Some Simon & Garfunkel Song (April, Part I)

April happened. April really happened. So much happened in April that it's difficult to know where to begin, but let me begin, as ever, with this simple fact:

My mother is a BAMF. My mother rocks. She rocks so much that to say she rocks has become some sort of hellish understatement. She rocked herself all the way to Kansas, got a rockin' job with a rockin' salary, and rocked on back home. Or, "home." For those of you who didn't pick up on this before, my post on home in late February stemmed from my dawning awareness that the place I'd called home for twenty three years (roughly; there was a time I couldn't talk) might not even be my parent's home for much longer. It's interesting. I am proud of my mom, obviously, and excited for my dad, who is all set for his "third stage in life" (his words), which could be anything from starting a consulting business to doing more of what he does now, from straight up retirement to guiding inner city youth through the woods on birdwatching expeditions.

I am also (after almost four months of thinking about it) at peace with the idea of my home belonging to another family. As I explained first to my high school friends and then again, tearfully (bourbon was involved, but more on that later), to my dad and then finally to my mom, while that house belongs to us, nowhere else will ever be home to me. Chicago feels temporary. This apartment feels temporary. This gig (thank God) feels temporary. Only one of those things needs to be true. While that house belongs to us, I probably won't try to put roots down anywhere else, and it's rough, because I don't see myself moving back home. If I did that, I would be disappointing myself, my friends, and probably my parents. So I know it's not going to happen, but it's difficult to resist the siren call of my bed and my bookshelves and my back porch and my kitchen.

My parent's back porch. My parent's kitchen.

 So it's good they're selling the house because I need to cut the cord. I don't want to live in Kansas. (For one thing, it's a red state.) I probably will never live in Kansas. I may visit Kansas, but I can't see myself there.

As I was working through all this, I had a conversation with a good friend of mine from high school. She's a grad student in the Chicago area and we meet biweekly for brunch at Café My Spirit Animal (not its real name). Over the course of our discussion, we came to the simultaneous (and possibly belated, but whatever) realization that no one was making decisions for us any more. Another friend, this one from middle school, chipped in with the corollary over cupcakes: we don't always factor in our parents' decisions any more. None of this is earth crushing, none of this is unique to us, and all of this is as it should be, but they were two very interesting conversations.

So it's time to take charge, time to start thinking of my next steps in terms of where they may lead. As one of my favorite former coworkers would say, "Imma need for you to get it together." I'm trying, dude, I'm trying.

"And all the books you’ve read have been read by other people."

Beginning in April 2007, I started keeping a list of all the books I'd read the previous year. I got the idea from the girlfriend of the son of some of my parents long-lost Baltimore friends. We were in London at the time. (It's one of those undiagrammable connections.)

Previous installments of the reading list can be found over in the Hall of the Revels, here, here, here, and here.

And so, without further ado, here is the comparatively short list of things I've read in the past year. I blame not being an English major any more. Also all the back issues of New Yorker I've been reading over lunch. Also, if I'm honest, Netflix.

Of the thirty-four books (and one play) I read this year, there were only two that I hated. In general, I try to steer clear of books like that, because I have a compulsive need to finish every book I start. Additionally, only two of these books were re-reads, although in the case of The Westing Game, which I read twelve times at age ten, re-read seems a bit of an understatement.

Books

1) The Spire by William Golding
2) In Search of Respect by Phillippe Bourgois
3) The Secret History by Donna Tartt
4) Life Class by Pat Barker
5) Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault
6) Queen Margot by Alexandre Dumas
7) A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
8) An Unequal Music by Vikram Seth
9) Dorian: An Imitation by Will Self
10) The Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
11) The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
12) The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies
13) What's Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies
14) Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
15) The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
16) The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John Le Carré
17) The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
18) Savage Inequalities by Lawrence Kozol
19) Friendship, Cliques, and Gangs by Greg Dimitriadis
20) The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
21) Our Kind of Traitor by John Le Carré
22) The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
23) Answered Prayers by Truman Capote
24) War Horse by Michael Morpugo
25) The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King
26) A Neil Jordan Reader
27) The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
28) Listening is an Act of Love ed. Dave Isay
29) The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
30) Breaking the Code by Hugh Whitemore
31) Blackout by Connie Willis
32) As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann
33) The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
34) Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
35) Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins


Top Five of the Year, in descending order

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John Le Carré
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins


And an Explanation

I went back and forth over including Catching Fire in the Top Five. I wondered whether I should put The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in instead. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was a re-read, true, but I barely remember the first time I read it, it's a classic, and is far better written than Catching Fire. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was the subject of not one but two plays I saw at the Steppenwolf this year (an adaptation and an inspiration), and both moved me beyond words.

