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Imperfect Persistence

Dusty Leave a comment


One of my flaws as a teacher is my insistence on persistence. I like finishing things: I don’t like leaving them incomplete. It’s a problem for my classroom because it means that I don’t always adapt quickly to how my students are taking in the material, how much they are learning from it; I have, more times than I can count, stubbornly kept on reading the same piece, the same essay, the same story, the same book, even though my students have completely lost interest, simply because WE’RE NOT DONE YET. Maybe even worse, I have gotten irritated about reading excerpts, and have gone ahead and given my students the entire piece to read, just so we can do the whole thing; then, when they get tired of it — or, honestly, if the author gets out of their golden zone and drops down into less stellar writing — and nobody is paying any attention to what I am reading, I keep reading it anyway. Why? BECAUSE WE’RE NOT DONE YET. Again, this is because I was unsatisfied with an excerpt, and insisted on reading the whole thing. (This example, by the way, comes from my experience with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “On Self-Reliance,” which is a lyrically beautiful piece of writing, with amazing ideas in it — aaaaaand it’s also over 10,000 words long, which is about 19 pages of 19th century transcendentalist sermon. Most textbooks that cover the era or the genre have excerpts from it. I gave a class the whole thing and tried to read it to them. The excerpts were better.)

To be somewhat more fair to me, I love literature and words and writing and reading more than I can clearly explain; so for me, all of Emerson’s essay is beautiful, and essentially all of it can be inspiring. I also feel a sense of — duty, I suppose, in that I find it disrespectful to take only excerpts from a longer piece. If all Emerson had to say was the thing about trusting yourself, that’s all he would have said; obviously, he thought there was more that was worth saying, and since Emerson was an incredible genius with words and ideas, and one of my heroes and inspirations, I want to honor the man and his work by taking it in, and giving it to my students, in the form Emerson intended: all 19 pages of it. So I gave my students the whole thing to read because I thought, and I think, that it’s worth reading the whole thing, that reading the whole piece is the right thing to do.

It turned out they disagreed with me, and as always, the students win those arguments by the simple expedient of shutting down, no matter how passionately I read, or how carefully I point out the valuable material in the rest of the essay after you get past the “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Maybe there’s a way I could have maintained their interest as Emerson goes on and on and on — no, there’s definitely a way; I just don’t know that it’s worth it when there are other good things to read in the world, and limited time to do that reading. At some point even my desire to finish things caves in the face of continued passive resistance, and I do (I did with Emerson) give up and discard the piece in favor of something newer and more interesting for the class to work on.

Though if I think their resistance to the learning was because they were being lame, rather than me being lame in my choice of material or pedagogy, I will often re-inflict the same sort of thing on them. I mean, what if we move on from Emerson — and go straight to Thoreau? CheckMATE, teenagers! Transcendentalism IN YO FACE!

On the other hand, one of my flaws as a political activist is a distinct lack of persistence. Or maybe it’s a lack of focus: I don’t have a single cause that I fight for; inasmuch as I have a political side and a set of causes to fight for, I don’t push myself very far into that fight. I give up very easily. I will argue until the cows come home — and then I will argue with the cows — but I won’t go out and do things, won’t collect signatures or donations, won’t canvass or march, won’t join political action committees or grass roots organizations. It goes straight back to the same point I made with what I teach in my class: because as much as I love literature, I do not love being around people. I guess I won’t say I hate it, because there are certain people I like being around as much as possible; but I hate going out among strangers. It’s one of the things that makes teaching an acceptable career for me, as an introvert; because I get to know my students, in some cases quite well, and that makes me more comfortable being around them. I hate the beginning of the year, and I hate getting new students and losing old students I like; because new students in new classes are strangers, and I don’t want to be around them until I get to know them better. (I don’t have to like them, actually, but I still feel more comfortable and get along better with students I know and dislike, than with students I can’t even recognize or attach a name to.) But that same discomfort with new, strange people keeps me out of political activity: because a march is thousands of people I don’t know, and all other grass roots political activity is focused entirely on meeting new people and getting them into the fight on my side. And I don’t want to do that.

But the result is, I don’t do much to make the world a better place, even though I want to, even though, knowing my abilities, and ignoring my personality and preferences and comfort level and anxieties and everything else apart from my abilities, I always tell myself that I would be good at politics. And I would: I think well, I listen well, I speak well; I’m very good with people. But also, there’s simply no way that I could be happy and comfortable being surrounded by strangers all the time, which is essentially the life of most political activists. Certainly the life of politicians, which I have also thought (And continue to think, in my less self-aware moments) that I could be successfully. I could give a speech. I could draft a law, and argue for it. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to make and maintain the friendships and alliances that would be absolutely necessary to get anything at all done in politics; I’d always want to just go back to my office, sit by myself, maybe read something; but that doesn’t matter, right?

Thinking this way has always had me considering whether or not I should start running for political office. (Also my students frequently tell me that I would be a good candidate and they would vote for me. It would mean a whole lot more if they voted. Or knew anything about political candidates beyond the most superficial information. Hey, they’re kids; what do you expect? It’s nice to hear, which is actually their point anyway.) I could start small, maybe a local school board; then something like a state representative, and then who knows? Congressman Humphrey? Why not? I wouldn’t want to go much farther than that, since greater power requires greater compromise, and I wouldn’t want to sell out; but I hear about congresspeople like Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who do the work of the Congress, who do the research and write the bills and all the behind-the-scenes grinding that is required to get stuff done. I could do that, I think. It would be useful if I did that. And I would give a good speech, and I would be awesome in a debate. Which makes me think I could get some useful things done, if I could go that far.

