tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13113246089956410882024-02-19T10:49:33.945-05:00Irritable ReachingNegative capability, my ass.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-12605756256973015652016-01-25T11:36:00.000-05:002016-01-25T12:05:37.867-05:00Walking on SunshineI secretly love Monday mornings. I have to work, but not until the afternoon, and I have a list of things to do but I know they'll get done. I don't love Monday mornings more than I love, say, the leisurely weekend mornings spent snuggling and savoring our coffee, but I love Monday's place in the rhythm of the week, the sense of a fresh start -- even if it also means a fresh to-do list and a reminder of the things I put off over the weekend. Monday makes promises it can't always keep, but I appreciate its can-do attitude.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiojzG-Z3cK17Jt1ULMXsbFqoIyHuHjLkw5ZKJaEyO8vZ80VSlUWvEqT6OQ5hkjep1bDHLBoS3Gn4yye4GLfWJPAUHOHQBXYR_bJkuEV3JA2COEMwgOMLgMINWio0wGwxnyqdRUXVO7XDk/s1600/Case-of-the-Mondays-Pic.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="152" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiojzG-Z3cK17Jt1ULMXsbFqoIyHuHjLkw5ZKJaEyO8vZ80VSlUWvEqT6OQ5hkjep1bDHLBoS3Gn4yye4GLfWJPAUHOHQBXYR_bJkuEV3JA2COEMwgOMLgMINWio0wGwxnyqdRUXVO7XDk/s200/Case-of-the-Mondays-Pic.png" width="200" /></a>I commute on Tuesdays and Thursdays and they're long days, but on the other weekdays I like to take a quick walk once Dawn is off to work. It's chilly, but I like the cool air and the signs of life around the apartment complex: people warming up their cars or walking their dogs or hanging out on the stoop for a morning smoke. Sometimes a maintenance worker zips by on a golf cart, on the way to fix someone's garbage disposal or unclog a drain.<br />
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Today, despite the cool temperatures, the day feels remarkably springlike. The sun is shining and the wind can't quite make up its mind about how gusty to be. I've been noticing the days getting longer; the light is changing. This is good and bad because while of course it's pretty, I also have this inexplicable anxiety about spring days. They feel odd to me, like something's not quite right.<br />
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I've looked this up, and it's apparently a thing. My oldest daughter has it, too, and we compare notes sometimes. The best guess is that our generalized anxiety, however mild, leaves us somewhat overwhelmed by the expectations of spring, a kind of sensory overload. Spring is the overexuberant Labrador puppy to winter's tired, old, but otherwise undemanding tabby.<br />
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It's still too cold for any of that to hit me, though, and I just enjoy the morning. As grumpy as I can seem when pressed to weigh in on Big Issues -- to me, we're just a bunch of primates who don't actually know how to handle our oversized cerebrums, and this will probably come back to haunt us, so no, I'm not going to jump on your religious or political or philosophical bandwagon -- I genuinely do find life <i>interesting</i>. People, too, really. The world is no end of entertainment, and this morning it's got some good cinematography going for it. The <i>mise-en-scene</i> is working for me.<br />
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After my walk, I finish up the breakfast dishes, put in a load of laundry, and a take a bath. I love hot baths, and by "love hot baths" I mean "I have a bath problem." Like meth or heroin, it leaves me wrinkled, but unlike those things it's relatively cheap and doesn't rot my teeth out. I'm calling it a win.<br />
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After that, I'm off to tackle that to-do list. Even if there aren't any papers to grade (and they'll start rolling in soon enough), there are emails to catch up on, class announcements to make on Blackboard, errands to run. That laundry I put in earlier isn't going to fold itself, and I think I need to make an appointment for an oil change. There's plenty to do, and Monday is getting impatient.<br />
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For now, though, I might just open the blinds and get one more cup of coffee.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-52006242661557845352016-01-23T12:44:00.000-05:002016-01-23T13:21:07.715-05:00Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)Sometimes we shop for groceries like normal suburbanites -- you know, the massive coupon-laden stock-up run in which grocery shopping becomes an X-Games event. A lot of the time, however, we just shop day-to-day, partially for cashflow reasons and partially because it seems easier to just grab what you need for dinner and maybe a miscellaneous item or two.<br />
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It's pretty easy for Dawn to stop on her way home from work or for me to stop after I've dropped Gabby off at school. Plus, when I work for Coke I'm in and out of grocery stores all night, so I can just grab something we might have missed or something for the next day's dinner. We like to think it's a more "European" style, picking up the day's needs from the market, but probably Europe has supermarkets by now.</div>
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On this particular day, we decided that all we needed was some pork chops, so I stopped at Kroger after the school run. On the way in I chatted with some employees on break -- I knew a couple of them from my Coke job. We exchanged pleasantries and I got to hear a little store gossip.</div>
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Once inside, I heard one of the employees I'd been talking to get paged, so I stepped back outside to warn him: "You just got paged," I said, "Did you hear it?" </div>
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"Who was it?" He asked.</div>
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"Hell, I don't know" I said, shrugging.</div>
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"Man or woman."</div>
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"Definitely a guy's voice."</div>
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"Shit," he said, stamping out his cigarette. His reaction told me who was doing the paging.</div>
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"Sorry bro," I said, and we both laughed as we headed back inside. "Is it just me," I added conspiratorially, "or is he the Grumpy Cat of managers?"</div>
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"Oh, he is. He brings all of us down."</div>
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"That sucks. Have fun," I said with a wink as he headed to his fate.</div>
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The packaged pork chops weren't doing anything for me so I headed to the meat counter, where another employee I knew was working. She recognized me and noticed I wasn't in my Coke uniform. "You shoppin', hon?" </div>
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"Yeah," I said. "Mama needs pork chops." </div>
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"Well, you better keep Mama happy," she replied as she packaged my order and we chuckled at that. I grabbed some protein bars that Grant likes for a snack and checked out.</div>
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As walked out, I noticed a woman out front smoking a cigarette. At first I thought it was an employee but they're not supposed to smoke there and she wasn't in uniform. I heard her ask a passing woman if she had a phone she could borrow. The woman refused.<br />
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I had just passed her and was not surprised to hear her ask me if <i>I</i> had a phone. "That bastard took my phone, my wallet, and my bus pass," she muttered. I wasn't sure what that was all about, but I figured what the hell, so I brought up the phone keypad and handed it to her.<br />
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I didn't really make eye contact, and I'm not entirely sure if it's because I didn't want her to feel uncomfortable (I didn't) or if I was already uncomfortable myself (I was). I looked away as she made her phone call because even though it was obvious I could hear her, it still created the sense of giving her some privacy.<br />
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She was twentysomething, a little shorter than me and bone-thin, with the kind of dirty blond hair in which "dirty" describes both the color and condition. She looked tired, which I found out later was because she was tired. She smelled of the cigarette she'd been smoking and maybe a little of alcohol. Something sweet, like bourbon or rum.<br />
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She called her dad. I thought she was calling for a ride but it turns out she was calling to get some number from him -- a phone number, I assumed, but maybe not. Another thing that had been taken from her, apparently, was "all my numbers." Again, I'm not sure if those were phone numbers or something else. It all seemed a little cryptic, but lots of things might when you don't have the proper context.<br />
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He gave her a set of digits and she made another phone call, which didn't appear to be successful. She called her dad again and I wasn't clear on the entire exchange but he was going to call her back.<br />
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On my phone.<br />
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"Do you have a vehicle I could sit in to get out of the cold?" She asked, completely matter-of-factly. She was neither rude nor deferential, just asking to sit in a complete stranger's car like one might comment on the weather or how badly the Lions were doing. We were literally standing in front of my car so I gestured to it and we got in.<br />
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Two things were running through my head. One was "If you give a mouse a cookie..." and the other was me trying to calculate the odds that this was some sort of scam. I wasn't in any particular fear for my life. It seemed too random and messy to be a scam, and I'd already reached the Glass of Milk stage, so we waited.<br />
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Her story, as best as I can gather from her phone conversations and her almost nonstop talking, went something like this: her name was Brandy, and sometime yesterday she got kicked out of a halfway house for reasons that I didn't catch but she insisted weren't her fault.<br />
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She ended up at the hospital -- again I'm not sure why -- and they were unable or unwilling to do whatever it was she wanted or needed, so she walked out. She ended up at a friend's house in the company of an alcoholic who, come morning, insisted on following her to Kroger where she needed to fill a prescription.<br />
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At the Kroger pharmacy, her alcoholic friend made a scene which may or may not have eventually involved him lying on the ground. This got him escorted out, but not before he filched her wallet, phone, and bus pass. In the ensuing attempt to get help from the customer service desk, <i>she</i> was asked to leave, which she also insisted was not her fault. It's a story that I'm certain is incomplete and not sure is reliable, but there she was, stranded outside of Kroger with nothing but a cigarette and a prescription of methadone.<br />
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Only now, because I'm kind of a sucker sometimes, she was warming up in my car waiting for a call on my phone. I felt trapped, and I felt bad for feeling trapped. I was painfully aware of the awkwardness of a married middle-aged man in a car alone with a twentysomething woman in the Kroger parking lot. At least it was the front row.<br />
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I was also painfully aware that I had no idea what her life was like and no real way to imagine it. I could only guess at the shit she'd seen, even that day, and marvel at how utterly composed she was. It was purely a matter of problem-solving for her: she needed information, which seemed to be numbers of some kind, and she needed to get in touch with whoever took her stuff (I know what you're thinking, but I didn't get the impression that the numbers she needed were simply the phone number of the guy in question, though there's a certain elegance to that). She kept rifling through bits of paper she had in her purse, but I didn't look to see what they were.<br />
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She also needed to get her things from the halfway house, and a shower and a place to lie down. There was no way in hell I could provide the latter -- the very thought initiated an anxiety attack on my part and would be difficult to explain to, well, anyone -- so I offered to drive her to the halfway house, for which she was grateful.<br />
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It was twenty minutes away, but the phone call wasn't forthcoming and I couldn't spend the rest of the day in the Kroger parking lot. I thought about just buying her a Starbucks so she could sit there and at least be warm while she waited for her dad to do whatever it was he was going to do (this did not seem to include picking her up, which would have been my go-to plan). But that would leave her stranded without a phone and without the belongings she left at the halfway house.<br />
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So we drove. On the way, I offered her one of the protein bars, which she gladly accepted but then said she was also dehydrated and asked if we could stop and get some water. I pulled into a gas station where she picked out a bottle of water, a cup of coffee, and a soda. While I was paying she bummed a cigarette off one of the other customers. I remember carefully choosing "credit" when I paid with my card so as to avoid her seeing my PIN, just in case.<br />
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She smoked about half the cigarette, then carefully snubbed it out so she could light it again later. We made our way to the halfway house, where I waited in the car as she gathered her things. This took longer than I thought it might, and I considered just leaving her there, or maybe just letting the staff know that I had to be moving along. They had said she couldn't stay but they would still have a better set of resources for what to do with her.<br />
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Just as I was ready to head in, she came out, with a couple of bags of belongings. There went my plan. Next, she said, she needed to go to the DHS to talk to her caseworker. She wasn't sure of the address and it wasn't coming up easily in a search, but she remembered it was close to a McDonald's. So I found the McDonald's and headed there, whereupon she directed me to the correct building.<br />
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"I'm sorry," I said. "I need to get moving, so this is the end of the line for me." I wasn't so much worried that this would end badly as I was worried it might not end. If you give a mouse a cookie...<br />
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"Oh, okay," she said. "Thanks so much for everything." She wasn't happy but she was completely polite. "Have a great day," she said as she gathered her things from the back seat.<br />
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"You too," I said, but the customary response felt hollow. I was dropping her off at the DHS with a fistful of belongings and half a cigarette. The chances of her having a "great day" were a little slim. But I knew that the DHS would have a waiting area and a phone and some knowledge of what resources Brandy might avail herself of.<br />