With all that being true, why Catching Fire? Ultimately, it had one thing in common with the other books in the Top Five: I couldn't put it down. Indeed, I read it on Cousin R's kindle with Cousin R in the room (she was watching Skins, so it wasn't like I made her go sit in the corner...although she was sitting in the corner). The thing about Catching Fire, and the third book in the Hunger Games Trilogy, Mockingjay, is that it made me feel like a teenage reader again. I was so invested in the story and the characters that I didn't spend too much time picking apart the gaps in logic or the wobbly writing. True, I was a college-educated teen reader, so I reveled in the references to mythology, to climate change, to reality TV, and I gloried in the ambiguous emotions and relationships the main character, Katniss, has. Sure, I see its imperfections and the love triangle made me roll my eyes, but those were things teenage me did too. Not everything has to change.

The Hunger Games series is also significant because of the impact it has had on the kids I work with. Kids who don't usually read are reading it. Boys are reading it, and not despite but because of the female protagonist and how much she kicks butt. I love talking about books at work, because it reminds me of college, and it reminds me of high school, and it reminds me of every part of my life I've enjoyed. And, frankly, it's the reason I was hired.

Character and Setting

Words of wisdom from the most unexpected source imaginable: sometimes this is what gets you through the day. Today, for instance, began all right. Then it was bad. Then it was okay again. Then it was amazing.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

My latest project for the kids in the evening program is a podcast to the editor. We're going around asking each other questions like, "What changes would you most like to make?" "What about the world frustrates you?" "What is going well?" "Do you think it's possible to change other people?"

Now, there is one boy in the evening program who is a mess: always a little ragged, always a little hungry, sometimes a little dirty, always foul-mouthed and peripatetic. He wandered into our interview session today and instead of allowing him to interrupt us (although he is unexpectedly respectful of the voice recorder; he always asks if it's recording before launching into offensive lyrics, and if it is he paces and waits) we decided to interview him.

In response to the question "Do you think it's possible to change other people?" he answered in the affirmative. "How is it possible?" asked his interviewer.

He thought for a long time. Just before the interviewer got frustrated and moved on to something else, he muttered, "The setting."

"What?" he interviewer demanded.

"The setting. You gotta change the setting."

"Setting means place and time," explained the interviewer a touch condescendingly. "You mean place and time?"

"Yeah, man, but, you know..." he trailed off and eyed the floor.

"You mean more than that?" I began. "You mean--?"

"I mean like everything. Their attitude. Their atmosphere. One thing at least. You gotta change the setting."

When the interview was done, he bounced away, grabbing a pool stick as he headed out the door, gone before I could say anything about it. Later I saw him doing pull-ups on the triangular bar holding the library door open. Even later, I stood in the art room and he hopped past the window in the alley outside, grinning widely, waving with one hand, giving the finger with the other, on his way home.

He rarely listens, he is frequently disrespectful, many staff members worry about him although few like him. I really hope he can find it within himself to change his setting one day. Or that, if he is unable, he finds someone who can.

I'll Take It

"Heaven knows (at moments of anxiety magic thinking knows no let or hindrance; they are reading everything I write on this yellow pad)--I'll take it, I'll take it." --Life Work, Donald Hall

The way I have been feeling lately defies description, but I think that it must be closely related to my coworkers' assessment: "You're tougher than you look. We thought you'd be long gone by now."

The rhythm of my life is this: I do my job, and I recover from doing my job. The lows are low and the highs are high. One such high came this past Thursday when a cast of seven actors from the youth program put on the play we'd been working on developing together since late October. Seeing the pride they took in the finished product, however imperfect, was an incredible experience. I was also moved when four of my actors turned up on time and enthusiastic despite being sent away from the Center in disgrace the night before. There was subtext: they didn't want to let me down, and I was so touched that I almost cried.