It struck me hard in this strange, idle ambition of mine when I heard that Mitch McConnell, whom I loathe more than most politically opposed people in this country, but who is unquestionably one of the most effective politicians of the last half-century if not more, absolutely hated working with Barack Obama: because Obama wanted to explain the ideas behind his political goals and actions, wanted to get into the philosophy and convince McConnell to work with him on the merits of the thoughts and his ability to communicate them; and McConnell just wanted to do a fucking deal. Because that would 1000% be me, trying to get into the underlying morality and the cause and effect of any legislation or policy I wanted to pursue; and the other politicians, the deal makers and negotiators, all those goddamn extroverts, would just roll their eyes and say they had another appointment.

So no. I should not go into politics. I should not run for office. If I could just jump straight into the role for which I am suited, I would be a real asset to the country or the state or whoever I worked for — I would make a hell of a speechwriter, I think — but that’s sort of like the ambition I had when I was a kid, to work my way into the NBA by becoming a 100% never-fail flawless free-throw shooter, who they could substitute in whenever a foul was called, and then I could calmly hit all the free throws and help win the game, despite being 5’10” and essentially unathletic. The problem being, of course, that the game doesn’t work that way. To become a speechwriter for a political campaign or organization, I would have to work in the field, and especially network in the field, for years; and I would have to do all the things I don’t want to do in order to do the one thing I want to do.

This same persistence makes me a good author, because I can keep working on one story until it is a whole book. And the same lack of persistence makes me an unpublished author with five — almost seven — genuinely good novels sitting on my computer, and not on bookstore shelves. The contrast, and what seems to me to be fairly extreme opposite traits, is difficult to wrap my head around sometimes: because how can I give up so easily on some things, and fight so goddamn hard and so goddamn long on others? If I’m willing to put in so very much time and effort to write a novel, to the extent that it takes over my life at times, and becomes one of my defining attributes, that I am a writer, that I am a novelist: why on Earth won’t I fight to get my books published? Do I just want to write, but not have other people read what I write? Why would I want that? And yet, that seems to be exactly the life choice that I have made: I’ve been writing novels for almost 20 years now, and have not published a single one, other than through self-publishing. (I know, I know — hang on, I’ll come back to it.) But you see, I know, with a bone-deep conviction of total understanding, that writing is communication, and therefore requires an audience for the writing to be anything real. I want people to read what I write. I am happy that people came and read my blog two weeks ago, when I posted the chapter from my novel Brute, and I am disappointed that fewer people read the one from last week, about Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. (That combination has contributed significantly to this topic, by the way. I’ll come back to that, too.) I do want readers. I want my work to be published.

So why do I give up?

And the larger problem is, how do I get myself to change? If I can’t understand my motivations, the causes of my actions, I can’t address them, can’t change them; self-awareness is the most important factor in self-change. How do I tell myself to keep fighting for the things I give up on, when there’s no simple explanation for why I give up on those things and not on others? I’m neither 100% stubborn, nor 100% (Hey, what’s the opposite of stubborn? Wishy-washy? Flimsy? Weak-willed? Maybe adaptable.) adaptable, so I can’t just point at my nature and say “That’s just who I am, I never/always give up.” At the same time, if I’m willing to give up on things because of inherent or essential aspects of my personality — I am not going to stop being an introvert, which means I’m never going to be a good political operative — why do I keep persisting in the areas that are just going to keep hitting this wall? If I’m never going to be a good political operative, why do I keep trying to get involved in politics? If I’m never going to push myself to publish a novel, why the fuck do I keep writing them?

This is where I come back to self-publishing, then. Because honestly? It’s the perfect compromise. I have printed and sold somewhere in the hundreds of copies of my three published novels. (One has never been printed because it’s only available as an ebook. But there are a fair number of people who have read it electronically.) That means I have an audience: I have readers. The feedback I have gotten from my readers about my novels has been almost entirely positive. (Some people think I’m too wordy. No, sorry: EVERYBODY, including me, thinks I’m too wordy; some people think that’s a problem with my books. Mostly agents and publishers.) It also means I don’t have to do all the shitty things I would have to do if I were to become a professionally, traditionally published author, namely: I don’t have to compromise. I don’t have to edit my books to someone else’s standard, which standard would be almost entirely derived from what the market research said would be most profitable. Why didn’t my first novel sell? Because it was too long: it’s a young adult fantasy novel, based almost to the point of plagiarism, on Harry Potter, and it’s 600 pages long. And sure, the last HP books topped 600 pages — but the first two did not. After those first two became the most popular YA fantasy novels of all time, Rowling was able to write whatever the fuck she wanted and sell it to anyone, which is how we got The Cursed Child. (By the way, I liked parts of that. But not enough of it. And there’s no reason on Earth why it is a very short play, rather than what would likely have been a very good novel, other than Rowling decided she wanted to write a play, and was arrogant enough to think she had to be right because she’s JK Rowling. Which is also how we got this neverending TERF bullshit that has tainted the entire franchise. Sometimes persistence is not a virtue.) So once again, I want to skip all the difficult stuff and just go right to doing whatever the fuck I want to do, namely writing the very long books I enjoy writing.

