Life advice.
Notes on Creativity
Why is the cliche “into the teeth of the wind?” Riding into the wind isn’t like getting bitten. It’s like swimming upstream a river of ghosts, like dream-running, like fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
It’s like riding into the wind. It’s, like, the fucking wind.
From Tom McAllister’s series on daytime TV
From Tom McAllister’s series on daytime TV
Although most of Bethenny’s celebrity was earned doing things that I normally avoid, I still had some peripheral knowledge of her before I watched the show. I knew, for example, that she was from the Bravo stable of reality stars. I knew that I hated the name of her show, Bethenny Ever After, in the way I hate all of the not-quite-punny titles for reality shows, the ones where producers just shove the star’s name into a well-known saying without regard to logic, grammar, or even clarity. I reject this degradation of our culture to the point that we’re too lazy to even come up with good puns; I reject the sloppy decision to just find a cliché and cram it together with a non-pun and pretend it’s clever. I reject the entities who are complicit in maintaining this ruse of cleverness by reprinting the titles of these shows and never ever questioning them or demanding that they be changed for the good of humanity, because, listen, we need to keep saying this over and over again until it makes some kind of difference in the world: a culture is its language and when we stop even pretending to care about the language, when we go out of our way to degrade it and make a mockery of it, when we decide the language itself is worthless, then we cease being a culture and instead become nothing but a mass of nameless consumers. We negate ourselves.
Ways I Have Been Battling Rising Anxiety
- Less coffee
- St. John’s Wort
- Prayer
- Jack Johnson station on Pandora*
*I’m not proud of this. I don’t even love the songs—this is not a guilty pleasure/closeted bro thing—but I swear I can feel my blood pressure drop when I turn on this station. Except for when it plays John Mayer. Then my blood goes hot and I can’t thumbs-down that shit fast enough.**
**Why does Jack Johnson seem only mildly hokey, but John Mayer seems like schmaltz that must be destroyed? Good question. I wish someone would tell me the answer.
The Transformation of MODERN FAMILY
Modern Family is light fare, total fluff, comedy without teeth—but the thing is, the show doesn’t have to be lightweight. Given the conflicts and dynamics they’ve set up, they could get into some serious shit about gay marriage, blended families, the changing role of the patriarch, etc. They’ve just never been interested in that business—until now, it seems.
Last week, the father got into it with his son about his upcoming gay marriage. He raised some tough questions (“Why do you get to be you, but I don’t get to be me?”) and said some ugly things. It wasn’t funny, but it wasn’t supposed to be. Earlier in the season, one of the daughters said some things to a therapist that sounded like a real insight into the pressures felt by high-achieving teenagers.
Modern Family has always had the potential to be the All in the Family of this generation. For the first time, though, it seems like they’re thinking about exploring that potential.
The Hobby-ization of the English Major
Everyone wants to write; no wants wants to major in it.
credit: Bruce Matsunaga | Flickr Creative Commons
Yesterday I was reading applications for editing positions for the undergrad literary magazine when I noticed something peculiar: none of the applicants for the position of Associate Editor were English majors.
All of them claimed to be passionate about literature and writing (and for the record, I completely believe them: why else would they want to slog through piles of student submissions? If they were just looking for a resume builder, I can think of a hundred easier or sexier options. And these applicants have options; all of them are excellent students). Two applicants majored in business; one majored in Psych. Majors that will, in the parlance of students, “lead to jobs.”
My college, Butler University, is a liberal arts institution. Yet the overwhelming majority of my students view their education as preprofessional training. They talk about getting core classes “out of the way” so they can focus on their major. To them, college is a really expensive vocational school.
Right or wrong, this view does not bode well for English departments.
“Welcome to the future, man,” I wrote to my co-advisor after reading the applications. “Nobody wants to be an English major, but everyone wants to minor in it.”
It could be worse, I suppose. We could attract almost no interest (Classical Studies, anyone?). I’ve noticed that students tend to be more engaged in elective courses—that is, courses that line up with their interests—than they are in their required core courses. But can you get real dedication from students in an elective class, or will they be serious only until it’s time for the mid-term in Chem?
