane emergency, what do they tell us to do? Put your own mask on before helping anyone else. Because if you pass out from lack of oxygen, you can’t help anyone.

I suck at this. I sacrifice myself for others all the time. Not in the grand sense: there’s almost no one I would be willing to die for; and the ones I would be willing to die for, I don’t want to die for, because I want to stay alive so I can love them and be loved by them. But I give up way, way, WAY too much of my time and energy for other people. I fight for my political beliefs because I want to do good in the world. I spend too much time working on my teaching because I want to help my students. And I do these things even when I can’t find the strength to do it: because it’s important to me. And then, when I do take a day off to play some Minecraft, I feel guilty about it for days afterwards. I get mad at my wife when she does things that I was going to do — say, vacuum or wash the dishes — because I was going to do them, and she shouldn’t have to do my tasks. But one of my favorite things to do for her is to take a chore that she was planning on doing, and do it for her, so she can relax.

But the more I spend of myself on others, the less there is of me. We get used up. And we don’t realize it, because we think we’re happy helping others — and we are (At least I am [and maybe I should have included the statement Don’t Be a Selfish Asshole, but I feel like we all know that already. Right?]), but helping others takes energy. It takes time. It takes: when we give, we lose something, even if we get a little bit back from sharing joy and human kindness. Whereas if we would take the time to take care of ourselves, we would have more to spend helping the people we want to help, the more capable we would be to do the things we want to do, which would then give us more time and energy and satisfaction/happiness to be able to share more with others. Think of it in terms of #2: a low-stress life will let me live longer; and the happier and more content I am, the more energy and will I would have to do things that I want to do — like paint my own house. Or help my students learn how to write better arguments. Or learn how to cook eggs. But if I am stressed, then I don’t want to learn to cook eggs: I just want to order a pizza and watch TV.

So: take care of yourself first. And then take care of other people. Definitely do the second one: putting time and energy into other people helps with #1, and makes all of our lives better; but do it second. Put yourself first. When you don’t need any more attention, you’ll turn to others; and it won’t be a struggle. Happy people are helpful people. Helpful people are happy people.

And that explains the current state of the GOP.

Frank Thorp V on Twitter: "Randy Rigdon of Cincinnati wears a "TRUMP 2016 - FUCK YOUR FEELINGS" shirt at Trump's rally at the US Bank Arena ==> https://t.co/HFDnuJYdHJ" / Twitter
Look at ’em. Are those happy people? They are not.

#10: Be kind. Everybody deserves it — though not everyone deserves it twice.

Make sure you are kind to yourself, too, and that certainly means removing unkind people from your life: and don’t feel bad about it when you do it. But otherwise: start every interaction with kindness, and try to end every interaction the same way. Why? Because

Pride Goeth Before… Something Something

Dusty Leave a comment

I got stopped by a fellow teacher this past week and asked a question I had never thought about before: between the two most common science fiction future predictions, that is, that humanity will evolve and transcend in some way, or that humanity will destroy itself, which did I think was the most likely? And although I had never thought about that before, I have read enough sci-fi to have encountered both of these predictions — actually, in my new elective class on fantasy and science-fiction literature, we have read both a dystopian novel (Feed by M.T. Anderson — HIGHLY recommend) that predicts that humanity will destroy itself and the Earth’s ecosystem along with us; and a short story by Isaac Asimov called “The Last Question” (Asimov said this was his best story. It’s probably not — but it’s a cool idea, and it’s very well realized. Also recommend. But not as highly as Feed.) which depicts humanity evolving and transcending. Along with our computer intelligences, I might add; which is a nice element to include in this unusually hopeful story. So I was able to formulate an answer, quickly; one that responded to the question but also considered some of the complexities in the topic: I said, immediately, that the doom option is far more likely — but I also pointed out that said doom is certainly not going to be the actual end of the human race, because we are enormously adaptable and incredibly good at surviving, so some people would live through the end of the rest of us, and those people would end up being very different from the people who came before the doom; and therefore those people may be said to transcend. But also, I asked what was meant by “evolve” and by “transcend?” Humanity has largely stopped evolving physically, because we now evolve societally; our greater height and longevity, our now-selective fecundity but also our incredibly improved survival rate — all these are changes that have been wrought by society, and not by physical evolution through natural selection. So is evolution to be defined as something that happens naturally through the same process of environmental pressure which differentiated us from the other great apes? Then hell no, humans will not evolve. But is evolution simply about the changes wrought on the species by their — our — continued survival and our steady adaptation to differing circumstances? Then yes, we will continue to evolve. Also, does “transcend” mean changing who we are as a species? Being born different, as the kids say? Or is it about changing individuals after birth? That is, if I am born as a normal weak-ass human, but then I add machine elements to my body, and end by uploading my consciousness into a robot body: have I transcended? Have I evolved?