However: let me also point out that the book is so long because it’s actually two and almost three books combined into one: the character has a life in the “real world,” a second life in the world of dreams which is the main fantasy aspect — and a third life in a role-playing game he runs, which I narrated as a real story, lending the book an element of swords-and-sorcery fantasy which I think is a real strength. Telling three stories means a lot of pages. Also a lot of work. But even writing this paragraph out here is making me excited about the concept all over again; maybe it’s time to go back and write the sequels I never wrote. Because I gave up on that series when it didn’t sell, even though I loved it and loved where I planned to have it go.

So maybe I do give up on writing sometimes. Well, like I said, I did eventually stop reading “On Self-Reliance” at my students. I don’t like doing things that don’t work. I don’t like wasting time. I have too much other stuff to do. More productive stuff.

More productive stuff like publishing my own books. Another accomplishment I am very proud of. And even though I don’t like being around strangers, I have, twice now, been very successful at selling my novels to strangers at a booth at the Tucson Festival of Books. Which I’m going to do again this year. And that’s an area where I actually like interacting with people: because they are book people, and I get to talk to them about pirates and stuff. And then they give me money, and they take my book away with them, and hopefully read it and enjoy it. A couple of them have told me they did read it and enjoy it, so I think I can assume that other people did, too. (I know for sure that several of my friends have read and enjoyed my books, and I’m grateful for that, and for them. I’m just saying that of the strangers who bought my books, most of them probably read the books, and some number of them enjoyed the books. A couple of those strangers have told me so.)

So then, why, if I’m happy self-publishing, if I get an audience and also a sense of accomplishment, and freedom as a writer — why do I still want to publish with a traditional legacy publishing house?

Because my other dreams and aspirations persist, too. I don’t just want to write: I want to get rich from writing. I want to be famous because of my writing. I want to be invited to speak on a panel at a convention, where I can see people dressed as my characters. I want people to write essays about my books like I have written essays about the authors whose works I admire.

It’s the same thing with politics: I don’t want to be around strangers and I don’t want to compromise; but I do want to make a difference. I do want to make the world a better place, to make people’s lives happier and more fulfilling. And sure, I’d like to be famous as a politician, too. As someone who made a difference. (Also, if I was a politician then I could get my damn books published.)

I meant for this topic to be just a brief introduction, a lil hook, to my intended goal with this post: to finish talking about Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. There’s a whole second half, more than half, of that essay which I left off, last week. I talked to my brother, who told me the interesting truth that Martin Luther King Jr. Day is his favorite holiday: that the ideas and values represented by the holiday, associated with Dr. King, are closest to him, most important to him, compared to those associated with other holidays. And I told him that I had just written about Dr. King that weekend, about the Letter, and he asked which piece by Dr. King that was: was it the one about the long, slow arc of justice that bends towards freedom? No, I said, it was the one where he said “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“Oh,” my brother said, “the one about white moderates, about how he was disappointed by the white moderates.”

“That’s the one,” I confirmed: and immediately felt guilty. Because I left that part out. I stopped before that section of the Letter, which goes on for many more pages, covering many more ideas — and continuing to be brilliant.

I should have kept going, I thought. I didn’t finish the piece, and I left out important parts of it.

But then again, my wife, after reading the post last week, said it was good — but also that it was long. And my WordPress stats counter told me that not very many people read it. (Actually, my most popular posts continue to be my old book reviews, a couple of them in particular, and some of my essays about novels — especially the one about The Lord of the Rings and Gollum, and The Metamorphosis and Gregor Samsa.)

Regardless, though, I thought this week, I would finish analyzing the rest of the Letter. For Dr. King, another of my ideological and wordsmithing heroes; and for my brother, and for the sake of getting to the powerful statements the Letter makes in the last two-thirds, particularly about just laws and unjust laws, and about white moderates. Because, first, I want to finish the piece; and second, I worry that I am one of those white moderates who would have disappointed Dr. King. Because I don’t keep fighting for justice, don’t maintain my persistent participation in the political struggles that affect people in this country and in this world.

And thinking about that got me to here. On a subject about which, apparently, I have a lot to say. (I think I will probably finish analyzing the Letter next week. But we’ll see.)

I don’t want to be one of the white moderates who disappointed Dr. King. I don’t want to be wishy-washy, and tell myself that I’m being adaptable, when the thing I am adapting to and accepting is failure to do what is right, what should be done. If I should get my books published, I don’t want to be a coward who gave up and failed simply because I didn’t have the strength of will, the persistence, to keep fighting. If I have a role to play in achieving a more just world, I do not want to be the person who backed away from the fight simply because I don’t feel comfortable around strangers.

But the answer to this is not what I am implying there — what I frequently catch myself saying to myself, as a criticism, until I remember that it should not be a criticism, not even of myself. The answer is not to never give up, ever, for any reason under any circumstances ever ever ever. The answer is not to become a zealot who never compromises, to become an extremist. (Though Dr. King makes a wonderful point about extremists in the Letter, calling himself an extremist for love, and for freedom, and for justice. I could be that kind of extremist, I think.) Dr. King himself was a moderate: he wanted change to come without violence, without tearing down the systems and institutions that were tainted with intolerance and injustice. He wanted this country to be better: but he still wanted it to be this country.