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When I finally got home, I called Dawn and told her the story. "Well," she said, "that was weird, but I'm glad you were able to help. You did what you could."<br />
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"I know," I said. "It was pretty surreal."<br />
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"Please tell me you remembered the pork chops."</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-5167075468471451582015-11-10T21:13:00.000-05:002015-11-10T21:13:41.352-05:00He Ain't HeavyThe Friday before Halloween, Dawn sent Willy to school in his Marvel pajamas and a sign that said "I'm Super Willy, the Superhero." That's as good as it got. <a href="http://www.popsugar.com/celebrity/Neil-Patrick-Harris-Family-Halloween-Costumes-35723733#photo-35723733">Neil Patrick Harris's family we ain't</a>. Still, it had a certain Willy style and sass. It worked.<br />
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When a child dies, we often grieve not just for the loss of life itself but for the loss of potential, for all the things that child won't be or experience -- the prom, a wedding, their own children. Dawn remarked to me the other day that with Willy we're also grieving for everything he couldn't do or be in the first place. </div>
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<a href="http://www.gotomycodes.com/userpics/layouts/thumbnail/i33547A780.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.gotomycodes.com/userpics/layouts/thumbnail/i33547A780.jpg" height="160" width="200" /></a>For all that we tried to give him, we couldn't give him the chance to make the winning goal in soccer, or get an A on his science project, or experience his first crush (though he <i>was </i>a bit of a flirt). His needs were such that we called it a win if we could just keep him fed, diapered, and properly medicated.</div>
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We did try to give him a personality. Since we had no way of knowing what or how much was going on inside that smooth brain of his, we ascribed things to him. We blamed him for things he couldn't possibly do, like eat all the Oreos or leave the toilet seat up. It was slightly less probable than blaming those things on the dog, but funnier.</div>
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We accused him of timing seizures to get out of doing things or just to make more work for us. "Anything for attention" I'd say, pretending to be exasperated. We accused him of being petulant in age-appropriate ways: "Tweens, amiright?" Another of my favorite jokes (and timing was key here) was "I know, right? It's like there's something wrong with his brain or something." </div>
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We accused him of being grumpy with people he didn't like and of having an eye for the ladies. I used to seat him at the table to grade papers or play games. We narrated his life in the way that we wished he might be actually experiencing it, even though we knew that was probably not the case.</div>
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In light of this, it seems all the more appropriate that many of us imagine him, in whatever version of the beyond we're able to conjure, running and jumping and playing Nintendo because those were things he couldn't do in life. It's standard fare at funerals, and the images offer solace and comfort.</div>
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I don't want to make light of that. Those things are true in the best sense, in the way that they need to be true. If you thought or said or believe those things, thank you. It's touching and beautiful. I mean that.</div>
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But -- and I tread lightly here -- it doesn't quite work for me, and not because I have a less robustly kinesthetic view of what happens when we die. To me, that running and jumping and Nintendo-playing kid isn't Willy. I don't say that to be churlish or contrary or pedantic. It's a beautiful thought, but it's not the Willy I know.</div>
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Maybe it's because I came late to the party and never had cause to lament what his life might have been. I get that. I don't want to take anything away from someone else and how they need to process.</div>
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Nobody is glad that Willy had lissencephaly. It was not a gift. Neither Dawn nor I cop to a deity doling out special needs kids to parents who apparently don't have enough shit to deal with.<br />
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We never wanted Willy to be defined by his diagnosis. But he <i>did </i>have lissencephaly, and it was part of who he was for us. He was one of the "Liss Kids," an elite cadre.</div>
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The Willy I knew couldn't walk on his own, or even crawl or scooch down the hallway, so he had to be carried. Of course his parents scooped him up and carried him thousands of times before I ever had the chance, but that's what I remember: carrying him.</div>
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Willy had the reach that he had precisely because he had lissencephaly. Dawn and Todd made the connections they did because they were thrown violently into that world. A large chunk of the hundreds of people that paid their last respects to Willy we only new because of his disorder. </div>
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Willy's superpower wasn't something he had in spite of his lissencephaly; it <i>was </i>his lissencephaly. That doesn't make it good or right or something for which we should be grateful. But it made him who he was and it made us who we are.</div>
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He needed us. Completely. He showed us, collectively, what we were capable of in the face of such abject need.<br />
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And he showed us it was okay to need. That's a superpower.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-54353853615786669962015-09-09T10:20:00.000-04:002015-09-09T10:20:17.405-04:00Workin' for a Livin'It's just before 2am on a summer night and we shamble toward the entrance like a zombie horde. We mumble greetings to each other as we wait for the manager on duty to unlock the door and let us in. I've been unloading trucks at a major retailer, adding to what I like to call my "summer employment portfolio."<br />
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It's a world in which we're keenly aware of time. We're keenly aware of the fact that it's two in the morning, and most of us can tell you exactly how much sleep we got last night, a subject that lurks in much of our small talk.<br />
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We're also keenly aware of how many hours we've worked that week, because overtime is against company policy, even for crew leaders. This gets tricky on Saturday, which happens to be not only the end of the pay period but one of our busiest days.<br />
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It means that many of the strongest workers, who naturally end up working more hours, can't stay for the whole shift on Saturday because they're up against the 40-hour limit. Others "save hours" so they can help out. Either way, the attention to time is pervasive.<br />
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And we're aware of the time on each shift. We're usually scheduled for six hours, and if we're going to work more than that we have to take a half-hour unpaid lunch (another strictly followed policy), which leads to a kind of shorthand: "Can you take a lunch today?" means you're being asked to stay over, whereas "Let's break for lunch" over the PA means they expect the whole crew to stay over.<br />
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But you don't <i>have </i>to take a lunch, and if you don't, they can't make you stay. Otherwise, the manager on duty is in violation of policy -- which means, in the logic of corporate America, that you're the one in trouble. I'm not positive, but I suspect that you can't be forced to work past your scheduled time according to union regulations anyway.<br />
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The third possibility, "Let's go to break," indicates the whole crew is going on a fifteen-minute paid break, which means they're expecting the truck to be put away before the six hours are up and no one will have to take a lunch. Here, too, I think the union says you don't <i>have </i>to go home early, but nearly everyone does. There's an ebb and flow to how long the shifts run, and most people just roll with it.<br />
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It's not all like this. My other job, as a soft drink merchandiser, is a lot more fun. I actually like it. I'm relatively autonomous; I clock in and out on a phone they provide, and each night I have a route of four or five stores where I'll stock the shelves with whatever we've got in backstock. I also build displays and process orders.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">No, I didn't build this, but it's awesome.</td></tr>
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Being in and out of the same stores, I've gotten to know some of the managers and employees, as well as the other merchandisers. It's like a secret underground society of grunts on the front lines of American consumerism.<br />
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Even among vendors of competing products there's an easy camaraderie. We talk a little smack, but at this level there's far more commiseration than competition.<br />
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There's something I like about this world. It keeps me in shape, for one thing, but it's also pleasantly concrete: I'm not mindlessly pushing widgets through a chute, but I'm not trapped inside my head, either.<br />
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That's the Good Job. At the Bad Job, once the 2am shifts get going, I stop taking lunches so that I don't get held past the six hours. Sleep is too precious. The Good Job goes until nine or ten at night, sometimes later. I get home, grab a bite to eat, visit with Dawn for a bit, then take a nap.<br />
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At 1:15 I get up, go to the Bad Job, put in my six hours, take a nap, and get ready to head to the Good Job. Lather, rinse, repeat. I'm sleeping six or even seven hours in a given 24-hour period, but never all at once. I'm keenly aware of the time.<br />
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I don't make it more than a couple of weeks at this pace. I can't take the lack of sleep. It's like all I think about is when I'll sleep next and how much I might get. I'm not doing either job as well as I want to. I swear I can feel cognition slipping away. One day I call in sick and never go back.<br />
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There is no shame in falling before a greater enemy.<br />
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I needed to quit anyway, because it was time to start course prep. Compared to the horror stories we hear about adjunct faculty (the preferred nomenclature is "fixed-term"), I'm doing pretty well: I'm full time. I have benefits. I have a two-year contract. I get to teach some interesting classes. I've never felt treated like a second-class citizen.<br />
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There are some distinct advantages, too. I don't have to attend faculty meetings. Granted, this is because I don't get a vote, but let's accentuate the positive. I don't have to advise students or sit on committees. Any publishing I might do looks good, especially since I teach writing, but it doesn't need to meet the criteria for tenure.<br />
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I say all of that to put these next observations in perspective, and to make it as clear as I can: I'm not disgruntled. I like the university where I teach and I love the colleagues and students I get to work with. I feel, in general, pretty lucky.<br />
<br />
But my base salary is still less than what I made 15 years ago as a music minister with a bachelor's degree. Anything I publish might look good, but with a 4/4 load (four classes each semester), I don't have time to write anything. I still haven't submitted a proposal for turning my dissertation into a book (there's a publisher mildly interested) and I owe a colleague a book review for a journal he edits. I'm spending time I should be grading papers revising this blog post (which I can't really put on my CV).<br />
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Again -- I want to make this very, very, clear -- <i>I'm one of the lucky ones</i>. I'm not on government assistance, partially because I teach extra courses (here and elsewhere) and I get summer jobs. I feel so good about being able to get them, in fact, about being able to make ends meet, that I forget to be scandalized by the fact that I need them in the first place.<br />
<br />
It might just be some kind of neoliberal Stockholm Syndrome, but I like to work. I like, well, being useful. I like doing things. I like the feeling of having done a good job. In some ways, I feel like it speaks to my work ethic. I'm freakishly cheerful about work, and I'm reliable. I get things done.<br />
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I'm the quintessential cog in the machine, working to support a lifestyle of consumer distractions from work. My hard work is rewarded with goods and services that I pay for by working, things that someone provides me as part of <i>their </i>work, for which they reward themselves with goods and services paid for with the money they get from working.<br />
<br />
The work I do in retail involves making sure people have access to the products they use to console themselves for (or distract themselves from) the daily grind of productivity, and the work I do as an educator involves helping students get the degree they need to join that daily grind.<br />
<br />
Part of me feels like I should be affronted or outraged, but I'm not. Neither do I feel things are as they should be and that I deserve what I've got (good or bad). It just <i>is</i>. I applaud efforts at reform but I'm not holding my breath for a glorious revolution.<br />
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Truth is, I'm <i>happy</i>. I do my work and enjoy my downtime. My wife and I are consumers, like everyone else, but we're not big accumulators. We're not interested in surrounding ourselves with <i>things </i>-- apartment living makes this impractical anyway -- so much as we want to collect <i>experiences</i>, like trying a new pub or tubing down the river or just curling up to watch Netflix.<br />
<br />
Maybe that's just respite from a world gone slightly mad but it's <i>our </i>respite, and being together makes it worth it. What <i>should </i>the world be like? At this point, I've given up trying to answer that question. I'm not that smart. All I know is that I've got a workday ahead of me, which I'll enjoy for the most part, but not nearly as much as coming home at the end of it.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-7444246197596191842015-03-15T13:16:00.000-04:002015-03-15T14:07:06.092-04:00Mean Time Before FailureI went to my first demolition derby when my oldest daughter was queen of the county fair. She had to attend certain events, which meant I got in for free. The demolition derby is like the deep-fried Twinkie of live entertainment: I can't say it's good, but that doesn't mean it's not enjoyable.<br />