Ben Schmidt of Northeastern University charted out college major trends over the last several decades. The English major is the dark grey stripe getting squished under business and engineering. As you can see, the percentage of students who major in English now is roughly half of what it was a generation ago.
What happens when all your students are dilettantes? If all you have are minors, can you get resources from the University? How will you be viewed and treated by other departments?
Maybe I’m wrong about this. After all, the interest in English is still strong, particularly in creative writing courses. Interest and desire have clear upsides. My department has the classes the students want to take; we have the magazines and the presses and the readings they want to get in on.
Of course, that’s the same lie that every mistress tells herself. He’s with his wife by duty, but I have his heart. And we all know how that plays out: you get screwed, and that’s about it.
The Best Thing Ever
This morning I was writing in a coffeeshop when an old man in a feed cap got my attention with a wave. “This seat taken?” he asked, gesturing to the couch across from me.
“All yours,” I said, trying to sound friendly, not reflexively resentful at being interrupted. At the same time, my phrasing was clipped, and my eyes went right back to my work. But he was still talking to me. When I looked up, he repeated himself, but I only caught a few words because he had a voice worn soft by time, and I have a hard time picking words out of background chatter and Eighties music and a barista bashing the espresso thingy against the counter. The man ended with a soft heh heh, so I put on a bemused look of Go figure/Whaddya gonna do? and once again looked down at my work. That’s when he said something else that included the word “Alzheimers.”
“Pardon?” I said, and really tried to listen. Of course the banging started up again just behind my head (Why do I work there?), and I missed the first half of the story, which ended with this fragment: “…but I told them, if I did have Alzheimer’s, how would I have made it through forty-five years?”
He looked at me expectantly. I smiled nervously because I didn’t know what else to do. He frowned and shook his head. “I mean seventy-five years,” he said.
My smile faded. Oh, no.
“What do you do?” he said abruptly.
“Pardon?” I said again. I’d heard him clearly that time, but now I was off-balance. Was this guy okay? He didn’t have a drink in front of him. Had he been wandering around? Were people looking for him?
Pointing at the notepad on my lap, he asked again what I did. When I told him I was a writer, we had one of those conversations that count as an occupational hazard. Boy, he had a story for me, it happened to be his life story, and would I give him my phone number, please, so he could contact me to start writing it.
I have never given out my number in response to such a request, but the man was getting louder and people were looking over, including the hipster by the window thumbing his phone, and, at a loss for what to do in this situation, I found myself writing down my number.
The moment I tore it off the page, though, he waved to someone in line. “Keep it,” he told me, then mumbled something about how it was time to be taken away. After the door closed behind him and a woman who might have been his daughter, the hipster looked at me. “That,” he said, “was the best thing ever.” Then he guffawed.
I looked down. Looking back, I want to give the hipster the benefit of the doubt—maybe he didn’t hear the business about Alzheimers—but just then I felt sick. I didn’t want to share an ironic sneer. I didn’t want to have anything to do with his scorn.
What did I want? To be a generous person, a person who can listen and be present. The kind of person who doesn’t instinctively shrink away from someone who is reaching out.
But when I ducked my eyes away from the hipster, I saw what kind of person I was.
My knees were angled away—from the hipster, from the spot where the old man had sat—like I had been flinching and flinching. The notepad was still in my lap. My hand clutched my own phone number. And I had never put down my pen.
A Life in Bikes, Episode 10: The Long Haul
photo credit: T. Kiya | Flickr Creative Commons
My next bike will be a Surly Long-Haul Trucker. It’s a steel touring bike, built for hauling loads of stuff over long distance in relative comfort. My dream is to travel with my boys, around Indiana at first, and then further. Out west, maybe. To go long hypnotized miles during the day and camp at night. They’ll probably want to bring pencils into the tent, but that will be all right. The point—if there needs to be one—is to ride together, to be exhausted together, to be, together.