I’m reading a book, currently — Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein — that is about extremists who were willing to do anything to achieve their ideological goals: they recognized that the only way to really achieve the change they wanted was to create a crisis, a shock, that would set a people back on their heels, and while the people were all reeling, the changes could be implemented because people wouldn’t be able to resist. And those people? They’re evil. Not only because their ideas were wrong and bad for humanity (The specific group Klein is focusing on is the neoliberal economists of the University of Chicago, under their prophet Milton Friedman — and fuck that guy), but because they refused to accept anything less than everything. They were not moderates. Their economic theory requires absolute purity, not a single element of compromise; and so they are zealots. And because Friedman was himself a zealot, who spent his long life fighting for this one cause, for this one idea, for the supremacy of his theories and the absolute elimination of all else, he did incalculable harm to this world. And it stuns me, and I’ve commented to myself in my annotations in the book (Of course I annotate books I read. Don’t you?), that Friedman and his colleagues and disciples could have such complete courage in their convictions, such unwavering confidence in themselves and their rightness, and their righteousness. Such complete, perfect, persistence. The ideology and Friedman’s example both lend strength to that tendency; but I think that’s a sign of zealotry in all cases, that absolute unquestioning confidence. And zealotry, in all cases, is bad.

I don’t want to be a zealot. Not even for a good cause. But I also don’t want to be weak, don’t want to give up when a fight is worth fighting.

So the answer?

Compromise.

Self-publishing my novels is the right thing for me to do. It’s where my focus and my energy should go. I may send away queries to agents, sure, and I may even hit the lottery and get published; but otherwise, I should compromise between what I want, and what the reality of my strengths and weaknesses dictate. There’s no point in wishing I could network with the publishing industry and get published that way; it’s not who I am. Sure, self-publishing means I am unlikely to ever get rich and famous from my writing; but that’s the idea of compromise: you don’t get all of what you want. But you focus on the main goals, and you work hard to get those, even if you have to give up something else.

My main goal has always been to be a writer. To create worlds. Part of that means I need to have people read and participate in my writing. That’s the main goal. That’s what’s important. And if I have to give up fame and money in order to achieve that? Fine. Probably better for me, even if it doesn’t feel like that.

Another of my main goals has always been to help people. This one, like the goal of becoming a writer, is essential to who I am, and who I want to be. If I want to make a difference, it doesn’t have to be a difference that affects the whole world, or even the whole country or the whole state: making a difference for one person is making a difference in the world. And I do that: for my family and friends, for my readers, and for my students. And since I’ve had thousands of students, I can actually say that I’ve had a pretty strong impact on the world around me, because I have had an effect on a pretty big number of people.

And I did it by staying true to who I am, and knowing what I can do and do well, and then doing that, exactly that. Not by wishing I could do something else, or be someone I am not. I do wish, sometimes, that I could do or be more than I am — I wish I was more tech-savvy as a teacher, and more organized, and better about using different styles of teaching and learning; and I wish I could be more of an extrovert when it would be useful to interact more with other people — but I have my strongest effect, and make my greatest progress, by doing what I do well, and persisting in that. Knowing what is actually important and what is actually good — and knowing, on the other hand, what would be nice, but isn’t necessary. And also, in contrast to Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys (And if you want to know why I will continue to say #FUCKMILTONFRIEDMAN, read Shock Doctrine, or listen to Unfucking the Republic.), being open to the idea that what you think is the most important thing, and what you think is true, may not be — and being willing to learn what is true. That is also part of knowing what is really important, what is really good. I believe that reading is vital for everyone, that to be able to have a full and valuable life you must be literate: but I am coming to accept the idea that people don’t need to read. It’s still good and always will be, and for me personally it is vital; but not everyone needs to read. I can accept that. Because I’m not a zealot. And I’m not an asshole.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have some confidence, some persistence in believing that what you think is actually true: you need some. I have to believe my writing is good enough to publish, or I would never put it in front of any audience, and then I would not be a writer. It’s important to believe in yourself and your decisions, to trust your decisions about what is important, which means you need to trust yourself; but the best way to do that, in my experience, is to trust your process whereby you came to the decision, and to base it on good processes: gather information, verify the information, draw conclusions from what you know; be open to newer or better information, even if it contradicts what you used to believe. As long as you are willing to abide by new information (also, good information), then what you decide based on what you currently know is the best you can do: and that should be good enough. Trust yourself — but verify your information. Friedman never questioned himself, not even when other facts interfered with his conclusions; he had an explanation for everything that showed how his theories weren’t flawed, it was the world that was wrong. That’s too much self-confidence. That’s arrogance and zealotry. But also, when I ask why I never got published, part of me wants to think it is because I’m not a good writer: and I know that isn’t true. I am a good writer.

What I am, is someone who has read Emerson’s “On Self-Reliance,” the whole thing. I understand what he meant when he said “Trust thyself.” And I know that his point rests on an older commandment, which is even more important: Know thyself. Know what you can do. Know what you should do. And when those two streams converge, when the two strings vibrate in harmony: keep going, keep fighting, and never give up.

Again? Really?

Dusty Leave a comment

So I had insomnia last night, again. I woke up about 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep: I was too busy fretting about my teaching. (It didn’t help that I had an annoying earworm, the chorus of Five Finger Death Punch’s “Jekyll and Hyde,” repeating in my mind the whole time. But the main thing was the fretting.) Am I teaching fast enough? Am I teaching right enough? Am I teaching hard enough?