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Two things struck me. One was the sheer noise, from the PA announcer to the sound of crunching metal to the roar of the cars themselves, most of which just had straight pipes poked through the hood into the exhaust manifold. Mufflers are for sissies.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1alN292O2iyeXyO9fdRYFEFCgLX26PhKFvBbTwot3F4PBuxI2mVO7gVsBiMdukJsDnIol_He8BThpX0GyCVvNHMvKSqqM61tSqsEzISO0TsUvlnTbYeXEUXHvW7MmAzNCPeBYDK2rDQA/s1600/090903_demo-derby.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1alN292O2iyeXyO9fdRYFEFCgLX26PhKFvBbTwot3F4PBuxI2mVO7gVsBiMdukJsDnIol_He8BThpX0GyCVvNHMvKSqqM61tSqsEzISO0TsUvlnTbYeXEUXHvW7MmAzNCPeBYDK2rDQA/s1600/090903_demo-derby.jpg" height="132" width="200" /></a>The other thing that struck me was how much some of these cars could take before they stopped running. They were getting smashed into by other drivers deliberately trying to take them out, and yet for all the damage they often managed to remain functional longer than I expected. </div>
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Teams of backyard mechanics patched the cars back together between heats. You could see the sparks from the cutting and welding torches they used in their automotive meatball surgery. Parts were replaced -- or bypassed -- to get the cars ready for the next onslaught. One of the winning cars could only go in reverse by the time the tournament was over, but it won regardless.</div>
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Most of us experience our cars as more fragile than that. The difference between "functional" and "street legal" is salient here, as is the fact that most of us don't have crews patching us back together after every trip. We're not smashing our cars into each other on purpose, for the most part, but our damage threshold is (practically speaking) much lower.</div>
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As a power-commuter (I make a four-hour round trip twice a week for my main teaching gig), I am constantly aware of the things that might go wrong and render me unable to get to work or back -- or worse, stranded somewhere in between. In the past year I've been pretty lucky, but that's after replacing one car and spending $5,000 fixing another.</div>
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The simple fact is that things break. Hard drives and other products are given something called an MTBF rating, which stands for Mean Time Before Failure (or Mean Time Between Failures, depending on the kind of system). Failure is a given; the only variable is how long before it happens.</div>
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This is true of everything. Relationships die. Families disintegrate. Civilizations crumble. Climates destabilize. Stars go supernova. I used to joke with my more theologically-minded friends that my eschatology -- my vision of the end times -- is "everybody dies." </div>
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The body-as-machine metaphor is problematic for a number of reasons, but the body is nevertheless a complex system that will eventually experience the catastrophic failure we call death. "On a long enough timeline," says the narrator of <i>Fight Club</i>, "the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." </div>
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I think about this sometimes when I'm feeding Willy or giving him his pills. He's got a brain disorder; there is something profoundly wrong with one of the most vital of bodily organs. This has led to the failure or at least the compromise of other systems -- and yet he is still very much alive. Dawn was told he might not make it past two years old, and we just celebrated his eleventh birthday. </div>
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Willy's situation is, at least statistically, more fragile than most of the rest of ours. The next seizure could be the one from which he doesn't recover. The next feeding could be the one that his body stops assimilating in the slow spiral of degeneration. The next virus that gets passed around could be the one that ends in a lethal bout of pneumonia, to which he is susceptible. </div>
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But it's a difference of degree rather than kind. We're all fragile in this sense. I could die tomorrow of an accident or an aneurysm, and Willy would outlive me. Or I could have any number of things go wrong and live on in defiance of the odds, as Willy has. Bodies are weird and unpredictable.</div>
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St. Benedict adjured his monks to meditate upon their own death. That sounds morbid, but it's probably good perspective. Everybody dies. Of course we have preferences about the timing, but beyond the statistical advantages of staying healthy and minimizing risks, we don't really get much say. </div>
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In my own nod to the Buddhist recognition of impermanence, I tend to expect that things will break, that plans will go wrong, that my attempts to budget will get wrecked. That everyone dies. This isn't pessimism. I'm not negative or morose. In those moments I have to confess that, deep down, I'm probably a nihilist, I always make sure to qualify it: "but I'm the happy kind."</div>
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This doesn't make me a pessimist any more than my expectation that good things will happen makes me an optimist. Of course good things will happen. They have. They do. Ditto bad things. I like it better when the former outweigh the latter but again, apart from statistical advantages I have no control over that. </div>
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If the universe doesn't owe me anything, then I can't be disappointed when I don't get it and I can't afford to be triumphalistic when I do. The good things that happen are either the consequence of things I hope I'm smart enough to repeat or they're random happenstance. Bad things are either the consequence of things I hope I'm smart enough to avoid or they, too, are just happenstance.</div>
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I'd like to beat the odds, but I might not. Not everyone can or the odds would be different to begin with. I'm okay with that.</div>
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Everybody dies.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-64082689943564875482014-09-04T12:50:00.000-04:002014-09-04T14:33:10.084-04:00Lucky Man<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"No, wait ... I'll tell you something," said Zaphod. "I freewheel a lot. I get an idea to do something, and, hey, why not, I do it. I reckon I'll become President of the Galaxy, and it just happens, it's easy. I decide to steal this ship. I decide to look for Magrathea, and it all just happens. Yeah, I work out how it can best be done, right, but it always works out. It's like having a Galacticredit card which keeps on working though you never send off the cheques. And then whenever I stop and think -- </i>why did I want to do something? How did I work out how to do it?<i> -- I get a very strong desire just to stop thinking about it."</i> -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</blockquote>
</blockquote>
It's just after 6am when I pull into the gas station about a mile from our apartment complex. It's a two-hour drive to where I'll be teaching for the day and it will take a tank of gas to get there and back. I don't mind the drive; seasoned road warriors know there's a serenity to the open highway, and I have podcasts to pass the time when that serenity eludes me.<br />
<br />
It's the kids' first day back at school, and I've left Dawn with most of the morning routine, except for Willy's morning pills and whatever we were able to do the night before. It's still hectic, and I'm on the road before the real chaos starts.<br />
<br />
We spent Labor Day getting everything ready -- school supplies, clothes, lunches. We made lists and charts and schedules. We drilled the kids on their routines and responsibilities until we couldn't stand any more eye-rolling. Everything went off without a hitch, except Dawn got to work and realized she didn't pack a lunch for herself. Such is a mom's life.<br />
<br />
Dawn and her ex moved to the same apartment complex after they separated, which means there are three of us around for parental support (and supervision). They've remained friends and he pops over now and then for a beer or dinner or to pick up some leftovers we've saved back for his lunch on the night shift. I joke that it's a very postmodern arrangement, and I've thought about pitching the premise to Fox as a sitcom. We just need a couple of catchphrases and some canned laughter.<br />
<br />
Because of the move, however, the kids are too far from school to walk and outside of the district to be bused -- except for Willy, who gets bused regardless. That translates into three kids needing to get to three schools at three different times via two different means of transportation around three different work/sleep schedules. I'll spare the details, but the logistics are such that even with the three of us on task we still have to enlist the help of one of our neighbors. It takes a damn village.<br />
<br />
The truth is, though, that things are going remarkably well. Amazingly well. Almost uncannily well, as if orchestrated by cosmic forces. Things have fallen into place with refreshing regularity and we're grateful, even if we're a little fuzzy on where such gratitude should be directed. This is common, of course -- what couple doesn't feel their love to be fated in some way?<br />
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I'll take well-worn clichés for fifty, Alex.<br />
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On the one hand, it does feel like that, even in a more general sense: we've both lived lives that have pretty much just worked out, beyond our ability to orchestrate them. I have applied to and attended exactly four schools in my academic career -- I figured I'd go somewhere and I did. I can only think of one time where I was granted an interview but didn't get the job, and it's hard to shake the feeling that in most cases just the right job showed up at just the right time.<br />
<br />
This feeling is not uncommon. Daniel Quinn called his memoir <i>Providence</i>, and it narrates what is for him the uncanny process by which he arrived at his life's work. Kelsey Grammar, in his memoir, describes his own sense that the universe was somehow making his path straight.<br />
<br />
I recently heard <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2014/09/02/podcast-david-sedaris-on-leadership/">an interview with David Sedaris</a> in which he confesses his belief that the right thing will come along if we are but patient and hard-working, and it worked for him: he kept plugging along writing articles until one day <i>a publisher called him </i>to see if he had a book they could publish. "I've been waiting for your call my whole life," he said. "I have one in my drawer."<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.isbenas.com/SURFJOURNAL/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Untitled-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.isbenas.com/SURFJOURNAL/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Untitled-1.jpg" height="143" width="200" /></a>The Tao te Ching adjures us to wait until the muddy waters clear and the right action presents itself. The Taoist concept of <i>wu-wei </i>describes a kind of flow, rolling with life's changes in the way that a good surfer neither fights the waves nor succumbs to them.<br />
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It's not hard for me to see each life as having its own genius, one that we are to lean into and go where it takes us without regret or triumphalism.<br />
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On the other hand, neither of us really believes this. We'll say it was "meant to be" but we do so with the irony of those for whom "meant to be" isn't really a thing. It's too hard to reconcile with a world in which there are brain disorders, tsunamis, and only one season of <i>Firefly</i>. Providence, if that's what we're going to call it, might narrate our experience but I shy away from it as a way of making sense of the universe.<br />
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Maybe it's all a matter of perspective, and I simply have a better attitude than some people. It could be that I just stumbled independently upon the power of positive thinking. Metaphysical musings aside, it's become almost axiomatic that positive people tend to experience the world more positively, and negative people more negatively, with some fuzziness as to which way the causality arrows are pointing.<br />
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But what about all those people in situations where positive thinking isn't going to help them? There are millions of people in the world in situations that are simply and abjectly cruel if part of a cosmic plan, and putting a positive spin on that isn't going to do them any good. If I take any part of my own experience, make it normative, and extrapolate from it a path to success and happiness, I'm a tube of hair gel and a good dentist away from being Joel Osteen.<br />
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No thanks.<br />
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More likely, it's a matter of confirmation bias and selective memory. We humans have a predilection for pattern recognition, even when the patterns aren't really there. Add to that some dumb luck and some underacknowledged (or even subconscious) machinations on our part, and it's no wonder our lives seem charmed.<br />
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In the end, "meant to be" is an affirmation, a way of calling something good. It's a way of saying we believe -- not in fate or cosmic forces, but in us, in our own future.<br />
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I get home around nine and Dawn has saved some salmon for dinner. "How was the drive?" she asks.<br />
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"Uneventful," I say. "Just like I like it. How was your day?"<br />
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"Let me tell you," she says, her smile weary but content, "the morning was <i>crazy</i>..."Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-66336768011443502522014-07-25T09:30:00.000-04:002014-07-25T09:30:59.319-04:00Live and Let DieIt's Saturday, and I have to work, so I ask if there's anything I can pick up. Since I'm stocking shelves at grocery stores, it's easy for me to grab something on my way out.<br />
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"We need drinks for the pool party tomorrow," Dawn says.<br />
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"Okay," I say, "what should we get? Do you like piña coladas?"<br />
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<a href="https://shop.lifesmokevapors.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Pina-Colada-500x500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://shop.lifesmokevapors.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Pina-Colada-500x500.jpg" width="200" /></a>It's an innocent question at first, but I immediately know where I want to go with it.<br />
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"Oh, sure," she says.<br />
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"And getting caught in the rain?" I deadpan.<br />
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"Absolutely," Dawn replies, without missing a beat. "But I'm not much into yoga."<br />
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I'm not into yoga, either, but I've been practicing something recently I call "bolus judo." "Bolus" refers to the way we feed Will, using an open syringe as a funnel and letting gravity do the work. Another option is to use a pump, but that option has been precluded by Dawn's discovery that she can't substitute her laptop charger for the pump's power supply.<br />