I bought t-shirts on sale and used fabric paint to decorate them with the name of the play. When I handed them out to the cast there were a lot of questions. "You spent your own money on these?" "Can we keep these?" "I'm hanging this on my wall!"

Twenty minutes before the play started, one of the girls in it asked me, "What are we doing next?" She's ready for a project, and she's ready now. I laughed, and asked for the weekend to recover.

***

Last week was also a good week for coworker bonding. On Monday night I went out to dinner at Golden Corral with the two teachers I'm closest with. There had been a staff retreat and we were all getting out simultaneously at five (unheard of). So we all hopped in my car and drove to Bollingbrook, where I had the interesting experience of sitting at a table next to a family with a toddler with my name. "[My name], chew your food!" "[My name], calm down!" "[My name], stop fidgeting!" It was hilarious, if not particularly good for digestion.

***

This weekend I drove home to see our neighbors, who were visiting from Iowa. (They live in Iowa, but they're still our neighbors.) I stuck around to watch the Oscars with Dad. (Mom was gallivanting around Europe being the academic BAMF she so clearly is.) This morning I called in sick (partially true and entirely deserved), and made my leisurely way back to Chicago, arriving just before rush hour.

And now for my thoughts on home. I started this entry ready to get it all down, but now I don't quite know what I intended to say. It's hardly a new phenomenon, a 23-year-old struggling with the idea that the place that has been "home" for so long possibly no longer is. Going home this weekend was bittersweet because it felt so right and then I had to leave again. At the same time, forcing myself to contemplate the hard fact that I will probably never live in that town again for any length of time, that my bedroom is now basically my own super-comfy storage unit, and that things change, inevitably and neutrally, was not as difficult as I thought it would be. Sure, I'm tearing up a little right now, writing about it, but that's how I work. When I think in the abstract about how wonderful my parents are and what they mean to me, it's just a fact of life. But when I sat down to write my senior thesis acknowledgements I started bawling in an embarrassingly public Princeton location.

But I didn't start writing this to upset myself, or my readers. The point is that adulthood sneaks up on you when you least expect it. I don't wear particularly adult clothes to work--it's a question of cleanliness and mobility; they resemble my high school outfits more than anything else--but this job has changed and will continue to change me in ways that only become apparent when I react to events differently from how my own predictions and experience would lead me to expect. I am much more resilient, I explained last Wednesday to a relative stranger, than I thought I would ever be, and that is, and will always be, a relief.

I'm not getting the bends, detaching myself from home. I may occasionally freak out about the future, but it's nothing, nothing, compared to the Summer of Angst, 2010. My parents tell me that I can always come home, or that I can still take a year off and write, and I know that what they're saying is true. What I'm coming to realize, though, is that I've reached the point in my life where I'm the one who has to make the smart decisions, the strategic decisions. I can't move home again whenever the lows are low. The thing to do is so come up with a new idea of what "home" is, and then to feel safe and looked-after wherever that is. It can be mobile--in fact, it probably should be--but for my own sanity it needs to stop being the comfy chair in the patch of sun with the smell of cookies in my living room. My parent's living room. Whatever.

I have felt at home in a lot of different places, all over the world. None of then have been home, but that still bodes well for me, I think.

A Visit to the Circumlocution Office

Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Dickens!

I read you because I read Joan Aiken--she told me to read you, in fact--and it was one of the best things I've done. Thank you for Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend in particular, and for these:

Great Expectations

"They took up several obviously wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances."

"'I am ashamed to say it,' I returned, 'and yet it's no worse to say it than to think it. You call me a lucky fellow. Of course, I am. I was a blacksmith's boy but yesterday; I am -- what shall I say I am -- to-day?'"

"For an hour or more, I remained too stunned to think; and it was not until I began to think, that I began fully to know how wrecked I was, and how the ship in which I had sailed was gone to pieces."

Our Mutual Friend

"'My daughter, there are times of moral danger when the hardest virtuous resolution to form is flight, and when the most heroic bravery is flight.'"

"'This reminds me, Godmother, to ask you a serious question. You are as wise as wise can be (having been brought up by the fairies), and you can tell me this: Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?'"

