I Don’t Have an iPod, But My Mom Does

My roommate my freshman year of college once told me, “You’re a bigger girl, but it works for you.” I recall that at the time, I was pretty crushed. She fretted when clothes ran small and a size 2 wouldn’t fit, once semi-bragged that she never allowed herself to eat more than 15 grams of fat in a day, and even with the glorious metabolism of a teenager, did an hour of cardio a day. She was pretty in that tiny, cute way all women at least vaguely envy, and she had nice clothes and nice things and was intimidatingly well-organized. At 18, I was just learning all the things one could be insecure about, and, despite our differences, she was the kind of person I wanted to think I was more or less like her. Read: the kind of person I didn’t want to think I was fat.

Thanks to the introduction of empty alcohol calories, eating buffet style three times a day, and lots of late night pizza, I had gained some weight since high school, and while I won’t say I liked it, I did see putting on the “Freshman 15″ as a kind of rite of passage. It didn’t make me any more likely to have a salad instead of fries with dinner, or any less likely to drink beer and eat a fourth meal later on.

Later that year, I remember being at a party and that someone’s friend from home was visiting. She was a “bigger girl” with a loud, dirty mouth. She bragged about having had sex with a guy universally known to be “hot” and, hoisting glass (or, in those days, more likely a mug or plastic bathroom glass) said heartily, “Score one for the fat girls!” and made eye contact with most of the other girls in the room, as if surely we identified as “fat girls” and would understand the sweet victory of  a one-night stand with someone who probably has a “no fat girls” policy, even in the case of alcohol-induced hook-ups. (An obvious catch!) 

Of course, this girl was trying to settle the score on a few of her insecurities at once. You can’t make yourself thin just by worrying that you might be fat, but it takes  the edge off if you don’t have to be fat alone. And no woman, of any age, is ever 100% sure that meaningless sex is a good idea. I hope I am never that cynical, and the thought that someone who was only starting out in life could see the world as that cruel and limited has haunted me since. At the time, though, all I could see was that I had been labeled officially as a “fat girl.” That was the club into which I had been inducted, and I could prepare for a destiny as a character actress in real life, a lifetime spent as the romantic lead’s funny friend. 

But, still, something in me understood that the weight equals fate formula is something one has to agree to. And I just didn’t. I just didn’t identify as “fat,” and couldn’t really see that society’s obsession with thinness had much to do with me at all. I will never know how I could have been so wise when I knew so little about so much.

The summer after my sophomore year, without consciously trying to lose weight, I lost the Freshman 15, and have been pretty much the same size since. I never blot the grease off my pizza. I have never had a gym membership. I drink Diet Coke because I genuinely prefer the taste (actually, that’s an addiction probably worthy of a blog of its own…) My exercise is the walking necessary to city life, and while my diet is diverse enough to be nutritious, I don’t deny myself the foods I like. It is almost certainly true that I weigh more than many women my age who are considered attractive. But, since we’re talking about looks here, isn’t it the “attractive” part that counts? 

I don’t know what my old roommate, who was defined by being thin, may have intended me to hear when she said, “You’re a bigger girl, but it works for you,” but what I hear now is: it ain’t broke. Score one for the girls, all of us.

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Orwell was a patriot, a patriot in the sense that he was able to identify things as characteristically “English” which he admired and felt a sense, however intangible, of personal pride in being associated with them. At the same time, he was very open in public and in private about his fierce opposition to British imperialism, and, in fact, to the entire notion of an empire, the driving force of his country’s foreign policy for much of his life. In short, he found a way to stand for “God Save the King” while he sought to destabilize India’s role as the “jewel in the crown,” and perhaps even to destabilize the crown itself.

Critics of Orwell would perhaps say that this disparity is another demonstration of his eagerness to accommodate existing authority, of his lack of commitment to real socialist revolution, or, at best, of his naivete. As usual, I direct a certain hand gesture in the general direction of Orwell’s detractors, but that isn’t my point, at least not this time. 