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The bolus feed is precarious, as I explained in an earlier post, because it involves an open syringe of formula in range of limbs akimbo. What I've discovered is that I can put the side of the bed down and swing my own leg up to block Will's arms. I'm not really pinning him -- my leg is draped over him with my foot on the far side of the bed -- but it does keep his arms out of the way.<br />
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Will's summer school is with the county school district rather than the city proper, so it's a different facility. It's also a much more robust facility for special needs, with a dedicated full-time nurse, a pool, great equipment, and a high teacher-to-student ratio.<br />
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These are the people who fixed his wheelchair, and his teacher regularly texts pictures of his activities and progress. This is not to slight the teachers and aides at the city school, who were fantastic; they just didn't have the same resources. We're looking at keeping him with the county school for the next school year and beyond.<br />
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The hitch is that the county school won't recognize the Do Not Resuscitate order, or DNR, on file for Will. Not without a court order. The director is sympathetic; there's currently a family pursuing such an order, and the school has helped them find an appropriate lawyer and has generally been cooperative and supportive. It's less a rancorous clash of wills than it is a collective attempt to jump through the proper hoops.<br />
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The decision to put a DNR in place is fraught and complicated. It means leveraging our ability to prolong life against the quality of that life as well as the life of the rest of the family. It's an alarmingly real-life variant of Lifeboat, involving not just real people but your own children. Put the most starkly, it requires sussing out the conditions under which you are willing to let your child die.<br />
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There's no clear line for this. There's a point at which prolonging life is inhumane, but that point is by no means obvious, and sorting that out is different for every family and every situation. There's no appealing to what is "natural" (a long-deconstructed notion anyway); in completely "natural" terms Will wouldn't have made it nearly this far -- but then, neither would many of the rest of us. "We're already keeping him alive by feeding him through a tube," Dawn points out.<br />
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To go through the arduous process of coming to such a decision -- consulting with doctors and family, wrestling with the ethics involved, starting into the abyss of mortality -- and then have that questioned <i>a priori</i> by a board policy can be demoralizing. For the board, it's a matter of liability; for us, it's a matter of parental rights.<br />
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Dawn and Todd didn't come to the decision to establish a DNR for Will lightly, and it is intended to represent their wishes in those cases when they can't be present to make those wishes known. Almost the only time Will is not with one of us is when he's at school, meaning that the one place a DNR is most likely to be relevant is one where it's not going to be honored.<br />
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It's the same ticklish, ironic structure as being on hospice. This seems to pop up everywhere. I'm reminded of Zaphod's reaction in <i>Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</i> the first time they use the Infinite Improbability Drive, whereupon they miraculously (or, rather, improbably) pick up Arthur and Ford seconds after the latter are ejected from a Vogon airlock: "Is this sort of thing going to happen every time we use the Infinite Improbability Drive?"<br />
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"I'm afraid so," comes the reply.<br />
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My understanding is that while the DNR is legally <i>valid</i>, it's not legally <i>binding</i>. It effectively establishes parental or guardian wishes but does not obligate anyone to follow those wishes. That, apparently, takes a court order, and the University of Michigan's Advocacy Clinic has agreed to represent us. They're trying to work out co-plaintiff status with the other family, otherwise we'll have our own case. Either way, we hope that it sets precedent for other families. Surely the board doesn't want to get sued every year.<br />
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It's especially frustrating because Will's previous school was receptive to the DNR without any legal wrangling. Again, that structure: the better facility for special needs is the one fussier about a legal detail common among special needs families, especially involving terminal conditions like Will's. Does this sort of thing happen a lot?<br />
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I'm afraid so.<br />
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The piña coladas were a bust, so I tried my hand at making a Bloody Mary. The end result? I won't be trading in the coffee and papers for bartending anytime soon.<br />
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But I'm going for gold in bolus judo.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-66455888155635320812014-07-08T10:06:00.000-04:002014-07-08T10:06:02.118-04:00Stuck in the Middle with YouI pull into the Meijer parking lot at 2:30 and punch in on my Blackberry (yes, those still exist). For my Coke job, I'm on the road, going from store to store stocking shelves. The Blackberry is how we clock in and out and how get our route and keep track of what we've done at which location -- how many cases we pulled, whether or not anything is out of stock, etc. It's also our only contact with the office, by email (usually) or phone. I haven't been to the home office in months.<br />
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The first thing I do is check the coolers in the checkout aisles. These we stock with 20 oz. single bottles of our main products, and they're the first thing the higher-ups would check if they visited the store. Stocking the coolers is a little like having your towel with you in <i>Hitchhiker's Guide</i>:<br />
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<i>A towel...is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.promal.com.my/wp-content/gallery/towel-pictures/bath-towels.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.promal.com.my/wp-content/gallery/towel-pictures/bath-towels.jpg" height="200" width="200" /></a></div>
have.... For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost."</i> </blockquote>
Basically, if the coolers are stocked, the supervisor will assume you've got everything under control and simply haven't gotten to the other bits yet, whereas if the coolers are a shambles this will cast something of a pall over the visit.<br />
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I say this as if such a visit has actually happened, which it hasn't. I also haven't seen any of my supervisors since training. But the effect is real; if I go into a store and the coolers are in good shape, I immediately assume the stop is going to go well in general, even if that happens to not be true. Someone told me that sales from the coolers alone pays everyone's salary but the truck drivers, but this strikes me as a tall tale. Unless that includes vending machines; that might actually be plausible.<br />
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Today the coolers look fair but they need some attention, and I am just completing my perusal of them when the day guy catches up to me. A typical route is four or five stops with the same Meijer outlet as the first and last stop. That means that sometimes I run into the day merchandiser when our stops overlap.<br />
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He tells me that the bad news is they've cleaned us out of two liters and the coolers need to be hit, as I've already seen, but the good news is he's got the backstock all organized and ready to go. We talk shop and a little gossip and he heads out.<br />
<br />
I head to the backstock area -- and it <i>is </i>nicely organized -- and load up an L-cart with 20 oz. singles, which we just call "cooler pop." I'm in the middle of stocking the coolers when my phone rings (my regular phone, not my Blackberry). It's not a number I recognize, so I just answer "Ted Troxell," in case it's a student (I'm teaching an online class) or something official. Usually it's a telemarketer.<br />
<br />
This time it's not a telemarketer or a student. It's Will's teacher.<br />
<br />
"Hi, this is ____ from Will's school." I'm immediately on edge: I've never gotten a call from the school before, but he's in summer school now and this is a different facility. She immediately puts me at ease.<br />
<br />
"Everything's fine," she says, but she wanted to let me know that their resident MacGyver had fixed Will's wheelchair by using one of the ankle straps, which we don't use, to repair the lap belt, which was broken. She wanted to make sure that was okay, which had me wondering in what kind of scenario that <i>wouldn't</i> be okay.<br />
<br />
Will's been on hospice care, which has been a great boon. An aide comes out to give him a bath twice a week and a nurse and social worker come out every other week. Most of his care is coordinated through this one service and they do a great job. He's managed to avoid any major hospital stays and is, in general, healthier than he's been in a long time.<br />
<br />
There are some downsides. He has to show signs of regression in order to keep qualifying. If he makes too much improvement, he'll get kicked out of the system and we'll be navigating things on our own. It's the medical analog to the welfare recipient who gets a job and then no longer qualifies even though they still need the help.<br />
<br />
Lately he's been having trouble with seizures and chorea (erratic involuntary movements) and even as we're trying to address those issues we're also secretly glad that this might be enough to secure his place in hospice a couple more months. It's an odd world to live in, where you simultaneously want your child to be healthy and to regress enough to qualify for hospice, precisely because it's hospice care that's doing the most to keep him healthy. It's not just a catch-22; it's Derrida's <i>pharmakon</i> inverted.<br />
<br />
Another artifact of being on hospice is that we only get about two weeks of Will's medication at a time, so it feels like we're constantly running low. The idea is that a patient in hospice is dying, and not just in the Sylvia Plath/Eastern philosophy sense in which we're all dying. Ergo, they don't need a stockpile of drugs.<br />
<br />
(It reminds me of a scene in <i>Brighton Beach Memoirs</i>. Eugene's mother sends him to the store for a quarter pound of butter. He complains that she sent him just that morning for a quarter pound, so why didn't she just have him get half a pound then? "And suppose the house burns down in the afternoon," she says. "Why do I need an extra quarter pound of butter?")<br />
<br />
It also means that the insurance company won't cover both hospice <i>and </i>repairs to Will's wheelchair (it also won't cover prescribed modifications to the chair, like a headrest that would keep Will's head from flopping, or additional equipment like something to sit in <i>besides</i> the broken wheelchair). Dying people don't need to be secure in their wheelchairs, apparently. They're dying anyway, right? It makes a certain kind of sense, in a systemic corporate logic kind of way, but not on a human scale.<br />
<br />
"Are you kidding?" I tell Will's teacher. "Of course! Thanks so much." We exchange pleasantries and hang up. It's just a wheelchair strap, but somehow I feel lighter, like for awhile I might be able to believe in humanity. It's the little things, I guess. I text Dawn to let her know, and then I have to get back to work.<br />
<br />
These coolers aren't going to stock themselves.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-78947119796438578512014-06-03T10:36:00.000-04:002014-06-03T13:44:01.074-04:00A Day in the Life"Will you feed Will?" she asks me.<br />
<br />
"Of course," I say. "I was planning on it."<br />
<br />
"Do you think we could crack the window open? I want to hear the rain."<br />
<br />
"Sure," I smile. "I'll close it when I come to bed." I open the window and adjust the blinds so the air can flow.<br />
<br />
"I can hear the crickets."<br />
<a href="http://www.hahastop.com/pictures/No_Diving_Or_Jumping.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.hahastop.com/pictures/No_Diving_Or_Jumping.jpg" height="144" width="200" /></a><br />
"Actually, they're probably peepers."<br />
<br />
"What?"<br />
<br />
"Spring peepers. Frogs."<br />
<br />
"Oh."<br />
<br />
My pedantic side is showing; who cares if they're crickets or frogs? I roll my eyes at myself in the dark.<br />
<br />
I'm home a little early from my Coke job. My schedule is 2:30-11 but some nights are slower. I worry that I won't have enough hours to pay child support, but I also get paid mileage for going from store to store and that should compensate. Plus last week I worked a warehouse shift, which pays a lot more <i>and </i>I worked five hours of overtime.<br />
<br />
It's time for Will's last feeding. Will is ten years old and has lissencephaly, a disorder in which the surface of the brain is smooth, lacking the ridges and crevices (technically gyri and sulci) which ordinarily characterize the brain's topology.<br />
<br />
The result is, among other things, cognitive impairment and chronic seizures, requiring a cocktail of drugs which would kill most of us just to keep things somewhat regulated. The prescriptions all say x amount x times a day "for seizure control" but I'm learning quickly that "seizure control" is wishful thinking at best. It seems more like a dark joke that's not very funny.<br />
<br />
Actually there's a cognate of gallows humor that's part of the discourse of special needs families. "Willy's talking back again," I'll say to Dawn, who'll reply something like, "Probably we're not spanking him enough." Or the time I told Dawn that I had to take his driving privileges away because he was burning out the clutch.<br />
<br />
[Don't judge me; I just had that clutch replaced.]<br />
<br />
I'm new to this. Not just to the procedures and routines, but to the life-world of having a special needs child. I'm sure it's cute to the veterans: the noob's first blog post. Isn't he adorable? I've tried to jump in with both feet; Dawn sometimes seems amazed that I want to jump in at all.<br />
<br />
There's a lot of philosphizing and theologizing in these circles. A lot of theodicy. This makes sense; we're face-to-face with some of the most challenging aspects of life. We're tempted to wonder why, and to speculate, but I think we also intuitively know there's no answer. To me it's just life. Nothing more, nothing less.<br />
<br />
In my case, I'm choosing this life, but I don't actually see it any differently than if Will were born to me. Ignoring for the moment the extent to which it feels like this life chose me <span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">– </span> a sentiment that is phenomenologically viable but metaphysically suspect <span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">–</span> there was no cost/benefit analysis with Will on the minus side when I decided to start a new life with Dawn.<br />
<br />
In fact, pardon the salty language but that's a shitty way to look at it anyway. Will was and is simply part of the constellation of things that make up this life, and I feel I belong here. So yes, I'm up at 10 o'clock feeding a child with a terminal brain disorder, and that's not tragic or admirable or even all that remarkable. It's just life. "Was that life?" Nietzsche asks at the end of <i>Thus Spake Zarathustra </i><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">–</span> "Then once more!"<br />