Is this an evolved human? I mean, other than because it is Patrick Stewart…

Anyway, the point is I talk too damn much. But also (And this is more the point): I’m very smart. I was able to start answering the question, and then think about both the question and my answer, while making my initial point. I thought of these two works I have named, and thought about how they fit into the spectrum of future possibilities. I could have kept going. I could have turned this into a lesson, or even a unit, without thinking too hard. (We should also include “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut. Great story about evolution, and also dystopian doom. And “By the Waters of Babylon” by Stephen Vincent Benet is a nice example of people surviving past the cataclysm, and maybe becoming better? Maybe stronger?) I could have put this to students, and maybe helped them to recognize the importance of trying to become better, rather than worse, even though worse is MUCH easier. I have used it as an example here, but I could have turned this into a whole essay; it might have been a good one.

I am proud that I can do that. I am proud of my abilities. I read well and remember what I read; I think well and speak well and write well. Over the last 20+ years of teaching, I have actually learned to think like a teacher: surprising, considering that I didn’t even think like a student when I was growing up. Part of why I do that, why I think like a teacher? I’m proud of being a teacher. I’m proud of what I have done as a teacher. Not as proud as what I have done as a writer; I still think art is more important than education, because education has been co-opted and commodified, and also to some extent Balkanized (Meaning it has been broken up into small pieces, as the Balkan states were broken off of the Soviet Union; now there are lots of them, but they are individually much less than they used to be, partly because they are hostile to each other. Huh. I actually didn’t know that last part was in the definition. Now I have to think about whether that applies to teaching. Yeah, probably; I have often had conflict — beef, as the kids say [By the way: I do that “As the kids say” thing precisely because it is “cringe,” which is hilarious. I can actually make my students shiver with loathing when I say something like “No cap, for real for real.” I love it.] — with other teachers, and that probably is a result of the system, at least in part.); while that has definitely happened to art on the internet (which was where and how I discovered the term Balkanization, in a description of how the internet has affected art), art is able to — well, to transcend that process, and remain valuable, which education has struggled to do. So when asked what I have accomplished that I am proud of, the immediate answer is always: my books. I have written books. They are good books. I am proud of them. Only after I have said all of that — and probably much more — do I maybe add — “Oh, and I’m proud of teaching, I guess.”

And that’s why I’m writing this: because two weeks ago I wrote about value and worth and price, and I recommended that people stop buying stuff, which theme I wanted to expand on lest I be too holier-than-thou; and both that piece and this one are in response to the number of my friends who question their value and their worth: particularly in terms of their art and their accomplishments as artists. I do it too, and for some of the same reasons; but I do it less. Because I’m a proud man.

And Pride goeth before a fall.

Okay: so what is pride? What does it mean to be proud of something, or of someone? What does it mean to be proud of yourself — and is that the same as being proud as a person? Of having pride? Is pride good, or bad?

According to Christian values, pride is bad. We should instead be humble. But okay, what does that mean? My immediate thought is that humble means “Not proud;” so I should define “pride” first, and then “humility” in relation to it. I suspect we are more familiar with and have a better understanding of pride, especially we Americans. So we’ll start there.

I think of pride in two contexts: pride in one’s accomplishments, and the pride a parent feels about their child. That’s not to limit it to those: I am proud of my wife, I am proud of my brother, I am proud of my father (Maybe even more so than he is proud of me…), I am proud of my friends. I am proud (in a way) of things about me that I wouldn’t label as accomplishments, like my intelligence and my empathy. But the first things that come to mind are the first two I stated. When I talk about being proud of my accomplishments, I think that feeling is a sense that what I have done is good, is important, and is something I think is defining for me. I’ve done stuff that I’m not proud of (Which should be a simple statement describing things like “I drove to the post office today” but has a strong negative connotation, implying things that I have done which I am not only not proud of, but that I am ashamed of; those things also exist), and some of it is good and important — like food. I make dinner sometimes. I made dinner last night. Sandwiches. Pesto, tomatoes, mozzarella cheese. Potato chips on the side. (I didn’t make those.) Delicious. Food is good and important, the fact that I make the food sometimes so my wife doesn’t have to is good and important — but I’m not proud of that. Because I don’t see it as defining.