It is a constant worry. Not just for me, I’m sure, but for most teachers. It’s why the Standards movement has gained so much ground among teachers, even though logically, standards have very little to offer teachers other than more work and less individual freedom. Because teaching is a profession with an enormous amount of uncertainty. The goals are uncertain – am I teaching my students reading and writing? Critical thinking? Good citizenship? Obedience and conformity? – and the measurements are uncertain – do I want them to get high grades, or high standardized test scores? Or do I want them to feel self-confident and happy? – and the future of one’s employment is the most uncertain of all: because not only does it rest on the vagaries of school population and school funding, but it also rests on those same uncertain, everchanging goals and measurements. Teaching is like walking through a fog bank on the edge of a cliff and trying to shoot a bullseye with a bow and arrow. And I don’t mean a target: I mean the actual eye of an actual bull, that is moving somewhere through the fog, and may be trying to knock you off the cliff – especially if you shoot him with the arrow.

But here’s the thing: everything about teaching is uncertain, except for this: teachers are important, and good teachers are doubly so; and I think, after sixteen years, it is certain that I am a good teacher. I think I can know that, even if I don’t know anything else for sure. I have always been able to work well with my students, and even when the curriculum has been drastically changed, I have generally been able to adapt to the new stuff and still get good results. I am slow, both in covering material and in keeping up with paperwork; and I am a bit of a maverick, in that I tend to push for my own choices of material and my own goals rather than the ones preferred by my administrators; but our goals are generally pretty congruent, because I always have the students’ best interests in mind. It’s one of the things that makes me a good teacher. And I have had former students, and their parents, come back to me and tell me that my class was their best class, that it was one of the things they looked forward to in their school day; they have said that they learned a lot from me; they have said that I changed the way they thought, or they read, or they wrote. Bull’s eye.

Unfortunately, my confidence in myself doesn’t actually translate to a lack of worry. Partly because I am a worrier by nature, and partly because I am surrounded by a whole world of people telling me to do something differently. “You’re teaching THAT?! Don’t teach that – teach this!” “You’re teaching that THAT way?!? Don’t teach that way – teach this way. And also this way. And kind of this way, too. And make sure you have clear lesson, unit, and semester plans, all prepared in advance and shared to a Google document with everyone else who wants to read them and laugh behind their hands at you.” “Make sure they get high test scores. But not on that test – that’s the old test. Use this test. And also, keep the parents happy – which means make sure they get high grades, since that’s what pleases parents.””Oh – and check for dress code violations, and make sure they aren’t fooling around in the supply closet.” I tell myself all the time that all I need to do is my best; but it never feels like enough. At least I think that. Particularly when I wake up at 3am. It all makes it very difficult: to teach, and also to sleep.

But finally, I got back to sleep. And I had a dream. In the dream, I was making my wife drive me to school early so that I could donate a pile of art books that we didn’t want any more, that I thought my students might enjoy or be able to use. And when I got there (In standard dream fashion, it was raining Biblically, and the school was something like an old haunted Victorian, and I actually had a suite of my own – and needed to take a shower before class started – and the principal I talked to was the one from Oregon before I moved here in 2014), before I went inside, a sleepy student – it was still dark, before sunrise, plus the rain – asked if she could lie down in the back of the car, and because she was obviously tired and cold, I let her, over my wife’s irritated objections. I went inside with my art book donation, and there found that I had a new assignment: now all of my classes were going to be taught outside. (Apparently in the middle of a deluge. Hey, why not? They can learn about water conservation and climate change. And hypothermia.) Starting that morning. I objected to this, even threatening to quit, but my administrator asked me to slow down, in the middle of my outraged temper tantrum, and explain why I wasn’t willing to make this change; and in thinking about it, I realized that I was teaching things that all related pretty well to being outside – Thoreau’s Walden and Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening and the like. And I threw up my hands and said, “Fine. Fine, I’ll do it. But can I please have a moment to myself before there are students in my face?” My administrator left, and I burst into tears.

Then I woke up. And in the shower, I realized: there I was, donating my possessions, my time, my car, my wife’s patience, to my students, and my school was still screwing around with me for no good reason – and I was still doing what they asked. I do everything that is asked of me, and I do it as well as I possibly can, which is generally pretty well. And I do what is really required: I try to do what is best for my students.

Even my subconscious is tired of me worrying about this crap.

Things Not Failing At Would Be Good

Dusty 1 Comment

My student told me the other day that he had had a dream about me. Fortunately, the dream wasn’t as creepy as that statement: he was in my classroom, and I was teaching a “lesson” on the Twenty Worst Things to Fail At (Ending a sentence with a preposition? Apparently Dream-Me has a crappy sense of grammar.). He said I went through the list, and #2 was “Life,” and #1 was “THIS CLASS!”

It seems Dream-Me is also one of those teachers who talks about his class like it’s the only thing standing between students and a roaring tsunami of doom and destruction and disappointed parents who don’t love their children quite as much if they go to a state school. Apparently Dream-Me also enjoys a nice soupcon of anti-climactic irony. I mean, really, Dream-Me? Failing at your class is worse than failing at life? Isn’t the idea supposed to be that failing the class leads to failing in life? You blew your own point, pal. Don’t you know anything about rhetoric?

Though I have to add that I often act like a jerk in my wife’s dreams, where I tell her that she’s unattractive and ignore her when she’s scared or in pain. So maybe I have an evil Dream-Twin.

After telling the class about his dream, the student asked me to come up with my own version of the twenty things. I didn’t have a ready answer for him, but I said that I would think about it. Here’s what I thought. I could only come up with nineteen that needed to be on the list. Because I don’t live my life by other people’s rules.