A Life in Bikes, Episode 9: My Favorite Thing
photo credit: Tevjan Pettinger | Flickr Creative Commons | Okay, that’s not a Trek 7.1, but it’s cool to see a bike in the sky, right? E.T. phone home!
Last spring we bought my boys Trek 7.1s. 21 inches tall, seven speeds. Up to that point, our longest family ride had been a halting exodus to the DQ, filled with promises of sundaes on the way out, and complaints of stomachaches on the way back. But now the boys were older and taller and their new bikes weighed less than eighty pounds. We rode round-trips of nine miles to the library, thirteen miles to the zoo, and, one day, twenty-two miles to a farmer’s market.
It became My Favorite Thing to go on rides with the boys. I wanted to do it every day, but I held back out of fear of burning them out (see also: the library, YMCA pool, kung fu movies).
When I ride with them now, we have a destination. They still think endeavors should have a point, and that bike rides should have a purpose, preferably food-related. I ride behind them to call out directions but also, okay, to engage in a little magical thinking. I don’t have the awareness or grit of my father, but a part of me believes that if I can hold them with my eyes, I can keep them safe.
And I can marvel at them. At us, riding together. This is the line of us. My lineage.
A Life in Bikes, Episode 8: Drift
My younger son, doing his best impression of a kickstand.
The bike I ride now is a Trek Soho, an upright five-speed with flat handlebars. With disc brakes and an internal gear hub, it’s good for commuting, picking up groceries, and not lying to myself that I might at any moment tackle a single-track trail. In a way, it’s as tricked-out as my old banana-seat Schwinn, with fenders, an aluminum rack for pannier bags, and a ringy-dingy bell that is as useful as it is embarrassing. Oh, and it’s got a homemade growler carrier.
It’s just a paintcan with some bolts and bungee cords, but it is the perfect way to ferry a growler of beer and feel virtuous about it. (Long ago I noticed that if you drive to the store in the middle of the week to buy beer, you feel kind of scummy. But if you bike to the store, then you feel hip and virtuous!).
I would like to say that I made the carrier with my father, because that would mirror the earlier episode about repairing the brake light with him. In addition to showing some personal growth on my part, it would be a feel-good father-and-son moment. A confession: that’s how I wrote it in an earlier draft of this piece, but when I imagined my dad seeing this on Facebook and leaving a comment like YOU SHOULD REALLY TELL THE TRUTH BRYAN, I decided to tell the truth.
My dad built that growler carrier for me. (Thanks, Dad.) This is one difference between writing essays and fiction. Sometimes your real life character doesn’t actually develop. But on the plus side, sometimes you’re not disillusioned with a father figure.
* * *
The summer I got the Soho was the summer I got back into biking. And cooking. I read biking magazines and blogs. I started thinking about longer bike trips. I bought new cookbooks, got a new grill, played around with deep dish recipes. It might not sound that exciting, but it had been a while since I’d been able to cultivate a hobby. How long? The last cookbook I’d gotten had a gift receipt taped to the back: 2004. The year my second son was born.
Now, nine years later, the boys didn’t require constant attention. I had a little space to discover myself. I love my sons, but I felt more alive that summer than I had in years.
* * *
Sometimes now I ride alone. Something about the smoothness of the ride, circles moving in circles, is hypnotic. I understand how it made my boys fall asleep. Riding alone can put me in a state of semi-conscious bliss. It feels like “flow,” that term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe a mental state of complete focus. Flow is about complete immersion in an activity and a falling-away of self-consciousness. You lose yourself, in the best way.
But that’s not exactly what happens to me on a bike. I feel joy, but not challenge. I zone out, not focus in. What I experience isn’t flow; I’d call it drift.
Still, I’ll take it. My life has enough challenge and focus. Escaping my self-consciousness is a gift. Escaping everyone else to be alone for a while is another kind of gift.
The way I ride a bike is an affront to modern life: unhurried, unharried, unelectric, uninterrupted, aimless and harmless.
It’s peace.
Or maybe it’s erasure. Mere absence. Irresponsibility.
Or are these just different names for the same thing?