<br />
Will can't properly chew or swallow, so he gets fed through a gastric tube, or g-tube. There's quite a bit of terminology to learn here; Dawn was proud of me recently for using the phrase "rescue meds" in a Facebook post. I'm still trying to sort out the taxonomy of seizures. Anyway, his pills get crushed and suspended in liquid and delivered through the tube via a large syringe.<br />
<br />
In another attempt at "seizure control," Will's on a ketogenic diet <span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">– </span> think Atkins <span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">– </span> and can't have the liquid drugs because most of them have sugar in them. This means crushing the pills in a mortar and pestle, pouring the powder into the syringe, putting the plunger in the syringe without the powder shooting out the other end (a rookie mistake, and yes, one that I've made), and then pulling water into the syringe to create the suspension.<br />
<br />
This is then injected into the g-tube and followed by three more syringes full of water. This happens three times a day, each instance followed by two feedings an hour apart. In the morning, for instance, he gets his meds at 6, then feedings at 7 and 8. At night it varies, and on this particular night he needs one more feeding before we're done for the day.<br />
<br />
His food, such as it is, is some sort of keto-friendly protein shake. Sometimes we just call it formula. It's supposed to be vanilla, but it ends up smelling like cake batter with a hint of Parmesan cheese. Like cake batter made with sourdough starter or something. Sickly sweet, with a hint of sour, and not in a good way.<br />
<br />
I turn on Will's light and he's awake and alarmingly alert. I say "alarmingly" because a) he's supposed to be sleeping and has had some trouble with the whole day/night thing lately and b) because when he's alert (which is, on the whole, a good thing), feeding him becomes a matter of dodging fidgety limbs that seem precisely calibrated to knock your hand and splash his food everywhere.<br />
<br />
It's like he waits for it. To feed him, we attach a plungerless syringe to the line and use it as a funnel for the food. He doesn't have much motor control, but his hands instinctively grasp, and he could conceivably grab the line and yank out his g-tube, which introduces a host of problems.<br />
<br />
More likely, however, you'll have his arms contained with one of your arms, feeling clever with your other hand holding the syringe out of reach, and a knee will come out of nowhere in some kind of ninja move and douse you with formula.<br />
<br />
Did I mention the sickly-sweet/sour smell?<br />
<br />
I mean, theoretically, of course. It's not like this has actually happened to me or anything.<br />
<br />
Ahem.<br />
<br />
Tonight I'm onto him. I watch the arms <i>and </i>the legs and the feeding goes on without a hitch. I change his diaper, and give him a pad and a second diaper because he likes to gunnysack on us, saving it all up for a massive flood in the morning. We do a lot of laundry.<br />
<br />
I situate him on his side, with his stuffed bear and a pillow between his knees and a blanket. "It's sleepy time," I say, hoping he'll take the hint and get some sleep. In the morning we'll start again with pills and the morning feedings, along with getting him ready for school. I'll have some papers to grade, and around 1:30 I'll get my route from Coke.<br />
<br />
I check Facebook, and think about a snack but it's late and I'm not hungry. I brush my teeth, close the bedroom window and blinds, and get in bed.<br />
<br />
"Did Willy get a blanket?"<br />
<br />
"Of course," I say, and kiss her forehead. I'm not even sure she's really awake.<br />
<br />
In about five minutes, I'm not either.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-67181220424526886192014-03-21T12:54:00.000-04:002014-03-21T12:54:49.811-04:00Drive My Car (A Reluctant Lenten Reflection)In a gesture toward what I like to call "involuntary poverty," I gave up my car for Lent -- or rather, my car gave me up. There's a joke being played on the atheist forced to observe in this way, even if there's no one there to play it.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01012/PF-breakdown_1012604c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01012/PF-breakdown_1012604c.jpg" height="125" width="200" /></a>Lent, as a season of fasting prior to Easter, has been part of liturgical life longer than Christmas has, and for some reason, even though I'm not a terribly devout observer of Lent (or terribly devout in general), I like that it exists.<br />
<br />
Eugene Peterson, in <i>Reversed Thunder</i>, writes that one of the good things about church is that it goes on without us. Whether we pray or not, people are praying. Whether we're even there or not, people are gathered. Somehow this is comforting. I feel that way about Lent.<br />
<br />
I'm not sure why this is. My friend Daniel, a Catholic convert, told me, "I think it is interesting to see the attraction Lent has for my non-religious, atheist, agnostic and even Jewish hipster friends. Of all the things within Christianity that is culturally accessible I wouldn't have chosen Lent to be it."<br />
<br />
I wouldn't have chosen to give up my car, either, and I do hope I get it back before Easter. About a month ago (before Lent began, actually) it broke down on the way out of Ann Arbor -- I hadn't even made it out of the city -- and has been stranded there ever since awaiting an engine replacement.<br />
<br />
I'm learning to appreciate, however, the way this forces me into a discipline I did not choose. I'm walking more places, obviously, and to be honest I'm enjoying the exercise: except for some rudimentary (and sporadic) calisthenics, I don't work out. A 20-minute walk can do wonders for the otherwise sedentary, and I've enjoyed quite a few 20-minute walks.<br />
<br />
It also throws me upon the mercy and generosity of others. The illusion of independence is shattered and I am forced to both ask for help from others and allow them to help me without the pretense that I'm going to be able to meaningfully pay them back. There's a certain paradoxical charity in allowing others to be charitable without trying to reciprocate (cue Derridean reflections on the gift).<br />
<br />
I see this more generally as well. I'm staying during the week with a younger couple, and I try to be the model houseguest. I'm quiet. I'm neat. I also have an almost obsessive-compulsive need to be helpful: I do the dishes, or fold the load of laundry I find in the dryer when I do mine.<br />
<br />
I sometimes notice, however, that these efforts also have the potential to subtly rob my friends of their opportunity to offer me hospitality. I'm not saying I shouldn't do them, but it introduces an element of payback. It hints at a calculus. Sometimes I duck out of the house on foot before I can be offered a ride; there's just a whiff of passive-aggressiveness about it.<br />
<br />
There's a lesson to be learned here, and a balance to be sought. Maybe I'll find it. Maybe, on the other side of my reluctant Lent, I'll have grown in some sort of discipline of receiving charity.<br />
<br />
Or mabye I'll just have killer thighs. Either way.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-33329892873899208842012-03-05T07:11:00.000-05:002012-03-05T17:17:36.416-05:00Bohemian Rhapsody<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Marvin stood at the end of the bridge corridor. He was not in fact a particularly small robot. His silver body gleamed in the dusty sunbeams and shook with the continual barrage which the building was still undergoing. He did, however, look pitifully small as the gigantic black tank rolled to a halt in front of him. The tank examined him with a probe. The probe withdrew.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"</i><i>I'm afraid," said Marvin, "that I've been left here to stop you."</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"What are you armed with?" roared the tank in disbelief.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Guess," said Marvin.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Errmmm ..." said the machine, vibrating with unaccustomed thought, "laser beams?"</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Marvin shook his head solemnly.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"No," muttered the machine in its deep guttural rumble, "Too obvious. </i><i>Er ... how about an electron ram?"</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>This was new to Marvin.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"What's that?" he said.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"One of these," said the machine with enthusiasm.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>From its turret emerged a sharp prong which spat a single lethal blaze of light. Behind Marvin a wall roared and collapsed as a heap of dust. The dust billowed briefly, then settled.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"You're thinking along the wrong lines," said Marvin, "You're failing to take into account something fairly basic in the relationship between men and robots. </i><i>I'll tell you what they gave me to protect myself with, shall I?"</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Yes, alright," said the battle machine, bracing itself.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Nothing," said Marvin.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>There was a dangerous pause.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Nothing?" roared the battle machine.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Nothing at all," intoned Marvin dismally, "not an electronic sausage."</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Hell that makes me angry," bellowed the machine, "think I'll smash that wall down!"</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>The electron ram stabbed out another searing blaze of light and took out the wall next to the machine.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"How do you think I feel?" said Marvin bitterly.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"I think I'll shoot down their bloody ceiling as well!" raged the tank.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>It took out the ceiling of the bridge.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"That's very impressive," murmured Marvin.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"You ain't seeing nothing yet," promised the machine, "I can take out this floor too, no trouble!" It took out the floor, too.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Hell's bells!" the machine roared as it plummeted fifteen storeys and smashed itself to bits on the ground below.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"What a depressingly stupid machine," said Marvin and trudged away.</i></blockquote>
<div>
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<div style="text-align: right;">
-Douglas Adams, <i>The Restaurant at the End of the Universe </i>[edited]</div>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
In case you haven't noticed, I've spent the last few months wrestling with the work of John Milbank for a dissertation chapter, and I still haven't recovered. I may never recover. This is the wonder of Milbank. His regular whipping boys are the apostles of what he calls "postmodern nihilism." Basically, for him, all those postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers in the wake of Nietzsche, all those darlings of cultural studies -- Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze (especially), and even Levinas -- they're <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEmvf_6k0pM">nihilists</a>.<br />
<br />
They're like the robotic tank in the above passage: having lain waste to everything, they have nothing left to stand on, no purchase for undertaking any kind of radical politics -- never mind the extent to which they get employed in the service of such a politics. It won't work, Milbank feels, and in characteristic fashion he tells us that orthodox Christian theology is the only thing that will. It's a little more complicated than that, and more of the story can be found in the chapter "Ontological Violence" in Milbank's <i>Theology and Social Theory.</i><br />
<br />
I bring this up because it is Milbank who has convinced me that I am a nihilist, and it is my love/hate relationship with Milbank and his project that has goaded me into embracing that with something akin to enthusiasm. I want a T-shirt that says "I'm the postmodern nihilist Milbank warned you about." </div>
<br />
<br />
<center><embed align="middle" allowscriptaccess="samedomain" flashvars="stxt=I'm the postmodern nihilist Milbank warned you about.&a=137&tx=49.9&ty=44&color1=0x000000&color2=0xFF0000&color3=0xFF0000&color4=0xFFFFFF&font=1&gender=1&symbol=3&lnpath=http://www.pageplugins.com/generators/tshirt/&dom=http://www.pageplugins.com/" height="320.3" name="TShirt Generator" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" quality="high" src="http://www.pageplugins.com/generators/tshirt/tshirt.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="285.85" wmode="transparent"></embed></center>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
(Or maybe not.) <br />
<br /></div>
What I'm trying to do is accept Milbank's premise -- yes, this is in fact a kind of nihilism, and we should admit that -- without accepting his conclusion that we should therefore either embrace orthodox Christianity or just give up and acquiesce to capitalistic excess. This strikes me as a much more sophisticated but nevertheless equally spurious version of the argument that atheists, having abandoned God and therefore any basis for morality, should just become axe murderers and call it a day.<br />
<br />
But if Milbank is correct that this is a form of nihilism, he's also correct that it is difficult to get a coherent politics out of it. I'm critical of Milbank not because I think there's a better way to arrive at a radical politics (or any politics for that matter) but because I don't think Milbank's project is going to work. It's very interesting theology, and has made quite a splash, and that's good for Milbank but I don't think anyone in the political world is going to make a hearty go of it and I don't think it would produce the desired results anyway. Of course, since it won't be tried we'll never know. Or as I like to say: history might prove me wrong, but I don't think it's that motivated. Nihilism FTW.<br />
<br />
Milbank's articulation of a postfoundationalist milieu in which the apology for Christianity is its ability to stave off nihilism cannot, no matter how earnest Milbank's belief itself might be, fully escape the irony of the postmodern nihilism he laments. At that point it's already too late. Postfoundationalism <i>is</i> a nihilism, not in the sense of abandoning meaning altogether (as if that were possible) but in the sense of being forced to recognize that our attempts to create meaning don't rest on anything solid, and can't. If it's hard to get a politics out of this, then Milbank is in the same boat. On one hand, he's done it -- but then we should be able to recognize that others can, too. On the other hand, well, see above.<br />
<br />
This might seem depressing, and that makes sense to me, but strangely I find it all invigorating. In fact, embracing that has been what I think has been a very helpful response <i>to my own depression</i>. This keeps coming up lately. Once again, there are three witnesses, three conversations that on their own might have made me think, and have demanded my attention all the more by ganging up on me with the rule of three.<br />
<br />