Orwell was able to rag on nearly every point of his country’s policy and popular culture, and much of its art and symbols of ‘progress’, because he problematized and reappropriated what it meant to be patriotic, to be proud to be English. For any point and place in history, this is pretty nuanced, pretty sophisticated stuff, and there are two kinds of rhetoric in my own country and my own time that make me think of him and hold his example especially tightly. The first is that kind of rhetoric you get from the FOX news-watching, SUV-loving, flag-draped crowd, which is that America is #1 because, well, because we just kick ass and everyone knows it, including (perhaps especially) God. As a late-20s, well educated liberal who has always lived in blue states, it’s easy for me to dismiss this kind of talk as simply moronic.

The other kind of rhetoric is not so easy for me to set aside, since the people I hear it from tend to be my friends, and (in truth) I feel it so often in my own throat. I’m talking about the kind of talk which, in the sprit of rejecting the morons, rejects wholesale that anything about America might be well-intentioned or worthy of extolling. The most extreme example of this kind of talk I have personally witnessed happened, not surprisingly, soon after 9/11 when an acquaintance declared that because of our hubris, we deserved to be attacked. (It goes without saying, perhaps, that said acquaintance isn’t from New York and didn’t know anyone hurt or killed.) Most of the time, people know enough not to say they side with bin Laden (or whoever we should blame for 9/11) in polite conversation, but the sentiment–that America is a big, dumb bully that has whatever happens to it coming–has been the official party line of disaffected liberals (as if there’s another kind!) for the whole of the decade so far. 

The disaffected liberals are my people, and the Bush years were hard. American foreign and domestic policy has involved no small amount of lunch money-stealing, and especially if you’re talking to someone from another country, it’s often easier just to say that the whole thing sucks then try to defend or explain the indefensible and inexplicable. I admit readily that I’ve towed that line to speed up conversations I didn’t want to have. It’s an efficient way to communicate, “I’m not a flag-waving asshole, but I don’t really want to get into it.”

But let’s get into it.

My problem with the “we suck” rhetoric is that it is, really, just as much of an oversimplification as the “we rule” rhetoric. Perhaps it is even worse, in a way, because “we suck” is a reaction to “we rule,” it doesn’t stand on its own. We end up on the side that’s against things because we let the other guys define what the sides were and then pick the better one for themselves. In bowing out and saying that there is nothing about being Americans that we are proud of, we are owning the swagger and simple answers of Bush’s Washington.

The history and texture of a nation is too massive and complicated to say just that we kick ass. We owe it to ourselves, and to the world, not to ignore slavery, Manifest Destiny, McCarthyism, etc. But it is also true that the American Revolution is perhaps the only revolution ever to lead to a stable government, and a relatively democratic one at that. We can depend on elections running legally and power being transferred peacefully. It’s silly to suggest that there is no class system here, but it is not immovable. We maintain more racial, ethnic, religious, and ideological diversity than anyone else ever has, and that still blows my mind, even if we fail to maintain it entirely without hiccups. It’s easy to conjure up the image of Ellis Island as a giant holding cell guarded by TSA on steroids where you had to change your name and forgo the kerchief, but it actually boasted a number of accommodations, like a kosher kitchen, aimed at welcoming variable peoples. And that’s more than a century ago! We’ve never been perfect, but I think history shows that we are essentially committed to progress in the good way, in the way that triumphs over old prejudices and seeks solutions.

As Orwell dismayed his country’s place in the world while nursing a nice cup of tea, we can sip Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and seek the same third way. Not allowing dangerous simplemindedness to define the American brand just may be the ultimate patriotic duty.

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Part of the hiring process in the English Department at UMB is going out to lunch with a group of students so they can check you out and pass along their impressions to the faculty. Yesterday, I was one of these student representatives, and the complimentary buffet isn’t the only thing I’ve chewing on since. (Sorry, that set up is unforgivable, but…forgive me.)

The candidate yesterday was a young guy with a newly minted Ph.D from City College in New York. He looked 18, and his clothes were self-consciously hip in a way that I’ve gotten less used to these months in Boston, but I’m sure he was 30 or so. He was trying to get a feel for how the student demographic at UMB compared to CCNY, and when he figured out that I had lived in New York for enough time to make it count, the conversation changed completely. At first, we were just talking about favorite spots and “It’s Our Pleasure to Serve You” coffee cups. Finally, someone with some idea of what it might mean to teach middle school in Bushwick! Oh, street cred, how I’ve missed you.

But then: “So what’s it like to live up here after New York?”