Nineteen Potentially Terrible Failures

19. Starting the coffee in the morning, as I failed to do today. It’s an unforgivable sin.

18. Realizing that not everything is a competition, or that not everything needs a grade. Life is not a game, capitalism and competition do not make people better, sports are not the basis of human culture. There’s little that’s more annoying than when you reach the end of a difficult obstacle and then someone turns to you and says, “Ha! I beat you.” Or asking someone how you did with a difficult task, and having them say, “I give you a C+.” (By the way: no, it isn’t ironic that I said that and I’m a teacher. I know this to be true because I’m a teacher. Because I know it to be true, I hate grades, and tell my students so as often as I can.) One should not try to decide if this one thing is better or worse than this other thing – especially not with people – and one should never use a single and generally insignificant criterion to make that judgment, as in, “My class is more important than the rest of your life because my class has me in it,” or “Sports are better than reading because sports are more exciting to watch on TV.” It is reasonable, within a narrow scope, to consider, “Is this thing/person/event good or bad in this specific way in this specific instance?” because you can choose criteria and then decide if the thing matches them — and if your scope is narrow, you can have enough information to be reasonably sure of a valid appraisal. When trying to decide if I should eat an item of food, for instance, I ask myself two questions: one, Am I hungry? And two, Is it a doughnut? If either of those answers is Yes, then I eat. I don’t ask: Will eating this make me a winner? or, Is this the best thing to eat? or, Which doughnut is better?

Eat all the doughnuts. Then they’re all winners. And so are you.

17. Avoiding the use of memes and Vines. Memes and Vines are two things: they are amusing, and they are fast. But that’s it. They have no practical purpose. And yet, people post memes and Vines all over social media, attempting to lay claim to positions or to express opinions or preferences/allegiances (“Share this meme if you remember what this is!” “This Vine shows what it means to grow up in the 90’s!”) And I don’t mean there are good memes and bad memes, or good Vines and bad Vines; there are, but the point here is that they have no particular use: memes should never be used to argue, and Vines should never be used to communicate. Memes are never the best form of the argument; they are always oversimplified, generally exaggerated, and always mocking if not directly insulting. Vines are too short to have any poetry in them: six seconds is not long enough to set up a punchline, or build up expectation and suspense, or to create irony. Vines are just one big pratfall, everything bang, boff, and wow! It relies on an aesthetic of contempt, of laughing at the fool, of pointing at the freak. Of course there is a millennia-old tradition of this, but any other medium has at least the potential to grow past shock value. What serious thing are you going to say in six seconds? Would you even have time to ask that question?

16. Remembering what you thought of in the shower after you get out of the shower. Godddamnit. I know I had something else that should be on this list. What was it? Too late. It’s gone. I really need to get some waterproof whiteboard or something, so I can take notes in the shower; that’s one of the best places for thinking. It’s one of the only places in the world where there is, usually, nothing but silence: the white noise of the water, and the sound of your own thoughts.

And speaking of silence . . .

15. Silence. Ray Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451, put this as “leisure” and said it was one of the three critical elements that would keep our society from turning into the dystopia he imagined. He said that we need real information – denied the people in the novel by the burning of all books – and quiet time to think about it. Time without televisions or radios, without people talking, without cars rushing around or sirens blaring. (Just for the sake of completeness: the third thing we need is the right to act on decisions made with the use of the first two.)

This society has plenty of information. Too much, in fact. What we don’t have is a quiet moment to sit and think about that information. My students generally don’t like silence: they start feeling awkward, and then they make noise in order to block out the silence. When asked to work quietly, many of them insist on listening to music, saying that it helps them concentrate. It doesn’t: music asks for, and receives, some kind of attention, especially when the other task is not entertaining; the evidence is overwhelming that people cannot actually multitask, and doing two things at once means you pay less attention to both. But music in one’s ears does eliminate that awful, shuddering, heaving beast, Silence; and for them, that’s the goal.

But the thing is, silence allows us to dive deeper into our own minds. Of course this is what teenagers are trying to avoid; they don’t want to think about what’s inside themselves or why, or what it means, and so they build a wall of noise and hide behind it. But that doesn’t make what’s inside us go away, and someday, we must confront it, work through it, and then turn it into strength. We take things in and make them a part of ourselves, turning difficulties and sorrows and any powerful experience into the foundation on which we build the temple of our Self: grief becomes courage, anger becomes determination, heartbreak becomes wisdom. But it’s a process, and it requires thought, and thought requires silence.

Maybe we should all just take a whole lot more showers.

14. Doing your job. We live in a society, and people depend on other people. For me to be a good teacher, I need someone else to produce my food, to build my house, to maintain my car. For the mechanic to do a good job maintaining my car, he needs someone else to make the parts and the tools, and the auto manufacturer to maintain quality standards. For the auto manufacturer to maintain standards, he needs to understand science and math: engineering and physics, and measurement and data management; and for that, he needs a good teacher. When any of us fails to do our job, the others are put at a disadvantage. Now I have to install washer/dryer hookups in my new rental because the property management company failed to inspect the connections properly: and that’s time I can’t spend teaching. “United we stand” is always true, not just when we are at war.

And speaking of war . . .

13. Peace. I should probably make this #1, but I’m not trying to create a hierarchy here (See #18). But in truth, there is no greater travesty, no greater horror than war. War is hell. That doesn’t mean war is uncomfortable, or unfortunate but necessary, or kinda bad but at least it helps the economy. War is hell. War is the worst thing imaginable, the home of all sins and all evil, the farthest point from goodness. It is one of my deepest discomforts to know that my country, my homeland and my family’s for at least three generations back, has failed at peace for nearly its entire existence. This fact puts the lie to all claims of American exceptionalism: we are not the greatest country in the world, everyone else does not envy us, we are not even a good country, because we have built this country on war. War is the source of our economic and scientific advancements, war is the foundation of our international relations. We are war. We are hell.