 

"'No man knows till the time comes, what depths are within him. To some men it never comes; let them rest and be thankful! To me, you brought it; on me, you forced it; and the bottom of this raging sea,' striking himself upon the breast, 'has been heaved up ever since.'"

"'No one is useless in this world,' retorted the Secretary, 'who lightens the burden of it for any one else.'"

"'Then idiots talk,' said Eugene, leaning back, folding his arms, smoking with his eyes shut, and speaking slightly through his nose, 'of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy.'"

"No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot."

 

Thereof One Must Be Silent

Sometimes I really, really can't talk about it. There's stuff that happens at work that's just ripe for blog posting, but to do so would be personally and professionally unethical.

In times like these, I remind myself to take secret notes and to remember that later I can heavily disguise everything for publication. That's the only way to come to an understanding of events, sometimes. Especially this week, which has proved a continuation of the last in more ways than one. If my dad's mantra is "Energy, optimism, enthusiasm," then mine is "Everywhere I look there's inspiration." A good mantra should be a buoy, as well as the truth.

The Woman Who Knew Too Much

If I had to sum up January in an overused phrase, it would definitely be "Ignorance is bliss." The day-to-day has been a lot calmer minus one key student, and the resulting absence of frantic attention grabbing maneuvers has given me more time to learn about the Center, the community, and the lives of the students in the evening program.

It's been a lot to take in, my conversations with my coworkers about the guy who got shot in the foot, the kids who step out to get high and then try to come back in, and the various warnings that one dude was given before he was thrown out for good. I don't work very much with the older guys--theater is understandably not their thing--so I am significantly out of the loop when it comes to their stories. The sudden influx of information last week coupled with a walkover re-routing (too many Latin Kings live on one of the streets we used to take, a middle school contingent of whom once started to throw ice at one of my coworkers) threatened to coalesce into a full-fledged Friday night freakout when I got stuck behind one car that refused to exit the alley I use to leave the Center parking lot. After a bit I glanced in my rear-view mirror to find another car idling behind me.

I honked politely and was released, my heart hammering.

Have I ever felt personally singled out and threatened? Absolutely not. Have I found myself in combustible situations? Absolutely. My biggest fear is probably being swept up in something over which I have no control.

It doesn't help that I've been continuing my way through the fourth season of The Wire. This re-watching is taking longer than all the others, for reasons I have already talked a little bit about here. There's no doubt in my mind that it's my favorite of five excellent seasons, that it's a masterpiece, and that it's brutally uncompromising in painting a picture of, to use a technical term, the crap-shoot that is inner city education. Only one of the four students featured in this season is granted an almost-sure-thing future, and it's the one you were least worried about to begin with. Great.

I've had weeks on this job that were emotionally difficult. I've had weeks on this job that were physically difficult. Last week was the first week that has been psychologically difficult and I think it's no coincidence that it was the week that, in all other respects, was the easiest on record. With time and breath to think, I found myself coming up against the undeniable fact that I'm not cut out for this kind of work in the long term. I can do anything for a year, but a year is all they're getting.

If I stay in Chicago (which is looking more and more likely), I'll definitely come and volunteer. These are the best coworkers I have ever had, even (especially) the one who leaned over to me during a staffing with the family support specialist (who had just finished filling us in on the fourth of four kids with significant emotional problems) and asked me under his breath, "Are you straight with this?"

My coworker must have seen something in my face, just like that guy who made me a pain au chocolat very much not on the menu after I cycled for miles to his bakery on a false promise, and just like my high school theater teacher who took one look at me curled up on the floor during tech rehearsal and told me to go home with my walking pneumonia. When people call you out like that, when they see that unless they hand you dough with chocolate on the inside you're going to pass out, it's just one in a series of great ways of saying, "I see you." Indeed: "I'm watching you, just like you're watching everyone else. And you thought you were the only one."

In college, I told Roommate J that I could read people, herself included, like books. She called me out on that once, too, and after that we would both occasionally refer to me as a hefty tome, in the right hands just as easily read as everyone else. It's a complicated emotion, but I think that, ultimately, it's comforting to know that, even if ignorance is bliss, there are people who refuse to remain ignorant about what my feelings are and that if, one day, everything falls so far short of okay that I need to talk it out, there will be people to listen.