The question I don’t want to answer, don’t know how to answer. And what I said almost surely didn’t make any sense to him. In fact, I’m not even sure exactly what I meant, but I’ll try to make some sense here.

It’s a trade-off. The things you come to think are going to be hard in New York (and, yes, that list is long), like dealing with any institution, not getting the benefit of the doubt from your landlord, having to live in a dirty din (even if people tell you that you live in a “nice” area), those things aren’t hard in Boston. It’s clean. People can be eccentric but mostly reflect the friendliness of those who aren’t embattled, who haven’t been screwed over or inconvenienced one time too many. Boston does not breed an unspoken contempt for authority, or distrust, or ill will.

But the things you come to expect to be no big deal in New York are hard in Boston. Heading over to a party, you might reasonably think that you can stop at the ATM and pick up a six-pack or a bottle of something. Maybe. But maybe your simple little errand will lead you around a dizzying circle of dark residential streets, leaving you, if you didn’t get lost, trying to rationalize the faux pas of showing up empty-handed. You probably won’t get anything to eat, anywhere, after 11:00 pm, and definitely not after midnight. And if it’s midnight, you should probably be heading home anyway–the assertion that the T runs until 1:00 is just a lie. The T almost never goes exactly where you need it to, so you’ll have to get a bus or take a hike. On a clear, mild night, that walk can be a sweet finish to an evening out. But this is New England, and the weather doesn’t usually cooperate. So, you’re stuck in that no man’s land between the last T and the last bus, which can last for nearly an hour (at Harvard Sq, anyway). So basically, you just left a party (where hopefully your friends with cars were understanding about the empty-handedness) at midnight to get home at 2:00 anyway. 

Dark thoughts emerge. Is it even worth trying to go out when there’s Facebook chat and DiGiorno? Has it come to that?

This is turning into a rant, and I’m going to get it under control, but it felt good. There are deeper, more important things in a city than how easy is to stay out late, of course, but I’m building to a metaphor…

New York is both the party and the hangover. Whatever it promises, it resolutely refuses to be all one thing or the other. Boston is constant: medium-sized, medium-paced. For a soul accustomed to the cycle of being elevated by sights and sounds, then ground down, then elevated, then crushed again, Boston doesn’t, on the surface at least, seem to offer much to fight against or fight for. 

Maybe it’s a little crazy to want to live that way, anyway. And maybe Boston has a spirit I just haven’t been let in on yet. So, the answer is: I don’t know. I await.

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Since I was quite young, I have been told that I have an “artistic temperament.” By some, that was a compliment: I was sensitive, insightful, and curious. By others, it was not a particularly good review. When I made known my intention to be an English major to the professor of my freshman drama seminar, she told me that “you can’t be both a good artist and a good critic.” Her view was that if you identified as a writer of literature yourself, you would sympathize with the author, and this sympathy smoothed out the edges too much for you to be able to analyze and interpret “objectively.”  (As if “objective” reading exists!)

I’ve always known she was wrong. And this semester, the tenth anniversary of my first as an undergrad, I think I know how to say why. 

There is always a lot of talk in pedagogical circles about the importance of giving students the experience of writing their own poetry in order to understand the way the craft operates from the inside. Anyone who has ever tried to write a sonnet, or even a haiku, knows that it’s a lot more complicated than writing an email. In the case of fiction, though, that point may be more elusive. Most people would not bring The Oxford Book of Verse to the beach, but many would bring a novel. Poets are cloaked in mystery and romance, but writers of fiction prose are perhaps often seen simply as people who have the time to observe reality and write it down. Writing a poem takes magic; writing a novel takes discipline. Oh, please.

In terms of student engagement, my most successful units have been novel studies. My students tended to be very reluctant readers, nonreaders independently, and so there was a certain sweetness about one of them swooping up to me at the beginning of a period, asking breathlessly, “Miss, can we read the book today? Pleeeease.” In general, they hadn’t been read to, hadn’t been allowed to sink into a good story without the passive shock and awe of movies and television, into a story that required more than 90 minutes of their lives. Part of my job was to do what I could to give them the experiences with reading I had had that made me love it. 

