1. I forgive myself for constantly exasperating those around me with my relentless existential crises about where I’m going to live. Feeling foreign in New York and feeling like a New Yorker everywhere else is part of who I and and I don’t really have any intention of living any other way. It’s a state of angst I have chosen and chosen again and again. It’s a problem I count on having and I don’t want it solved.

2. I forgive myself for the likelihood that I will continue talking about getting a PhD in English but am pretty unlikely actually to do it. The fact that I could have a life as an academic seems to be way more important to me than being an academic, and I’ve pinpointed at least two reasons why. The first is not particularly noble: my career as a Master’s student in English was glory in miniature and I don’t want it messed with. The second reason, which is still mostly about me but isn’t 100% vain, is the fact that I have chosen to teach public school in the inner city, among a bevy of other options, has always been an important part of my narrative. The sum of these reasons feels like this: Sure, I could get into a competitive PhD program, but I had my fun as a grad student already, and it’s time to set my brain (not to mention my heart) back to the important work of social justice. That’s legit, right?

3. I forgive myself that REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” fills me with so much stupid hope that it’s criminal. If I’m alone when I hear it, I belt it out as best I can while my throat constricts with emotion. I will never mention this again.

4. I forgive myself that, sure, I’m interested in seeing new places and learning new things, but I don’t really have that much wanderlust when you come right down to it. At my age, education level, and class bracket, you really aren’t shit if you don’t feel a manic compulsion to trek off to every continent. How can you show face(book) if you don’t have pictures of yourself in European bistros, in front of the Great Pyramids, in a wooden boat in Thailand, and working on a farm somewhere Spanish-speaking? It’s not that I don’t think that experiencing other places has value, it’s that I think many of my peers miss that you can experience the different at home, too, if you are willing to pay attention, and that that has value, too. Feelings of foreignness that you have while traveling are easy to contain in photos and cocktail party-ready stories, but the way you understand yourself relative to the place you call home (wherever in the world that may be) is closer to who you really are, and, personal ads and college alumni magazines aside, that is what I want to talk about.

Thanks for your indulgence, gentle reader. The next post will be a real reboot.  :) E

My immediate, gut reaction to the first question is no, but the second requires a bit more thought. My writing shows that I set myself against New York when I lived here, but began associating with it and longing for it almost as soon as I left. My reasons for leaving New York in the summer of 2008 are well-documented on this website and in countless conversations with family and friends. I have made dramatic pronouncements such as that New York teems with humans but doesn’t have enough space for humanity, and that it is not the dwelling place of my soul. Such things are dramatic, but many of the things I remember from those five years have to do with how I fashioned myself as a Mainer in exile. I loved it when people assumed I wasn’t a native and asked me where I was from, and was even more delighted if they said something like, “Oh, Maine’s so beautiful–what are you doing here?” which they often did. Unquestionably, I considered Portland not only my home, but the geographic source of everything real and good and true about me, and about everything else, too.

But if that sign with the picture of a lobster and the words “Welcome Home” in the Portland airport tugs at my heart, it is equally true that that same heart swells at the first sight of signs advertising SCRAP METAL off the Cross Bronx Expressway as I head south from New England. Swaying into the left lane to merge onto 278? Forget it. I’ve been misty-eyed since the exit for Co-op City Blvd. During my two year hiatus in Boston, a city which never charmed me despite meeting some great friends, from 2008-10, this divided loyalty had even more opportunity to demonstrate itself. I loved that Portland felt closer, not just because it was easier to visit, because the people I met recognized it as an actual place unto itself, not just as yet another place people leave to move to New York. But I also spent a lot of the first year dating a guy in Brooklyn, and when that ended, I still allied myself with New York and luxuriated in the cool cred that was granted to me for saying flip things like that Boston’s blandness made me worry that I was going soft.