12. Putting down the phone. This is the other reason for America’s failure to achieve real greatness: because we are so very bad at this. It’s not just the phone, though, and it’s not just this generation; twenty years ago, I would have said “Turning off the TV.” The only difference is that now we can take the TV with us everywhere we go; it’s an increase in quantity, not a change in quality.

Don’t get me wrong: smartphones are wonderful things. The convenience and quantity of available information is staggering. If you added a phaser, it would be every gadget the away team uses on Star Trek: it’s already a communicator and a tricorder. (They should add a phaser. And it should go off automatically if you subscribe to Donald Trump’s Twitter feed.) Smartphones are fine and useful, as were televisions and radios before them.

But the phone, and the TV, are substitutes for real experience. With a phone you never have to look in someone’s eyes when you tell them you love them, or hate them. With a phone you never have to get up and go outside to see how the weather is. With a phone you never have to find something to do to occupy your mind. In other words, a phone allows you to avoid thinking, feeling, and doing. It allows you to avoid life. So the key with a smartphone is to put it down as often as possible, to use it only when it is convenient. One should never need it.

And speaking of Donald Trump . . .

11. Not being Donald Trump. Which means that every single person on Earth is successful in avoiding this failure, with one notable exception. Think of it that way and you almost pity him.

A corollary to this is: not voting for Donald Trump. Our country is already hell. Let’s not put an idiot in charge.

10. Honesty and avoiding hypocrisy. Yeah, telling the truth is hard. Yeah, living up to your own standards and sticking to your own principles is hard. But when you fail to do this, when you fail at honesty, you destroy yourself: when other people know you for a liar, as inevitably follows being a liar, people stop trusting anything that you say. You essentially silence yourself; you make all of your opinions, everything you say, into nothing but hot air and bull puckey. You take away your own ability to contribute to and participate in human society. Which makes it a terrible travesty that we lie so much, and even worse, accept that people lie and say that they should lie. The idea of a “little white lie,” which says that it is better to tell someone they look good in that dress and their hair is pretty and their rear end isn’t at all enormous, is a terrible foundation for a society. It makes us liars. Little white lies are just gateway lies that lead to adultery, embezzlement, and Watergate.

But the truth is: you can’t live a lie. You can keep piling more lies on top of it, but eventually, the weight grows too great, and your lie-pile collapses in on itself. And then you find yourself in court.

9. Keeping your dreams alive. This is something, I think, that we often lie to ourselves about: we tell ourselves we are happy with things the way they are, when really, things the way they are are okay for now – but we want something different. We want more. We want to achieve, to accomplish, to become. And that thing we want, that dream, is difficult and scary and risky, and so we tell ourselves that we really don’t want that, really don’t need that; this is enough. We say it enough that we let that dream die.

(A secondary point: if people tell us little white lies about our ability, tell us that we’re really good singers when in truth we’re not, it holds us back from accomplishing our dreams and makes those dreams more frustrating: because the truth may push us to work harder, or to change dreams – an acceptable choice, and one that shouldn’t be construed as failure; the point is to have a dream, not only one dream – where the lie makes us just keep trying to make it work, and not know why it isn’t working. If I wanted to be a professional singer, I would hope that someone would tell me that I need to work on my singing more, so that I could get good enough, instead of giving me false confidence which will lead to failure because I’m genuinely not good enough. Tell me again that little white lies are a good thing.)

It does take courage and fortitude to hold onto hope, to keep working towards something without realizing success in it, or even worse, to keep waiting for your moment to come when you can try, or try again. But this is who we are: fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and humans aspire. My dreams are me: I am who I am, and I do what I do, because it will lead me to accomplishing my dreams, to becoming the me I want to become. Giving up your dreams is giving up humanity, identity, self. If you do that, if you fail at hope, what’s left?

8. Naming your children. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why people name their children the way they do. I don’t understand why people want their children to have unique and different names. It doesn’t make the child unique and different: it makes the person who named the child unique and different, because that’s who came up with the name. It’s a selfish, narcissistic act. How do we not see this? The child may like its name, but how could you possibly know at birth what the child will like? You can’t.

Your child’s name is not the appropriate place to show your creativity.

So here are the rules. A person’s name should be a name. You shouldn’t name a child after an object – Apple Paltrow – nor after a profession – Pilot Lee – nor after a character trait – Moxie Jillette. Some of these sorts of names have a long enough history that they have become acceptable, have become names, like Prudence or Hunter; but it takes history and tradition to make that happen. You cannot start a new one just because you want your child named Upholsterer. (Upholstery Jones has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?)

Most important of all: a person’s name should be spelled correctly. If you like the way a name sounds, then focus on the sound, and give the child that name. If you want your child to have a different name, THEN GIVE IT A DIFFERENT NAME. This is not hard: there are millions of names out there. Millions. Many of them are lovely and unique: in all my years of teaching and meeting people, I have only met one Ambrose. I am the only Theoden I know. I have never met a Gwendolyn, or a Marguerite. And despite knowing dozens of them, I still think the name Sarah is beautiful. I still like the names Jacob, and Thomas. A good name is a good name, even if there are five of them in the class; and if there are five Dylans in the class, it doesn’t help that one of them is Dillon, and one is Dylin, and one is Dillan, and one is Dyl’lyn. If I call out “Dylan,” they all look up at once. If you want your child to have an uncommon name, then give it an uncommon name. But for the love of all that’s good and pure, give your child a name worthy of the human being it will be attached to.