If students are reading and enjoying it, it’s tempting (especially with rowdy, easily bored teenagers) to take the path of least resistance. But teachers fall short of their goals if they don’t get students to think critically about what they read, which can be difficult when the reading is pleasurable and more accessible. Untrained readers can “get into” a book, but when it’s time to talk or write about it, it sounds like the class is catching up on a soap opera. They blow past any implications of form and discuss the characters and their lives as if they were real. The key, then, is to get students to go beyond caring just about what the author is doing and begin to probe and appreciate how and why he or she is doing it.

First, one small confession: I am a massive Harry Potter fan. My interest in mythology, medieval literature, and teenagers, alongside my taste for British wit and flights of fancy, make it impossible for me to turn away. The first time through the series, I read as fast as I could, hundreds of pages flying by in a single day. Especially in the case of the seventh and last book, I was resolute that no one would spoil it for me, but popular media was so saturated with it that I knew I had to get to the end as quickly as possible. That kind of emotional investment is, I think, an important experience to have as a reader, but it is not literary studies. The second time through, when I was not so bound by suspense, I began to appreciate how clever Rowling is. Having done some writing myself, I noticed things like a device to get certain characters at the same place at the same time, speculated on why characters had certain names, and saw symbols and motifs emerge. (One example: Voldemort, as a half-blood who is obsessed with establishing a new order of only pure blood wizards, no matter what he has to do to rid the world of muggles, mudbloods, and blood traitors, must be an allegory for Hitler and Nazi eugenics movement. That’s deep!)

Writing fiction, that “beautiful lie,” is a series of decisions. As an author, you are trying to present something essentially true about the human experience, but it is a craft in which raw material is shaped into a story. Reality must be observed, considered, and finally cut down to size and packaged. Every author must contend with certain narrative conventions, even (perhaps especially) modern and postmodern authors who want to expose and explode them. People learn by doing, and there is no better way to demonstrate how fiction writers’ craft operates than to make students fiction writers themselves. Having written a short story, or even just a scene, students would understand the decisions authors have to make, like which conversations to have the reader listen in on, and which of the characters’ activities are part of the plot and which are not important or relevant enough. They would, as all fiction writers do, have been forced to create systems that operate as analogues to reality. 

The creation of literature is not a mystery, and neither is literary analysis. So let’s be democratic about it. Making students into authors themselves makes them more likely to care about another author’s craft and gives them a way to talk about the hows and whys because they have asked themselves those questions from the inside looking out. And once people, of any age, have a way to talk about something, they usually can’t be stopped. This post proves that.

So, Professor X, you might have a Ph.D. from Yale, but you got this one wrong.

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Yesterday, I hosted a new ESL Teaching Fellow in my classroom, a bright young woman I already know and already like. My principal hired her to fill the vacancy I will leave behind. I’m leaving, quite by choice and after considerable effort, and that means IS 162 will require an ESL teacher. A third of my current students are moving on to high school anyway, so I couldn’t hold onto them even if I stayed. The nature of school is that people come and go. Those are the facts. The purpose of education is to be off and out, right? Isn’t that a bit like what I’m doing, by leaving the world of middle school, probably forever, for grad school?

Yes. But.

In his iconic all-synthesizer classic “Cars,” Gary Newman sang, “Here in my car, I feel safest of all.” I had never given it much thought, until I headed home yesterday and wanted to cry but couldn’t because I don’t have a car. If you cry on the subway, especially at rush hour, you have to do it standing up, your own face very close to the those of people you don’t know. People who will either try very hard not to notice that you are crying or will stare at you curiously. In either case, there is no sympathy and no comfort.

I didn’t want sympathy or comfort though. I wanted privacy. I wanted to be in a space that was mine enough so that I could have a few moments to grieve the loss of a beginning, an experience, an experiment that is about to be over and continued by someone else.

As I sat on that train, I was filled with images, mostly faces. And names, so many names. Names from every year, every class. Armando. Natalia. William. Said. Diana. Joana. Melissa. Karina. Jairo. Ilina, oh Ilina. Jose. Kasandra. Wanderlin. Damian. Abner. Sebastien. Lyze. Edwin. Jenill. Koralina, my birthday twin. Graciela. Stephanie. Stefania. Estefanny. Don’t cry, don’t cry.

New York fills you up with sights and sounds, with passion and mission. The place bulges with humanity. But, central to all its smaller cruelties is the inescapable fact there is no space and no time to react with any humanity at all. But, tired as I am, it is a little hard not to keep trying.