Among my 2003 Teaching Fellows cohort, there were a lot of us who came to New York for an adventure. We had heard that you should live here for a while when you’re young so you’ll be more cultured and interesting later in life. I was in New York indefinitely–retirement plan and all–but I never stopped thinking of it something temporary and experimental. I watched my new friends dig into the New York experience–taking swing lessons at Lincoln Center, photographing each other walking the Brooklyn Bridge, poring over reviews and going to off-Broadway shows–and wondered why I wasn’t doing those things, why I never seemed to know what movie was showing for free in Battery Park. And mostly, I wondered why I couldn’t really seem to care, not in any sustained way, anyway.

I don’t mean to suggest that the city didn’t or doesn’t impress me, or that I haven’t spent a fair amount of time playing in it. And I was doing a lot more of those New York-y things than I thought I was at the time.  But those memories don’t overlap much with the more visceral snapshots of moments when I’ve felt a real sense of belonging. Those bits aren’t about having a fabulous time at all; in fact, they are utterly mundane, like a brief shared eye-roll with a stranger on the subway when something mildly outrageous has happened, or realizing that it is surprisingly hard to find an ATM in Chinatown and recalling that I have already noted that, or anytime I’m walking on the street by myself, where I know I look like I’ve got business, even when I’m not 100% sure where I’m going.

But I never feel more like a real New Yorker than when I’m in Maine, where someone need only say something like, “The traffic on 302 is terrible!” or express the deeply held belief that it is absolutely necessary to own real estate before getting married or having a baby, to make me feel impatient, foreign, and profoundly connected to New York. At these moments, I am forced to contend with the fact that it is the place where I became an adult. The place that made me an adult. It was here that I learned things like how to pick a restaurant, how to be in bars, what is reasonable behavior at work and on a date, and living here is what made it important to know those things in the first place. I can’t change the set of priorities and sensibilities I have, at least not quickly, and more importantly, I don’t want to. I can’t deny the fact that I do think I’m more cultured and interesting from living in New York, even if I thought I was putting up a fight.

But the putting up a fight is, I think, the secret to all the city’s magic to me. Perhaps it is different for natives, but for a transplant to teach in public schools, to make friends, to find love, even to grocery shop or fill a prescription, require psychological and emotional fitness and physical effort. There is nothing to default to, no foolproof routine. Living that way can get the better of you because it demands the best of you. But what’s better than your best?

Back in New York for another round, I notice that people have stopped assuming that I’m from somewhere else. So it wasn’t the dimples, then, or the function over form footwear. At Vanessa’s wedding recently, someone insisted that I have a New York accent. I don’t, but nothing about my speech (except for a stray “wicked” that I have carefully preserved) suggests that I’m from Maine either. Over dinner one night this spring, my roommate’s friend Peter, a Brooklyn native, asked what my Bulldogs sweatshirt was about and when I told him it was from my high school in Portland, Maine, he gasped, “Oh! I was sure you were a New York girl! You’ve got the attitude.” I have to admit that I liked it. I can’t quite explain how, but it made me feel like I am still young, still strong, still capable of being both exciting and excited.

I love Portland, and I’m always proud to tell people where I’m from. I can get into any hard shell lobster, I wince when people pronounce Maine’s second largest city “Bang’er,” and I know that a summer residence, no matter its size, is a camp, not a lakehouse or a cottage or something uppity like that. But like knowing what movie is showing in Battery Park, those are basically superficial things that don’t have much to do with what it takes or what it means to live in Maine. If I decide to move to Portland, which I still fantasize about doing, I will have to endure a version of the period of loneliness and homesickness that any transplant endures.

But, for the record: no, I don’t fold pizza. Astrid, I hope this answers your question.

But, arbitrary or no, I am really, really, especially missing my grandmother today. Maybe it’s that Mother’s Day season makes other people talk about their grandmothers and me realize that I don’t have any. It’s a kind of loneliness in the abstract, but lonely nonetheless.

I know that grief is supposed to be all about the person who is lost, but I think that, if we’re honest, our emotions are basically about ourselves. In losing my grandmother this November, I lost someone who adored and accepted me unconditionally. She was not well-educated, and I know she didn’t understand why I do a lot of things that I do (more school?) and that my priorities were always a mystery to her (why aren’t you buying a house in Maine like your cousins?), but she loved me. And something more. She liked me, too. My stories, of my students, of cities I’ve lived in, of things I’ve seen and done, have been all the more special and alive because I know how much they delighted her.