That’s another aspect of this we struggle with, I would guess. It’s hard for us to define ourselves. It’s particularly hard for artists to define ourselves, because most of us — almost all of us — have other jobs. Almost no one makes their living exclusively from their art. And here in our capitalist society, we define ourselves first and foremost by our jobs; that is, by our income-earning vocations. Even that word is misused: it means a career or occupation (One regarded as particularly worthy and requiring great dedication, the Google tells me, so the definition is closer to what I want it to be, and I’ve just been misusing it. But I wonder how many people who use the word use it to that full definition.), but it comes from the Latin word for “to call,” vocare, so it is a calling. Something we are summoned to, something we are compelled to do — no, even that doesn’t have the right feel, because honestly, I am summoned and compelled to earn a paycheck because I have a mortgage and because I need to buy tomatoes and pesto and mozzarella for my sandwiches. A vocation should be something that thrums the iron string of our soul that Emerson wrote about in On Self-Reliance. Something that makes sense of us, and by which we make sense of ourselves and our world. My father spent five years or so working as human resources director for a tech company in Boston; but his vocation was always particle physics, and when he went back to that, he made sense to himself. So he is proud of his work at SLAC [Stanford Linear Accelerator Center], and not as proud of his work at the tech company. Similarly, I am proud of my writing, and proud of my teaching — and I mean, I guess it’s cool that I have put a lot of work into home renovation projects over the years.

I’m quite proud of this image of me, which I captured after I spent several hours installing that floor. I guess I’m proud of the floor.

So that’s the first part of pride. When you do something that is good and important and defining, then you are (or should be) proud of that. “Important” is a word in there that probably needs defining too, though it is definitely subjective for me: there’s no real reason to think that my writing is important, as I have not been groundbreaking or influential or even particularly successful with my writing; but I think it is important. And I see a distinction between my important writing, like this blog I keep trying to keep up, and my books; and my unimportant writing, like my journal or the emails I send, stuff like that.

So if that is pride, I’m not sure why it’s a thing that Christianity would be against. Other than, of course, the cynical assumption that the faith wants to put all goodness into God so that people need to rely on the church; if God is the source of all good things, then there isn’t anything for any human to be proud of, because we didn’t do that stuff, God did; he just let us borrow it. Personally I don’t like that. But then I’m not a Christian. That may be exactly the mindset they’re going for.

But I don’t think that’s the source of the idea that “Pride goeth before a fall.” (Hang on, let me check on that, because I used “Spare the rod and spoil the child” in an essay I wrote once for school and claimed it was from the Bible, and later on I looked it up and it does not in fact come from the Bible at all. I am actually proud of that essay in a particularly perverse way: I think it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever written, which it was meant to be, and it has been an effective example for my classes because it is so bad. Okay, so this one is from the Bible but I’m misquoting: it is “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18, King James Version) I think — though I agree that my understanding of Christian ideology is a pretty laughable foundation for a discussion — that the pride spoken of there is a different kind of pride: and now that I have actually found the correct quote, I feel pretty well confirmed in that.

It’s the haughty spirit. That’s the point. That’s the bad pride, the one that leads to karmic justice in some way.

See, there are plenty of people who take enormous pride in things that they didn’t even do. So it’s one thing to take pride in something that isn’t good; I’m pretty damn proud of my longstanding hobby (One might even call it a vocation?) of stapling papers in the wrong corners in order to mess with my students:

Trigger warning: if you like things being done just so and being done right, you will not like what I did to these papers.

But there’s nothing good about that.

And then there are plenty of things I am proud of which are not important — like the video games I have beaten, that sort of thing. And I already spoke of things that aren’t defining, like cooking dinner for my family. Those things may not really deserve pride — and because of that it does make me question whether I feel proud about them — but regardless, there is no harm in being proud of things that don’t really matter much.

But then there are people who are proud of things they didn’t even do: like being American. Or male. Or tall. Or white. Don’t get me wrong, you can like those things, you can appreciate being those things (I’m not really sure why you would, but to each their own): but what on Earth would make someone proud of being born in this country? What did you do to make that happen? What time and effort did you put into it? Now, if you emigrated here, went through the enormous upheaval of moving to a whole new country; if you made a life and a home here, and created a place for yourself: that would be something to be proud of. But if you are proud of the fact that were born here, well. Bill Hicks has something to say about that: (**Please note: this clip is not safe for work.)