The first conversation came on the heels of my last post: in the midst of <a href="http://www.mikemorrell.org/2012/02/the-problem-with-pietism-why-nondual-mystics-and-awestruck-atheists-get-it-right/">various cross-postings and roundups</a> I was introduced to another blogger. His work intrigued me, especially inasmuch as he was offering a bit of a critique of mainstream atheism mainly, it seemed to me, on the basis that it didn't fully own up to being a nihilism. This intrigued me, since that's my critique of a lot of things. But when I brought it up, the conversation fell apart on two levels.<br />
<br />
First, my interlocutor felt that my attempts to connect him with schools of thought familiar to me constituted a form of rhetorical violence and that I was failing to see past those associations and engage the real person. This apparently warranted a bit of lecturing on his part. Second, he didn't feel I was taking the conversation seriously enough, and that I was treating his own seriousness as something to be mocked. He approaches such conversations, he told me, as if everything was at stake, and faulted me for approaching it as if nothing was at stake and this was just fodder for making snarky jokes. Which is true.<br />
<br />
To the extent that the bit about labels was a critique of representation I'm quite sympathetic; there <i>is </i>a kind of rhetorical violence involved. But think rhetorical violence is only the issue if by naming something we assume we are identifying its essence and thereby gaining some sort of mastery over it. I don't think there is an essence to name. I just rather automatically look for associations and connections; what I am identifying is not an essence but a possible family resemblance. His earnestness surprised me coming from someone whose writing evinced what I thought was nihilism, so maybe I was wrong about that. But I don't know why he couldn't have just said "no, I don't think this is nihilism, and here's why."<br />
<br />
As for the other, well -- guilty. I apologized for this, but pointed out that I <i>did</i> admit to being a nihilist, and as problematic as the label might be for him, I might have meant something by it. It's like the swordfighting scene between Jack Sparrow and Will Turner in <i>Pirates of the Caribbean</i>: Turner says "you cheated!" and Sparrow shrugs and says "Pirate...."<br />
<br />
I tend to <i>not </i>take things seriously, I admit. Humor is my default. I'm a cynic, but I'm a happy cynic. Even when I'm curmudgeonly it's all schtick. My blogger friend wrote that if everything wasn't at stake, suicide would be preferable. I confess this baffles me. Suicide just doesn't seem that interesting.<br />
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The second conversation came during an independent study. One of our graduate students is doing some work with anarchist theory and wanted more background, so the department gave me the go-ahead. This has been fun because it's given me a reason to dig into to some of the history, and especially some primary sources, that I'd neglected up to this point. We've been chomping at the bit, however, to get to the <a href="http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745330860">postanarchist stuff</a>. This is the intersection of postmodern/poststructuralist thought and anarchist theory, and we're geeked out about it.<br />
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Todd May is my favorite, but he has trouble arriving at a specific politics, even though he tries to do so and <i><a href="http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02085-7.html">he wrote a whole book on practices</a></i>. Still: what does a postanarchist actually <i>do</i>? That seems to be a difficult question. My counterpart, frustrated with May (and me sometimes), prefers Saul Newman. So I'm May and she's Newman. "We should develop a comedy skit based on that," she told me, "Except only three people would get it...and they're in the UK."<br />
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Newman's politics is more promising, but he gets there by sneaking some universals in the back door. I think this really is the central aporia: in a world where nothing really matters, what is politics? Does it do any good to critique the philosophy that tells us there is no starting point for not being a good starting point? To me, the problem is ticklish. To my grad student friend, it's a bit depressing, though she's hardly suicidal.<br />
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The third conversation was with a friend of mine who, like me, is sometimes visited by depression. We have similar personalities and wrestle with similar issues, but he has a more developed sense of justice than I do and greater sense of affront when that justice doesn't present itself. I'm more cynical, but I don't want to take that sense of justice away from him and I don't presume my own path to be normative. He's tempted to think that things might not be worth it without meaning or justice; he's actually had some suicidal thoughts.<br />
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I want to take that seriously, but at the same time it's a part of his experience I can't relate to. I chalk it up to narcissism: my own life is so interesting to me that if I ended it on purpose I'd be missing out on what happens next. Hey, it works: don't hate me. I also think it's precisely my nihilism that leads me to have lower expectations of the world and thus less chance for disappointment (and depression). Defense mechanism? Sure. I don't think that is unusual.<br />
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It's a long story, but I discovered in the midst of a disastrous life crisis that my narcissism can't be trusted with intrinsic meaning. I'm a nihilist for the same reason a recovering alcoholic doesn't drink. At this point you can dismiss my perspective as an artifact of my personality issues, but then I'd just point out that your perspective does the same thing for you, and we're back to the same place. Nihilism FTW <i>again</i>.<br />
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But who am I to say that my friend's sense of justice is misplaced or misguided? He might be led to actually do something. I don't think nihilists can go around prescribing what can and can't be done. It's just that we know it's ultimately ironic (particularly in the sense that Rorty calls "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironism">ironism</a>"). <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/living-breathing-philosopher-912-v16n6">Simon Critchley is not sending me Christmas cards.</a><br />
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Another friend put it to me this way, describing my nihilism as a double bind: "you feel compelled to treat other people seriously on their own grounds, allow them to define themselves to the extent that it is possible, but you also believe, so to speak, in nihilism: you feel that despite their protestations you know 'what's really going on' even if it's precisely nothing that is going on."<br />
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What I ended up telling my friend is that maybe between suicidal despair and a nihilistic cynicism is way of narrating that sense of justice as a call that can never be fulfilled but is nevertheless generative. There are shades here of Derrida's "democracy that is to come" or a kind of Levinasian ethical call; we can respond to that call but we cannot answer it. Can we get a politics out of that? Not a universal one, certainly, but I don't think that should stop people from acting on their desires for a better world. I'd just point out that those desires are always already constructed from choices we've made or choices that have been made for us.<br />
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I'm also a lot of fun at parties.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-57623759060176265812012-02-20T08:03:00.000-05:002012-02-20T08:24:28.865-05:00Building a MysteryI recently referred to myself as a "postsecular atheist," which I think might be fairly accurate if I knew what it meant. I've been wondering about that. Insisting that I'm technically a theological non-realist (or a metaphysical non-realist more generally) seems pointless since nobody knows what <i>that </i>is, either. But the problem with identifying as an atheist is that I'm <i>not </i>the sort of atheist for whom being an atheist is the goal as opposed to an artifact of not believing in God. There is no "right way" to be an atheist, but some atheists seem to act like it, and I'm not sure I pass the test. It's mutual, though: atheism, as a discourse community, is not that attractive to me -- no offense to my atheist friends.<br />
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I don't share the (stereo)typical atheist disdain for religion. I don't think we'd all be better off if we just got rid of religion, as if that were even possible. I'm an atheist less by virtue of being certain that God does not exist than by not being able to say what it would mean if God did, or why we should assume there is only one God, or how I should comport myself in the face of the existence of said God. I don't know how we would know those things, which I suppose is more agnostic than atheist. But being allergic to metaphysics, I don't have a framework in which "I believe in God" is intelligible. Redefining God as whatever might happen to be "out there" doesn't really do much work, and neither does redefining God as something I might be a little less reticent about, like the Tao or something (if that worked, wouldn't it make more sense to just be a Taoist?). So, to recap: I don't believe in God, which I think is the definition of atheism. I just don't fit the usual profile. </div>
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This is where the "postsecular" bit comes in. Postsecularity describes the sense in which we're realizing -- at least in some areas of thought -- that what we think of as "the secular" is not something that was revealed when we finally pulled back the veil of religion, but rather a way of thinking that was constructed in response to and on the heels of developments in Christian theology. There are various ways of narrating this, from Charles Taylor to John Milbank to Marcel Gauchet, but the basic idea is that there is no neutral sphere in which we can negotiate the common good without influence from religion or ideology. Moreover, the idea that there <i>is </i>such a sphere is itself a claim about the "way things are" that is already at odds with religious formulations. <br />
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It would be silly, for instance, to say that liberal democracy is a religion, <i>per se</i> (though perhaps not that silly) but it does make defacto (meta-)religious claims and cannot avoid doing so. A claim that religion and state should remain separate is still a claim <i>about religion</i>, and suggests that the state, and only the state, should be able to do things that might otherwise fall under the purview of religion. Questions about the common good or how we might best live to together, questions that we assume to be political, are not questions about which religion has been silent. Even the idea that there is a genus "religion" of which a given person's way of constructing the world can be seen a species is problematic -- especially for those ways of seeing the world we tend to call religions. What lies at the core of many people's construction of identity is precisely the thing that liberal democracy says they should bracket.<br />
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[Postsecularity is the condition in which we recognize that "the secular" is just some shit we made up. This opens us up to the realization that postsecularity is just some shit we made up in the wake of realizing that secularity was some shit we made up. Basically it's shit all the way down.]<br />
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So what does it mean to be an atheist self-consciously in this milieu? I can identify three candidates for what postsecular atheism might look like -- three versions of it -- and I find them all unsatisfying. First and foremost, of course, is Slavoj Žižek. I love Žižek; I don't love how that makes me a lot like a bunch of nerdy post-evangelicals who also love Žižek. And I'm not sure how much I agree with Žižek, especially since most of the stuff he's on about -- psychoanalysis and Lacan and all that -- I really don't have much use for. Still, there's an attraction. Žižek's like the crazy drunk uncle whom you secretly love just because he makes things more interesting. You don't want to emulate him, or take any of his advice, but he's a hell of a lot of fun.<br />
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For Žižek, God is the Lacanian "Big Other" we need to do without. The psychoanalysis is over when you recognize that there is no Big Other -- that you are, basically, on your own. To the extent that this speaks to the experience of postfoundationalism, I'm on board. But Žižek doesn't stop there. The twist is that it is <i>Christianity </i>that tells us this. Jesus' cry "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" <i>is </i>this realization, Jesus beating the crazy old man in <i>Thus Spake Zarathustra </i>to the punch by almost 2,000 years.<br />
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Žižek and Jesus are like Tyler Durden telling his minions, "You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you, never wanted you, in all probability he hates you. This is not the worst thing that could happen," except that God can't be bothered to actually hate you because he's not there. God the father empties himself into Jesus the son and gets whacked and can now only be found "resurrected" in the Spirit in the form of community. And we all have to enter into this realization. There is no God, no Big Other; there's just us, muddling through, doing whatever we can. We, collectively, are the only God we're going to get.<br />
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Two things bother me about this. One, it seems to prescribe a normative (and normatively Christian!) path. If we'd just get over our fixation with the Big Other (God being merely one candidate for this), we could be free and move on to...whatever. And this, to me, introduces a kind of back-door humanism -- that's the second thing -- an emancipatory project presuming a human subject<i> </i>to be liberated.<br />
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Another possibility is Alain de Botton's "Atheism 2.0." I'll be honest -- I haven't read the book, <i>Religion for Atheists</i>; I've only seen his <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0.html">TED talk</a>. And I hadn't heard of him at all before I read this <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/12/religion-for-atheists-de-botton-review">scathing review by Terry Eagleton</a>. So my introduction wasn't great and my knowledge is not robust. I may be getting him wrong. Still, Botton is interesting in that he thinks atheists too quickly dismiss aspects of religion that might be helpful. From the aforementioned talk:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Whatever it may be, you know the kind of thing I'm talking about -- people who are attracted to the ritualistic side, the moralistic, communal side of religion, but can't bear the doctrine. Until now, these people have faced a rather unpleasant choice. It's almost as though either you accept the doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.</blockquote>