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A few people (okay, mostly my dad, my most loyal reader) have asked me what my blog title means. The truth is that, until I had written a few posts, I wasn’t sure myself. It just sounded right. Once I had thought of it, I couldn’t even think of what else might be a title.

Really, the title is about a two things that are different but related.

I am a music fan. I listen to music often, read Rolling Stone, feel nostalgic when I watch VH1 Classic, and am a formidable opponent at music trivia. I care that Group A is working with Producer B, and that they are recording in the same studio in which Group C recorded the legendary Album D. I love liner notes, especially on resissues, to which members of the band usually contribute. Liner notes come with albums, collections of songs which, in the best cases, have been carefully chosen and arranged. Albums mean CDs. You know, CDs, like in the 90s.

From the title of the blog, you already know that I don’t have an iPod, but its more than just the lack of the actual device. I haven’t made a single move in the direction of digital music. I don’t have a single music file on my computer. I have never been to the iTunes website. I don’t have any idea how to burn a CD. When my mom declares that she has to charge her iPod, or when my dad tells me about an old song he unearthed and downloaded, they are speaking from a world that my generation created but that I am not part of all.

So, part of the reason I don’t have an iPod is simply that it isn’t how I listen to music. I like albums, but I also like the act of buying a CD and bringing home to pour over the packaging and listen to it from start to finish. And I don’t even want to have my whole music collection available all the time–I don’t want to listen to music all the time, period. I’m more committed than that. The other reason is the discomfort with my generation that I’ve felt for as long as I can remember. When I get that feeling that “everybody” is doing something, I have to resist it. That’s not a matter of being too cool, it’s not conscious enough for that. For better or worse, I guess I’ve never done that well with the group identity thing.

But as I get older, my generational identity is becoming more complicated. The baby boomers, who I confess I have always idolized, frustrate me more and more as I get older. Their self-indulgence and narcissism looked better on them when they were younger I guess. And it’s hard not to resent inheriting the Social Security crisis a little bit.

I’ve been hoping since I was about 10 that my own generation (Gen X.5, I guess you’d call us) would look better to me as we grew together, and I’m still hopeful. Still, at least for now, I’ll stick with the Sony CD changer I took to college. I hope that answers your question.

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There is a moment that happens at parties which I absolutely dread. Not with fear or despair; I mean the kind of dread that mixes frustration with deep annoyance. Loathing makes me nervous, being nervous makes me self-conscious that I am nervous, and my self-consciousness (what could be more uncool?) deepens the dread the next time it happens.

Those who know me may know that the moment I am talking about is the one in which a fellow party-goer suggests that we smoke pot. There is maybe nothing else that makes me feel so completely alienated, unnecessary, and maybe even unwanted, like being out with a couple on their anniversary, but on a grander scale. It is like how it would feel if everyone in the room suddenly, quite by choice, began speaking another language. At once, I am awkward and useless. The scene has switched, gone where I can’t follow. (I suppose it is won’t, not can’t, but that isn’t how it registers emotionally.)

What I have just written seems a little dramatic, even to me, but that is only because nearly 15 years of dealing with pot smokers and navigating social situations has softened my rhetoric and dulled the visceral reaction a bit. I can play it cooler now, but it is acting. My true reaction to pot smoking–to drug use, period–is something like disgust, if disgust could raise a lump in your throat and make you feel vaguely like calling your parents.

With the passing of each of these 15 years, I suppose it has become more and more remarkable that I have never tried pot. My peers and I, after all, were raised by boomers, many of whom still use drugs recreationally. The adults we grew with (my own family being an exception) assumed that we would “experiment” with it, and so, most of us did. It’s true that in college I did become a somewhat enthusiastic reveler, very comfortable, say, organizing a drinking game. As a result, new friends often casually assume that I smoke pot. That moment in a budding friendship, when this assumption is revealed, is one I dislike also, because it insults me a way I find difficult to hide. My convictions are mysterious and passionate, and once public, I have to explain them and even defend them. I have to be prepared to have them dismissed, or worse, to be condescended to.

Even now, I feel a little hesitant about clicking the “publish” button. But I will. Maybe then I can exhale.

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