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Miss Maudie talks about Atticus’s shooting ability, once it is revealed that he was called One-Shot Finch, after he shoots the rabid dog. The kids can’t understand why Atticus never talked about how he was a dead shot, and why he never goes shooting if he is so good at it. Miss Maudie theorizes (Falsely, in a way, because he later says what he wanted his kids to think — that courage is not a man with a gun — but this point of Maudie’s also makes sense and might be part of his reasoning) that it is because Atticus recognizes that there’s no sense in taking pride in what she calls a God-given talent. She says that being born with a good eye and a steady hand is nothing that comes from hard work and dedication; it’s just a thing that is true about Atticus, like being tall.

I don’t entirely agree with Miss Maudie — I think that shooting a gun accurately would take a hell of a lot of practice, and therefore would be something to be proud of; but also, you would need to shoot in a good way, and also in an important way, for it to earn pride in my definition — but I see her point and I agree with the idea that taking pride in something you didn’t do, something you aren’t responsible for, is silly. That’s the idea of the Bible verse, too, I think.

See, if you put in the effort on something, if you really do the work, then it’s damn difficult to be proud of it. Because first of all, you’ve seen alllllll the mistakes you made in the process of learning; and if it is something hard to do, then you made a lot of mistakes. You also know, better than anyone, how much effort you have spent, and also you should know the difference that effort made: and that should pretty clearly show you that anyone else who put in the same effort would probably make the same progress — unless you were born with a gift of some kind that contributed to your ability, like having a sharp eye and a steady hand. But if it is something really difficult, then you also recognize that your sharp eye and your steady hand are not the things that make you good, or that make you great: they make it easier for you to be good or great — but only effort and dedication makes you good, or makes you great. The physical gifts are not something you did, so not something you should be proud of: the pride comes from what you put into making yourself into someone you can be proud of. Michael Jordan certainly has physical gifts that make him a great basketball player: but he’s Michael Jordan because he had the will and the drive, and he put in the effort. Therefore, I think he should be proud of what he accomplished. Shaquille O’Neal, on the other hand — well, he should be proud that he is apparently a very nice person. And then, of course, if you do what most of us do with our passions, and you look around at other people who do the same thing, what you are bound to find is people who do it better than you. Because nobody, not even Michael Jordan, is actually the greatest: there’s always somebody better. Knowing that keeps us humble, even if we have accomplished something to be proud of.

But even though it is difficult to take pride in what do, if that thing we do is a calling, if that thing is very difficult, if that thing takes years of dedication and effort to accomplish: then we have to take pride in it. We have to. Because there’s another aspect of pride.

The pride a parent takes in a child, that I take in my wife, my friends, my family, is not the pride of accomplishment. I mean, I’m proud that I support my wife in her art (and I’m proud I make her delicious sandwiches for dinner, without which she could not continue to make art), but otherwise? Her art isn’t my accomplishment. I did nothing to make her into the artist she is, not really. My support and sandwiches were helpful, but she could have done it without them, of course. But I am so incredibly proud of what she can do. So is that like the pride that dumb people take in being born between Canada and Mexico?

No: it’s something else.

The quality of an accomplishment that makes it pride-worthy, the aspects of it that make it (to one’s subjective viewpoint) good, and important, and defining, can be boiled down to one simple emotion: the most powerful emotion. Love. I write because I love what writing can do, and I love what writing is; and therefore I love writers — and therefore, when I write, I love myself. I love when I am able to create the effects that make me love writing. I am so very proud of those moments, of those effects, of what I did, and of myself for achieving them. And yes, it is entirely subjective: but then, often, so is pride. That doesn’t make it bad.

Pride is bad when it is not based on love. That’s the second half of the proverb, the “haughty spirit.” When one bases their pride on their contempt for others, then pride is bad. When one sets oneself above others, and is proud as a corollary to that, that is bad. That leads, in a righteous universe, to destruction: to a fall. (I know it doesn’t always. This is not a righteous universe.)

So really, it’s not that it’s dumb to be proud of being an American; it’s dumb to think that other people are lesser for not being Americans. (I knew that, actually. I am proud of my country. But also, I am humbled by it, because I can never do enough to make it the country that it should be, which means I am not fully worthy of it: so my pride does not create in me an haughty spirit. What a phrase that is. Don’t you just love the KJV?) It’s not that bad to be proud of being tall, or of being white; it’s bad to think that short people are worse off, or that people who aren’t white are somehow worse or less than white people. That’s where pride goeth before destruction: at least it is to be hoped that it does goeth before destruction. Because that kind of pride should be destroyed.