Botton's solution? Raid the various religious traditions for ideas, concepts, rituals, etc. (the "nice stuff") that might give us the purported benefits of religion without committing ourselves intellectually or otherwise. On one hand, this seems hopelessly consumeristic; on the other hand, Botton seems to be enriching his particular tradition -- atheism -- with things learned from outside that tradition, much as postmodern Christians might enrich their tradition with the findings of science or the musings of philosophy. Traditions are not hermetically sealed, and most if not all have a history of syncretism and cross-pollination. Nevertheless, I don't much see the point. I really don't see atheists banding together in a parody of religion to feel better about themselves. Or they already do and we call them Unitarian Universalists.<br />
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Finally, there's Robert Jensen. Jensen shares a leftist politics with Žižek (I'm not sure of Botton's politics; Eagleton calls him a libertarian), but unlike Žižek and Botton is actually a member of a church. He tells his story in <i>All My Bones Shake</i>: he met the pastor of a Presbyterian church in the course of his political activism and became attracted to the church's collective life and the way it intersected with progressive politics. Eventually he got sucked into that life even though he's not really come around to believing in God as such. The story is a good one, and while Jensen is not the riveting memoirist that Anne Lamott is, it's the best part of the book.<br />
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The rest of the book outlines what we might call his political theology, which he sums up in the paradoxical "There is no God, and now more than ever we all need to serve the One True Gods." The construction is deliberate. By "there is no God" he means basically what Žižek means by there not being a Big Other but without that language. What we think of as God, he says, is just a name for mystery itself, which is not something we worship or commit ourselves to.<br />
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The "One True Gods" are community (as a concept) and communities (as concrete expressions of that concept), things we must attend to if we're going to survive as a species. This is, perhaps, compatible with Žižek's emphasis on the death of God and the birth of community in the Spirit. Jensen comes off as a communalist (and something of a localist) with a bit of anarcho-primitivist ecological apocalypticism thrown in the mix, but without landing on anything recognizable as anarchist theory. He's a progressive, which is better than a lot of the alternatives, and his theology seems like a bit of a mainline liberal rehash that at least has the stones to admit to being atheist.<br />
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There are also out-and-out Christian Atheists, and Žižek and I have both been branded with that designation. I'm sometimes loath to call myself either one, let alone both. My atheist friends wonder, given my interest in Christianity (and my not-infrequent defense of Christianity as a coherent body of thought) if I'm really an atheist at all. Some of my Christian friends who know of my "status" are holding out a none-too-subtle hope that this is just a phase for me, and that I will come around. It's been over a decade, but there are days I can almost imagine what it would be like to believe again. I don't think they're right, but I can't predict the future.<br />
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On the other hand, I'm reluctant to call myself a <i>Christian </i>because it seems like, well, God is kind of a big deal. At any rate, I'm coming to realize that my own admixture of intellectual atheism and social participation in Christianity is largely artifactual, a result of what I call "social inertia": I've been part of the Christian tradition for most of my life. In some ways I've been in and out; in others, I've just been in, with the idea that I could ever be out being largely illusory. These are my people. Many of my friends and most of my family are Christians. I also don't believe in God -- but being an atheist isn't enough of an identity marker for me to disrupt all of those relationship and become "the atheist" in that social grouping. Or become somebody's project, which is what tends to happen. <br />
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I'm not, however, trying to combine those things into a cohesive philosophical framework. I happen to be a theologically literate but otherwise nominal Christian, mostly by heritage. I also happen to not believe in God.<br />
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This is not the worst that could happen.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-58505554165619656762009-10-31T06:50:00.001-04:002009-10-31T08:57:52.024-04:00Event Horizon<div>This time of the semester is awful for writing; I notice that last spring there was a similar midsemester lull in my blog entries. Life is full of rhythms, which has been something of a theme with me lately. There are microrhythms and macrorhythms, daily routines and seasonal variations. We can dance with time gracefully or we can wrestle it for a blessing. And maybe that choice, too, has its own rhythm.</div><div><br /></div><div>One of those rhythms, in my life, is the rhythm of depression. I don't struggle with depression because struggling doesn't help. I don't suffer from depression because as corny as it sounds, suffering really is optional. I prefer to say that I have some experience with it, assiduously avoiding any kind of value judgment. Mine is admittedly mild; I'm remarkably productive, even when I'm in a funk, and I'm not (currently) on medication. There are steps I take to help manage it, but the reality is, in my experience, that it comes in waves and rhythms, and I'm learning to recognize them.</div><div><br /></div><div>The idea that I might be depressed came as a shock to me when I first confronted it -- or was first confronted by it. I'm rarely <i>sad</i>, so it never occurred to me that I might be depressed. Stressed out? Sure, sometimes. Unstable? Duh -- have you met me? (I'm a musician, for God's sake. We are not normal.) But depressed? This did not come to mind, at least not to mine. I equated depression with sadness, and I had elaborate mechanisms for keeping negative emotions, like sadness and anger, at bay. It certainly didn't occur to me that this might itself be a symptom.</div><div><br /></div><div>What I've discovered is that, for me, being genuinely sad is a luxury, and this is precisely what makes me susceptible to depression. Depression is not sadness but a kind of affective fog, a numbness that nothing breaks through. An insuperable case of the blahs. And my normal emotional baseline is relatively inert. I'm not easily moved. What this means is that it's not really a far cry from here to a <i>bona fide</i> depressive episode, where the fog rolls in and I feel like I'm staring into a gaping existential maw. </div><div><br /></div><div>It's easy to think, in these cases, that what I need is something to believe in, some kind of hope, but that does not seem to be true. What works better, for me, is to simply roll with it. To embrace it. To lean into the rhythm when it comes: Yes, I'm depressed right now. Yes, it's quite possible that life has no intrinsic meaning. Yes, it's kind of hard right now to maintain the patina of social acceptability. But if life is meaningless then it always has been, and I've felt better in this meaningless universe and will feel better again. And if it's not meaningless, then what I'm experiencing now is simply the perception of meaninglessness, and it will pass. If it gets too bad, I'll get some help; in the meantime, let's not make any major decisions.</div><div><br /></div><div>One of the things that has helped me a lot is to give up the quest to <i>find</i> meaning and accept responsibility for the task of <i>making</i> meaning. To embrace the gaping existential maw, to fling myself into the void and reverse my assumptions: depression is not some exception to my usual and better-adjusted self but a quite understandable response to my apprehension of our utter contingency. It's not that life is meaningless but that we <i>can't know</i>, and therefore have no way to tell which kinds of meaning might actually obtain and which bits we just made up. In which case, what we consider the normal range of human emotion is basically an arbitrary response to the vagaries of life based on a sense of meaning that has no foundation. A flattening of affect is a perfectly reasonable response, if you ask me.</div><div><br /></div><div>Except that it's really no fun, and not that interesting, and all other things being equal I prefer the times that I can ignore that and appreciate the wondrous diversity of life. Being in a depressive episode simply means I've temporarily lost my mojo, that I'm off my groove a little bit. It is my psyche at rest, and maybe sometimes I need that rest. It is indeed a rhythm, and maybe somehow I need that rhythm.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm also a very religious person, so this has (of course) manifested in how I think about God, and something I've found very helpful is to recognize that I'm what's called a theological non-realist. This marks a kind of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><i>détente</i></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><i> </i></span></span>between my atheist and believing selves, mostly by denying either of them the last word. The gist of it is that none of our God-talk apprehends the "really real." We're all shooting in the dark. God could not exist at all, or God could exist and be nothing like what is taught by our favorite religions. </div><div><br /></div><div>There could be an infinite number of Gods, creating each other like some nested set of ontological Russian dolls. Our universe could be utterly and starkly alone, a cosmological fluke. The "really real" could be God, or not-God, or any number of variations of God or not-God. We have no way of knowing, no vantage point that allows us purchase on the answer. Some of our speculations could be correct -- even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes -- but we're still clueless as to which bits those might be.</div><div><br /></div><div>Instead, our God-talk is usually about something else, often having to do with ethics or justice. We bind up our sense of what is right and good and true and we project it into the ether and call it God. Sometimes we do it almost that baldly. And yes, even my theological non-realism is likely a product of something else, some artifact of my personality or upbringing or cultural conditioning -- and this might tank my assertion if it didn't follow so neatly from that assertion. That's actually one of the things I love about it.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't why being here would bring with it such a palpable sense of peace, but it does. The fact that I love working for a church does not need to make some kind of deep ontological sense because there isn't any such thing. There are any number of very human reasons that I love it and those are good enough. Being on a church staff is not, at the end of the day, intrinsically any more ironic than getting up in a good mood -- or getting up at all. I'm not there to undermine or challenge what they're doing, but to help them do it, even if I can't sign off on the metaphysical assumptions behind it. People need it, and I need it, for various and varied reasons most of us don't think about and don't want to. And none of us gets to be in charge of what those reasons are supposed to be.</div><div><br /></div><div>A 14th-century English mystic described God as being within a "cloud of unknowing, " which is quite possibly a bridge between my skepticism and the mystical path. For the author of the <i>Cloud</i>, the way forward is direct experience of God rather than the pursuit of knowledge, and I'm just as skeptical about direct experience as anything else. On one hand, I recognize the validity of the mystical experience and there are a number of my own experiences I'm rather fond of. </div><div><br /></div><div>On the other hand, I'm a lousy mystic. I've dabbled in centering prayer and even chanted Psalms, but I'm not interested in the kind of discipline required to take the mystical path seriously. Plus, I find some of it a bit dubious; as sympathetic as I am to the value of the experience, I don't usually buy the explanation of what the experience is supposed to be. Union with the Godhead -- or an induced brain-state? Transcending the self -- or suspending the process by which we define the boundaries of self? Tell me that meditation helps you cope with the world, and I'll believe you. Tell me that you've seen the face of God or become one with the universe and I'm liable to change the subject.</div><div><br /></div><div>The author of <i>The Cloud of Unknowing </i>assumed that there was a "really real" God in the center of that cloud. I'm not so sure, though of course I can't rule it out. Years ago, as my conservative theology began to break down, I could feel my assumptions about the Bible slipping away. It dawned on me that if the Bible were true, it was in the sense of pointing to Something Else, and at the time this Something Else presented itself in a kind of vision, of something stark and terrifying -- not exactly malicious, but not warm and cuddly either. Somehow I knew that if I continued to play out my curiosity, it would mean facing whatever this was. Later, when belief in God failed me as well, it was like I looked to the place where God used to be and there was nothing there, just a stark desert landscape -- which is why I use a desert landscape for my Facebook profile.</div><div><br /></div><div>Scientists use "event horizon" to describe the theoretical boundary of observation, a place beyond which we cannot see or measure or explore. It's the point in a black hole where light bends in on itself and can't escape. It's almost as if the the universe insists on keeping certain mysteries to itself. I feel the same way about this "cloud"; it's not so much that God is hidden behind it as that we simply can't see or know what lies beyond. When I first encountered the desert landscape of my soul I thought maybe I'd just call the empty place "God" and get on with things. Robert Jensen, in <i>All My Bones Shake</i>, says that God is the name we give to the mystery of the universe. This is not, for Jensen -- who is both an atheist and a Christian -- a "God of the gaps," but a way of recognizing our inclination, in the face of wonder, to form praises on our lips.</div><div><br /></div><div>And maybe, in a nod to my English mystic, I can decide that the "really real," whatever it might be, is God -- even if God doesn't exist. I'm not sure I'm ready to go there, but it's an option. It might serve as a way to remind us of our smallness, our contingency, our unknowing. Most of us strain, somewhere, for a glimpse of the numinous. I can't tell you how you're supposed to do it, or where. But sometimes, on that desert landscape, I can see a bit of a breeze, if I don't try to look too hard.</div><div><br /></div><div>And that's enough.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-81400411737278503452009-08-22T07:24:00.004-04:002009-09-10T11:49:09.912-04:00Canning PicklesHad coffee with a friend of mine last week, whom I hadn't heard from in awhile. He's a (very) part-time music minister at a small church not far from us, and while we're not exactly close, he sometimes seeks me out for counsel. In the right conditions, it's something I do pretty well, and I enjoy it. Part of my psychological makeup is a need to feel useful and competent, which I don't think is terribly unusual, but since I'm being transparent about my dysfunctions I might as well confess that I often enjoy the feeling of being useful (which includes the feeling of being very smart and insightful) more than the person's company. Sick, I know. This is my life.