She was a person who said she liked things and people and ideas to be the way they had always been. She liked a meat and potatoes diet, and ideologically, she was Greatest Generation to the bone. But she was fundamentally not judgmental, and she trusted me. She would say that she didn’t like exotic anything, but when she heard me rustling around in the kitchen, preparing one of my one-of-a-kind specialties with a lot of ingredients, she never balked, even when I was making a curry, which she normally would have claimed was too spicy. Invariably, she would say something like, “Well, this is nice for something different.” I know I’m a pretty good cook, but that is still the praise that means the most. To see an 80-something year-old woman who thinks she only likes beans and hotdogs ask for a second helping of my mulligatawny soup is a kind of subtle satisfaction that I will never forget.

But the way she trusted me at the table is maybe a symbol for everything else. She really listened to me when I talked. She wasn’t necessarily inclined to support something like gay marriage, or to see why we should give amnesty to illegal immigrants, but where I stood on subjects like that had a lot of weight. I would sit on the loveseat with my legs tucked under me and explain why I see the world the way I do, and she would sit in her recliner and listen and say, “Well, that’s true, too.” And, in the end, her kindness and basic love for and interest in people always won out. Being kind wasn’t a political thing to her at all, it was an instinct.

It certainly wasn’t all a matter of me teaching her things. I learned countless things from her. That if you tie a bow what seems like upside down, it won’t come out crooked. That you should always tip the bartender. That it’s easier to peel a banana from the end opposite the stem and it’s easier to get to the tail meat of a lobster if you crack the shell lengthwise first. That I should hold out for the right guy. That you should know how to iron, even if you never do. That it isn’t possible to have nothing in common with your family because being family is everything. I’m better, and my life is richer, because I know these things.

So…thank you, Grammie. Happy Mother’s Day.

Unabashedly, I mostly turn to pop music when faced with life’s most emotional questions. Maybe that is only because my favorite authors are often so obviously not the types you want to get advice about dudes from. I mean, Orwell, both in public and private, and in fiction and nonfiction, writes with sparkling clarity and confidence about by which processes power is consolidated, say, or how the upper classes perform their status, but his romance/sex scenes kind of suck, and his diaries and letters suggest that among the reasons that his novels aren’t sexy is that he just doesn’t get it. You can almost see him straightening an already straight tie and coughing awkwardly. As a woman myself, I think we’re worth getting at least as excited about as infringement on civil liberties and the household habits of the working class.

I could read other authors (I do, in fact), but I started thinking about how men and women should act in relationships and what constitutes real or ideal love (funny how those terms often refer to the same thing even though they certainly shouldn’t) before I read serious literature with skill and regularity, and pop music isn’t something I feel responsible for being scholarly about or sophisticatedly detached from. The Cure’s Robert Smith and Orwell aren’t so different anyway, maybe. Both were raised as nice middle-class boys in good enough English towns who made careers out of being (perhaps) disproportionately miserable about one thing or another. Yet it is Robert Smith, not Winston Smith, from whom I draw much of my sense of what it means to experience the romantic and the erotic, and more specifically, how men you’d want to have those experiences with feel and behave while under the influence of love.

The sound and feel of Cure songs fall into two or three categories easily identified by anyone, serious fan or not, because its bipolarity is so frickin’ pronounced. No one can write a pop gem with bounce and frantic chirp better than Robert Smith, and if you happen to be a particular kind of dreamy coed, the manic ecstasy of a song like “The Lovecats” can push your hopeful heart to the point of bursting. And it goes without saying that playful innuendo of lines like, “We should have each other for tea, huh?/We should have each other with cream” is more than enough to cause swelling.  Smith is never shy about referring to a lover or a moment or a feeling as perfect–“You’re so perfect, you’re so right as rain/You make me make me make me hungry again,” in the breathlessly paced “Why Can’t I Be You?” Even in the comparatively mellow radio favorite “Just Like Heaven,” the bliss of a sexual encounter (and maybe even just an anticipated one) with his beloved has him “spinning on that dizzy edge.”