That’s not the pride that people have in their children, unless those people are really damn awful. Parents who put in a lot of work helping their kids to achieve something can take pride in their accomplishment, too, but mainly, parents are proud of their kids because they love their kids. And that love is pride; that pride is really just love.

I think that pride is love turned outwards. Love is generally directed into the person, or the pursuit, or the object, for whom/for which you feel the love; or it is turned into ourselves, as we enjoy the loved thing or the loved one being around us and bringing us joy. When we are proud of someone, as when we are proud of our accomplishments, we want to share that love with others: we want to express it, we want others to see it, we want everyone to know about it. That’s pride. I am proud of my books because I love my books. I am proud of my wife because I love my wife. I want to show off my books, I want to show off my wife, because I want other people to know of my love, and I want other people to understand how much I love, and why I love, and how lucky I am to have these loves in my life: both my accomplishments, and my incredible, incomparable wife.

Also: I am sometimes not proud of being an American. Because I do not always love my country. I am always proud of my wife.

But please remember this, whoever is reading this: if you work on something hard; if you think that thing is good; if you think it is important; if you think it defines a part of you: then be proud of it. Be proud of it like a parent is proud of their child. Notice that I have not spoken of the value or the worth or the price of the thing you do of which you are proud: love has no price, and so neither, therefore, should pride. You just feel it, and want to share it: and you should. Always. And if you are a parent: be proud of your child, especially when that child is proud of themselves. Love them for who they are and for what they do: and love yourself the same way. Don’t talk yourself out of it because you could have done better, or someone else could have done better, or it wasn’t exactly what you thought it would be: just love what you did, and love yourself for doing it. Be proud.

You deserve it.

The Incredible Incomparable Artist Toni DeBiasi

Dusty Leave a comment

I have a post about half written, which I had intended to finish for this week’s blog.

But then this happened.

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Ftonidebiasiart%2Fposts%2F694268322482782&show_text=true&width=500

So now I feel the need to brag a bit, for her sake. Because my wife is absolutely amazing.

First of all, you need to go look at her art. This is her Facebook art page, and this is her Instagram page.

Now understand this: Toni has dedicated herself and her life to her art. Despite countless obstacles and difficulties of every kind — financial (LOTS of financial obstacles; this is the United States, after all, and she is an artist, who does not come from family money, and married a public school teacher, the poor misguided fool), personal, medical, emotional, cultural, and practical — she has always made art. Starting when she was a tiny child (Who looked pretty much like this:)

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Toni has spent her life drawing and painting, observing, learning, practicing, training, hoping, dreaming, trying — and living –but mostly, drawing and painting. It is her favorite thing to do, her solace, her source of self. And she is absolutely incredible.

She set out to depict how animals are, despite their generally kind nature, slowly building up rage over how humans have treated them, and treated the Earth that we all share. In dozens of drawings like this one:

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This was an Inktober sketch, one of 31 she did in the month of October: one ink sketch per day.

And paintings like this one:

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This is Llombie. He is a llama zombie. I love him.

She has depicted animals in unusual ways, often exploring the interactions between humans and animals, the ways humans use animals, and particularly the ways animals reflect human ideas, and the way human ideas impact animals. Sometimes the humans and animals are friends:

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Just a sketchbook page she posted, but I love the toad

And sometimes they are not:

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Another Inktober sketch

A few years ago, that morphed into the Anarchy Animals: in drawings and sketches and paintings, animal portraits started suddenly including the anarchy sign, which she was using to show that animals were someday going to rise up and overthrow their oppressors. Worldwide anarchy. Led by such as these:

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Anarchat

And this:

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And this one, where the anger is growing more clear, and more dangerous:

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Eventually, she decided to do a full series of paintings of animals in this theme, all inspired by creatures exploited and threatened by humans, creatures whom she would depict fighting back. That series, Animal Anarchy, led to these two paintings (The series is ongoing):

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And when she happened upon a call for entries for a show that would focus on the theme of Animal Activism, she entered both of these paintings. And, of course, she won. The koala piece won First Place in the Painting category for all entries, and an Honorable Mention for Overall Best In Show; the ostrich piece won Honorable Mention in the Painting category.

And I just want to share with everyone how amazing and unbelievably talented and fiercely imaginative my wife is. And how proud I am of her. Because she is the best artist, and the best partner (but more importantly, the best artist), I have ever known or ever hope to know.

Congratulations on your win, my love.

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