<div><br /></div><div>My friend has a Yoder-inspired "radical discipleship" kind of theology similar to the one I tried to have before I stopped bothering. This tends to get him in trouble. There's a bit of a game to navigating an evangelical church when your theology doesn't quite match up, and he's so adamant that there shouldn't be a game that he refuses to play it. Plus, his situation is interesting: he gets a very meager stipend to lead music, which he thought was basically a staff position, until he learned recently that the elders mostly think of him as a benevolence case. That has to hurt a little.</div><div><br /></div><div>Recently, his Sunday School class was studying the passage in Numbers about the 12 spies. The spies are sent into Canaan and 10 of them report that the Canaanites are a bunch of preternatural badasses and they might as well turn back, whereas Joshua and Caleb come back convinced that YHWH will fight for them and this will be a cakewalk. 10 were bad and 2 were good, as the old song goes, a conspicuous numbering that probably comes to us (perhaps along with the rest of the story) from the southern tribes somewhere around the 6th century BCE. </div><div><br /></div><div>One of the obvious take-aways from the story, at the Sunday School level, is to trust in God despite the obvious circumstances. This is the angle my friend took, encouraging them that with God on our side, we can do anything God asks of us. This was met with resistance, however, from a couple of women in the class, who insisted that sometimes life is just too hard. We're human and frail. For good or for ill, they could relate to the 10 naysayers and weren't afraid to say so. When my friend tried to correct their theology on this matter, they began, rather loudly, to discuss canning pickles. </div><div><br /></div><div>Later, when they got to the part where Moses falls face down on the ground, the class pondered what this might be about. Some suggested that Moses had simply given up, falling on his face out of pure frustration. My friend pointed out that the Hebrew word used in the passage means to prostrate oneself in worship, and that Moses was probably humbling himself before the Lord and surrendering the situation to God's control. He pointed out that it is a corresponding Greek word that is the one most commonly translated "worship" in the New Testament. The pickle canners responded to this by saying something to the effect of "Yeah right. Like we're gonna do <i>that</i>," whereupon they resumed their discussion.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now, the story comes to me from my friend, so I'm not sure that you or I would have experienced the pickle ladies as quite that rude. Then again, they might have been. I don't know. But I invited him to look beyond both the passive-agressive tactics and the theological content of their resistance and consider their social context. This is a small town in a downward economy. It might not be terribly surprising that they identify more with the 10 "bad" spies. It's quite possible that, however much they might be faithful churchgoers, their religion has never really offered them the sense that they can do anything, and they don't expect it to. </div><div><br /></div><div>Instead, it offers solace, repose, and a form of community in the midst of a repressive economy -- not just recession but capitalism itself -- that they're not allowed to see for what it is. What I call oppression, from my academic, leftist, nerdy white guy perspective, they call bad luck or hard times. I'm going to guess, and I'm going to sound like I'm stereotyping horribly, that they're probably more likely to have the country station tuned in while they're canning pickles than they are the local Christian pop station. Their theme song is probably less "I Can Do All Things" than it is "Help Me Make it through the Night."</div><div><br /></div><div>These thoughts are inspired, at least in part, by a book I read for a comprehensive exam called <i>White Soul: Country Music, the Church, and Working Americans</i>. It's actually a theological work, whose author, Tex Sample (I did not make that up), studied at Boston University and now teaches at St. Paul's in Kansas City. His goal is to help the church understand and minister to working-class culture, using country music as the lens through which to do this, and along the way he offers a challenge to those of us who might look down our liberal bourgeois noses at working-class culture and country fans in general. </div><div><br /></div><div>I'm totally guilty of this. I remember going to my first demolition derby, on a fluke, and though I admitted to really enjoying it, I qualified this to one of my artsy friends by saying "I felt like I should be eating pork rinds and wearing a wife-beater." The subtext here is that I was allowed to enjoy it only as a form of slumming. I've also made my share of NASCAR jokes. It's true; I confess.</div><div><br /></div><div>As my friend and I discussed his Sunday School class, "canning pickles" quickly became a trope for the quotitidian, for the daily concerns of people who do not have time for or interest in arcane theological arguments. The pickle canners were saying, to my friend, that his theology was not practical for them. It was literally nonsense. They couldn't see any impact on their daily lives from his reading of things, and being theologically or exegetically correct was not a priority for them. They wanted cameraderie, fellowship, a bit of solace. They wanted their weekly opportunity to check in and be seen, maybe catch a bit of gossip -- to encounter the divine for a moment and then go back home to the roast in the crockpot. This ritual -- from the gossip to the roast, with the numinous in between -- serves to confirm both their perspective on the world and their place in it.</div><div><br /></div><div>In this, I think they're like most people. Let's face it: the people who go into theology, or ministry, or religious studies, or become militant atheists -- and I submit these people have more in common than they might think -- are kind of weird. They think about religion a lot more than normal people do. It looms large in their minds. I remember listening to <i>A Prairie Home Companion </i>one night and discovering that, as odd as it sounds, I envied the people of Lake Wobegone, not for their idyllic life on the edge of the prairie but because their relationship with religion was so...normal. </div><div><br /></div><div>Seriously, most people do not think about religion with the kind of frequency or at the level that I do, and sometimes I envy them. In a way, it's been my goal to find a way closer to where they are in spite of the fact that I'm constitutionally unable to be truly irreligious. Hence the turn from theology to religious studies, from being conservative to trying to be radical to admitting that I'm really just a liberal.</div><div><br /></div><div>This doesn't make a lot of sense to my friend (not that I tried to explain it as such), who takes Jesus more seriously than that, to his credit. I don't find it realistic, and he's constantly running up against the realpolitik of a small-town church. I encouraged him to look at it more like a mission field, and to spend the kind of time learning the culture that a good missionary would, and that this includes the religious culture as well -- even when it clashes with his theology. I encouraged him to think less in terms of what he was there to teach than what he was there to learn. I also told him they wouldn't understand his theology until they knew what love looked like as it flows from his understanding of the gospel. Model that, and teach it, I said, and then they'll have a framework in which the theology makes sense. </div><div><br /></div><div>In the meantime, he's learning how to can pickles.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-52852941343345837492007-09-14T19:03:00.000-04:002008-11-29T19:04:25.586-05:00Fast Food KarmaI don't think I'm very picky about food. I'm not talking a total lack of discrimination -- I know the difference between a New York strip and a sirloin, for instance -- but to be honest the threshold of what I'll actually eat is pretty low. The only things I can think of that I absolutely won't eat are beets and lemon pastries. I have preferences, but if push comes to shove I'll eat just about anything.<br /><br />For this reason I'm not usually picky when it comes to restaurants, either. I'm convinced that there's something I will like no matter where we might go. Just as an example, your typical casual dining restaurant is bound to have a BLT, a bacon cheeseburger, or a quesadilla. Unless it's a specialty restaurant like seafood or pizza, and I like both of those. Or, to put it somewhat more simply, any given restaurant is probably has some sort of specialty or ethnic cuisine, and I can't think of any of those I don't like, or it serves something involving bacon.<br /><br />I'm also not a fast food snob. To me, fast food is what it is. I'm sure it's not healthy, and it's probably a symbol of a whole host of things I try not to stand for, but it can be tasty and convenient and to be honest I'm just as happy as the kids are in those moments when we suspend our concerns for health and global awareness and hit a drive through. It's life in America, and it shouldn't surprise you that there's something I like in every imaginable <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1228002747_0">fast food restaurant</span>.<br /><br />The kids often choose McDonald's, which is fine by me because I'm partial to their double cheeseburgers. The McDonald's cheeseburger is really more an entity unto itself than a contribution to cheeseburger culture as a whole, but it's only a dollar and as such seems like a kind of low-impact decadence. The <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1228002747_1">Quarter Pounder with Cheese</span> is better, but to an extent incommensurate with the price difference. A dollar-menu alternative is the McChicken sandwich, which I'll sometimes get when I've been hitting the double cheeseburgers too hard, and once every couple of years I'll eat a Big Mac. I even tried a chipotle chicken wrap, and it was pretty good.<br /><br />At <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1228002747_2">Burger King</span> it's hard to justify getting anything but a <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1228002747_3">Whopper</span>, though they sometimes have a novelty involving bacon that I feel compelled to try. <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1228002747_4">Taco Bell</span> is problematic only because I like so many things, though I often end up getting the quesadilla because you can eat it while driving and wearing decent pants. KFC's chicken doesn't always agree with me, but they now have boneless wings (can someone explain the difference between a boneless wing and a nugget?) which are pretty good and don't seem to have any untoward gastrointestinal effects. Arby's has the Bacon Beef-n-Cheddar, the appeal of which should be self-explanatory, but sometimes you just need a fistful of regular roast beefs and a gallon of Arby's sauce.<br /><br />Wendy's is probably my favorite. They have the new Baconator, and the Big Bacon Classic, but really I often find a Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger and a small chili to be satisfying. I like the hot sauce packets they give you -- the sauce is strangely clear, and slightly viscous, and is apparently known only to Wendy's. If I feel like splurging, though, I'll get a <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1228002747_5">Spicy Chicken Sandwich</span>. They actually have a bit of kick to them, and they're large enough that my wife and I can sometimes even split one.<br /><br />This was mood I was in when we stopped at a Wendy's on a recent trip. I was hungry, having been driving for awhile, and I wanted a Coke, so when one of the girls declared she just wanted fries, I saw my ticket: get the combo meal, give her the fries, and two of us are happy. One-third of lunch (there are six of us, for those of you who don't remember or who are poor in math) is taken care of in one fell swoop. Proud of myself for this moment of luncheon efficiency, I arrived at the table in triumph only to discover that something was terribly amiss.<br /><br />My sandwich was tiny. And by "tiny" I mean "very small", lest there be any confusion. And I'm not even sure it was spicy. I returned to the counter and tried to communicate my disappointment. "I'm sorry," I said to the rather greasy-looking young man who inquired about my dismay, "but I ordered a Spicy Chicken Sandwich and I don't think that's what this is. Maybe I got a <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1228002747_6">Crispy Chicken Sandwich</span> instead?" The Crispy Chicken sandwich is the <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1228002747_7">value menu version</span> of their regular chicken sandwich. If I were doing the <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(0, 102, 204); cursor: pointer;" class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1228002747_8">value menu</span>, I'd have killed a Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger and be halfway through my chili by now.<br /><br />Greasy Guy inspected my sandwich. "Nope," he said matter-of-factly, "That's a Spicy Chicken." Apparently in Wendyspeak, it's not a "Spicy Chicken Sandwich", it's just "a Spicy Chicken." You could hear the capitals in his voice and appreciate his command of this insider lingo. I tried to look incredulous. I tried to look wary. I tried to look like I wasn't going to fall for any of this bait-and-switch bullshit. But he would have nothing of it. He was either a master of deception or incredibly daft. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.<br /><br />I returned to my seat defeated. I should have made a fuss, demanded to see a manager. But I was hungry, and with each bite -- of which my sandwich comprised four or five at best -- my evidence dwindled and the prospect of doing anything substantial became more and more ludicrous. I filled out a comment card, in a vain attempt to fill the gnawing sense of lack. Besides, we had inexplicably ended up with an extra order of fries so I filled up on those and we went on our way.<br /><br />This was on mind as I thought about dinner a few nights ago. My jazz class is two hours away, and the university will pay for dinner and a hotel if I want it. If I stay the night I hit the Applebee's down the road. So far I've tried the bacon cheeseburger and the quesadilla, and they're both very good. But this particular night I didn't want to stay, but I was hungry. I thought about Applebee's -- they have take-out and the quesadilla is probably portable -- but it wasn't on my way out of town, and I'd have to wait. The <span class="yshortcuts" id="lw_1228002747_9">Jimmy John's</span>, to my chagrin, was already closed, and I was about to give up and just eat something when I got home when I noticed a Wendy's a few exits down.<br /><br />This posed both a temptation and a dilemma: dare I risk it? Do I get a Spicy Chicken and chance disappointment? My original hankering for one had not been truly satisfied, but I'm uncertain whether I can take the defeat a second time. What if they changed the sandwich? There's still the value menu, and there's also an Arby's at the same exit. I can get a Bacon Beef-n-Cheddar and be happy. But there's that gnawing lack, that sense of emptiness needing to be filled. I can do nothing else: I order a Spicy Chicken Sandwich combo meal and hope for the best.<br /><br />I am not disappointed. The sandwich is huge, the fillet perched awkward on a bun hardly adequate for the task. It is both hot, in the temperature sense, and unambiguously spicy, as if hell-bent on burning your tongue one way or the other. It looks as though it were carved from a roast pterodactyl, as if the universe were somehow trying to right itself in light of my prior bad experience. I drove down the road, gratefully nursing my nearly-burned tongue. Except the fries kind of sucked.<br /><br />Is there no justice?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13633407562888054314noreply@blogger.com0