There are dozens of other examples: the childlike “Caterpillar Girl” (especially “flowing in and filling up my hopeless heart…”), the muted claustrophobia of “Close To Me,” even the terrified longing of “A Forest.” According to this canon, the desire and longing associated with passionate love amount to a kind of gorgeous panic. It is all-consuming and mercilessly kinetic, but worth it because to have such feelings is also to be granted access to purity and beauty. “Perfect” love is the ultimate balm for all wounds (“Whenever I’m alone with you…you make me like I am clean again,” in “Lovesong,” which RS wrote as a wedding gift to his wife.) This version of love combines the sickness and anxiety of courtly love (one easily recalls Troilus, once a man’s man, hypnotically rocking back and forth in his bed, weak from sleeplessness and lack of appetite) with the transformative powers of divine love.

I am much more a scholar of Christianity than a believer, but I know that the trade off with divine love is that once you seek it, you can’t lose it. God’s interest in you and ability to forgive you is guaranteed inexhaustible. But no matter how intense, earthly human-on-human love offers no such promises. So if you’ve been counting on the sweaty sugar high of a new romance becoming a permanent fixture that will redeem you and make you whole, well, there are going to be some tears.

Which brings me to the other category of Cure songs, the ones about disappointment and despair. Despite the fact that a majority of the band’s singles are the upbeat, hyperactive ones, Robert Smith is certainly better known for singing about being sad. I think that may be because his kind of bliss is inextricably linked to experiencing loss. Even if the letdown is completely outside the song, extreme highs suggest extreme lows. These songs range from frenzy to mend damage done so perfection can survive (“I’m coming to find you if it takes me all night…’cuz always and ever is only for you”) to total resignation (“It was the sweetness of your skin/It was the hope of all we might have been/That filled me with the hope to wish impossible things”). Whatever the case, if it was real love, which it always was in Cure songs, once it’s gone, the feeling of loss and accompanying misery are forever. Compounding the difficulty of navigating the world of romance is the fact even in perfect relationships, a false move in a single conversation can sentence you to a lifetime of loneliness (“If only I’d thought of the right words/I could’ve held onto your heart.”) Tough break.

In short, the version of romantic relationships this songbook establishes makes perfection both absolutely necessary and absolutely impossible to hang on to. And maybe this line of thought isn’t as antischolastic as I think, because, again, the readiest example of what I mean  is a 14th century literary one: the climatic moment in the dream-vision Pearl, when the dreamer, filled with desire (“luf-longyng”), tries to cross the river into the New Jersusalem to be with the object of that desire and finds himself fallen back to earth, wide awake, and heart-broken. The lesson is, I suppose, that mixing courtly love (with its filthy focus on reproducing and having a fair amount of fun doing it) with divine love is a sinful mismatch. You don’t get closer that kind of light and purity just because you want to, even if its physical embodiment has the best cleavage ever. The Medievals were big on this point. The other major contribution from Pearl‘s anonymous poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, gives us a knight whose real troubles begin when he ceases to be Mary’s knight and begins to devote himself his host’s lovely wife.

Okay, so now for the autobiographical bit. Early this spring, I met someone with whom I shared exactly the kind of giddiness of which a Cure song that will get radio play is made. He did things like ride his bike over in the rain to hand deliver a love letter enclosed  in an envelope he’d made out of a map of a place he wanted to take me to someday. Seriously. Nearly immediately after we confessed attraction and the intent to date each other, he began to talk about our relationship as the one he had suspended his life while he waited for. I know better than that one true soulmate stuff, but this guy didn’t sound like your grandmother did when she assured you that every pot had a lid. The dreamy coed several paragraphs above still lives inside me, and these were words I’d been waiting more than a decade for a man to adore me enough to say. There was never enough time to spend together, even when we weren’t apart for days on end, and no way to be physically close enough. Since we all have a finite amount of time and energy to spend, I surely gave more of myself than I could really afford, but it’s easy enough to justify letting a few of life’s details slip when you are busy establishing the gold standard of perfect romance.