Speaking of children . . .

7. Raising children / Raising pets. First, let’s be clear: neither of these is more important, or more fulfilling, than the other. Either or both are, in my opinion, necessary elements of life, because everyone should know what it is to experience unconditional love and absolute dependence. Everyone should know that another being exists because you provide that existence. Everyone should have the chance to know that you gave a being the opportunity to live and love and have fun and be strong and be sad and give joy and give comfort. Everyone should be part of a family, and at some point, everyone should have their own family, should take care of their own family. What that family looks like is entirely up to each individual: I wouldn’t necessarily tell people they should have pets instead of children, or children instead of pets, or both, or neither. Everyone should have a family. That’s it.

And as part of that, everyone should do a good job taking care of and raising their family. Pets should be raised to be loving and polite, and so should children. All needs should be provided for, and neither expense nor inconvenience should keep a need from being met. Not all wants should be given, because kids should not be spoiled – the idea that all children should be spoiled is simply an outgrowth of our obsession with youth, and the absurd idea that childhood is the best time in life, and therefore children should be given everything they want and prevented from ever experiencing anything sad or painful. Let’s be clear: childhood is life, and life sometimes sucks. Life never gives you everything you want, and the same should be true for childhood. A good childhood is one where all the necessities are provided, and there is love. The same goes for a good puppyhood, or cathood, or birdhood, fishhood, iguanahood. The adult’s job is to create that life: all necessities, and love. Do that, and you’ve succeeded.

And speaking of love . . .

6. Love and compassion. I don’t think I need to explain this. Again, if I was making a hierarchy, this one would vie with “Peace” for the top spot. If you don’t understand what these are, and you don’t understand why they’re important, then you probably wouldn’t have made it this far in my list anyway. So all I’ll say is this:

5. Cleaning, specifically washing dishes. Why is this on the list, and why did it come directly after love? Because this is the key to a happy marriage. Of course you don’t want to clean everything. Nobody wants to clean everything. Even people that love cleaning want someone else to help, because they want someone to share in the joy of cleaning. Most people that insist on cleaning everything do so because other people do a crappy job. But everyone wants help cleaning. So learn how to do it, and then do it. And doing the dishes is most important because A, even if you have a housekeeper/cleaning person, you’re going to make an occasional dish late at night, and it’s uncouth and/or unsanitary to leave it until the next day, and B, the worst thing to find unclean is a dish. Nothing worse than coming across a fork that still has dried egg yolk between the tines. So wash your own dishes, people.

Speaking of doing things yourself . . .

4. Local TV and radio advertising. It is possible to do this right. What you do is show scenes of your place of business, if it’s TV, and in either case, have some pleasant, non-offensive background music and hire a professional to speak over the background music and describe your business and what makes your business special.

Here’s how to fail at this:

 

3. Tattoos. First, don’t get one unless you mean it. There are very few things that are forever. One of them is tattoos. This means that the subject matter of the tattoo should be forever, as well. Tattoos that represent unchanging values, or aspects of your personality? Fine. Tattoos that represent loved ones, or things you wish never to forget? Excellent choice. Spongebob? No. Even if he was your favorite cartoon character, he won’t always be. Believe me: I used to love the Gummi Bears cartoon. (Still do, actually.) But if I had a Gummi Bears character tattooed on me, it would lead to sheepish explanations every time someone saw it. Sheepish explanations should not be forever.

And second: location, location, location. Don’t tattoo your face. There’s just no reason for it. The same goes for your neck. There is not, and never has been, a neck tattoo that doesn’t tell the world “I look like a neo-Nazi meth head.” I don’t care if it’s your child’s name in Old English script, if it’s on your neck it looks like it says “More Meth, Please.” There’s lots of skin on the body. Pick somewhere else. And if there is no other blank skin on your body, STOP GETTING TATTOOS. Find a new hobby. Knit a scarf that says “More Meth, Please!”

2. Sunglasses. There are only two rules, and they are very simple: first, no white frames. Ever. Second, sunglasses belong on your face or on top of your head. If they are not on your face or on top of your head, TAKE THEM OFF. Hold them in your hand, put them in your pocket, hang them from a handy clothes-hole – neckline, pocket, belt, whatever. Do not put them on the back of your head. Do not hang them under your chin, like a plastic Lincoln beard. Do not put them around your neck. Do not hang them from a string unless you are a lifeguard.

Just take them off.

Like you can never do with that tattoo of Rick Astley saying “Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down.” Someday, even Rick-Rolling someone with your bare biceps will lose its charm. Even Rick Astley isn’t forever.

1. Trying again. Here’s a quotation that would actually be worthy of a tattoo somewhere.

Success [is] never final and failure never fatal. It [is] courage that [counts].

(The quote, amusingly enough, doesn’t come from Winston Churchill or Joe Paterno or John Wooden, as the Interwebs and The Almighty Google would have you think. It’s from a 1938 Budweiser advertisement. Quote Investigator )

To be honest, this list should be one item long, and this is it. The only thing that makes you a failure is giving up. That is not to say that giving up is always failure: sometimes it’s the right thing to do, and then it is a success, as it allows you to put your time and energy where they belong, rather than in the wrong place. But if it’s a thing that you want to do, that you should do, the only way to fail is to stop trying. Be brave. Try one more time.

And then once more again.