The problem, of course, is that once you’ve decided that a person, and, by extension, your relationship, is perfect, there is less and less air to breathe. Necessary conversations about compromise really can’t happen because the stakes are so high. I mean, things are either perfect or they aren’t, right? So maintaining perfect love often means suppressing dissent at the same time you are insisting that dissent is impossible. (Orwell always creeps in…what I mean is exactly covered by ‘doublethink,’ of course.) It’s possible to keep practicing that trick of the brain for a while, but no matter how invested you are in the ideal being real, forever is actually a wicked long time–much longer than it seems  in your beloved’s arms those first few whispery nights–and keeping a myth aloft indefinitely is a lot harder than it sounds when it has a melody to go with it.

Dear Courtesy Title,

Expression of interest in specific position and experience in/passion for the general field. Rattle off degrees/credentials. Claim that combination of experience, degrees, credentials makes me qualified for job. Repeat expression of delight re: job’s existence.

Insert two or three paragraphs detailing the grit and wisdom I’ve gained by teaching in different contexts and my academic achievement. Hammer home how rewarding it all has been and that I’ve always taken on challenges.

Smooth transition to the new challenge of the opportunity  for which this letter is being written. This job, whatever it is, is my logical next step, a dream fulfilled.

Mention resume/references attached. Thank for consideration. Look forward to discussing the position in more detail.

Close with robotic sincerity,

Elizabeth Sampson

I make it sound worse than it is, and if I could be a bit more cynical about the whole thing, I could probably churn these things out a lot faster. It is always true that by filling one page of things about yourself, you are not saying the thousands of other pages of things you could say. Even so, the cover letter is a strange genre. Under most circumstances, you have to write a bunch of them to get a handful of interviews to be offered a single job. Maybe this math works out because you really are only looking for one job. Still, the cover letter demands that you present your entire education and working life as single-minded, direct preparation for this particular exciting opportunity with your company/organization/school. Like there is only one arrow in your quiver and one target in the woods.

What I really want to say is something like, “Forget my resume. I’ve been to school, I’ve worked some jobs. Meh. What you really want to know is if I’m likable, and I SO am.” So, to potential employers: here are a few of the things my cover letter doesn’t say but that I think are what will really matter on the job.

• I will wear sneakers to work pretty much everyday during long pants season. The shoes I wore to my interview you will see again maybe twice, if you’re lucky. You won’t really notice, though. Barefoot, I’m as tall as most women in heels, plus my sneakers are super stylin’ and always seem logical with my outfit.
• If you’ve been hoping that the staff would bond more outside of work, you need to call me for an interview RIGHT NOW. I have an incredible gift for convincing people that transportation concerns, childcare issues, medical appointments, a full inbox, nagging significant others, and similar are not appropriate reasons for missing post-work happy hour. I will build alliances that crush workplace cliques and get everyone there. People will say how much fun they had and wonder why they didn’t do something like that before, etc, and a tradition will be born. You’re welcome.
• It will always seem like I have all my work under control and have time to talk. That may or may not be true, but since I will get everything done, one way or another, do you really care?
• I will usually have an ambitious to-do list on my desk. This list is not just for show, but you shouldn’t expect me to be happily checking off particular items. I use these lists to keep afloat general categories of concerns, but I will accomplish tasks in any order, or more likely, will decide on a wholly different approach which calls for different tasks. Please see above item. Don’t worry.
• The stuff in my cover letter about my passion for teaching, fundamental belief in everyone’s right to rigor and respect at school, and desire to continue contributing to society in ways I can see? I meant all that. Like, really meant it. In fact, I actually toned it down because I don’t know you and those convictions are important and personal. Imagine what I’ll reveal when you do know me.

My outlook and sensibilities have always put me somewhat at odds with my generation. I have usually preferred the company of older people, and I will admit that also unchanged from those early memories of myself is a delight in being considered cutely precocious. To those who have known me for any length of time, it can hardly be a surprise that I’m as happy as I am in a relationship with someone 17 years older. My generational ambiguity means that we don’t have those knee-jerk moments of “Oh God, you’re so old/young” that separate people by age group. It’s true that I can’t help but know most of the words to most of what was on the radio in the late 80s and90s, but those aren’t the songs that define me. Mostly, my own biological generation, with its isolating earbuds and failure to launch cases, has been a mystery, something I assumed I would just have to wait out until everyone was older and more interesting (which, I confess, is to say, more like me.)

But the conversations that began and sustain this new bigenerational relationship have revealed a stamp on my understanding of the world that betrays the time and place I grew up in, and it makes me think that I may have been serious and sensitive because of the culture of 80s America,  not just alongside it. We late Gen-Xers and early Millenials grew up with crack and AIDS, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer  and skyrocketing rates of violent crime and unemployment. The news (in my outraged liberal household, anyway) depicted a world were things were not getting better and weren’t going to get better. We were filled to the brim with the idea that nothing was certain in the serious matters of life, but that fun had a price, too. I have a vivid memory of standing over the garbage can in the cafeteria the day after the ’88 election and registering real despair as I threw my tray away that I would have to live my life half again before we would have chance to elect a president who would do things differently. If the fashion and synth pop of the 80s seem a little frivolous, I think we earned it, because nothing else was. We were offered no innocence, no comfort that things would work out for the best, no moon landing.

I know that my individual experience is little more than anecdote, and that, since I was actually a child, there are holes in my memories and gaps in my understanding. Still, I see myself more clearly now as part of a generation that was introduced to the world as an uncertain, hostile place and it helps me to better understand and appreciate why we act the ways we do. Not every third grader that lunch period 22 years ago was fretting about the election outcome, but perhaps, by some subtle resignation,  I’m more like the rest of that cafeteria table than I think. And maybe that’s okay.

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.

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.

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.

Passages like these are throwaway gems in Orwell’s work, the literary equivalent of the breezy, effortless melodiousness of a McCartney-penned B-side. It’s rich in a few ways. The speaker is Ampleforth, a poet Winston meets in a squalid cell in the bowels of the Ministry of Love. Clearly, he functions to demonstrate what Orwell had written nearly nine years earlier, in ‘Literature and Totalitarianism,’ that art, which is elementally an expression of an individual’s emotional life, cannot exist under the kind of regime Nineteen Eighty-Four imagines. In Oceania, the ‘art’ is either intended to pacify (the music and porn novels churned out literally by machines to keep the proles happy), or to promote the Party’s ideology (the grand anthems and Newspeak ‘scholarship’). It’s also worth pointing out the intertextual reference to Kipling, since Orwell wrote so extensively about his experiences with British Imperialism and is considered by some among the very first postcolonial theorists.

Obviously. But this passage is also a kind of Valentine to English, and I confess that that is why I have always liked it.  Something in me swells with irrational pride at the idea that English is an unyielding language that can only be tamed, molded, and elevated to beauty by the most talented and committed among us. It’s little wonder why Orwell, who wrote against the long odds of poverty, war, chronic illness, and hunger, and railed against the muddying of English with ugly jargon and purple, meaningless Latinate words, is among my very favorite writers. His passion, at least as I understand it (or imagine it, but it comes to the same thing)–to keep English the sort of language one can tell important truths in with style and grace–is the soul of my literary conscience.

As an ESL teacher, I did not enjoy watching my students struggle with silent letters and irregular verbs. I know that English would be easier to learn if there weren’t so many vowel sounds (15 or more, including diphthongs). Still, I think English gives as good as it gets. Once mastered, it offers a massive, grand vocabulary which is constantly being infused with apt words from other languages (and its own dialects) and the ideas that go with them. English has a tremendous capacity for clever euphemism and register shift. In English, you can produce stirring rhetoric that doesn’t sound over-the-top, express dissatisfaction without sounding like you’re going to kill someone, and say sweet things to someone special without sleaze or cheese. 

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s invented language–Newspeak–seeks to restrict people by taking away these latent expressive powers in English. The ending of the novel is devastating, but, having read it over and over, I can say that it makes me feel absolutely alive. A bit of that aliveness rushes to the surface every time I reflect on the messy weirdness of a word like “enough,” or a resolutely irregular plural like “children,” or the counterintuitive “had had” verb construction. (The children had had enough!) 

So, rock on Ampleforth. It’s almost Valentine’s Day.